You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

spriteless comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: polymathwannabe 11 August 2015 01:24PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (240)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: ETranshumanist 12 August 2015 05:08:29PM 0 points [-]

We could double humanity's genetic "shuffle rate" by allowing couples to have one child naturally but requiring men to donate their sperm to a central bank, and women to carry and give birth to "randomly-fathered" children.

Obviously the institutional and logistical (not to mention ethical) challenges make this impossible in any present society. But for a planned community of fixed size (e.g. a small colony of humans attempting to rapidly populate a planet, or a starship designed to support the minimum possible human population with the highest possible genetic diversity), such measures may be a practical necessity.

I suspect this has been explored in Science Fiction, though I've never read anything in which this idea was put into practice.

Comment author: spriteless 15 August 2015 01:23:50AM 0 points [-]

I suspect this has been explored in Science Fiction, though I've never read anything in which this idea was put into practice.

Anne McCaffery's Nimisha's Ship mentions it as a duty of the first colonists of a planet. Important families from colonized worlds still check for any harmful combinations of recessive genes before siring a child. The book is more about the politics and cool space ships though.