In order to make any notable gains in desirable traits from selective breeding, one must necessarily only allow a small portion of the population to reproduce.
It’s unclear to me that this is true. It might very well be possible to have people who aren’t in the selective breeding group to have one child per couple and the selective breeding group have more children then that.
Though humans are capable of reproducing sometime in early adolescence, most humans today opt to wait until their 20′s to 30′s to have children.
You can harvest male sperm faster then that and put it in sperm banks. Male sperm is also much more easy to scale.
This is a good point, though even with one child you’d have a significantly lower per generation gains. I’d have to model this to get a clear idea of how it would function. I guess part of my theory here is that parents would still have to raise their own children, which would limit the number of offspring high-scoring individuals could have.
I did some quick maths and determined that if one were selecting strictly for a single trait and were to take the top 11% of scorers and that entire group was to have 10 children each (while the rest of the population was to have 1 child), your population would have an average trait score 2/3rds of one standard deviation above the previous population’s mean. Not a trivial difference, but not that great.
Furthermore, if this was really being done you’d end up with a highly hierarchical society where all those who were not among the top scoring fell further and further behind. In fact, this will likely be a problem even in what I would consider well designed genetic engineering schemes, though the gap in those schemes would be more generational.
In order to make any notable gains in desirable traits from selective breeding, one must necessarily only allow a small portion of the population to reproduce.
It’s unclear to me that this is true. It might very well be possible to have people who aren’t in the selective breeding group to have one child per couple and the selective breeding group have more children then that.
You can harvest male sperm faster then that and put it in sperm banks. Male sperm is also much more easy to scale.
This is a good point, though even with one child you’d have a significantly lower per generation gains. I’d have to model this to get a clear idea of how it would function. I guess part of my theory here is that parents would still have to raise their own children, which would limit the number of offspring high-scoring individuals could have.
I did some quick maths and determined that if one were selecting strictly for a single trait and were to take the top 11% of scorers and that entire group was to have 10 children each (while the rest of the population was to have 1 child), your population would have an average trait score 2/3rds of one standard deviation above the previous population’s mean. Not a trivial difference, but not that great.
Furthermore, if this was really being done you’d end up with a highly hierarchical society where all those who were not among the top scoring fell further and further behind. In fact, this will likely be a problem even in what I would consider well designed genetic engineering schemes, though the gap in those schemes would be more generational.