Would another advantage of multiple gametic parents be less reversion to the mean? With just two extraordinary-on-some-measure people contributing, it's presumably more likely to revert to mean and have less extraordinary offspring, but I'm having a hard time imagining how the recombination would actually work with 16 or 64 contributors. I'm essentially thinking of it like randomly shuffling amongst the contributors.
I imagine it would then have to depend on the direct lineages of all the contributors - if they're from standout families like the Darwins, Wedgewoods, Galtons, Mills, etc, they're less likely to revert to the mean, due to having less randomly "up" components in their genomes, but if they're from less distinguished lines on whatever measure, more of their extraordinary trait will have been driven by randomness rather than substance. But I'd expect familial accomplishment to be basically randomly distributed in a group vs 2 people too, unless there's an explicit selection effect for distinguished lineages. So maybe the same risk / tendency for mean reversion. What do you think?
Time for some of the extraordinary familial descendants of the world to step up, form polycules, and create some uberkinders!
More realistically, if this is ever a thing it will be via uterine replicators + government selected pools of contributors to make the uberkinder.
good post, friend.
Would another advantage of multiple gametic parents be less reversion to the mean? With just two extraordinary-on-some-measure people contributing, it's presumably more likely to revert to mean and have less extraordinary offspring, but I'm having a hard time imagining how the recombination would actually work with 16 or 64 contributors. I'm essentially thinking of it like randomly shuffling amongst the contributors.
I imagine it would then have to depend on the direct lineages of all the contributors - if they're from standout families like the Darwins, Wedgewoods, Galtons, Mills, etc, they're less likely to revert to the mean, due to having less randomly "up" components in their genomes, but if they're from less distinguished lines on whatever measure, more of their extraordinary trait will have been driven by randomness rather than substance. But I'd expect familial accomplishment to be basically randomly distributed in a group vs 2 people too, unless there's an explicit selection effect for distinguished lineages. So maybe the same risk / tendency for mean reversion. What do you think?
Time for some of the extraordinary familial descendants of the world to step up, form polycules, and create some uberkinders!
More realistically, if this is ever a thing it will be via uterine replicators + government selected pools of contributors to make the uberkinder.