How advance are the Alpha lines?

honesty they don't seem all that advanced. Take the harrington line for example, with the exception of her telepathy, i think you get someone like or at least near Honor herself through random chance. For that matter when it comes to infiltration families how advanced can you make them, before someone starts asking awkward questions? most wealthy planets seem to dna test their citizens, but even if you don't know what your looking for, i could imagined that you could put a flitter on that says anybody with with dna outside let's said the 95th percentile gets flagged for further review. I would say that at least their intelligence boosting seems to work.

Puidwen wrote:honesty they don't seem all that advanced. Take the harrington line for example, with the exception of her telepathy, i think you get someone like or at least near Honor herself through random chance. For that matter when it comes to infiltration families how advanced can you make them, before someone starts asking awkward questions? most wealthy planets seem to dna test their citizens, but even if you don't know what your looking for, i could imagined that you could put a flitter on that says anybody with with dna outside let's said the 95th percentile gets flagged for further review. I would say that at least their intelligence boosting seems to work.

The Harrington line has been out of control by the LRPB for at least 400 years. It's not a good sample.

But I agree on your other points. The other Alphas we know for sure about are the Detweilers, Anisimovna, Bardasano, and Audrey O'Haranrahan. Bardasano was different but only in ways that could be explained cosmetically; Anisimovna and O'Hanrahan can definitely pass for regular, unenhanced humans. We're told the major characteristics that have been selected for are resistance to disease, intelligence, longevity and probably physical beauty. We haven't been told that O'Hanrahan is beautiful, but Anisimovna definitely is.

But I get the feeling that, despite all their efforts, their intelligence isn't much above that of natural occurrence elsewhere. The difference is probably that it is much higher on average over the entire population (of Alphas), instead of a one-in-a-million occurrence. That is not a bad thing, actually. RFC has told us that Leonard Detweiler's vision of improving humanity wasn't wrong... only his methods and especially his descendants'.

But higher average intelligence won't help win. If they have an occurrence of brilliance at 1 in 1000 but a total population of only half a million Alphas, they have 500 brilliant people. Meanwhile, if the regular population's ratio is of 1 in a million, the GA shall have something like 50,000 of them.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Puidwen wrote:honesty they don't seem all that advanced. Take the harrington line for example, with the exception of her telepathy, i think you get someone like or at least near Honor herself through random chance. For that matter when it comes to infiltration families how advanced can you make them, before someone starts asking awkward questions? most wealthy planets seem to dna test their citizens, but even if you don't know what your looking for, i could imagined that you could put a flitter on that says anybody with with dna outside let's said the 95th percentile gets flagged for further review. I would say that at least their intelligence boosting seems to work.

The Harrington line has been out of control by the LRPB for at least 400 years. It's not a good sample.
(SNIP)

I doubt that the Harrington line was ever in their control. It is, after all, centuries older than the founding of Mesa. It is in their database of genetic enhancements, but, IMHO, it was never modified by them (wouldn't Allison noticed if Alfred and Honor had non-standard genetic modifications?).

Then there is the Winton line, which, I believe, was never in their database. On one side, we have the Detweilers who had been steadily enhanced for centuries. On the other side, we have Elizabeth Winton and Honor Harrington whose ancestries hasn't been enhanced for over 10 generations. All have tempers from hell, who controls that better? Not the Detweilers.

Now that i think about it, the alignment seem really bad at their enhancing objectives even compared to others in the series. By pure random chance/mother nature you got both zilwicki and cachat. Zilwicki is almost literally the greatest hacker in the universe, and in terms of strength can probably crush your skull. cachat is more intelligence and all around skill, but i think there was a line in one of the books that they tested his reflexes and he was in on of the top percentile. For that matter catchat's daughter martial arts master Robert Tye is not normal. In deliberate attempts we have the scrags. One of them did chunk a full grown, if tiny woman across a room. And then there's Thandi Palane.

Genetics are all about statistical potential. How many geniuses have had genius prodgeny?
The old argument about nurture and nature. A world beating runner's children may have the potential to be fast, but if they are too lazy to train then not.
Same applies to mental strength, or artistic ability.

Genetics are all about statistical potential. How many geniuses have had genius prodgeny?
The old argument about nurture and nature. A world beating runner's children may have the potential to be fast, but if they are too lazy to train then not.
Same applies to mental strength, or artistic ability.

DNA testing has it's limits.
Certainly a normal panel of DNA testing is done for individuals on most of the more affluent planets if for nothing more than scanning for various diseases. The original Harrington family to immigrate to MBS was known to have had the Myerdall (spelling) modifications and there has been a lot of inflow of immigrants to MBS over the centuries. Not the least of the variation that would show up is people who were better suited to higher gravity wolds settling on Sphinx.

Then you have the research that Honor's mother did on Grayson to try and determine why the low birth rate for males which included males not making it very far in their development in pregnancy. She found it, provided a "fix" and - the tech available is something we don't have yet- they could "gene-clean" the early Grayson modification out going forward. That would also call for gene mapping and then you have to figure out all the permutations and connections of what bits of the DNA interacts with what other bits of DNA to create the trait expressed in the individuals. This is not as simple as "this was done, we correct it if we do that".

Puidwen wrote:Now that i think about it, the alignment seem really bad at their enhancing objectives even compared to others in the series. By pure random chance/mother nature you got both zilwicki and cachat. Zilwicki is almost literally the greatest hacker in the universe, and in terms of strength can probably crush your skull.

Though, while I can't offhand remember if it was commented on in the books, Zilwicki likely has some heavy grav genetic mods in his family tree (just like Honor does) -- and if so his strength isn't all random chance. (Though he might be on the upper end of what that mod package offers)

But you're right that the MAlign doesn't seem to have pushed things in their Alpha lines very far beyond what the human baseline or the the 'open source' genetic mods offer. (Longevity might be their biggest win). They just, presumably, hit towards the high end of that range with more consistency -- making for a tighter statistical distribution and raising their average; compared to baseline humanity or 'open source' mods)

I'm not sure that the GA knows about the Alpha etc lines. What appears to be know is that "the other guys" have been working on genetic modifications outside the Beowulf codes and have applied them to themselves.

Certainly the various output of the Manpower genetic slave lines show that Manpower/Alignment has been doing a lot of tinkering with the human genome but beyond the Manpower Catalog (I presume something like that existed) mostly the GA has a lot of anecdotal evidence and lots and lots of examples of what was done to a vast quantity of freed genetic slaves. Given the state of genetic testing in places like Beowulf and SEM, there is probably a number of databases of "variations" and apparent manipulations of genes when people enter their medical systems. Yeah, there are privacy concerns but I believe the more affluent Star Nations would be tracking these things

But, to this point, nobody could point to a given person and say "That individual is an Alignment Alpha Line" Given the amount of legal modifications over the past centuries and also the illegal (per Beowulf and other Systems) ones that have entered the general populations of planets, it will be somewhat difficult to sort out Star Lines (also I think not something the GA knows about) or come to be able to use just DNA to identify a member of the Alignment.

In any case, you would have to study individuals and then groups of people from the same close gene pools to try and pin down what a particular modification does in an individual.
Allison Harrington actually had an easier time with the problem of male to female ratio with Grayson because the modification was now deeply entwined in the genetics of Grayson and you could start with any large set of samples of both male and female Graysons (other than immigrants in the past 50 years or so) and look at the mapping vs various "baseline" maps for planetary populations elsewhere. With the Star Lines, they are going to be all over the place as far as variations from anybody's datasets since it appears that at least the Star Lines individuals have been modified before conception for centuries per the Long Range Planning Board.

You have to wonder if all those changes have started to approach the point where two Star Line individuals could not procreate though physical sex between indivulals---effectivly making them not only a different species but one that would be dependent on really advanced medical tech to continue.

Jonathan_S wrote:.

Though, while I can't offhand remember if it was commented on in the books, Zilwicki likely has some heavy grav genetic mods in his family tree (just like Honor does) -- and if so his strength isn't all random chance. (Though he might be on the upper end of what that mod package offers)\[/quote]

On one hand zilwicki looks like exactly what i would expect from a heavy worlder mod. On the other hand it's never mention anywhere as far as i know, not even in his own thoughts, and honor does think about her mods once in a while. I suppose because of the old anti-genie prejudice his parents decided to never tell him.