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From: chiaravi@silver.bacs.indiana.edu (Lucius Chiaraviglio)
Newsgroups: sci.bio,sci.med
Subject: Re: Neoteny and Human Genetic Engineering
Keywords: clarifications and ethical considerations
Message-ID: <2919@silver.bacs.indiana.edu>
Date: 6 Jan 89 03:40:50 GMT
References: <13127@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: chiaravi@silver.UUCP (Lucius Chiaraviglio)
Organization: Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Indiana University, Bloomington
Lines: 62

In article <13127@cup.portal.com> mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson)
writes:
>What if that small amount of difference
 [between the genomes of chimpanzees and humans]
>                                        encodes a clock that decides when
>to arrest the development of adult features?

	It would be simpler if the difference consisted chiefly of
modifications to the existing developmental program, rather than addition of a
new timer.  This doesn't mean that the latter couldn't have happened, but the
former would be the first thing to look for.

>                                              Wouldn't it be fun to try
>pushing it forward to get a race of super-geniuses, or pushing it back to
>see what pre-man must have been like?

	This isn't the most clearly-worded question in the world.

>                                       Of course there would be enormous
>social problems with trying to do it in this country, but once the Human
>Genome Project reveals the clock, a technological backwater nation could
>do it as an exercise and demonstration of their own talent (recall the
>pioneering work in fetal cell transplants done in Mexico).

	In that case, that nation had first better be able to figure out which
of the chimpanzee-to-human modifications is relevant to the differences in
intelligence, temperament, and lifespan, and how they work, because simply
sequencing the human genome (which I am all for, incidentally) isn't by itself
going to tell what each part means, except for a few parts that are similar to
ones already discovered -- that takes a lot of additional work.  Think of it
as being shown extremely complicated engineering plans that are all written in
a code of which all the subtleties haven't been discovered yet and when you
haven't finished your engineering education -- that is essentially what we
will be up against once we finish sequencing a human genome.

>Another possibility, with lighter ethical baggage, would be to neotenize
>one of our primate cousins.  If its intelligence could be raised by a
>factor of 10, it could be darn useful as an assistant or for assembly-line
>work.
>
>Imagine that!  "Hey Chimpman, change the channel."  "Chimpman, bring me a
>beer."
>"Chimpman, grade this stack of freshman midterm exams."

	No, this does not have lighter ethical baggage.  If you bring
something's intelligence up to the point where it is capable of learning to
make ethical decisions, you must give it the same rights as we have.  If you
somehow increase something's intelligence asymmetrically so that it can learn
to work in a technological society but cannot learn to make ethical decisions,
you have created an abomination (of which too many already exist).

	Incidentally, while I don't have I. Q. numbers for chimpanzees (if
such would even be meaningful), I have gotten the impression that increasing
the intelligence of a chimpanzee to increase I. Q. by a factor of 10 would put
it ahead of us in intelligence (as someone else pointed out in another way in
a subsequent posting).

-- 
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