this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
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How are you going to find humans that can extract oxygen from water in the first place?
Selective breeding requires stock that has at least a related trait to the desired outcome. Humans don't.
You could breed for longer breath holding, etc, but unless you got lucky with a mutation, you can't magically produce a trait that isn't available.
Now, you could definitely start diddling genes in one way or another and get there with some luck and good protocols but that's not selective breeding.
At some point, you would run into a wall that requires evolution or other genetic changes to happen, and that ends selective breeding entirely. You could then start the breeding program again, but I say that isn't the same thing.
If we could find the genes that once gave us gills back when we were water creatures. Not sure if those are even there anymore.
Yeah I think that the best plan would be to genre edit a solution, then selectively breed 'normal' humans to recreate that engineered genome