Eugenics, Ready or Not
quadrant.org.au
quadrant.org.au
It's a long, long way between "preventing disease by manipulating someone's genes" and "deciding you really wanted a blonde baby".
As someone who lost his brother to a genetic disease it sort of pisses me off to hear people try and tell people in my family's shoes that we're on a slippery slope to 'designer babies' when all we want is to keep our family member from slowly dying of a disease with symptoms like Alzheimer's at age 20.
If "designer babies" is the price for cures like that, we should gladly pay it. This from a pretty conservative guy, esp. on life issues.
Dismissing that argument out of hand is disingenuous. I absolutely, fully support no-holds-barred consideration of all the viewpoints involved here – 'designer babies' is a very real issue that we absolutely must think about in the scientific, social and ethical sense (like basically every bit of science fiction touches on).
We can stop disease, and we can create children who will be better equipped to tackle tomorrows problems. The education system has very similar goals. It's not a sin for a wealthy family to drop tons of money on private schools, tutoring, and other expensive methods of getting their child ahead. But as soon as genetics are involved, it's a problem that invokes images of nazi's and irrecoverably widening income gaps.
Maybe not to the right wing. But to the left wing?
who can stop army from creating/amending super soldiers? military is well known for disregard on basic human rights in the name of greater good or whatever. same goes for private military contractors. boundaries are anyway extremely blurry, what I consider ridiculous and unethical would other couple consider as giving extra hand to their incoming baby in a very competitive world.
one country bans it, but it doesn't prevent its neighbour to have more permissive laws for certain cases. just look at the private banking, or assisted suicide travelling.
Gattaca showed this future rather nicely. the thing is, from perspective of the generation when change happens, things might look harsh & horrible in more than one instance. from perspective of augmented civilization looking back 500 years ago on the "age of big leap forward", we will look like a bunch of incompetent, useless and fragile primitives. not so sure what to think about that...
For example:
It's not a sin for a wealthy family to drop tons of money on private schools, tutoring, and other expensive methods of getting their child ahead.
I'm pretty sure there are quite a few who would argue otherwise. Entrenched privilege and the resultant increase in inequality is quite a divisive issue already; a putative future in which this aspect of society is further extended such that children of the wealthy are unassailably genetically superior will be unacceptable to many.
My point is not that genetic manipulation is wrong – in fact, I'm pretty sure it's inevitable and essentially the next stage in human evolution. But it's an outstandingly complex concept that can't be waved away with what amount to fairly reductive comparisons.
I know of very few admirable people who were forced through the sausage mill of educational excellence. Most of the people I admire are "mutts". They're a bit ... off nominal, because people on the bubble don't make waves, usually.
If we can't get that right then messing with DNA seems like going from playing with matches to playing with dynamite.
I'm not saying there aren't very real issues that need to be addressed with manipulating human genetics. I've seen GATTACA too ;). The issues I had with the article (which I've since skimmed) are this (try to read it in a friendly tone...I'm emotionally invested in this, but I'm not irritated):
* The term "Eugenics" may be correct in this situation, but it's historically loaded with extremely negative baggage. It felt like click bait.
* Comparing disease removal by genetic manipulation to optional enhancements by genetic manipulation is unhelpful. One allows for the other, but that doesn't mean we must allow them as a pair.
* The wealth gap for this treatment is going to be no different from the wealth gap in any other new, expensive treatment we currently use. Poor people will still have less access to any expensive treatment, this isn't going to be different in any way. It's a problem, yes, but it's not specific to Genetic manipulation, it's specific to medicine.
* Our ability to screen people for genetic defects and decide if we want or don't want children is already excellent; I know I'm a carrier for Batten disease, my brother's killer. Had my wife also been a carrier I just wouldn't have had biological children. That's not Eugenics, that's sanity. Abortion of diseased embryos is a far more complex, but orthogonal moral issue which we've already been dealing with for a long time.
* Our legal system limits this sort of experimentation and it's terribly slow to change. Even autonomous cars, which are safer and less accident prone than humans, are going to take a long while to get approved. Saying we're on a slippery slope ignores how much regulation there is over this. I'd even argue what we're dealing with is a slippery slope uphill. Encouraging research into, and legalization of, genetic manipulation to cure fatal diseases is almost certainly not a slippery slope because of the legal structures we've build around such research.
https://www.centerforhumanreprod.com/services/infertility-tr...
So I guess the safety of the genetic modification procedure would be the only ethical difference when altering well understood genes to prevent disease.
Also, my family doesn't suffer from it. It is autosomal recessive, so only the unfortunate 1/4 have any symptoms at all. My other brother and I are carriers, so we have a 50% chance of passing our gene on to our kids. Neither of our wives are carriers.
The fact that one might have personal reasons to dislike or abstain from genetic editing does not mean that eugenics are immoral for the rest of the population.
Perhaps it's because of how people identify themselves. Most of my friends identify themselves with the 'voice' they hear in their heads, their thoughts and personalities, as do I. My body is more of a vessel and while it's part of me it's not 'me' in any way that matters for my identity. I wouldn't mind tuning a few bits and pieces here and there...
Either genetical improvement will be only available to top 0,5% (this way nothing changes, they're already separated from the rest of us, we don't interact)
Or it will be available to top 70% (middle class)
In both cases there's no scary divide.
We could have scary divide if this option was only available to 10% population, but economically that's unrealistic.
Talking about developed countries, of course.
Please try to keep comments to the realm of reality. Just making things up doesn't move the discussion forward.
Modern USA as a country is based on premise that anybody can afford to buy a car. I don't see why society can't be based on premise that anybody can afford eugenics for their children.
Your employer will be able to afford it before you can. I don't mean your boss, I mean corporate policy. People already tolerate all kinds of ridiculousness for "culture fit" and drug testing and semi-stealthy political tests. You can follow corporate's genetic fine tuning policy, or not work here, its not like we're forcing you to do anything...
Perhaps it's unfair to discuss eugenics in the way it would be used in an ideal world. I agree with you that the scenario you sketch seems far from impossible.
But I would like to submit your example now for your own consideration.
Are computer today not so ubiquitous that it's reasonable for an employer to require you to be skilled in their operation? Don't certain jobs just _require_ you to possess a certain physical or mental trait?
I know I'm begging the question here, and that 'being good with computers' is very different from 'forced to modify body because out of financial necessity'.
But is is also very different from 'accepting that time moves on, and that nowadays (2100AD) it's very normal to get a job-related tune-up'?
As opposed to the 'culture fit' and personality tests (which may or may not have a causal relation to the benefit that you provide to the company) a specific and objectionably verifiable improvement to a part of your body or mental capacity is not something that companies should be barred from expecting from their employees I think.
Also, military will do it WAY before private corps if they are still using human soldiers at the time. If you can give people enhanced strength and eyesight, with less sleep required and resistance to all kinds of diseases, you'd be a fool not to.
Obviously someone anxious and timid would make a better underling WRT primate dominance rituals, correct? So lets lower the testosterone level to nil, mess with the brain biochemistry to make them extremely anxious all the time ...
This is before we get started on short vs long term. So we got 100 applicants for every warehouse job, well, we'll only hire applicants with the Arnie S. muscle mod. Oh you say in five years they'll all be crippled for life due to skeletal and ligament problems, well, hey, manual labor has always been a tough life and we still got 99 applicants left for every job, so tough luck ...
Then there's morally questionable stuff... you can guess the genetic mods that will be mandatory at strip clubs and breasturants, but for women in corporate sales positions, things will be morally ambiguous. Of course things happen already with plastic surgery, and its assumed genetic engineering would be cheaper and more convenient... anyway people (well, men, mostly) make some hiring decisions for somewhat questionable physical characteristic reasons, and the situation will only get worse.
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"
If the risks and side-effects are as small as this article seems to suggest, then it's a no brainer.
Others have pointed out that this technology will be available to the rich first, but this is a problem with economics, not with the technologies. Economic inequality has gigantic, far-reaching concerns, many of which have nothing to do with genetics. We should fix economic inequality, not its symptoms. Hampering genetic research because it exacerbates a symptom of economic inequality doesn't fix economic inequality, it just creates a separate problem.
Of course, there are some places where giving some people capabilities allows them to harm the capabilities of others. Genetic testing for jobs, for example. But these concerns are largely off-base because the science doesn't actually back up that genetic testing for jobs would help the employer. It's a problem without an incentive to cause it.
Or put another way, if GE and eugenics rants are a century old thinly veiled anti-feminism rant full of codewords and dog whistles, it doesn't seem to match actual outcomes very well, to the point it can't be taken seriously anymore.
Its possible that some reversion to the norm signal is stronger than the limited fine tuning individual women can perform when they select mates, and that reversion to the norm effect could be overwhelmed by advanced enough genetic engineering. Possibly. Or possibly not.
Usually in soft sci fi and journalistic fiction, genetic engineering and eugenics has been a place holder for cut and paste style plot line of a comic book villain revival of the nazi party. Now that plot line can be interesting as contemporary social commentary or an alt hist if well written, but using genetic engineering as a stage piece is super old and tired and should be retired. Fiction needs a new macguffin to write about nazis or genetic engineering. And at that point somewhat more realistic speculative hard sci fi or predictive social science can intelligently discuss somewhat more realistic predictions, a little less comic book villain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Supporters_and_critic...
In fact, the legacy of this exists today - note that the Communist party of China is the main practitioner of eugenics today (see Yao Ming).
It's only in the modern era of identity politics, inequality as a real concern, and racial spoils systems that liberals have come to oppose it. If we acknowledge that intelligence is genetically determined, then we might be forced to recognize the tradeoff between individual fairness and statistically equal distribution of spoils. We might also be forced to acknowledge that inequality is a result of inborn meritorious traits (intelligence, conscientiousness) rather than some external unfairness.
It's hard to understand now, but society back then was quite different than today, and the political divisions of the time were also different. Francis Galton had done some early psychometry, and published his results claiming that the English upper class was the upper class because they were genetically superior to the lower classes. This result was widely accepted by both the progressives and the conservatives. The difference between the left and the right was not opposition to the principle of Social Darwinism, but just what should be done about it. The progressives advocated for eugenics to lift the lower classes from the 'genetic deficit' they were born into, while the traditional conservatives believed that this was unnecessary and that the situation as it existed was the natural order that shouldn't be fixed. Neither side would fit at all into modern common morality.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4404736/ [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20377125/ [3] http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?es_sm=93&um=1&ie=UTF-8&... [4] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613... [5] http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yury_Dodonov/publication...
The "eugenics" of this article is about rewriting our own programming in a voluntary and targeted way.
It seems that a new term would be helpful in avoiding the negative connotations of the word "eugenics".
In reality, in-vitro fertilization is a lengthy, complicated, painful, expensive and emotionally wrenching slog that often fails. The idea of choosing between embryos is laughable when so often you're hoping for one, just one, that actually has a viable shot. Anyone who would object to a little screening that helps prevent a woman from finally getting pregnant only to go through a miscarriage a few months later is a monster.
We don't have much choice, otherwise genetic malfunctions will get us sooner or later. The way we're having children now (few, low child mortality) is a way to breed genetic defects.
A) Can lead to interesting discoveries
B) Can have paradoxical effects - e.g. muscle degeneration in our ancestors lead to our weaker bit and consequently bigger brains, since skull could expand more because the muscles were weaker.
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040322/full/news040322-9.htm...
Imagine if you don't want your child to have ADHD, and you screen for it. But it turns out that people with ADHD hold a mutation to even higher IQ.
UPD: This configuration is also prone to splitting humanity into several casts just by biased marriage practices.
If you think people have morally become greatly advanced in the past 100 years, then this might not bother you. But you would also be operating in a regime of aggressively blind faith, because the evidence for that claim is exactly inverted.
If, on the other hand, you don't believe that, you might spare some thought for the last time this was popular.
And, I mean this entirely seriously, you should seriously take a moment to wonder whether you will be deemed undesirable in any exciting new order of these sorts of things. There is ABSOLUTELY NO NATURAL LAW that your ideological allies will be the ones who get this power. Not even being part of the dominant ideology today shields you from being on the dominant ideology's shit list 20 years from now. To a great extent, it is rational to make sure nobody gets these ideas because you, personally, ilaksh (and jerf) may well discover that you are on the receiving end of the 21st century nastiness. (How many of the 20th century's victims were individually actually on the government's side, right up until they were being slaughtered?)
From my perspective, it is tragic that some children are born with brains that cannot understand basic arithmetic. It is equally tragic that most are born with brains that cannot understand advanced physics. This technology will allow us to remedy a good portion of our ignorance. It should be embraced. Iodizing salt increased average IQ in many regions by a standard deviation. Reducing lead pollution about 8 more on top of this. Were these great evils? Why is removing deleterious mutations?