How would the population be affected in the long term if humans started to choose specific genes(Physical traits, intelligence, Disease resistance, Longevity) for their children?
In: Biology
What you are describing is called eugenics, and it has been discredited as not useful. Humans have very low genetic diversity compared to other species of large mammal, and most traits you listed involve a very large number of genes plus environmental factors, meaning it would be very hard to select for any of them effectively and very easy to cause inbreeding and the emergence of negative traits from recessive genes.
Evolution takes a very long time to produce significant differences even with fairly strong selection pressures, on the order of thousands of years. It’s just not a productive idea.
> ELI5 How does NASH Equilibrium apply to Evolutionary Biology?
Well, people have been applying game theory to evolutionary biology for many decades. Afaik the more relevant concept in that context is the evolutionary stable strategy, which has a slightly more restrictive definition than the Nash equilibrium (that is, every ESS is a Nash strategy, but not every Nash strategy is an ESS).
> if humans started to choose specific genes(Physical traits, intelligence, Disease resistance, Longevity) for their children?
It depends how they choose them. Maybe visible traits would go in and out of fashion. Presumably the choices would change as people learn more about their impacts, e.g. people might stop choosing a specific gene that tends to increase height slightly if they also find out it increases the risk of certain medical conditions. Maybe governments would try and mandate or ban certain choices. I don’t really know what you’re looking for. This idea doesn’t really seem well defined enough to apply game theory to it.
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