Hypothetically, that is.
Most research on human embryonic stem cells - currently impossible in western countries due to ethics concerns.
Theoretically, if a few stem cells from every embryo early on and frozen that might be a huge boon for them once they grow up to adults with potential health issues. Need a new heart? Grow one in a lab from the preserved cells - perfectly compatible.
Currently these kinds of things can’t be explored, and whilst the ethics may be dubious the potential medical benefits left on the table are astonishing.
Making a lot of clones of myself, raising them all differently, and seeing how many of them turn out in the same way as me.
Not the same, but your comment reminded me of an upcoming game I want to try The Alters
Oooh there’s a playable demo! I’m gonna try it as soon as possible!
Agreed, it’s an interesting thing to think about at least. The nature vs nurture debate is practically as old as time itself but it feels like we’re no closer to an answer outside of “it’s a bit of both.” But how much?
Twin studies show thats its about 50% each.
50% per twin?
50% genetics and 50% the twin’s respective environment. These twin studies often look at twins separated and raised in different households.
Worldwide, making all coffee decaf, and not telling anyone.
You fucking monster
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I’d probably die in a car crash pretty quickly
How many billionaires need to be publicly executed to fix the usa political system.
More than just the ones in America, I’d reckon.
Title says unethical
Put a hundred toddlers on an island. Leave a few older children that will disappear a few years later that are taught to fish/hunt/gather. See what kind of language develops, or what kind of civilization. How many survive?
It is VERY unethical. Add variables to other islands, such as the amount of children, and what you teach them.
Throwing somebody straight into lava in a volcano. Would be interesting to see what happens.
I always found the stories of human/chimp hybrids fascinating.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanzee
https://bigthink.com/the-past/soviet-human-ape-super-warriors-humanzee-ivanov/
Unproven, but theoretically as possible as horse/donkey, zebra/horse, or lion/tiger.
Take ten or twenty thousand children, take over a fairly large portion of a midwestern state, build a large and complete environment for them to live in including towns, museums, theme parks etc. and raise them as normal Americans but absolutely 100% avoid introducing them to the concept of religion until they’re 25.
Before the oldest turns 24, that small city would just sublime into a higher plane, leaving behind nothing but a beautiful prairie and a fresh minty smell.
I suspect they’d invent their own. No one introduced religion to humanity. It came from within.
Then the experiment would yield data.
It would yield another religion, originated in a group that could parley their forced participation into fame on social media, which might lead to many more followers and eventually a holy war with the Mormons. Hmm. Might be worth a try.
I’m pretty sure that they would start making one up very soon.
I’m not meaning dump 20,000 children alone in the left half of Wyoming, I mean, keep them with their parents, hire teachers, teach them math and science and…basically a history that replaces a lot of “and they believed their gods said” with “the ruling class decided they wanted to”. What happens to children when they are raised in a functioning, supportive, nurturing society that does not contain religion or superstition?
Many developed countries are majoritarily irreligious. But it’s also hard to draw the line between religion and culture.
Hypothesis: Conservatives will refuse to believe contradicting facts regardless of punishment.
Experiment: Use increasingly painful stimulus for negative reinforcement when subjects espouse harmful views, ie racism.
The mouse utopia experiment but on humans. Ive always seen a subset of people who bemoan having to work or develop specialized skills to contribute to society. They want everything provided for them so their whole life can be leasure and comfort. A lot of socialism and communism selling points tend to be about having social services and things provided to you.
I’m interested to see the long term affects of people in a society where EVERYTHING is provided for you all the time. Every survival concern, sexual pleasure, every base urge, every whim and desire. For decades and decades and decades. Would it be a genuine good for society or would it be a monkeys paw situation?
Ive always hypothesized that any human society that attempts this will quickly erode into something similar to the mouse utopia.
Without any environmental pressures or meaningful challenges to overcome a large portion of the population without strong internal drives will become lethally/suicidally lazy, apathetic, and narcicistic
I suspect theres a large amount of people who simply have zero internal drives to apply themselves to doing a thing unlesd they have to. without the pressure of survival in either a physical or economic way they would simply sit on their ass, jerk off, play games, and maybe groom themselves, for decades until they die. Merit and overcoming challenge are important aspects of drive and dopamine generation. You deprive a person of those things they become lethargic. If that sentiment proves itself true it will be a hard pill to swallow for a lot of ideologies.
Unethical questions:
Statistically speaking, how many people would escelate their wants to socially taboo depravities? How quickly?
How long on average would it take for pleasure to become less meaningful in the face of instant gratification? Is there a logarithmic function that charts this?
How many people on average decide to begin self harm out to seek novel sensations? How long until onset?
How many people choose to live out a full life vs taking the placebo cyanide capsule and being removed from experiment? What would their reasonings be?
I’m curious if it’s even possible to satisfy every whim of a human. Do they get any access to human culture? If not, it would be like cloned birds failing to migrate.
the issue that caused societal collapse in the
mouse utopiaBehavioral Sink was overpopulation, not that they had their needs met comfortably lolfor a more accurate comparison look at Rat Park Experiment.
TL;DR: rats in solitary confined standard lab testing cages will consume lots of morphine laced water available as an alternative to normal water, rats in a spacious cage with other rats of both sexes and entertainment are not very interested in the morphine laced water. in fact they drank more of the laced water when naloxone, a drug that negates the effects of opioids, was added to it. the implication being that the rats were more interested in sweet water than morphine in good social conditions
Remove every unhealthy person and/or gene modify existing ones to eliminate every allergy orbodily defect caused by gene defect.
Also gene modify so that theres no mental detorioration and humans die just because they are old and the nody can’t keep up with maintenance.
That’s not even unethical, we just have bioconservatives in charge.
Remove every unhealthy person
Well that seems very unethical.
About gene modification, assuming it were to fully work without risks, it would still only be ethical if the patient were to consent, which not everyone would.
Who from the US government will last the longest in a bonfire. Although it might be questionable if this experiment is really unethical.
Raise a group of a dozen newborns with absolutely zero contact outside of their own group. Food and necessities get provided of course, but no language learning, no nurturing, no generational teaching.
What kind of community do they form when they are old enough to grasp such things? Do they develop their own language; or a different method of communication entirely. How do they stratify their society, or even do they?
At a certain point, when they are old enough, introduce challenges that only work if they cooperate with one another. See what happens.
Here’s a very unethical linguistics experiment that I think would be interesting:
Raising a group of children completely isolated from any language, spoken or otherwise. They would not be fully isolated from people, but those people would not be able to communicate with each other in the vicinity of the children (no speaking, no gestures, etc.) Of course, to isolate them from language would mean strictly controlling their lives (very unethical). Could they communicate with each other, and maybe even develop a language?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
Not a controlled environment but it’s happened several times, with varied results.
Haven’t they tried this??
they tried babies without anybody and they all ended up dying at some point. turns out human connection is pretty essential
I find those rats with the NOVA1 gene fascinating. I wonder what would happen if we downright tried to give rats human-level intelligence? They are more empathetic than humans I hear, they would make the perfect replacement for our species!
And another thing I would like to try, is to find a really big person, and see how far they can swallow me feet-first, before they run into problems, or one of us is injured.
I hope you cut your toenails first!
That said, I doubt anyone would have an oesophagus wide enough to accommodate anything bigger than a hand, so you might need to choose a different host species and potentially, orifice.
