Baby Geniuses

A month or so ago, I saw an article in Mother Jones on genetic tinkering to produce more intelligent babies. One of the reasons that the tech bro geniuses are so enamored of pursuing mo' smarter babies is that they hope that one of those mo' smarter babies will grow up to solve the problem of "figuring out how to ensure AI doesn’t eventually destroy humankind."

I can certainly see folks wanting to edit out bad genes that result in disorders that would make their offsprings' lives nasty, brutal, and short. Or cause a longer-term disorder. Who wouldn't want to keep something dire and deadly like ALS or Huntington's Disease from striking their children when they're hitting their prime?

But as much as I don't want to see blue eyes disappear - and the good news is that they probably won't - the idea of poking and prodding a zygote to make sure the bébé has bébé  blues, well... I'm not thinking that it's such a good idea.

Not to mention fine-tuning those little zygotes to make them brainier. 

Ah, no. Better to invest in better nutrition, better education, better parenting, better libraries, a better environment to help make sure that all children are in a position to be brianier without noodling around with their DNA. 

And as the tech bros seem to amply demonstrate, there's no guarantee that superior intelligence - nurtured or natured - translates into superior integrity, decency, and goodness.  

Isn't it disturbing enough that Elon Musk has 14 children and counting because he wants to make sure that there's plenty of him dog-paddling in the gene pool. (Wanna bet that the Musk offspring he spends the most time with turn out to be chips off the old weirdball. And the ones protected from close encounters of the any kind with their sperm-daddy turn out to be okay normies.)

Mostly, however, what I'm here to say is that, IMHO opinion, pretty much all babies are geniuses, their little baby brains going a mile-a-minute: absorbing information; communicating; learning, learning, learning. 

Think about it. 

Babies recognize their parents' voices, their touch, their smells. From the jump, without language, they can communicate their needs, their pain, their contentment, their joy, their preferences. (Spit out those nasty carrots!) 

They figure things out. 

Sure, they start crawling backwards - duh! - but pretty soon they realize that, in order to get their mitts on that stuffed Bluey, they need to move forward. Onward, baby genius! Onward!

But to me the biggest indication that babies are natural born geniuses is that they can categorize. 

I'm not sure that if someone put me - an educated adult - in front of a Great Dane, a Chihuahua, a Snoopy cartoon, and that stuffed Bluey, I would immediately understand that they are all dogs. 

Yet those baby genius brains are whirring, whirring, whirring. Yes, yes, yes! Great Dane, Chihuahua, Snoopy cartoon, stuffed Bluey. They are all DOGGY!

So let's hear it for baby geniuses. And stop trying to splice the DNA sequence to create one. 

Go baby genius!

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