>>10904289>If you have 100 people and you sterilize everyone who's under 1,85m tall, the percentage of tall people in the next generation would be way higherIt wouldn't be that much higher. The Wikipedia page for 'Regression toward the mean' has a relevant example:
Galton's biological explanation for the regression phenomenon he observed is now known to be incorrect. He stated:
“A child inherits partly from his parents, partly from his ancestors. Speaking generally, the further his genealogy goes back, the more numerous and varied will his ancestry become, until they cease to differ from any equally numerous sample taken at haphazard from the race at large.”
This is incorrect, since a child receives its genetic make-up exclusively from its parents. There is no generation-skipping in genetic material: any genetic material from earlier ancestors must have passed through the parents (though it may not have been expressed in them). The phenomenon is better understood if we assume that the inherited trait (e.g., height) is controlled by a large number of recessive genes. Exceptionally tall individuals must be homozygous for increased height mutations at a large proportion of these loci. But the loci which carry these mutations are not necessarily shared between two tall individuals, and if these individuals mate, their offspring will be on average homozygous for "tall" mutations on fewer loci than either of their parents. In addition, height is not entirely genetically determined, but also subject to environmental influences during development, which make offspring of exceptional parents even more likely to be closer to the average than their parents.
>This is true. But the potential risk is not as great as the benefit, I would argue.That's fair, clearly I disagree.
