Carlos Danger

Sure. I have heard that it is estimated that intelligence is 50% inheritance and 50% upbringing . This might be a really stupid question but If the bottom part is true why do athletic traits run in families. I may be mis-remembering how alleles work i've only done biology up to a high school level and that was a while ago..

By metric i just meant some scale like iq by which we could measure "how much" of a trait someone has. Suppose you had a few million genomes sequenced and statistics on each person such as iq, looks etc, could you not use statistical analysis to work out which genes/groups of genes correspond to each trait and use the results to work out the likely traits of an embryo? I didn't really understand your reply which probably means I didn't ask my question very well. If you produced children using methods A,B and C how much better would these children be (roughly) in terms of IQ score, 40 yard dash time, height, etc or is there just no way to tell? This question stemmed from a podcast where they discussed using these methods briefly and it probably does a better job of explaining what i'm talking about than I have. Here's a link, it should start at the appropriate section (which is only 10 minutes long). http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/2438?in=24:58&out=37:37

I'm using quite a loose definition of "enhanced" here. Assuming we knew which genes coded for which traits and we used that knowledge to produce the child with the most desirable traits (i.e. the ones that will give the child the best start in life) how much "better" would the average child be if he were produced by A) Using PGS to choose between 5 embryos, B) Selecting the best sperm from millions and the best egg from, say, a dozen C) Choosing the best chromosomes from a bunch of sperm and eggs and sticking them together in such a way that you get an embryo (is this even possible/feasible?) D) Any other method you can think of. Am I right in thinking that the average child created by A is likely to be in the top 20% of unenhanced children? I'm basically interested in what limiting factors come into play that stop f(X) from increasing linearly as X increases where f(X) is the desirability of the enhanced child's traits* and X is the number of: embryos in A, sperm and eggs in B and chromosomes in C. Does that make any sense? As you can probably tell, I'm not a scientist. * Assuming we had some fixed metric to measure this obviously.