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World Baby

 Create a baby that's every ethnicity
  (+5, -13)(+5, -13)
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The world has about 190 countries. If we bred males from 95 different countries with females from the other 95 we would get 95 half-breeds. Being careful to ensure that the offspring are half male and half female, we then mate the 47 male half-breeds with the 47 female half-breeds to get 47 quarter-breeds and so on.

By my calculations we can have a World Baby in 7 generations. In fact, we can use the prior generation of Semi World Babies to create lots of World Babies.

What do we do with World Babies? No idea. I bet they would fetch a sweet premium from superstar baby collectors.

—gordy, Feb 16 2009

World Puppy World_20Puppy
Similar idea [gordy, Feb 16 2009]

Building the Graph http://xkcd.com/403/
Somebody would have to oversee all that. [snoyes, Feb 16 2009]

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       not ever country is home to a unique ethicity, and some contain multiple. Many ethnicities do not differ biologically, so there would be no point in cross-breeding those.
—loonquawl, Feb 16 2009
   

       I think this is rather pleasantly half-baked. It would be a harmless silly game played with ideas of nationhood, much like the Eurovision Song Contest, but without the terrible sound-track. [+]
—pertinax, Feb 16 2009
   

       You don't have to wait for them to grow up. If you can get cloning down pat, you could just take cell samples as they are fetuses, and use those for the next round. 7 generations becomes like 5 years.   

       (regarding countries and ethnicities, no theyre not all distinct, but there are also some countries with many ethnicities...)
—Smurfsahoy, Feb 16 2009
   

       //What do we do with World Babies? No idea.//
My thoughts exactly [-]
—FlyingToaster, Feb 16 2009
   

       Purpose? [-]
—vincevincevince, Feb 17 2009
   

       What if it's ugly? :-D
—placid_turmoil, Feb 17 2009
   

       loonquawl, I appreciate your point about countries vs. ethnicities. After a little more research I can see that creating a World Baby would a much larger project with there being thousands of ethnic groups around the world.   

       I don't think we can say whether two ethnicities differ biologically or if that should even matter. The differences may be neurological manifesting in temperament or something.   

       At least part of the effort would be enumerating the world's ethnic groups and organizing them georelationally. We could then normalize the samples so that each area of the world is represented equally in World Baby.   

       Purpose? Isn't it obvious?
—gordy, Feb 17 2009
   

       Every person already has 100s of ethnicities, so much so that word 'ethnicity' is a total scam.
—xkuntay, Feb 17 2009
   

       //Purpose? Isn't it obvious?//   

       Uh, well, according to yourself in the last paragraph, no.
—Smurfsahoy, Feb 18 2009
   

       Skip all that procreation and generation and judging ethnicity, and just create a World Baby using genetic engineering using a sample mashup from 1000's of donors around the world. No need to wait 7 generations, or to try to convince people to procreate according to a formula.   

       Sure you'd want to travel a lot and get a good variety of genetic variety from obviously distinct ethnic groups. But you certainly can't pigeonhole ethnicity easily like taxonomy of fauna, so don't be upset if your French donor isn't 100% French (because there isn't such a thing), or your Australian Aboriginal donor is actually half-Sudanese.   

       World Babies would be raised in institutional isolation, and trained to be super-spy assassins.
—gonzola, Feb 18 2009
   


 

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