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[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

Yes, I believe that an organization with a few hundred thousand employees and billions of dollars could develop such historical and archaeological research. Then everything would be a matter of sacrificing a few hundred or thousand children and interpreting the results.

I don't think you've quite answered my questions.

First, do you actually mean "the 46 best whose remains we could find" rather than actually "the 46 best who ever lived"?

Second, what is your criterion for being best? The evolutionary criterion is reproductive success, which is why I brought up Genghis Khan. If it's not that, what other criterion do you envision?

Third, how are you identifying which human remains count as the 46 best individuals? A lot of those remains will be in nameless graves, I think. But if you can read the DNA and decide how fit the person was, why mess around with producing actual children? Generate the DNA sequence, put it into your lab-on-a-chip and computer, give it a fitness score, and then pick the sequence that has the highest score. Costs a lot less, and it's a lot easier to keep secret producing a dozen kinds and checking how well they do.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

Yes, I believe that an organization with a few hundred thousand employees and billions of dollars could develop such historical and archaeological research. Then everything would be a matter of sacrificing a few hundred or thousand children and interpreting the results.

The existence of such an organisation can't be kept secret. Its employees have to have bank accounts, pay taxes, and so on. Keeping research projects that involve hundreds or thousands of people secret, when they are highly unethical, is basically impossible: someone will always tell the press or the police.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm pretty sure that crustaceans have respiratory blood pigments. Most of them have gills, after all; tracheae don't seem to work under water.

If the tricks you describe could enable present-day insects to get up to 30 pounds, I think there would be at least a few insect species within a factor of 2-3 of that, given that there are hundreds of thousands of species. Wikipedia says the largest known insect is a giant weta whose record adult weight was 2.5 oz., or less than 1% of the weight you propose. And having insects use a respiratory pigment would require a radical redesign of the organism; you have to circulate the pigment through a gill, lung, or other structure with large internal surface area to get it oxygenated, and insects don't have such a structure.

Dying of suffocation because you've outgrown your respiratory system wins you the Darwin Award every time.

I dont think so, since environmental exploitation would have an utterly and lasting damaging effect in that regard on their behaviour and physiology. For quick and easy better respiratory systems using blood pigments you could copy those of some scorpions and large spiders, with book lungs supplying oxygen to tissues via haemocyanin.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't think you've quite answered my questions.

First, do you actually mean "the 46 best whose remains we could find" rather than actually "the 46 best who ever lived"?

Second, what is your criterion for being best? The evolutionary criterion is reproductive success, which is why I brought up Genghis Khan. If it's not that, what other criterion do you envision?

Third, how are you identifying which human remains count as the 46 best individuals? A lot of those remains will be in nameless graves, I think. But if you can read the DNA and decide how fit the person was, why mess around with producing actual children? Generate the DNA sequence, put it into your lab-on-a-chip and computer, give it a fitness score, and then pick the sequence that has the highest score. Costs a lot less, and it's a lot easier to keep secret producing a dozen kinds and checking how well they do.

The best you could find, if you couldnt find them, you couldnt use them. For criterion it would be specific per every trait: bigger, faster, smarter, healthier... It would be good to have genetic simulation, but its still on the works in the campaign, so child sacrifices need to be made.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The existence of such an organisation can't be kept secret. Its employees have to have bank accounts, pay taxes, and so on. Keeping research projects that involve hundreds or thousands of people secret, when they are highly unethical, is basically impossible: someone will always tell the press or the police.

Its not kept secret, the only thing kept secret are the illegal researches. The employees would not be able to run their mouth much if they are specialized enough to not have any idea of how the larger picture does look like.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't think you've quite answered my questions.

First, do you actually mean "the 46 best whose remains we could find" rather than actually "the 46 best who ever lived"?

Second, what is your criterion for being best? The evolutionary criterion is reproductive success, which is why I brought up Genghis Khan. If it's not that, what other criterion do you envision?

Third, how are you identifying which human remains count as the 46 best individuals? A lot of those remains will be in nameless graves, I think. But if you can read the DNA and decide how fit the person was, why mess around with producing actual children? Generate the DNA sequence, put it into your lab-on-a-chip and computer, give it a fitness score, and then pick the sequence that has the highest score. Costs a lot less, and it's a lot easier to keep secret producing a dozen kinds and checking how well they do.

Exactly. If your idea of the "best" is say Raoul Wallenberg, well that is a good model. It is also one likely not to have reproductive success for obvious reasons: he is likely to very nobly get himself killed. How about Michelangelo? Someone like him only succeeds because of having a patron and a lavish civilization even discounting that the real Michelangelo had a love life that was not conducive to reproductive success. How many generations does our Ancient Conspiracy wish to go before it starts cranking out Michelangelos and Oppenheimers? Or perhaps do we keep a few members for stud, and geld a few others so they can do other kinds of work? But then we are focusing on group success not individual reproductive success. Or in other words we are trying to build a civilization. Except building civilizations is what other civilizations seem to have been trying to do reasonably well without such brutal means.

Or maybe we have one Ghengis Khan, and he patronizes and protects lots of Michelangelos and Di Vincis in his secret society?

And that leaves off the point that we really have no reason to grant reproductive success as the criteria. If we do we grant it not to Ghengis Khan but to the first person who ever lived and who knows what he was like. Was he a cave man with a club dragging off Raquel Welch by the hair? Was he Odin walking around with an eyepatch? Or Adam walking around in a garden? None of these models are really suitable for biological research so they cannot be used in a eugenics project. Just picture it,"Hey Odin can you come down from Asgard to get a blood sample if your not to busy partying in Valhalla." Or better yet Zeus. Given how much time he spends womanizing he must have a great reproductive success rate.

But why the success in spreading genes? Why not success in spreading memes? In that case a great sage, or philosopher, or scientist or artist is a better model then Genghis Khan.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

The best you could find, if you couldnt find them, you couldnt use them. For criterion it would be specific per every trait: bigger, faster, smarter, healthier....

Can you increase all of those traits together? Dogs have greater genetic plasticity than humans; but if you increase speed, as with greyhounds or Persian gazelle hounds, you aren't going to get the strength of a mastiff, and it's doubtful you'll get the intelligence of a border collie or the tenacity of a dachsund. And if you have to make tradeoffs then you have a choice of which gain to prioritize; there isn't a straightforward "best."

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Can you increase all of those traits together? Dogs have greater genetic plasticity than humans; but if you increase speed, as with greyhounds or Persian gazelle hounds, you aren't going to get the strength of a mastiff, and it's doubtful you'll get the intelligence of a border collie or the tenacity of a dachsund. And if you have to make tradeoffs then you have a choice of which gain to prioritize; there isn't a straightforward "best."

In any case the most useful trait of dogs as of people is social cooperation.

But Eugenics is deceitful. The Spartans exposed infants that did not live up to their physical standards according to the judgement of the city elders. As a result of this and other elements of that philosophy, however scary an individual Spartan could be, Sparta could not compete.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

I dont think so, since environmental exploitation would have an utterly and lasting damaging effect in that regard on their behaviour and physiology. For quick and easy better respiratory systems using blood pigments you could copy those of some scorpions and large spiders, with book lungs supplying oxygen to tissues via haemocyanin.

I don't think that follows. There are really large insect societies. For example, a termite weighs around 2 g. A colony of a million termites weighs about 2 tons, and is quite sustainable. And because metabolism varies with surface area, not with mass or volume, it has the metabolism of about 1500 of your hypothetical 30-lb. insects.

Besides, there are lots of mammals that weigh 30 lbs. or more, and a mammal's metabolism is faster than a typical insect's, probably about tenfold for equivalent body mass. But mammals survive perfectly well.

[AlexanderHowl]

There is a mega colony of Argentinian Ants that inhabits ten percent of the land area of the Earth (by conservative estimates) and contains countless trillions of individual members. Their total mass probably exceeds that of humanity.