Celebrity sperm donor service

This is a great idea. Most celebrities have above-average IQ, so it makes sense to encourage the propagation of their genes. Better than a woman getting knocked up by some random unemployed gangbanger.

Unfortunately, the story is a hoax.

Comments

[ic]

They are worried about child support demand from recipients which directly compete against their own offsprings of choice.

[JP]

Women likely to get knocked up by a gangbanger couldn't afford celebrity sperm.

Much better idea: pay those women to come and get a quarterly depo-provera shot (obligatory for those receiving any form of government benefit).

[RandyB]

eBabe

[JL]

There used to be a sperm bank, The Repository for Germinal Choice, where the donors were Nobel prize winning scientists and other high achievers in intellectual fields, including William Shockley. There has never been a formal study of how the resulting kids turned out to be, but all the anecdotal information suggests that the results were very good. I just saw a documentary where they interviewed a couple who had had two daughters from this sperm bank, from the same donor. Apparently they (the daughters) were both classical musicians. The couple appeared to be Jewish, while the daughters were blonde northern European types. I wondered how the "cuckold" felt about the fact that the girls so obviously weren't his.

[asdf]

"I wondered how the "cuckold" felt about the fact that the girls so obviously weren't his."

I've long considered doing this myself because my family has a long history of pretty heavy genetic health problems. My current thinking is that as long as I found a wife that wanted to raise the children of my seed only then I would ask her to use a donor sperm. I'm not sure how using a donor sperm is all that different from having your DNA altered. I had this debate on Jehu's blog awhile back.

[Three and a Half]

But what would it accomplish? Let's look at the most extreme case - all children in the world are coming from the same sperm donor with the highest IQ. You will get a bunch of superhigh IQ but supersick children that would consume available resources and degenerate into oblivion after few generations. Let nature do the trick. Whatever distribution in IQ exists is the most optimal for survival of species.

[destructure]

"I've long considered doing this myself because my family has a long history of pretty heavy genetic health problems." -- asdf

With the advances in genetics, you could probably get a DNA test. You might not even have anything to worry about. Even if there was something, they could probably screen the embryos to ensure a healthy outcome.

***

"Let's look at the most extreme case - all children in the world are coming from the same sperm donor with the highest IQ." -- Three and a Half

Yeah, if all the children in the world came from Stephen Hawking it would definitely be a problem. But if a thousand kids came from a hundred top notch donors it should work out.

[asdf]

"With the advances in genetics"

We aren't there yet, and I don't know when we will be there.

[John]

"Whatever distribution in IQ exists is the most optimal for survival of species."

Maybe in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, but not today. Having a bigger brain means higher glucose requirements, so starvation is more of a risk. Luckily starvation isn't much of an issue nowadays.

[destructure]

"We aren't there yet, and I don't know when we will be there." -- asdf

That depends on whether the genes which cause a particular disease have been identified. If they have then its a simple matter to use IVF to create several embryos, test them to determine which ones are free of that gene and implant them.

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/new_genetic_testing_technology_for_ivf_embryos

[ode]

To: John
Granted we live in a far more technologically advanced society today compared to the cave man days but we must be honest with ourselves and admit there are more job openings for truck driving and waitressing than positions for theoretical physicists and computational chemists.

Society needs people with less then 100 IQ points or who will provide the cheap labor to do all the grunt work. Some will argue I am being cruel and wanting to hold the less fortunate down. I disagree. Compared to what goes on today in mainstream society...we lie to people, telling them they are smarter than what they really are, tricking them into taking out expensive college loans, training for job positions that do not exist. Now that is cruel.

[Steve Sailer]

There was an Arliss episode on HBO in the 1990s where Arliss signs up a bankrupt, alcoholic retired baseball legend (modeled upon Mickey Mantle) and tries to get him ways to make money. One is a "The Seed of a Champion" service for infertile baseball fans who want slugging sons. The Mantle character says in the infomercial that he got involved because he always wanted a job where he didn't have to leave the house.

[nebbish]

"That depends on whether the genes which cause a particular disease have been identified."

Some disease phenotypes are polygenic, with none or only some of the disease-causing mutations known. Even if they are known, it will be more difficult to get a "clean" embryo if there are tens or hundreds of genes of concern.

[Odinsdottir]

I don't care if celebrities have an above-average IQ because they still have no sense. How many of them are dead before 30, and how many of the rest have some kind of addiction, or some other psychological problem, or go through marriages the way the rest of us go through tissue paper.

Most people fixated on IQ scores seem to be mentally impaired themselves, unable to see the facts we're all presented with every day.