Mesan Alignment genetic markers

JohnRoth wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:
It does assume that Mesa - who've been orchestrating a 600 year old conspiracy over thousands of worlds with a fair degree of success - puts out sleeper families who (1) have no claimed or plausible genetic slave ancestry, but also do (2) have identifiable Mesan star line genetic markers.

The Alignment can certainly make mistakes, but that one seems too basic and unnecessary. They've got lines specifically to be indistinguishable from slaves - making sure the sleeper lines are ones that have no distinguishing markers is both doable and basic tradecraft. It does mean that the sleeper lines are outside the rest of the uplift program, to a degree, but everything so far is early days compared to the eventual uplift program when they can pull the curtain back.

Torch of Freedom, Chapter 50 wrote:
All three of his subordinates understood. Although Hasselberg was the only other person present who knew the identity of the actual individual behind that decision, all of them represented star-line genomes. Star-lines were a minority in the MSDF's officer corps as a whole, of course, but they were heavily concentrated in the more senior ranks, and for duties as sensitive as their own current assignment there'd been some judicious personnel shuffling. As a result of which, Task Force Four's command structure was undeniably top-heavy in alpha-lines, beta-lines, and gamma-lines.

Which meant that, unlike the majority of their fellow officers, they knew the Mannerheim System-Defense Force was actually an adjunct of the Mesan Alignment Navy no one else knew even existed. So the term "higher up" had a very different meaning for them than it would have had for any of those non-Mesan officers.

There's no suggestion here that they're any different from any other star line.

Well no - other than the common sense charitable assumption that the Alignment isn't making fundamental, obvious, stupid mistakes that aren't noticed or corrected over hundreds of years, that cannot even be attributed to ideological blinders. There isn't either an explicit notification that their every hair follicle, skin flake, or blood sample confesses "Made on Mesa" to casual, routine forensic checks.

If something forces us to acknowledge that yes, Mesa either could not or did not conceal the tell-tale genetic markers among their sleeper families, so they're just waiting to be exposed and bring the whole thing down, so be it. But I'd expect a high standard to swallow that kind of gaffe.

JeffEngel wrote:

For that matter, it's avoidable in another way: a background including genetic slavery sets someone up, immediately, as having sterling anti-Mesa bona fides. You're pretty nearly above suspicion that way. Beowulf and Manticore both welcome and integrate with open arms liberated slaves - if I were the Alignment, I'd make that my go-to method of infiltrating either. You wouldn't want to do it exclusively, because if they get a hint and it keeps coming up, it's going to turn above suspicion as a class quickly into under suspicion.

Last, Mesa's lost a lot of sleeper families over time. It's figured in. That also means that whatever markers they may bear, they've spread into the general population since then. Looking just for those markers will get you a lot of false positives of that sort: people whose ancestors were Mesan plants but who've been innocent for generations.

I'm going to have to go meta for a minute here. The basic background for the series was created in the early 90s. The human genome project was still in the future. The ability to get a full genome (Not just the SNPs) for approximately $1,000 has only just come online. We know a whole lot more about how it works, and especially how you look for various signatures in someone's genome than we did even ten years ago.

The model of genetics presented in the Honorverse is so far out of date it's unusable. In another 2000 years of steady progress on Beowulf, there won't be any difficulty in creating a signature and looking for it. How RFC wants to spin it is his business, but as far as I'm concerned, anything having to do with genetics is part of the arm-wave background rather than related to current science.

Could be. I don't know much of anything about genetic forensics, so I'm entirely open to finding out that the series is hopelessly compromised that way if not for the introduction of previously unmentioned technologies to compensate.

Two points though:
Science marches on, but it doesn't always leave plot requirements in ruins. Sometimes they evade it accidentally, or sometimes they can be reconstructed on the basis of new discoveries without trouble. Is it in fact even the case that Mesan sleeper families should be, according to what we know now, barring something we cannot now forecast, subject to being caught out with trivial ease?

And on the meta side: It would be a colossal anticlimax and wretchedly disappointing writing if Mesa's plot were undone by advances in real-world forensics that the author leaves unnoticed by geneticists and plotters 2000+ years in the future with 600+ years to work out details. So we can pretty well count on something frustrating that fool's mate.

JeffEngel wrote:
It does assume that Mesa - who've been orchestrating a 600 year old conspiracy over thousands of worlds with a fair degree of success - puts out sleeper families who (1) have no claimed or plausible genetic slave ancestry, but also do (2) have identifiable Mesan star line genetic markers.

The Alignment can certainly make mistakes, but that one seems too basic and unnecessary. They've got lines specifically to be indistinguishable from slaves - making sure the sleeper lines are ones that have no distinguishing markers is both doable and basic tradecraft. It does mean that the sleeper lines are outside the rest of the uplift program, to a degree, but everything so far is early days compared to the eventual uplift program when they can pull the curtain back.

Torch of Freedom, Chapter 50 wrote:
All three of his subordinates understood. Although Hasselberg was the only other person present who knew the identity of the actual individual behind that decision, all of them represented star-line genomes. Star-lines were a minority in the MSDF's officer corps as a whole, of course, but they were heavily concentrated in the more senior ranks, and for duties as sensitive as their own current assignment there'd been some judicious personnel shuffling. As a result of which, Task Force Four's command structure was undeniably top-heavy in alpha-lines, beta-lines, and gamma-lines.

Which meant that, unlike the majority of their fellow officers, they knew the Mannerheim System-Defense Force was actually an adjunct of the Mesan Alignment Navy no one else knew even existed. So the term "higher up" had a very different meaning for them than it would have had for any of those non-Mesan officers.

JohnRoth wrote:There's no suggestion here that they're any different from any other star line.

JeffEngel wrote:Well no - other than the common sense charitable assumption that the Alignment isn't making fundamental, obvious, stupid mistakes that aren't noticed or corrected over hundreds of years, that cannot even be attributed to ideological blinders. There isn't either an explicit notification that their every hair follicle, skin flake, or blood sample confesses "Made on Mesa" to casual, routine forensic checks.

Up to a point, I'd agree with that. I doubt if any of them have any generic genetic markers that point back to Mesa. As far as being able to identify a planet of origin, remember the gadget in Crown of Slaves that whats-his-name was using to track Princess Ruth on the Wages of Sin. Anything like that isn't going to be definitive unless you've got an extreme bottleneck like occurred on Nedbdle or a survival-related gene mod like the Graysons and Masadans. To mask Mesan ancestry, all they really have to do is make sure the Mesan survival adaptations aren't there.

However, they do have to have the common genetics for star lines, whatever those are, and those can be spotted once they're identified. If those weren't common, they'd have to redevelop them for every case, and that would be unreasonable.

JohnRoth wrote:However, they do have to have the common genetics for star lines, whatever those are, and those can be spotted once they're identified. If those weren't common, they'd have to redevelop them for every case, and that would be unreasonable.

Are there common genetics for star lines though? What makes a star line doesn't seem to be more than "we've done a lot of work on these lines, and we're heartily impressed with ourselves over them." And what you'd be designing for for sleeper families would include not having common markers to identify them as such. (If you could, and where you couldn't mask it as something innocuous.)

For the general uplift program, a star line seems to represent - as far as the "generic" Mesa-native ones go - brains, charisma, and general health. The slave population can give them a cover for at least charisma (insofar as looks are a measure, and for whatever else the customer wants out of entertainment-read-broadly lines) and specific sorts of brains. I suppose they could hide lots of improvements for general health in the slave lines too: those genotypes could be as healthy as you please and people won't twig to it when the medical care the slaves get will leave them all worse off than genetically normal sorts who do get effective medical care.

But if there aren't necessarily marks for any star line as such, then you certainly wouldn't include avoidable marks among the sleeper families. Mesan natives can afford markers; so can people with nominal slave ancestry. Sleepers can't - at least, not any markers that aren't consistent with a cover story that will never ever raise an eyebrow.

It would represent a lot more work if Mesan sleeper families represent star lines that are entirely distinct from the "core" Mesan star lines, and even cultivated so as not to betray any indication of any engineering of Mesan origin or any specific common heritage with one another. Agreed, readily. But these guys don't think small and they do think at very long range with (historically, anyway) ruthless consideration of the Demon Murphy and either cutting him off or leaving him unable to do critical damage. That would suggest they'd be entirely willing to do that additional work and foresighted enough to appreciate the possible need.

JeffEngel wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:However, they do have to have the common genetics for star lines, whatever those are, and those can be spotted once they're identified. If those weren't common, they'd have to redevelop them for every case, and that would be unreasonable.

Are there common genetics for star lines though? What makes a star line doesn't seem to be more than "we've done a lot of work on these lines, and we're heartily impressed with ourselves over them." And what you'd be designing for for sleeper families would include not having common markers to identify them as such. (If you could, and where you couldn't mask it as something innocuous.)

Jeff, I do keep up with modern genetics, genomics and associated fields. To give one example: intelligence. Although intelligence has approximately 50% heritability, large-scale genetic surveys (GWAS) have not turned up any genetic variants that have more than a 1% effect on the trait. Against that background, there won't be a huge number of ways to make gene modifications that reliably produce people who are in the upper .1% of the population.

As I've remarked before, RFC's background for the series was written in the early 90s. It shows in a lot of ways, genetics being one. I see lots of statements about genetic technology in general and Mesa in particular that have me rolling my eyes.

As far as I can tell, though, what he's doing is basic handwavium without a whole lot of thought going into the way the field is likely to develop. He's simply designed how it works, what it can do and what the limits are for the needs of the story he wants to tell.

That being the case, he's going to do whatever he needs to for the plot. Me being me, though, I'm going to be looking at it using what I know about how the field has developed in the following 25 years.

JohnRoth wrote:Jeff, I do keep up with modern genetics, genomics and associated fields. To give one example: intelligence. Although intelligence has approximately 50% heritability, large-scale genetic surveys (GWAS) have not turned up any genetic variants that have more than a 1% effect on the trait. Against that background, there won't be a huge number of ways to make gene modifications that reliably produce people who are in the upper .1% of the population.

As I've remarked before, RFC's background for the series was written in the early 90s. It shows in a lot of ways, genetics being one. I see lots of statements about genetic technology in general and Mesa in particular that have me rolling my eyes.

I don't think RFC is as far out of date as you think. I've always seen the Mesan Plot more in terms of Eugenics than Gene modification. There are quite a few subtle (and some not so subtle) hints that "genetic" slaves owe more to selective breeding and brain-washing than they do to explicit DNA modifications.

If gene-modification was as easy and reliable as Mesa and the Detweilers say it is, they really wouldn't need a "long range planning board" to arrange suitable pairings to "advance the genome."

Weird Harold wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:Jeff, I do keep up with modern genetics, genomics and associated fields. To give one example: intelligence. Although intelligence has approximately 50% heritability, large-scale genetic surveys (GWAS) have not turned up any genetic variants that have more than a 1% effect on the trait. Against that background, there won't be a huge number of ways to make gene modifications that reliably produce people who are in the upper .1% of the population.

As I've remarked before, RFC's background for the series was written in the early 90s. It shows in a lot of ways, genetics being one. I see lots of statements about genetic technology in general and Mesa in particular that have me rolling my eyes.

I don't think RFC is as far out of date as you think. I've always seen the Mesan Plot more in terms of Eugenics than Gene modification. There are quite a few subtle (and some not so subtle) hints that "genetic" slaves owe more to selective breeding and brain-washing than they do to explicit DNA modifications.

If gene-modification was as easy and reliable as Mesa and the Detweilers say it is, they really wouldn't need a "long range planning board" to arrange suitable pairings to "advance the genome."

That's the point. After 2000 years of development from where we are now, they shouldn't need to do the selective breeding thing. They didn't get those tongue codes by selective breeding, nor did they get the green hair that one of the women in CoS had by selective breeding. And the Simoes' foster daughter that kicked off a major story arc in ToF wasn't a result of selective breeding.

Arranging suitable pairings, though, does make sense, since it would tend to flush out stuff that simply doesn't work together. It's also good policy, since it makes it up front and in your face that there's a genetic improvement project going on - even if the selective pairing doesn't mean all that much.

The plot issue, though, is that the entire MAlign plot sequence in the story falls apart if you do any kind of reasonable projection from where we are now. It depends on genetic engineering being hard so that a secret cabal of would-be supermen can reasonably do their thing.

In fact, RFC is working out a current socio-political set of issues around slavery as one of his major plot issues, and he's projecting current issues onto the far future. That's not a diss, by the way: every SF author does it to make the issues relateable. Back in the day when I was going to SF conventions regularly, and fanzines were produced on mimeograph machines, stapled by hand and mailed out, there was a common complaint that a lot of space opera took place on West Mars. It's still a good story.

In fact, with CRISPR, I wouldn't be at all surprised if AP high school classes are doing genetic engineering within the decade. Heck, right now a lab can order mice that are genetically engineered to order from multiple suppliers, and that doesn't even require the latest technology.