How a "designer baby" might just work

In earlier discussions I've been skeptical of the idea of "designer babies" for many traits which we may find of interest in terms of selection. For example, intelligence and height. Why? Because variation on these traits seems highly polygenic and widely distributed across the genome. Unlike cystic fibrosis (Mendelian recessive) or blue eye color (quasi-Mendelian recessive) you can't just focus on one genomic region and then make a prediction about phenotype with a high degree of certainty. Rather, you need to know thousands and thousands of genetic variants, and we just don't know them. But I just realized one way that genomics might make it a little easier even without this specific information. The method relies on the phenotypic correlation between relatives. Even before genomics, and genetics, biometricians could generate rough & ready predictions about phenotypic values based on parental values. The extent of the predictive power depends upon the ...