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> but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate

sounds like an opportunity. as horse racing has a monetary reward associated with success one imagines a moneyball sort of play that you can compound by betting on your horse which the oddsmakers are going to handicap because it "doesn't have the pedigree" (at least the first few go arounds)

Pedigree is often a scam.

I know a peer of the realm who made pretty much his entire fortune on forged horses - he was breeding to make fast horses, but the pedigree was a load of, well, horseshit. All started because he’d bought a stallion who shot blanks.

Now it’s all about eight generations deep so he’s safe at this point, as they’re their own pedigree now.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on cows. There's a whole black market genomics industry going on in the uk right now, and probably elsewhere, too.

Seems like a carefully chosen term, maybe clone being too controversial.

I think replicant would be a fun term though. :)

A concerning amount of that product page is spent explaining how it has to slow down to pass through doorways, its inability to turn around in hallways, and its weak points you can use to disable one with a knife or gunshot. I feel like I'm reading a tutorial for how to defeat a tricky enemy in a video game.

This has to be some kind of kink thing. Not judging, just how it looks from first appearances.

Surprisingly yes!

Not as many as the ones that the US snatched in operation paperclip

Seems Brazil lost its early lead after cloning Hitler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_(film)

Yes, and no.

Twin studies are very politicized, waved around as an 'everyone is equal' flag, and therefore are often quite exaggerated.

People have difficulties differentiating between "some 'races' might on average show poorer test results" from "this person in front of me is from that 'race'" and "I'll therefore make an assumption predicated upon averages". This is true with all such things. EG, "women love shoes" vs "this person in front of me is a woman, therefore she MUST love shoes".

The first part of that statement is not sexist "women love shoes", the second part is "this person in front of me is a woman, therefore she MUST love shoes", but again the average person has immense difficulty with that assessment, and so the first statement is preemptively labeled sexist as a societal cure-method.

So anything which could be waved about to say "everyone is precisely the same, genetics don't matter" is used. Another such example of this, is how much 'everyone can be world class with 10000 hours of practice" nonsense which kept popping up about a decade ago. A mere utterance by one person, and everyone immediately accepted this concept. Why?

It lends towards equality.

Just as the concept of "there's nothing special or unique about any human being, it's all just how someone is raised" does too. So twin studies are absolutely essential in this context, and any aspect of such which fits this mantra is exaggerated, and any which does not ignored.

The truth, of course, is a mixture of things.

Genetics do matter. And yes, environment does matter too. With the US, and its 'left right' politics, it's basically 'this or that', never 'this and that'. If something becomes political, such as race politics, then you have only two views. Black and white, 0 or 1, no grey, nothing in-between.

Yet the truth is, it's both.

The 'platform' if you will, is indeed important. Genetics is important. Without that underlying framework, you're not going to get a genius.

Yet there are also additionals, such as yes -- were you raised in an environment capable of fostering that talent? An example being, if you're not provided the proper nutrition when growing up, your brain, your body won't be what it could be. The same is true in other aspects of your rearing. And of course, external factors can cause different genes to be expressed.

For example:

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23443-pinguec...

Pinguecula is often the result of the sun striking the side of your nose, and then it reflecting into your eyes. This is especially true if you're working outside, and your nose becomes sweaty, the water and oils of the skin causing a stronger reflection.

This bump is thought to reduce the sunlight from that angle, and it tends to only grow on people which spent a lot of time outdoors. It's the result of latent genes being expressed.

Genes are sometimes only expressed due to rare circumstances.

So certainly with twins, this is a possibility, with change ended up both physically and intellectually. Potential not seen, without the conditions to bring it about.

Twin studies don't always look at this. Most studies say something such as 'raised in similar conditions, in towns with similar crime rates, and equal access to food, etc, etc'.

Yet does that cover anything?

Each child may have gone to school with an entirely different range of exposure to other humans. For example, bullying, or even just one being exposed to more or less intelligent children as their peer group. And all food is not equal, a local field can have more important trace elements in it, compared to one even 10km away. A diet supplemented by local fare, can have an enormous difference in terms of nutrition.

I guess my exceptionally long winded point is, twin studies are wrought with a lack of real care, and bandied about due to US politics, and should not be taken seriously.

To take a step back from this, a parallel to twin studies, is ... well.. lineage.

You'll see many people in this thread talking about horse lineages. Well if lineage matters, twins are a sub-set of that. So all of the very extensive data around rearing horses, cattle, dogs, and all other animals and lineage, must be discounted as nonsense, if one is to discount twin theory.

What's the difference between humans and say.. horses here?

Rearing.

As I mentioned with twin studies, the platform is absolutely required to excel. Yet the truth is both, and rearing is important.

Yet when you raise horses, horses which could be worth millions, you raise them in a very controlled environment! The platform is there, the genetics are there, but the conditions which brought it out in the 'twin/clone', which resulted in the result last time, are far more identical in this case.

You have people raising these horses with training on a daily basis. Specifically enriched feed, great care to their health, and so on. The raising of such horses is far, far more controlled than any human typically receives.

So with horses, you have the platform, but also very rigid environmental conditions too.

ur replying to an anti-humanist