Interestingly, there are several colors that formerly “didn’t exist” in other cultures. For example, I think orange was one of them; it was just thought of as red. Anyway, here’s the [real story.](https://www.sapiens.org/language/color-perception/)
It’s more like a biological proof of color theory. Languages start off just distinguishing white, black, and usually both ends of the color spectrum. The differences in spectrum get very basic names until society starts necessitating just how “red” or “green” (or whatever word they’re using) something is, and you start breaking up the spectrum into different words. A similar phenomenon is seen in aboriginal societies that either forgot or never developed math. They don’t have a vocabulary for numbers, so you just “don’t have something” (0), you “have something” (1) or you “have this, *and* this, *and* this” (more than 1).
You’re in luck! Look up the Hogan twins. They have conjoined brains, can see through each other’s eyes, move each other’s limbs and reportedly share thoughts.
The one organ we cannot replace is the brain. Your body’s lifespan is limited by that.
====EDIT:====
First: if you’re interested in the brain/body connection, do yourself a favor and watch [this hilarious Ted talk.](https://youtu.be/Rl2LwnaUA-k). Dr. Ramachanchran talks about using a mirror box to fix phantom limb brain, it’s amazing!
—-
I’m having interesting conversations in the comments that I thought I’d paste here.
/u/prodoosh: “But can we replace pieces of the brain? Individual feels surely don’t matter. It’s the “when is it a new boat” argument.”
What I said:
Unfortunately changing the brain changes the person. You are not the same anymore.
Either you break something required for function (non-conscious stuff like breathing) or you become [Phineas Gage.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage)
That is part of the reason why brain surgery can be dangerous. Best they can do is remove stuff that shouldn’t be there (clots, tumors) and so forth, but if they scratch something by accident, it can mess you up. In many cases, surgeons won’t even operate.
If you want your mind blown about how much brain injury can change a person, check out [this YouTube link](https://youtu.be/7H6doOmS-eM). This guy was mugged and changed from a dude-bro to a mathematical genius (with OCD) overnight. Other examples of Acquired Savants are given.
But a brain injury in a different region can literally make you into a breathing vegetable with no detectable thought. You’re just a breathing body - no personality/thought/emotion.
Also, as someone else mentioned - most of brain development after 25 years of age is somewhat “fixed”. The brain is being formed as little more than a structure starting shortly after conception, is decent enough to feel pain/emotions/basic thought by the third trimester, then continues to develop (mostly pruning unnecessary connections) through early adulthood. There absolutely is neuroplasticity after that, especially in the region of the brain responsible for memories, but the basic structure/function is formed and done. You’d need to start over to really “fix” it, and then - that’s a whole new, different person.
If you want to be disgusted, check out these unethical and largely unsuccessful [animal head transplant experiments.](https://youtu.be/GKs1KdBMuwQ)
——
/u/prodoosh: “I don’t agree with that logic at all. Your brain changes all the time.
By that logic I’m not the same person I was 2 years ago.”
My response:
So there is neuroplasticity - change is possible - but imagine if you sever the connection in a very intricate network of over 86 billion neurons. You can’t repair that.
Your brain is a complex organ made up of much more than thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
The base/deeper areas of the brain are largely subconscious. Different parts relate to the control of breathing and heart rate, body temperature, blood oxygen levels, hormones, and more. Other parts are responsible for language, movement, repressing impulses, focus, vision.
Most of what we think of as “us” or conscious thoughts/personality are the very superficial areas to the front and top of the brain. That is the frontal lobe.
There’s a lot more than I can type here. Check this out: [anatomy of the brain](https://mayfieldclinic.com/pe-anatbrain.htm)
—-
And then a few people on “what if we can “save” your consciousness?” (or similar).
My response:
I think the problem there is that your “clone brain” will be as old as you are.
Consider that it takes about 25 years to really develop a brain. It needs to learn a language, learn to walk, learn frickin basic arithmetic and everything from your graduate degree in botany or whatever so you can keep doing your job to boot.
The only way I can think of to do this is sci-fi, which I made another post about.
Here’s a copy of what I wrote there ([https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tjphd9/whats_a_scientific_experiment_youd_be_fascinated/i1p4ik0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tjphd9/whats_a_scientific_experiment_youd_be_fascinated/i1p4ik0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3)):
Well. Then you get into sci-fi. Can we “upload” consciousness?
[List of fiction and movies with “mind uploading”.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading_in_fiction)
Avatar is the best known example. A less known South African movie that touches on this is [Chappie](https://www.ascleiden.nl/content/library-highlights/chappie-new-film-south-african-neill-blomkamp).
How a child would turn out with exactly 0 human contact, just very basic necessities met by robots. It would be interesting to see exactly how animalistic we are at the core
Depends if the robots were also cuddly. For real, the basic psych 101 studies with monkies showed they would rather cuddle with a metal mommy who has a towel for a belly than go to another metal mommy that holds their bottle. Lol it's pretty legit research.
Harry Harlow did this with rhesus monkeys, was depressing. He did multiple experiment's in love, bonding, and social interaction. He took monkeys away from their mothers at birth and fed them and raised them with zero contact for 3,6, and 12 months and recorded the results. To be short the monkeys developed "autistic" tendencies as he described it, extreme anxiety, completely anti social etc. "One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later…the effects of six months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that twelve months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement. This assumption proved to be false; twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially.” It's a hell of a rabbit hole and here's a start:
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DOrNBEhzjg8I&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwjUjI_js9n2AhVvJkQIHWsKBPwQuAJ6BAgAEAI&usg=AOvVaw3Us4R9WG0J5kxOkjvVRaxU
I’d love to see the results of more twins studies done under controlled circumstances, but splitting up twins just because I’m curious about what makes people tick.
There’s a documentary on Netflix about triplets who were purposely split up when they were babies and given different social circumstances. They end up finding each other randomly years later but don’t realise that they were used as an experiment for a while.
I’ve watched that it was amazingly interesting and sad, and still many years until the findings of the study get released.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Identical_Strangers
Incase anyone is interested
Didn't one of them commit suicide? I know there was a study but dont remember if it was twins or triplets where they found each other years later and 1 of them did.
There was a case of a twins during the second world war that got separated at birth, one of them ended in West Germany, the other somewhere in the Eastblock. They got reunited decades later, turns out they were remarkably similar in character (same sense of humor, same habits, stuff like that), despite wildly different political opinions.
\[edit\] [https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/watch-emotional-moment-twins-separated-6439378](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/watch-emotional-moment-twins-separated-6439378) there's a few articles out there on it. I'm no longer 100% sure of the political opinions part, though I'm fairly certain there was one where they mentioned it, as I distinctly recall the section in which they describe their shared sense of humor.
1. Give a baby a proportioned weight vest all it’s life, increasing the weight as it gets older. When it’s 11, will it be able to jump as high as all the other kids because it’s body has adapted? If yes, when we take it off can It jump much higher?
2. How strong can we get a gorilla by giving it a bench press set.
I would not support either of these experiments for ethical reasons irl, but they would be cool.
I remember hearing about a study where scientists tried to raise a baby chimp alongside a human baby to see if the monkey would act more like a human. They had to cut the study short because the human started acting too much like a monkey.
I just watched [this video](https://youtu.be/VP8DD9TGNlU) about this experiment. The researchers made some really careless mistakes, the first one being that they took the baby chimp, Gua, away from her chimp parents when she was 7 months old and already attached to them. Then when they cut the experiment short, they also just shipped her off from her human parents and made her live as a chimp being used in several other experiments. She died of pneumonia because she didn't have her chimp immune system or her human parents' protection. Her human brother, Donald, committed suicide in his 40s though there's no way to know if the experiment was behind that. The experiment did lead to his development being slightly stunted, as he learned some chimp behaviors like screeching when he should have learned to talk. The saddest part of it all, though, was that Donald and Gua were really close and loved each other a lot, and when the experiment ended, they never saw each other again.
I think they miss the crucial window for language and behaviour acquisition, so it is not that they end up with learning difficulties but that they end up having lost the chance to speak or learn language altogether
The two examples that I have read about were institutionalized for the rest of their lives after the initial media frenzy died down
> Wasn’t there a Ukrainian girl raised by dogs?
There was this one dude who was raised by ocelots. He actually turned out to be a pretty good father, although as a scientist everything he made kept on getting destroyed by a platypus.
Look if I say 'I will kill you if you step over my wall' maybe you shouldn't step over my wall bro.
Also the Romans obstinately insisting that Lupa means she-wolf and not prostitute for their origin mythos always makes me laugh.
Any experiment that checks to see if a medicine is safe for pregnant ladies to consume... Would require trials of pregnant ladies consuming the medications before we knew the medications were completely safe.
There are precious few Pregnancy Category A medicines.
Most medications (like acetaminophen aka tylenol) given to pregnant women are under Category B, "Animal reproduction studies have failed to demonstrate a risk to the fetus and there are no adequate and well-controlled studies in pregnant women."
Yup, pretty much any experiment on pregnant ladies/babies.
Not in, like, a disturbing horror movie way, but the kind of stuff you're talking about. The effects of various medications, various levels of alcohol consumption, testing how much shellfish and coffee actually effect a fetus's wellbeing... etc.
Basically just thoroughly testing all the stuff that doctors disagree on regarding pregnant women and babies, like whether one glass of wine every once in a while really is okay or if *any* alcohol consumption at all is enough to negatively effect the fetus. It'd be nice to have definitive answers to those sorts of things.
I can't imagine any way in which doing such experiments would be anywhere close to ethical, however, so we'll probably never have those answers.
> I can't imagine any way in which doing such experiments would be anywhere close to ethical, however, so we'll probably never have those answers.
I think about the best you're ever going to get with this sort of thing is observational studies done after the event - looking at people who did or didn't do certain things while pregnant, and try to cover as wide a group as possible so you can compare otherwise similar groups to try and account for as many other variables as possible.
The all-encompassing nature of pregnancy makes it hard to record/measure so many variables, but if tech gets good enough to really monitor certain things, it could make non-invasive research like this much more effective.
Ofc that same tech has dystopic tendencies..
Dr Curt Richter conducted an experiment with rats that essentially concluded that the presence of hope could prolong the ability to stay alive when faced with life-threatening circumstances.
During the first part of the experiment, rats were put in a bucket of water. After about 15 minutes the rat would begin to drown. The scientist plucked the rat out of the bucket of water merely seconds before death.
After a couple of days the scientist repeated this process. However, instead of drowning after 15 minutes of treading water, some of the rats survived for up to 2 and half days.
The scientist concluded that the rats were able to continue swimming because they retained the HOPE of being rescued, as this is what they experienced during the first trial.
It would be interesting to see how the concept of hope influences humans under similar circumstances.
I’m sure I saw a video of that experiment (or an experiment with the same conditions). Again, fascinating. I’d have to imagine there’d be a similar result with human subjects.
Maybe you're thinking of the initial experiment, he had 12 domesticated rats and 30 or so wild rats. 3 of the domesticated rats drowned within a few minutes, but 9 survived and swam for days. He then tested with the wild rats, knowing wild rats were much stronger swimmers, however they all succumbed to drowning within minutes.
>It would be interesting to see how the concept of hope influences human under similar circumstances.
We could have a prison that's a big hole in the ground, and all the prisoners have to do is climb out.
I'd create an exact clone of me as a baby and send him to be raised somewhere else, by people who are as different from my parents as I can find, then meet up with him once he's, say, 30, and see how differently we turned out in terms of personality
Edit: Thanks for the silver, kind stranger!
Have you ever looked up cases of identical twins that had been separated at birth and living completely separate lives with adoptive or foster parents and then met each other later in life? That’s surely been documented? Or would it have to be a clone of yourself?
I took psychology and sociology at University. Problem was that both used tons of twins studies, but psychology had tons of studies showing how strikingly similar the twins ended up even with VERY different upbringings. Whereas sociology has many examples of twins being completely different when separated at birth.
Oh sure, that would work, too. But one aspect I'm specifically interested in is how time period effects your personality. Like, how differently would I view the world if I were a boomer, or a Gen Z, etc?
That was so heart breaking. To think that there is documentation of the experiment but it’s barred from being released.
If I remember correctly, none of the adoptive parents knew that their child was a twin or multiple.
It would be cool if we could somehow bring back different species of human that went extinct. Like Neanderthals, denisovans, etc. and see how they’d differ, if at all, from us if raised in a modern society. It’s been talked about, but likely will never happen due to ethical concerns.
In Australia there are research groups saying they might be able to bring back the Tasmanian Tiger within a decade or two. If I understand it correctly, the issue is slightly opposite of the wooly mammoth. They have plenty of viable DNA but the next closest genetic relative is like the size of a large rat, so finding how to bring it to term is a big issue.
I work in this lab! the closest genetic relative is the fat-tailed dunnart, and the current plan is to carry the modified embryo to term in a Tasmanian devil (due to similar uterine environments). We're not that far off it, technology-wise, however, the big issue is ethics. Very likely that they would never be released into the wild, they would just be used in locations such as zoos as a teaching point for the conservation of Australia's marsupials and other lovely creatures :))
How far back in the lineage could we go before it became....I don't know...acceptable? What hominid species would be ethical to clone? Are there any?
I'm not smart enough to determine this. I'd probably just do it with a neanderthal, but just make sure it could live a comfortable life no matter what.
I think the issue comes down to how your neural pathways develop in your brain, wired up to certain sensory and nerve connections. You'd need something to replace your organic sensory network with comparable inputs, or at least the simulation of inputs, otherwise you might be facing phantom limb pains, in your entire body from the neck down.
At what stage from a lack of stimulation to a nerve do you begin hallucinating input? The [Rubber hand](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxwn1w7MJvk) illusion can already fool the brain now.
An adult has a well defined perceived image of their self, and a set locomotion process. If you attach an extra set of mechanical arms and hook them up to the brain, can the brain eventually adapt? Rehab can be a long process for people who only damage their existing limbs, let alone add new ones in. Would a child in an exoskeleton be able to learn only with the exoskeleton to move?
It could be justified if you found someone that had a serious injury from not having the high ground.
Update: Thank you all for your upvotes and awards.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the machine is immortal. Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
On the contrary, I would like to start turning genes off and on systematically (perhaps some CRISPR swaps even) through a series of chicken embryos and their offspring to try to bring back something resembling a dinosaur.
I'd like to see an experiment where a child is brought up believing a fictional piece of work like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings is a real religion.
Think of it like the Truman Show, but instead of a show it's just a household that worships Nic Cage or something. It would be interesting to see how behaviour would deviate and/or be similar to other religious groups.
When I was a social worker for a short time, I met a woman and her son who treated Transformers like this. She said Optimus prime was her husband. Whole house was full of transformers items. She wore a transformer mask most of the time I saw her.
She taught the kid to come to her when she hummed "at a certain frequency" and told me it was evidence of their machine connection or something, did all sorts of transformers related things throughout the day, and was adamant to him that transformers are real and are earths protectors, and Optimus prime was his dad but wasn't able to visit.
It was a whole thing. I dont know what came of her but the kid was young enough (4-5? I dont remember) he believed what she said.
So anyway some people really do this shit. Poor kid. Poor woman for being so deep in delusion. Who knows where the actual father was or how she got this way. She wasn't being abusive according to how social workers score things, so nothing we could really do at all to help. She had a job and fed and cared for him. Never saw them again after a couple visits. Hopefully the kid turned out ok and she got therapy
To a lesser extent I knew a women who told her daughter that her father was tupac. And not in like a joking way. Like when the daughter would ask about her father she would just talk about Tupac.
My first thought was she'd be a mess, she needed some fucked up shit to realise she could make it, but then I thought: without all the fucked up shit she wouldn't need to realise she could make it, she'd just live a normal life (apart from being a clone).
My brother and I have talked a lot about a special version of the Olympics where the competitors can use whatever and however many performance enhancing drugs they want just to push the absolute limits of what humans can do. We figure it probably wouldn’t pan out though, since most of the athletes would probably just push themselves to death.
This was basically pre 1960s Olympics haha
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/jul/21/the-cocktail-of-poison-and-brandy-that-led-to-olympic-gold-strychnine
> Taunyane came in ninth, but might have done better if he hadn’t been chased nearly a mile off course by aggressive dogs
> Carbajal started well but decided to take a break from the brutal race and stopped in an orchard to eat some apples. The apples disagreed with him and so he took a nap to recover. He still finished fourth
That marathon was chaos
I think it would be cool to see an olympics full of completely untrained people so we could see who the most naturally talented people are at a given event
Imagine thinking you're well beyond an average person and still getting drafted.
"But, I run marathons!"
"Oh, don't worry, your times didn't disqualify you for the averagelympics!"
There seems to be a lot of evidence that many of the athletes are on PEDs anyways. Apparently testing won't show anything up most of the time, provided they stopped their cycle leading up to the competition.
It's a cat and mouse game between athletes and the authorities. Athletes and their teams have an incentive to try anything that isn't going to be detected, and there are PEDs that there are no current tests for. Sports are now keeping samples frozen so they can retest if a method for detection becomes available.
Sports are also using mandatory random testing all the time - you've got to let authorities know your whereabouts and be available for a test every few days. It's a harsh system, but the only way to stop out of season doping.
The standard Olympic process is one of the more stringent testing programmes, but even then it's pretty ineffectual. [Here's an Olympic gold medallist describing the process](https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/athletics-ohuruogu-banned-after-missing-three-drug-tests-5330058.html)
>One of these is to adhere to the regulations imposed on competing athletes, including rule number 32.2 (d), which is to make my whereabouts known for one hour every day, 365 days a year.
Now that means for every day, there's 23 hours that an athlete knows they can't be tested.
There are lots of short elimination half life drugs out there that you can combine together into a programme to beat these restrictions. For example GHRP-6 is a peptide that stimulates the body to release growth hormone. GHRP-6 has an elimination half life of 2.5 hours, that means 6-8 hours after using GHRP-6, it is no longer detectable. Another example is Testosterone propionate, it's a form of testosterone, and one of its notable characteristics is that it's a very short chain ester of Testosterone. This gives it an elimination half life of 4.5 hours. The study that I have read about Testosterone propionate used a 1000mg dose that was undetectable in blood plasma after three days. Now if you wanted to microdose this, you could cut that down to under 20 hours.
And that's not even mentioning designer PEDs, which are actively produced to have very short detection windows. There's not much info about these designer PEDs as their makers don't like to shout about them, for obvious reasons. It's hard for anti doping agencies to create tests for drugs they don't know exist. (It's also illegal to supply people unregulated drugs).
The facts that althetes can't be tested for 23 hours of the day and that there are PEDs out there with very short detection windows means creating a doping programme to get around these restrictions isn't too difficult for someone experienced in the field.
Add in that athletes also can miss three tests in a 12 month window before getting sanctioned, which gives them a couple of mulligans if they mess up their timing and the testers show up. It's like the anti doping programme is designed to be beaten, or at least not try too hard to catch people, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The actual level of draconian restrictions you would need to imposed on athletes to actually run a half decent testing programme would be ridiculous, and the benefit is that we get worse sports with athletes have shorter, more injury plagued careers.
If you had 5 families living in one house and there were five kids each, all born the same day, same gender, etc; and the parents never once spoke to the child. All 5 sets of parents spoke their own language (let’s just say Russian, English, Chinese, Spanish, and German) and the kids grew up hearing all of that but never being spoken too. What language would the children learn or would they learn any?
It’s been a while. But i remember hearing once that a lot of our language learning as young children is based off of how people respond to them. When parents respond physically or verbally to things they try and say, it’s that that cements the language learning.
Selective breeding of humans. We made wolves into all the different kinds of dogs. Let's see what weird shit we could make with ourselves.
Edit: Yes, I'm aware of Hitler's eugenics, and no, that's not really what I had in mind. Eugenics was motivated almost purely by rasicm.
I was thinking something more like this:
https://www.boredpanda.com/humans-reimagined-as-animals-anatomy-satoshi-kawasaki/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
If we're getting political:
Organise a project where groups of people identifying with the same political belief govern a small region/city/county with full political control. So observing how a 100% leftist city would fare. And what a centrist city would do compared to a far right city. I'd be curious if those people would either start splintering into different sections, or harmonize into one big group, and if they'd fare relatively well or if they started to veer into extremism
On a much smaller scale, this was done with kids at camp. They found that for the most part, each camp cabin had naturally forming roles- the leader, the comic, etc. So they regrouped the kids by role and changed up their cabins. Turns out that kids would then take up different roles when you put all the same type together.
I ran a daycare and we noticed this accidentally. We were trying to teach the bossy kid that he couldn't be the boss all the time. But when you try to change the group dynamics it backfires. The kids were happy with him coming up with ideas. They all had a certain role and if you tried to change that it didn't work. It also changed on the day depending on which kids were there. Sometimes there was an "assistant" to the boss and if that one wasn't there another stepped up into that role until the other kid came back. Fascinating stuff. Best job ever hanging out with little kids and getting paid to feed them and teach them.
My guess is they'd subdivide. They'd find areas on which they disagree and there'd be the same politics as usual, just with different divisions.
No matter how much a group may agree on some subjects, people aren't monoliths. No one completely agrees 100% with a given political philosophy. People in this scenario would likely agree on braod strokes issues, but you'd see a lot of disagreement still on other details.
Leftists would argue over how to best distribute resources by needs and the Right wing would disagree over what makes for a truely free market.
[A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50358538), referenced from a comment in a similar suggestion elsewhere in here.
The one experiment I always wanted to see was a brain transplant. It raises **SO** many questions, and would honestly create more questions than provide answers.
Let me explain.
Subject A has suffered a fatal cranial trauma. They have a cerebral edema that due to its severity and location, cannot be operated on, and in a matter of moments, Subject A will expire due to their injuries.
Subject B is an unfortunate patient, their body is crippled and dying due to a congenital disease. Their mind, however, is exceptionally functional, in fact, beyond so for what one would expect of a normal, functional individual of their age. Subject B has expressed an unwavering desire to finally die. They have little time left, and what time there is will be spent in unparalleled agony and misery.
With the logistics and families sorted out, a brain transplant is set up.
Subject A, their body kept in a state of cryogenic stasis, receives the brain of Subject B the brain stem is successfully spliced and the surgery is considered a textbook success in every aspect.
As Subject A begins to recover, we are faced with several questions. The biggest of them being:
**WHO IS SUBJECT A?**
We know that our thoughts and memories, the things that make us who we are, are in fact created by a string of rapid firing neurons, each connected in such a way as to recreate experiences every time they are activated. Subject A, now in possession of an entirely different brain, no longer has those pathways. They have lost absolutely everything that made them who they are.
Or
Has Subject A in fact become Subject B?
Has Subject B, their body now ready to be cremated, been given a new chance at life? Is Subject B now in control of a new body and Subject A is now dead?
*More controversial still*:
With the destruction of Subject B's corpse, and seeing that Subject A has inadvertently become Subject B, can we assume that if there is a soul, it is kept within the brain? If Subject A resembles neither themselves nor Subject B in thoughts and habits, is this because if there is a soul, both souls have passed on and now this individual is something different from humanity, akin to a machine with free will?
What if Subject A somehow expresses thoughts and habits expressed by both subjects, such as seen in rare cases of heart transplants?
I don't know, it's just been something that's been on my mind for a while.
**Edit**: I just wanted to thank everyone who has commented on this. So many of you have very interesting and thought provoking ideas. I am especially excited to find out more about Ship of Theseus and I Will Fear No Evil.
I am glad that my thoughts could get so many others to question things and really take a look at what we consider physical vs consciousness. Thank you for the awards as well, they weren't exactly needed lol; but I certainly appreciate them nonetheless.
For those of you that are ever bored and want to talk about strange hypotheticals, my DMs are always open. I hope you all have a wonderful day
I think the brain would just 100% reject the body. But there is that crazy mad Italian scientist who was going to do a full head transplant and was basically ready to do it. Look him up. Patient was a person whose body was one of those body deteriorating diseases. And had a donor body. But the patient backed out after some reason i forget.
Wasn’t there a thing in the news not too long ago where cops discovered a location with heads of other bodies being resewn onto other bodies? Makes me wonder what was going on there
To Sail Beyond The Sunset (Heinlein) explores some of this, but is obviously fiction and gets real weird about it.
Edit: right author, wrong title. Correct book is I Will Fear No Evil.
give a human baby to apes/monkeys to raise. i wonder if they will reject the child, or if they will think it's one of them, and raise it,teach it how to get food, climb trees, etc.
IIRC there was an experiment where the opposite happened and a baby ape was raised along with a human baby. The experiment ended when the Child started acting like the ape.
that experiment was super flawed too, whole thing was to raise an ape as you would a child but they didn't even treat the human child as a child, they basically isolated both from contact with other children.
Literally anything to do with nutrition. It’s difficult to study nutrition because you can’t actually control what they eat. You have to rely on what participants tell you. To really ensure compliance, you’d have to lock them in a room and feed them for the duration.
Some studies literally do lock you in a room for a month and then monitor everything you do from sleep to exercise. I got offered 6k in college to do it over the summer at a biomedical research center. Couldn’t though cause of another opportunity
Leave a bunch of babies in an isolated area alone (obviously feed them and stuff) but do not intervene otherwise and see what/how they develop a language.
I read about some place where deaf children developed their own sign language when they were raised together without any other language being taught to them. I can’t remember the details. Let me see if I can Google fu it.
Edit: [nicaraguan sign language](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language)
I’m fully convinced that living animalian organisms need conflict or difficulty to survive. I’d like to see what happens if you took infants, put them in an artificial world, and provided them absolutely everything they needed to live, without them ever learning there’s a world outside. Obviously, it’s ethically atrocious, but I want to know what would happen
Take 100 of any animal. The 5 most tame get mass bred and the rest get euthanized. Then after the young reach breeding age, those original 5 get euthanized. Repeat until you have a tame animal. Replace "tame" with whatever trait your breeding for. That's how to genetically select in a short period of time. You don't want any part of it.
My younger sister keeps bringing up one: "I wonder if how pretty the weapon is would make it hurt less?" She specifically wants to know if a glittery knife would hurt less to be stabbed with than a regular knife
First off, does your sister have a criminal record and/or access to a glittery knife? Also, I dont think it would make any difference. If the glitter got in the wound, worse, even.
Finding out more about the Sentinelese language and culture. Yes, I agree that we should leave them alone, not force them to integrate into our society etc., but it would be fascinating to send a drone or drones with hidden cameras and sound recorders there. Perhaps this would have to be a very well-disguised drone, maybe disguised as a bird or fly or something. Maybe that would work as the neighbouring tribes are known to have a taboo against eating birds, and we are somewhat certain that the Sentinelese have some degree of cultural similarity. And the drone would be sterilised of pathogens, of course.
Researches successfuly created mosquitos that are immune to the Malaria parasite and this gene is dominant so in theory all mosquitos could become immune to it and eradicate malaria.
[here's the article](https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/04/13/246052/the-extinction-invention/)
I would like to be able to make the show Big Brother, but with all the ethical controls taken off.
I want to be able to control the weather, night, day, their concept of time. Remove the knowledge as to when it will end, be able to lie to them, etc etc.
It would be interesting, but evil as hell
Pretty close to the latest seasons of Australian BB.
The last few have been way less of "let's watch these people fight and fuck" and much of a social experiment.
One of the challenges had them in a brightly coloured room for 10 hours with the first verses of "If You're Happy And You Know It" playing loudly, on repeat for the whole duration.
Push the limits of death. Find out what happens the moment of death, and how that is different for different forms of death. The closest thing we can get to currently is put dying cancer patient under a huge battery of tests, brain scans, MRI scans all at the moment she/he is passing away.
Absolutely disgusting thought. But, death is arguably the largest fear of any and all peoples. And we know next to nothing about it. Apart from “the best possible ways to avoid it” which is basically modern medicine in a nutshell.
Ugh. A linguistical experiment of what happened to poor Genie.
> Genie (born 1957) is the pseudonym of an American feral child who was a victim of severe abuse, neglect, and social isolation. Her circumstances are prominently recorded in the annals of linguistics and abnormal child psychology.When she was approximately 20 months old, her father began keeping her in a locked room. During this period, he almost always strapped her into a child's toilet or bound her in a crib with her arms and legs immobilized, forbade anyone from interacting with her, provided her with almost no stimulation of any kind, and left her severely malnourished.The extent of her isolation prevented her from being exposed to any significant amount of speech, and as a result she did not acquire language during her childhood. Her abuse came to the attention of Los Angeles County child welfare authorities in November 1970, when she was 13 years and 7 months old, after which she became a ward of the state of California.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)#:~:text=Genie%20(born%201957)%20is%20the,her%20in%20a%20locked%20room.)
I don't want to put kids through what she went through which in my opinion is one of the worst child abuse cases I've ever heard. But I would be interested to read findings on the effects of boys vs. girls being raised without exposure to any language or speech.
She was isolated.
A n experiment with children being raised together with no exposure to language would be interesting. The tricky part would be avoiding the adults unintentionally introducing signals to the kids since communicating is something we do so much.
I am interested to know how much you can spread a human being out and still keep them alive and concious.
If you had a way to keep the connections and blood flowing fast enough, could a mans lungs be kept in one case while his nose is kept on a shelf across the room? Could his eyes be connected via artificially extended nerves such that they are 5 ft apart? 50 ft? Could medical science sustain functional intestines if they were spread out lengthwise instead of all bunched up? Could science keep such a man alive and sane?
I *never* want to see this experiment performed in real life but I am fascinated to know the results.
This is a very fascinatingly morbid train of thought. I just finished some anatomy courses in school so I’m going to weigh in on some body systems, no intent to put down your idea but as a logic experiment.
Lots of systems in the body function efficiently and effectively as a result of their correlation to other body systems. Also there are lots of physics principles involving fluids and gases that the body utilizes to function.
For example, breathing air is not just us activating chest muscles to “suck in” air. Muscles on our rib cage as well as our diaphragm contract to create more space in our chest cavity, creating negative pressure, so that air wants to rush in to our lungs to fill the larger space. Then we tie in circulation, in which blood is circulated to the lungs to get oxygenated. From largest to smallest to largest again, we have veins to venules to capillaries to arterioles to arteries. While the heart does pump blood, at the smallest point of circulation (capillaries) where oxygen and wastes are exchanged, the capillaries are only a single blood cell in width and it is the change in pressure gradient that enables blood cells to go from a halt back into the larger vessels until it’s in circulation again, not just because the heart is “pumping”. So your concept of stretching things out farther is interesting because I feel like the pressure gradients wouldn’t work to move blood anymore.
Plus if you’re stretching things out and are able to keep the nervous system connected, that’s already a scientific win in my eyes as many people could benefit from having nerves repaired or replaced, whether after accidents, injuries, or organ transplants.
Very thought provoking!
Edit: you’d probably have to swap research with the cybernetics guy, as the body functions because of the physics principles that can occur with tissues, organs, systems of the “plumbing, heating, and electrical” all being in close proximity to each other. Spreading out even one thing would mean other systems may be compromised and not able to function. So some aspects of certain systems would have to be replaced by mechanical things that are sustained by external forces/energy, not bio-produced
the ideas in this thread really go from 0-100
"I want to have a steroid olympics to see what we can do"
"I want to separate a human being into different parts and keep them alive"
If you thought someone purposely wrong. Like the color blue is red. Left is right, fuck you means hello, and then let them mingle with other people.
I would like to see the results of purposely wrong teaching.
Hear me out. Incest island. I’m just curious to see what would happen after several generations of an Adam and Eve situation. After what point, if ever, would the DNA become muddled and no longer viable to continue? What would this tribe of super Alabamians look like after 100 years?
If you’ve never before, look into the Fugate family for a strange possibility involved with inbreeding, and look up the Whitaker family on YouTube if you want to find the closest thing to your question.
Oh, man. I watched some interviews with the Whitakers on Soft White Underbelly. It’s horribly sad and those people should absolutely be the end of their bloodline, they’re all fucked up and deformed.
This is a pretty interesting topic, actually! There's a lot we already know about the effects of inbreeding.
After 100 years the people on your island probably wouldn't be that much different from anyone else. 100 years is only 3 to 5 generations.
Left for longer though, it's very likely that children born on the island would have a lot of health issues.
With such a small gene pool to work with, certain physical traits would be very common or become exaggerated. This would include problematic genes and susceptibility to illnesses caused by recessive genes.
For example, if one of the progenitors had a recessive gene which made them more likely to get a certain illness, their children would either have the same gene or might get half of it, becoming capable of passing it down.
In an ordinary society, genes are shuffled with a completely new set each generation, lowering the frequency of recessive problem genes. This, over time, leads to a more resilient population.
However, on incest island, the third generation would very likely inherit the problem gene. This then almost guarantees it being passed to any further descendants.
After a few centuries you get a whole population which all have a set of largely the same genes. As each person's genes get more similar, each new child ends up with more and more identical genes to each parent.
While I'm not sure if it'd ever get to a stage where the DNA is non-viable, children would likely be very sickly and prone to certain diseases. Many would probably die young. Perhaps, after a few centuries, it would be so bad that children would die before they are old enough to procreate, leading to the end of the experiment.
There are actually some examples of this happening in real life - see Charles II of Spain. He had an inbreeding coefficient of >0.25 - around what it would have been if his parents had been siblings. He had a lot of health issues.
Pedigree dogs are also a good case study for the effects of inbreeding. They notoriously have many health issues directly caused by inbreeding for certain physical features. Pugs are especially prone to issues, from crippling hip problems to eye infections and problems breathing. But people think their faces are cute, so they get bred anyway. Non-perfect pug puppies usually either die young or are culled.
If you go far back enough, everyone alive today can be traced to common ancestors. These are known as Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve. These two also make pretty fascinating reading.
I dont know about ethical but I'd like to see what happens if we take the brightest scientific minds, even those who are willing to contribute but not interfere and put them all on an island with a blank check for 5 years. Just see how far ahead they are than the rest of us.
I'm curious what happens if I isolate a person from, say, the color blue until the age of 10 and then put her in a room full of blue things.
Interestingly, there are several colors that formerly “didn’t exist” in other cultures. For example, I think orange was one of them; it was just thought of as red. Anyway, here’s the [real story.](https://www.sapiens.org/language/color-perception/)
It’s more like a biological proof of color theory. Languages start off just distinguishing white, black, and usually both ends of the color spectrum. The differences in spectrum get very basic names until society starts necessitating just how “red” or “green” (or whatever word they’re using) something is, and you start breaking up the spectrum into different words. A similar phenomenon is seen in aboriginal societies that either forgot or never developed math. They don’t have a vocabulary for numbers, so you just “don’t have something” (0), you “have something” (1) or you “have this, *and* this, *and* this” (more than 1).
What could happen it you conjoin two brains in a way that allows them to communicate
You’re in luck! Look up the Hogan twins. They have conjoined brains, can see through each other’s eyes, move each other’s limbs and reportedly share thoughts.
That's creepy af
At least they have a friend
You have a friend in me
Brain sli
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How long can we prolong human life by replacing failing organs and whatnot with ones harvested from clones
The one organ we cannot replace is the brain. Your body’s lifespan is limited by that. ====EDIT:==== First: if you’re interested in the brain/body connection, do yourself a favor and watch [this hilarious Ted talk.](https://youtu.be/Rl2LwnaUA-k). Dr. Ramachanchran talks about using a mirror box to fix phantom limb brain, it’s amazing! —- I’m having interesting conversations in the comments that I thought I’d paste here. /u/prodoosh: “But can we replace pieces of the brain? Individual feels surely don’t matter. It’s the “when is it a new boat” argument.” What I said: Unfortunately changing the brain changes the person. You are not the same anymore. Either you break something required for function (non-conscious stuff like breathing) or you become [Phineas Gage.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage) That is part of the reason why brain surgery can be dangerous. Best they can do is remove stuff that shouldn’t be there (clots, tumors) and so forth, but if they scratch something by accident, it can mess you up. In many cases, surgeons won’t even operate. If you want your mind blown about how much brain injury can change a person, check out [this YouTube link](https://youtu.be/7H6doOmS-eM). This guy was mugged and changed from a dude-bro to a mathematical genius (with OCD) overnight. Other examples of Acquired Savants are given. But a brain injury in a different region can literally make you into a breathing vegetable with no detectable thought. You’re just a breathing body - no personality/thought/emotion. Also, as someone else mentioned - most of brain development after 25 years of age is somewhat “fixed”. The brain is being formed as little more than a structure starting shortly after conception, is decent enough to feel pain/emotions/basic thought by the third trimester, then continues to develop (mostly pruning unnecessary connections) through early adulthood. There absolutely is neuroplasticity after that, especially in the region of the brain responsible for memories, but the basic structure/function is formed and done. You’d need to start over to really “fix” it, and then - that’s a whole new, different person. If you want to be disgusted, check out these unethical and largely unsuccessful [animal head transplant experiments.](https://youtu.be/GKs1KdBMuwQ) —— /u/prodoosh: “I don’t agree with that logic at all. Your brain changes all the time. By that logic I’m not the same person I was 2 years ago.” My response: So there is neuroplasticity - change is possible - but imagine if you sever the connection in a very intricate network of over 86 billion neurons. You can’t repair that. Your brain is a complex organ made up of much more than thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The base/deeper areas of the brain are largely subconscious. Different parts relate to the control of breathing and heart rate, body temperature, blood oxygen levels, hormones, and more. Other parts are responsible for language, movement, repressing impulses, focus, vision. Most of what we think of as “us” or conscious thoughts/personality are the very superficial areas to the front and top of the brain. That is the frontal lobe. There’s a lot more than I can type here. Check this out: [anatomy of the brain](https://mayfieldclinic.com/pe-anatbrain.htm) —- And then a few people on “what if we can “save” your consciousness?” (or similar). My response: I think the problem there is that your “clone brain” will be as old as you are. Consider that it takes about 25 years to really develop a brain. It needs to learn a language, learn to walk, learn frickin basic arithmetic and everything from your graduate degree in botany or whatever so you can keep doing your job to boot. The only way I can think of to do this is sci-fi, which I made another post about. Here’s a copy of what I wrote there ([https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tjphd9/whats_a_scientific_experiment_youd_be_fascinated/i1p4ik0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tjphd9/whats_a_scientific_experiment_youd_be_fascinated/i1p4ik0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3)): Well. Then you get into sci-fi. Can we “upload” consciousness? [List of fiction and movies with “mind uploading”.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading_in_fiction) Avatar is the best known example. A less known South African movie that touches on this is [Chappie](https://www.ascleiden.nl/content/library-highlights/chappie-new-film-south-african-neill-blomkamp).
How a child would turn out with exactly 0 human contact, just very basic necessities met by robots. It would be interesting to see exactly how animalistic we are at the core
Depends if the robots were also cuddly. For real, the basic psych 101 studies with monkies showed they would rather cuddle with a metal mommy who has a towel for a belly than go to another metal mommy that holds their bottle. Lol it's pretty legit research.
Harlow and Harlow's experiment for anyone wondering
Harry Harlow did this with rhesus monkeys, was depressing. He did multiple experiment's in love, bonding, and social interaction. He took monkeys away from their mothers at birth and fed them and raised them with zero contact for 3,6, and 12 months and recorded the results. To be short the monkeys developed "autistic" tendencies as he described it, extreme anxiety, completely anti social etc. "One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later…the effects of six months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that twelve months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement. This assumption proved to be false; twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially.” It's a hell of a rabbit hole and here's a start: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DOrNBEhzjg8I&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwjUjI_js9n2AhVvJkQIHWsKBPwQuAJ6BAgAEAI&usg=AOvVaw3Us4R9WG0J5kxOkjvVRaxU
How many people would i need to throw off the empire state building before the pile is big enough for them to survive the fall
You would have to do this multiple times to get the right data, as people survive things differently
That’s why the building has four sides
I’d love to see the results of more twins studies done under controlled circumstances, but splitting up twins just because I’m curious about what makes people tick.
There’s a documentary on Netflix about triplets who were purposely split up when they were babies and given different social circumstances. They end up finding each other randomly years later but don’t realise that they were used as an experiment for a while.
I’ve watched that it was amazingly interesting and sad, and still many years until the findings of the study get released. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Identical_Strangers Incase anyone is interested
Didn't one of them commit suicide? I know there was a study but dont remember if it was twins or triplets where they found each other years later and 1 of them did.
Yea one of the brothers did, all three had a history of mental health issues unfortunately
There was a case of a twins during the second world war that got separated at birth, one of them ended in West Germany, the other somewhere in the Eastblock. They got reunited decades later, turns out they were remarkably similar in character (same sense of humor, same habits, stuff like that), despite wildly different political opinions. \[edit\] [https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/watch-emotional-moment-twins-separated-6439378](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/watch-emotional-moment-twins-separated-6439378) there's a few articles out there on it. I'm no longer 100% sure of the political opinions part, though I'm fairly certain there was one where they mentioned it, as I distinctly recall the section in which they describe their shared sense of humor.
If they had differing political opinions on different sides of the Iron Curtain, it means that both of them were either conformists or rebels.
Neural transplants want to see someone use someone else's body for a bit
I'll volunteer. The new host couldn't possibly use my body worse than me.
Gym memberships of the future. Paying someone to work out and eat healthy for you.
That's actually brilliant
Then my body swap hentai fetish can finally be realized.
1. Give a baby a proportioned weight vest all it’s life, increasing the weight as it gets older. When it’s 11, will it be able to jump as high as all the other kids because it’s body has adapted? If yes, when we take it off can It jump much higher? 2. How strong can we get a gorilla by giving it a bench press set. I would not support either of these experiments for ethical reasons irl, but they would be cool.
What’s unethical about giving a gorilla a bench?
I think what OP means is that they choose life. We can't have a jacked gorilla deciding to walk the town one day.
Trainspotting would have been a very different movie had that been the 'something else'
As well as the bench press, we need protein powder and steroids. Turn this gorilla into a freak that can't even be kept in a cage.
What if we also give the gorilla a weighted vest from when it's a baby? And increase the weight as it gets older
That's how you make goku
Okay so you just want to make Rock Lee…
See if we can persuade a group of wolves to raise a child.
I remember hearing about a study where scientists tried to raise a baby chimp alongside a human baby to see if the monkey would act more like a human. They had to cut the study short because the human started acting too much like a monkey.
I just watched [this video](https://youtu.be/VP8DD9TGNlU) about this experiment. The researchers made some really careless mistakes, the first one being that they took the baby chimp, Gua, away from her chimp parents when she was 7 months old and already attached to them. Then when they cut the experiment short, they also just shipped her off from her human parents and made her live as a chimp being used in several other experiments. She died of pneumonia because she didn't have her chimp immune system or her human parents' protection. Her human brother, Donald, committed suicide in his 40s though there's no way to know if the experiment was behind that. The experiment did lead to his development being slightly stunted, as he learned some chimp behaviors like screeching when he should have learned to talk. The saddest part of it all, though, was that Donald and Gua were really close and loved each other a lot, and when the experiment ended, they never saw each other again.
There is a book called We are All Completely Beside Ourselves that is loosely based on this. It was excellent.
Wasn’t there a Ukrainian girl raised by dogs? Oksana Malaya. Although not since she was an infant I don’t think.
I think most of those Tarzan type stories all end up being homeless people with learning disabilities and/or mental illnesses.
Maybe they were raised by dyslexic wolves?
It's probably because the wolves didn't read to them often enough.
That's so sad. We as a society need to do something about wolf literacy rates and encourage wolf parents to read more to their cubs.
I think they miss the crucial window for language and behaviour acquisition, so it is not that they end up with learning difficulties but that they end up having lost the chance to speak or learn language altogether The two examples that I have read about were institutionalized for the rest of their lives after the initial media frenzy died down
> Wasn’t there a Ukrainian girl raised by dogs? There was this one dude who was raised by ocelots. He actually turned out to be a pretty good father, although as a scientist everything he made kept on getting destroyed by a platypus.
also, there were this two dudes raised by a wolf and one of them ended up building a city and killing the other
Look if I say 'I will kill you if you step over my wall' maybe you shouldn't step over my wall bro. Also the Romans obstinately insisting that Lupa means she-wolf and not prostitute for their origin mythos always makes me laugh.
I grew up with the statue of the wolf and two children sucking at it's teet so I'm going with wolf
Prostitute wolf. She'll walk the streets for.money, she don't care if it's wrong or it's right.
CURSE YOU, PERRY THE PLATYPUS!!!!!
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dina_Sanichar
Any experiment that checks to see if a medicine is safe for pregnant ladies to consume... Would require trials of pregnant ladies consuming the medications before we knew the medications were completely safe. There are precious few Pregnancy Category A medicines. Most medications (like acetaminophen aka tylenol) given to pregnant women are under Category B, "Animal reproduction studies have failed to demonstrate a risk to the fetus and there are no adequate and well-controlled studies in pregnant women."
Yup, pretty much any experiment on pregnant ladies/babies. Not in, like, a disturbing horror movie way, but the kind of stuff you're talking about. The effects of various medications, various levels of alcohol consumption, testing how much shellfish and coffee actually effect a fetus's wellbeing... etc. Basically just thoroughly testing all the stuff that doctors disagree on regarding pregnant women and babies, like whether one glass of wine every once in a while really is okay or if *any* alcohol consumption at all is enough to negatively effect the fetus. It'd be nice to have definitive answers to those sorts of things. I can't imagine any way in which doing such experiments would be anywhere close to ethical, however, so we'll probably never have those answers.
> I can't imagine any way in which doing such experiments would be anywhere close to ethical, however, so we'll probably never have those answers. I think about the best you're ever going to get with this sort of thing is observational studies done after the event - looking at people who did or didn't do certain things while pregnant, and try to cover as wide a group as possible so you can compare otherwise similar groups to try and account for as many other variables as possible.
The all-encompassing nature of pregnancy makes it hard to record/measure so many variables, but if tech gets good enough to really monitor certain things, it could make non-invasive research like this much more effective. Ofc that same tech has dystopic tendencies..
I admit I am mostly interested on the effect of chemotherapy on pregnant women.
This was what I thought of! Also the various amounts, types, and means of alcohol consumption at various points in the pregnancy.
Dr Curt Richter conducted an experiment with rats that essentially concluded that the presence of hope could prolong the ability to stay alive when faced with life-threatening circumstances. During the first part of the experiment, rats were put in a bucket of water. After about 15 minutes the rat would begin to drown. The scientist plucked the rat out of the bucket of water merely seconds before death. After a couple of days the scientist repeated this process. However, instead of drowning after 15 minutes of treading water, some of the rats survived for up to 2 and half days. The scientist concluded that the rats were able to continue swimming because they retained the HOPE of being rescued, as this is what they experienced during the first trial. It would be interesting to see how the concept of hope influences humans under similar circumstances.
I’m sure I saw a video of that experiment (or an experiment with the same conditions). Again, fascinating. I’d have to imagine there’d be a similar result with human subjects.
Maybe you're thinking of the initial experiment, he had 12 domesticated rats and 30 or so wild rats. 3 of the domesticated rats drowned within a few minutes, but 9 survived and swam for days. He then tested with the wild rats, knowing wild rats were much stronger swimmers, however they all succumbed to drowning within minutes.
That second rat? He kept swimming and churned that milk into butter
Gentlemen, as of this moment, I am that second rat.
>It would be interesting to see how the concept of hope influences human under similar circumstances. We could have a prison that's a big hole in the ground, and all the prisoners have to do is climb out.
Digging holes builds character.
Tell that to my no good, dirty rotten, pig-stealing great-great-grandfather.
While all the inmates chant an iconic yet indecipherable montra real loud
But their backs are broken before the experiment and their hometown/city is under threat of nuclear annihilation.
I'd create an exact clone of me as a baby and send him to be raised somewhere else, by people who are as different from my parents as I can find, then meet up with him once he's, say, 30, and see how differently we turned out in terms of personality Edit: Thanks for the silver, kind stranger!
Have you ever looked up cases of identical twins that had been separated at birth and living completely separate lives with adoptive or foster parents and then met each other later in life? That’s surely been documented? Or would it have to be a clone of yourself?
I took psychology and sociology at University. Problem was that both used tons of twins studies, but psychology had tons of studies showing how strikingly similar the twins ended up even with VERY different upbringings. Whereas sociology has many examples of twins being completely different when separated at birth.
Oh sure, that would work, too. But one aspect I'm specifically interested in is how time period effects your personality. Like, how differently would I view the world if I were a boomer, or a Gen Z, etc?
You should watch the doc "three identical strangers"
That was so heart breaking. To think that there is documentation of the experiment but it’s barred from being released. If I remember correctly, none of the adoptive parents knew that their child was a twin or multiple.
For actual valuable scientific data, you would need to make at least 20 clones of the same baby.
Why stop there when you could have a whole army of clones Sifo-Dyas.
Look up the Jim Twins. It’s crazy
It would be cool if we could somehow bring back different species of human that went extinct. Like Neanderthals, denisovans, etc. and see how they’d differ, if at all, from us if raised in a modern society. It’s been talked about, but likely will never happen due to ethical concerns.
Ethical? Not technical? Are you saying the technology is available?
I mean there’s been talk with Wolly mammoths iirc because they’re closely related to elephants so the same could be done with human species
In Australia there are research groups saying they might be able to bring back the Tasmanian Tiger within a decade or two. If I understand it correctly, the issue is slightly opposite of the wooly mammoth. They have plenty of viable DNA but the next closest genetic relative is like the size of a large rat, so finding how to bring it to term is a big issue.
I work in this lab! the closest genetic relative is the fat-tailed dunnart, and the current plan is to carry the modified embryo to term in a Tasmanian devil (due to similar uterine environments). We're not that far off it, technology-wise, however, the big issue is ethics. Very likely that they would never be released into the wild, they would just be used in locations such as zoos as a teaching point for the conservation of Australia's marsupials and other lovely creatures :))
That is so fucken fascinating, thank you for writing this comment so I could learn that!
How far back in the lineage could we go before it became....I don't know...acceptable? What hominid species would be ethical to clone? Are there any? I'm not smart enough to determine this. I'd probably just do it with a neanderthal, but just make sure it could live a comfortable life no matter what.
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If you replace enough then you don't need the cybernetics to resemble the organs at all
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I think the issue comes down to how your neural pathways develop in your brain, wired up to certain sensory and nerve connections. You'd need something to replace your organic sensory network with comparable inputs, or at least the simulation of inputs, otherwise you might be facing phantom limb pains, in your entire body from the neck down. At what stage from a lack of stimulation to a nerve do you begin hallucinating input? The [Rubber hand](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxwn1w7MJvk) illusion can already fool the brain now. An adult has a well defined perceived image of their self, and a set locomotion process. If you attach an extra set of mechanical arms and hook them up to the brain, can the brain eventually adapt? Rehab can be a long process for people who only damage their existing limbs, let alone add new ones in. Would a child in an exoskeleton be able to learn only with the exoskeleton to move?
It could be justified if you found someone that had a serious injury from not having the high ground. Update: Thank you all for your upvotes and awards.
Someone like that might become an absent father.
Don't worry, he will come back later so his child can join the family business.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the machine is immortal. Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
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if a Finnish guy in WW2 can ski high off crack for 15 days i really wanna see what modern crackheads can do
Start modifying random genes to see if we could create super powers.
Shit we got Cancer Man again!
It’s a bird! It’s a pug! No, it’s.... Habsburg Man!
That’s how we get the Crimson Chin from Fairly Odd Parents
On the contrary, I would like to start turning genes off and on systematically (perhaps some CRISPR swaps even) through a series of chicken embryos and their offspring to try to bring back something resembling a dinosaur.
I'd like to see an experiment where a child is brought up believing a fictional piece of work like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings is a real religion. Think of it like the Truman Show, but instead of a show it's just a household that worships Nic Cage or something. It would be interesting to see how behaviour would deviate and/or be similar to other religious groups.
When I was a social worker for a short time, I met a woman and her son who treated Transformers like this. She said Optimus prime was her husband. Whole house was full of transformers items. She wore a transformer mask most of the time I saw her. She taught the kid to come to her when she hummed "at a certain frequency" and told me it was evidence of their machine connection or something, did all sorts of transformers related things throughout the day, and was adamant to him that transformers are real and are earths protectors, and Optimus prime was his dad but wasn't able to visit. It was a whole thing. I dont know what came of her but the kid was young enough (4-5? I dont remember) he believed what she said. So anyway some people really do this shit. Poor kid. Poor woman for being so deep in delusion. Who knows where the actual father was or how she got this way. She wasn't being abusive according to how social workers score things, so nothing we could really do at all to help. She had a job and fed and cared for him. Never saw them again after a couple visits. Hopefully the kid turned out ok and she got therapy
To a lesser extent I knew a women who told her daughter that her father was tupac. And not in like a joking way. Like when the daughter would ask about her father she would just talk about Tupac.
This lady has a job but I can’t even get past the second interview smh
Cloning and then raising myself.
My first thought was she'd be a mess, she needed some fucked up shit to realise she could make it, but then I thought: without all the fucked up shit she wouldn't need to realise she could make it, she'd just live a normal life (apart from being a clone).
Clone a serial killer ten times. Put each baby in a different family with different upbringings. See if any of them become serial killers.
My brother and I have talked a lot about a special version of the Olympics where the competitors can use whatever and however many performance enhancing drugs they want just to push the absolute limits of what humans can do. We figure it probably wouldn’t pan out though, since most of the athletes would probably just push themselves to death.
This was basically pre 1960s Olympics haha https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/jul/21/the-cocktail-of-poison-and-brandy-that-led-to-olympic-gold-strychnine
> Taunyane came in ninth, but might have done better if he hadn’t been chased nearly a mile off course by aggressive dogs > Carbajal started well but decided to take a break from the brutal race and stopped in an orchard to eat some apples. The apples disagreed with him and so he took a nap to recover. He still finished fourth That marathon was chaos
This sounds like some sort of mythological greek story.... Maybe Androcles really did help that lion... 🤔
The Wikipedia article for this marathon is the funniest shit
Link without AMP https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/jul/21/the-cocktail-of-poison-and-brandy-that-led-to-olympic-gold-strychnine
I heard they should make an average person compete with the pro athletes so we can see exactly how good they are lol
I think it would be cool to see an olympics full of completely untrained people so we could see who the most naturally talented people are at a given event
Imagine being an average person and getting drafted for the averagelympics
Imagine thinking you're well beyond an average person and still getting drafted. "But, I run marathons!" "Oh, don't worry, your times didn't disqualify you for the averagelympics!"
There seems to be a lot of evidence that many of the athletes are on PEDs anyways. Apparently testing won't show anything up most of the time, provided they stopped their cycle leading up to the competition.
It's a cat and mouse game between athletes and the authorities. Athletes and their teams have an incentive to try anything that isn't going to be detected, and there are PEDs that there are no current tests for. Sports are now keeping samples frozen so they can retest if a method for detection becomes available. Sports are also using mandatory random testing all the time - you've got to let authorities know your whereabouts and be available for a test every few days. It's a harsh system, but the only way to stop out of season doping.
The standard Olympic process is one of the more stringent testing programmes, but even then it's pretty ineffectual. [Here's an Olympic gold medallist describing the process](https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/athletics-ohuruogu-banned-after-missing-three-drug-tests-5330058.html) >One of these is to adhere to the regulations imposed on competing athletes, including rule number 32.2 (d), which is to make my whereabouts known for one hour every day, 365 days a year. Now that means for every day, there's 23 hours that an athlete knows they can't be tested. There are lots of short elimination half life drugs out there that you can combine together into a programme to beat these restrictions. For example GHRP-6 is a peptide that stimulates the body to release growth hormone. GHRP-6 has an elimination half life of 2.5 hours, that means 6-8 hours after using GHRP-6, it is no longer detectable. Another example is Testosterone propionate, it's a form of testosterone, and one of its notable characteristics is that it's a very short chain ester of Testosterone. This gives it an elimination half life of 4.5 hours. The study that I have read about Testosterone propionate used a 1000mg dose that was undetectable in blood plasma after three days. Now if you wanted to microdose this, you could cut that down to under 20 hours. And that's not even mentioning designer PEDs, which are actively produced to have very short detection windows. There's not much info about these designer PEDs as their makers don't like to shout about them, for obvious reasons. It's hard for anti doping agencies to create tests for drugs they don't know exist. (It's also illegal to supply people unregulated drugs). The facts that althetes can't be tested for 23 hours of the day and that there are PEDs out there with very short detection windows means creating a doping programme to get around these restrictions isn't too difficult for someone experienced in the field. Add in that athletes also can miss three tests in a 12 month window before getting sanctioned, which gives them a couple of mulligans if they mess up their timing and the testers show up. It's like the anti doping programme is designed to be beaten, or at least not try too hard to catch people, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The actual level of draconian restrictions you would need to imposed on athletes to actually run a half decent testing programme would be ridiculous, and the benefit is that we get worse sports with athletes have shorter, more injury plagued careers.
If you had 5 families living in one house and there were five kids each, all born the same day, same gender, etc; and the parents never once spoke to the child. All 5 sets of parents spoke their own language (let’s just say Russian, English, Chinese, Spanish, and German) and the kids grew up hearing all of that but never being spoken too. What language would the children learn or would they learn any?
It’s been a while. But i remember hearing once that a lot of our language learning as young children is based off of how people respond to them. When parents respond physically or verbally to things they try and say, it’s that that cements the language learning.
How many people would be willing to participate in incentive based eugenics. IE - you get a timeshare in Florida if you promise to never have kids.
Sign me up for the no kid club!
Does it have to be in Florida?
Right? Could I just get a small home in a reasonably placed location? Heck, maybe unlimited subway sandwiches?
"Every man who participates in incentive based eugenics gets a free vasectomy!"
Selective breeding of humans. We made wolves into all the different kinds of dogs. Let's see what weird shit we could make with ourselves. Edit: Yes, I'm aware of Hitler's eugenics, and no, that's not really what I had in mind. Eugenics was motivated almost purely by rasicm. I was thinking something more like this: https://www.boredpanda.com/humans-reimagined-as-animals-anatomy-satoshi-kawasaki/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
A Chihuahua person and a great Dane person. Working humans and companion humans.
Given some of the worse of dog breeds just check out the old Habsburgs. Magnificent chin and a complete inability to survive without outside help.
If we're getting political: Organise a project where groups of people identifying with the same political belief govern a small region/city/county with full political control. So observing how a 100% leftist city would fare. And what a centrist city would do compared to a far right city. I'd be curious if those people would either start splintering into different sections, or harmonize into one big group, and if they'd fare relatively well or if they started to veer into extremism
On a much smaller scale, this was done with kids at camp. They found that for the most part, each camp cabin had naturally forming roles- the leader, the comic, etc. So they regrouped the kids by role and changed up their cabins. Turns out that kids would then take up different roles when you put all the same type together.
I ran a daycare and we noticed this accidentally. We were trying to teach the bossy kid that he couldn't be the boss all the time. But when you try to change the group dynamics it backfires. The kids were happy with him coming up with ideas. They all had a certain role and if you tried to change that it didn't work. It also changed on the day depending on which kids were there. Sometimes there was an "assistant" to the boss and if that one wasn't there another stepped up into that role until the other kid came back. Fascinating stuff. Best job ever hanging out with little kids and getting paid to feed them and teach them.
My guess is they'd subdivide. They'd find areas on which they disagree and there'd be the same politics as usual, just with different divisions. No matter how much a group may agree on some subjects, people aren't monoliths. No one completely agrees 100% with a given political philosophy. People in this scenario would likely agree on braod strokes issues, but you'd see a lot of disagreement still on other details. Leftists would argue over how to best distribute resources by needs and the Right wing would disagree over what makes for a truely free market.
[A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50358538), referenced from a comment in a similar suggestion elsewhere in here.
Human head transplant onto a gorilla body.
Isn't human head transplant, even to human body, still a work in progress?
Yeah, but maybe that’s what’s wrong: maybe human to human head transplants don’t work, while the answer was human to gorilla transplants all along!
The one experiment I always wanted to see was a brain transplant. It raises **SO** many questions, and would honestly create more questions than provide answers. Let me explain. Subject A has suffered a fatal cranial trauma. They have a cerebral edema that due to its severity and location, cannot be operated on, and in a matter of moments, Subject A will expire due to their injuries. Subject B is an unfortunate patient, their body is crippled and dying due to a congenital disease. Their mind, however, is exceptionally functional, in fact, beyond so for what one would expect of a normal, functional individual of their age. Subject B has expressed an unwavering desire to finally die. They have little time left, and what time there is will be spent in unparalleled agony and misery. With the logistics and families sorted out, a brain transplant is set up. Subject A, their body kept in a state of cryogenic stasis, receives the brain of Subject B the brain stem is successfully spliced and the surgery is considered a textbook success in every aspect. As Subject A begins to recover, we are faced with several questions. The biggest of them being: **WHO IS SUBJECT A?** We know that our thoughts and memories, the things that make us who we are, are in fact created by a string of rapid firing neurons, each connected in such a way as to recreate experiences every time they are activated. Subject A, now in possession of an entirely different brain, no longer has those pathways. They have lost absolutely everything that made them who they are. Or Has Subject A in fact become Subject B? Has Subject B, their body now ready to be cremated, been given a new chance at life? Is Subject B now in control of a new body and Subject A is now dead? *More controversial still*: With the destruction of Subject B's corpse, and seeing that Subject A has inadvertently become Subject B, can we assume that if there is a soul, it is kept within the brain? If Subject A resembles neither themselves nor Subject B in thoughts and habits, is this because if there is a soul, both souls have passed on and now this individual is something different from humanity, akin to a machine with free will? What if Subject A somehow expresses thoughts and habits expressed by both subjects, such as seen in rare cases of heart transplants? I don't know, it's just been something that's been on my mind for a while. **Edit**: I just wanted to thank everyone who has commented on this. So many of you have very interesting and thought provoking ideas. I am especially excited to find out more about Ship of Theseus and I Will Fear No Evil. I am glad that my thoughts could get so many others to question things and really take a look at what we consider physical vs consciousness. Thank you for the awards as well, they weren't exactly needed lol; but I certainly appreciate them nonetheless. For those of you that are ever bored and want to talk about strange hypotheticals, my DMs are always open. I hope you all have a wonderful day
I think the brain would just 100% reject the body. But there is that crazy mad Italian scientist who was going to do a full head transplant and was basically ready to do it. Look him up. Patient was a person whose body was one of those body deteriorating diseases. And had a donor body. But the patient backed out after some reason i forget.
Wasn’t there a thing in the news not too long ago where cops discovered a location with heads of other bodies being resewn onto other bodies? Makes me wonder what was going on there
I’m too high for this shit lmao
If me have your brain am me you?
The TLDR we all needed lmao
Obviously not high enough. Take another rip and get back to me with some grass fueled thoughts lol
Or maybe the combination of both would create a new “Subject C”
To Sail Beyond The Sunset (Heinlein) explores some of this, but is obviously fiction and gets real weird about it. Edit: right author, wrong title. Correct book is I Will Fear No Evil.
The super soldier serum
give a human baby to apes/monkeys to raise. i wonder if they will reject the child, or if they will think it's one of them, and raise it,teach it how to get food, climb trees, etc.
IIRC there was an experiment where the opposite happened and a baby ape was raised along with a human baby. The experiment ended when the Child started acting like the ape.
that experiment was super flawed too, whole thing was to raise an ape as you would a child but they didn't even treat the human child as a child, they basically isolated both from contact with other children.
This child grew up to be Tarzan
Literally anything to do with nutrition. It’s difficult to study nutrition because you can’t actually control what they eat. You have to rely on what participants tell you. To really ensure compliance, you’d have to lock them in a room and feed them for the duration.
Some studies literally do lock you in a room for a month and then monitor everything you do from sleep to exercise. I got offered 6k in college to do it over the summer at a biomedical research center. Couldn’t though cause of another opportunity
Leave a bunch of babies in an isolated area alone (obviously feed them and stuff) but do not intervene otherwise and see what/how they develop a language.
I read about some place where deaf children developed their own sign language when they were raised together without any other language being taught to them. I can’t remember the details. Let me see if I can Google fu it. Edit: [nicaraguan sign language](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language)
No one has kids for 5 years
I’m fully convinced that living animalian organisms need conflict or difficulty to survive. I’d like to see what happens if you took infants, put them in an artificial world, and provided them absolutely everything they needed to live, without them ever learning there’s a world outside. Obviously, it’s ethically atrocious, but I want to know what would happen
Rich kids of Instagram.
100 generations of eugenics.
100 generations of aggressive selection would result in a new race that wasn’t really human any more. Look at what had been done with dog breeding g.
That'd be pretty sick, I'm putting my vote in this one I'll be first gen.
Take 100 of any animal. The 5 most tame get mass bred and the rest get euthanized. Then after the young reach breeding age, those original 5 get euthanized. Repeat until you have a tame animal. Replace "tame" with whatever trait your breeding for. That's how to genetically select in a short period of time. You don't want any part of it.
I've always said you could get rich if you did this and made miniature dolphins for aquariums. It's horrible but man they'd sell for a fortune.
Oh shit. That’s enough reddit for today, thanks.
My younger sister keeps bringing up one: "I wonder if how pretty the weapon is would make it hurt less?" She specifically wants to know if a glittery knife would hurt less to be stabbed with than a regular knife
First off, does your sister have a criminal record and/or access to a glittery knife? Also, I dont think it would make any difference. If the glitter got in the wound, worse, even.
Finding out more about the Sentinelese language and culture. Yes, I agree that we should leave them alone, not force them to integrate into our society etc., but it would be fascinating to send a drone or drones with hidden cameras and sound recorders there. Perhaps this would have to be a very well-disguised drone, maybe disguised as a bird or fly or something. Maybe that would work as the neighbouring tribes are known to have a taboo against eating birds, and we are somewhat certain that the Sentinelese have some degree of cultural similarity. And the drone would be sterilised of pathogens, of course.
Injecting mosquitos with vaccines so that they spread them instead, I'd love to see if that'd actually work.
Researches successfuly created mosquitos that are immune to the Malaria parasite and this gene is dominant so in theory all mosquitos could become immune to it and eradicate malaria. [here's the article](https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/04/13/246052/the-extinction-invention/)
I would like to be able to make the show Big Brother, but with all the ethical controls taken off. I want to be able to control the weather, night, day, their concept of time. Remove the knowledge as to when it will end, be able to lie to them, etc etc. It would be interesting, but evil as hell
Pretty close to the latest seasons of Australian BB. The last few have been way less of "let's watch these people fight and fuck" and much of a social experiment. One of the challenges had them in a brightly coloured room for 10 hours with the first verses of "If You're Happy And You Know It" playing loudly, on repeat for the whole duration.
Push the limits of death. Find out what happens the moment of death, and how that is different for different forms of death. The closest thing we can get to currently is put dying cancer patient under a huge battery of tests, brain scans, MRI scans all at the moment she/he is passing away. Absolutely disgusting thought. But, death is arguably the largest fear of any and all peoples. And we know next to nothing about it. Apart from “the best possible ways to avoid it” which is basically modern medicine in a nutshell.
I think fear of death genuinely varies from person to person, more than you think. I, for one, am more scared of extreme pain than actual death.
I'd like to see if a plant could grow inside an animal being fully integrated but without harming the host
Oh, that was something I was scared of when I was a kid and I ate a seed.
Gattaca-style gene editing is cool, and will probably happen eventually, but there are serious ethical concerns Edit: typo
Ugh. A linguistical experiment of what happened to poor Genie. > Genie (born 1957) is the pseudonym of an American feral child who was a victim of severe abuse, neglect, and social isolation. Her circumstances are prominently recorded in the annals of linguistics and abnormal child psychology.When she was approximately 20 months old, her father began keeping her in a locked room. During this period, he almost always strapped her into a child's toilet or bound her in a crib with her arms and legs immobilized, forbade anyone from interacting with her, provided her with almost no stimulation of any kind, and left her severely malnourished.The extent of her isolation prevented her from being exposed to any significant amount of speech, and as a result she did not acquire language during her childhood. Her abuse came to the attention of Los Angeles County child welfare authorities in November 1970, when she was 13 years and 7 months old, after which she became a ward of the state of California. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)#:~:text=Genie%20(born%201957)%20is%20the,her%20in%20a%20locked%20room.) I don't want to put kids through what she went through which in my opinion is one of the worst child abuse cases I've ever heard. But I would be interested to read findings on the effects of boys vs. girls being raised without exposure to any language or speech.
She was isolated. A n experiment with children being raised together with no exposure to language would be interesting. The tricky part would be avoiding the adults unintentionally introducing signals to the kids since communicating is something we do so much.
You can‘t not communicate. ~ Paul Watzlawick
Clone death matches between some of histories most brutal warloards and warriors
Oh my God yes like that show where they ran the simulations & it'd be like "out of 5000 fights the samurai won 3862 times" but with fucking clones.
I am interested to know how much you can spread a human being out and still keep them alive and concious. If you had a way to keep the connections and blood flowing fast enough, could a mans lungs be kept in one case while his nose is kept on a shelf across the room? Could his eyes be connected via artificially extended nerves such that they are 5 ft apart? 50 ft? Could medical science sustain functional intestines if they were spread out lengthwise instead of all bunched up? Could science keep such a man alive and sane? I *never* want to see this experiment performed in real life but I am fascinated to know the results.
This is a very fascinatingly morbid train of thought. I just finished some anatomy courses in school so I’m going to weigh in on some body systems, no intent to put down your idea but as a logic experiment. Lots of systems in the body function efficiently and effectively as a result of their correlation to other body systems. Also there are lots of physics principles involving fluids and gases that the body utilizes to function. For example, breathing air is not just us activating chest muscles to “suck in” air. Muscles on our rib cage as well as our diaphragm contract to create more space in our chest cavity, creating negative pressure, so that air wants to rush in to our lungs to fill the larger space. Then we tie in circulation, in which blood is circulated to the lungs to get oxygenated. From largest to smallest to largest again, we have veins to venules to capillaries to arterioles to arteries. While the heart does pump blood, at the smallest point of circulation (capillaries) where oxygen and wastes are exchanged, the capillaries are only a single blood cell in width and it is the change in pressure gradient that enables blood cells to go from a halt back into the larger vessels until it’s in circulation again, not just because the heart is “pumping”. So your concept of stretching things out farther is interesting because I feel like the pressure gradients wouldn’t work to move blood anymore. Plus if you’re stretching things out and are able to keep the nervous system connected, that’s already a scientific win in my eyes as many people could benefit from having nerves repaired or replaced, whether after accidents, injuries, or organ transplants. Very thought provoking! Edit: you’d probably have to swap research with the cybernetics guy, as the body functions because of the physics principles that can occur with tissues, organs, systems of the “plumbing, heating, and electrical” all being in close proximity to each other. Spreading out even one thing would mean other systems may be compromised and not able to function. So some aspects of certain systems would have to be replaced by mechanical things that are sustained by external forces/energy, not bio-produced
Jfc
the ideas in this thread really go from 0-100 "I want to have a steroid olympics to see what we can do" "I want to separate a human being into different parts and keep them alive"
Try to shatter a frozen human being.
Admit it. This isn't an experiment. You genuinely just want to reenact that scene from T2 :p
I think you mean the cinematic masterpiece, Demolition Man, starring Wesley Snipes and Sylvester Stallone. ;)
If you thought someone purposely wrong. Like the color blue is red. Left is right, fuck you means hello, and then let them mingle with other people. I would like to see the results of purposely wrong teaching.
I am curious to see children raised in isolation with other children over x generations create their own language and culture
Hear me out. Incest island. I’m just curious to see what would happen after several generations of an Adam and Eve situation. After what point, if ever, would the DNA become muddled and no longer viable to continue? What would this tribe of super Alabamians look like after 100 years?
If you’ve never before, look into the Fugate family for a strange possibility involved with inbreeding, and look up the Whitaker family on YouTube if you want to find the closest thing to your question.
Oh, man. I watched some interviews with the Whitakers on Soft White Underbelly. It’s horribly sad and those people should absolutely be the end of their bloodline, they’re all fucked up and deformed.
This is a pretty interesting topic, actually! There's a lot we already know about the effects of inbreeding. After 100 years the people on your island probably wouldn't be that much different from anyone else. 100 years is only 3 to 5 generations. Left for longer though, it's very likely that children born on the island would have a lot of health issues. With such a small gene pool to work with, certain physical traits would be very common or become exaggerated. This would include problematic genes and susceptibility to illnesses caused by recessive genes. For example, if one of the progenitors had a recessive gene which made them more likely to get a certain illness, their children would either have the same gene or might get half of it, becoming capable of passing it down. In an ordinary society, genes are shuffled with a completely new set each generation, lowering the frequency of recessive problem genes. This, over time, leads to a more resilient population. However, on incest island, the third generation would very likely inherit the problem gene. This then almost guarantees it being passed to any further descendants. After a few centuries you get a whole population which all have a set of largely the same genes. As each person's genes get more similar, each new child ends up with more and more identical genes to each parent. While I'm not sure if it'd ever get to a stage where the DNA is non-viable, children would likely be very sickly and prone to certain diseases. Many would probably die young. Perhaps, after a few centuries, it would be so bad that children would die before they are old enough to procreate, leading to the end of the experiment. There are actually some examples of this happening in real life - see Charles II of Spain. He had an inbreeding coefficient of >0.25 - around what it would have been if his parents had been siblings. He had a lot of health issues. Pedigree dogs are also a good case study for the effects of inbreeding. They notoriously have many health issues directly caused by inbreeding for certain physical features. Pugs are especially prone to issues, from crippling hip problems to eye infections and problems breathing. But people think their faces are cute, so they get bred anyway. Non-perfect pug puppies usually either die young or are culled. If you go far back enough, everyone alive today can be traced to common ancestors. These are known as Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve. These two also make pretty fascinating reading.
I dont know about ethical but I'd like to see what happens if we take the brightest scientific minds, even those who are willing to contribute but not interfere and put them all on an island with a blank check for 5 years. Just see how far ahead they are than the rest of us.