[ExI] Purified humanity Re: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
> Removing redundancy to make mutations directly lethal might not be optimal
> for all genes. A lot of mutations seem to just reduce performance, so you
> increase the risk of being born with reduced performance genes. After all,
> being heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia is not lethal, yet pretty
> annoying.

### Aren't heterozygotes almost always asymptomatic, aside from being
immune to malaria?

This said, I agree that changing the levels of redundancy would not be
a simple project - since we evolved with redundancy, it's woven deep
into our control logic, and untangling this association would be a
very complex undertaking, probably much more difficult than a "simple"
sweep to remove pseudogenes, and correct mutated ones.

Rafal