The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction
hup.harvard.edu
hup.harvard.edu
That's a load of hyperbole.
First, the time-line is completely unrealistic. The ethical frameworks in a lot of developed countries currently are very much in defense of biological inception and against technological interference. It will take more than a generation to change that.
Second, a lot of people actually like reproducing via sex.
4th row.
This is something I thought of. We're biologically engineered to desire sex, and most forms of birth control deprive the pleasure we get from the act. Unless you're one of those people who are into karezza, I'm not sure the author's idea is going to appeal to you.
But I don't see how birth control would deprive you from pleasure from the sexual act. Both partners can get orgasms in safe sexual intercourses...
As for condoms, if you really must use them, simply pay extra for quality and there won't be any issues with how it feels. Most people negative experience with condoms are with those they give for free at schools and you might just as well use a thick rubber balloon at that point...
The only people I've ever heard of liking condoms are the ones that have trouble with premature ejaculation, where the [significantly] reduced sensation can help them last longer.
You need to pay premium to get the thin ones and use plenty of lube. If you get the right ones, you will get all the normal feelings (heat, pressure, etc.) except for the wetness. It will not be the exact same feeling as sexual intercourse without a condom, but it will be close enough. That's a small price to pay to be safe with that one-nigh hookup.
If condoms are really an issue for you, get a stable partner that is on birth control.
I do not use condoms very often since I am in a stable relationship, but if I can manage to have a load of fun using sleeves that are as thick as dozen condoms and covered with speed bumps from time to time, surely you can manage the occasional thin rubber.
Yeah, but condoms suck, categorically.
It's a night/day difference.
Edit for circlefavshape's comment: You are right, I got numbers confused. It is suggested to use alternate forms of birth control for 2-3 months after the surgery to verify the success.
What?!
It's books like this that require these ethical frameworks and it's really a shame.
These medical advances have very important use cases in the medical and Infertile community, and these ethical frameworks create massive amounts of heartache and painful waiting for those that really need these advances.
Why do people always have to find ways to exploit technology that can do great things for selfish purposes and ruin it for everyone else?
I'd say, unless we advance our timeline, we're in danger of becoming extinct. So let's hope the article is not all hyperbole.
Sure but this does not contradict what I wrote. I don't think designer babies is the way out of the unwillingness to reproduce we witness in industrialized countries. Maybe baby-care robots, maybe minimal basic income.
Currently, the world population is still growing, but that's mostly due to poorer countries and sub-populations. AFAIK, not even the US's whites are enough to sustain the population size:
"Expected lifetime births have also fallen for White non-Hispanic women from 1.91 in 2007 to 1.75 in 2013. U.S. White non-Hispanic births have been below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman for decades." (http://www.unomaha.edu/news/2015/01/fertility.php).
It is even worse in Europe and Russia.
Maybe it is a question of a middle ground?
I see a slowly declining population as being positive for humanity.
I think 1e9 children having a materially secure future is much better than 1e11 children fighting wars for the last scraps of resources.
Also if those children are not mine.
French INSEE (national statistical institute) doesn't seem to predict any decline here (although it reports a decrease in the rate of growth, and ageing):
http://www.insee.fr/en/themes/document.asp?ref_id=projpop055...
> If recent demographic trends continue, France’s population will reach 70 million by 1 January 2050, 9.3 million more than in 2005.
I'm curious to know what are your sources?
"Around 2045, natural population growth will be negative (-26,000 in 2049), the number of deaths exceeding the number of births. The population will however continue to grow until 2050, thanks to net migration." [paragraph 4]
Edit: Since it was unclear, I was trying to be sarcastic. There is no evidence that the human race is in imminent danger of extinction.
Look back to the 19th century, and if you look at the number of brothels in even small towns in the US, it's just astonishing: in 1880 or 1890 IIRC, my midwestern hometown was a small town of two thousand people that had more than a hundred brothels advertising. Women had limited legal rights outside of marriage and very limited employment opportunities, and with the example a very large community of sex workers, women had very real incentives to avoid even the hint of a threat to their "marriagability" (ie., virginity and "modesty"). 1890 is just three generations removed from 1950.
Remember it was in the 1950s that people fought major free-speech fights to print and distribute "obscene" books that had been banned for decades, like Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer. In the 1930s, censorship was upheld in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act due to the threat of reading the obscene parts on the Senate floor. These days pornography is omnipresent, and there are bestselling books by women about how great anal sex is.
If yes, you would know that there is really nothing new under the sun...
If studies are accurate, oral sex, anal sex (especially between man and woman, duh) and many other sex acts are far more common now. But I guess maybe people just lied about it until more recently.
the movie?
Those are the questions that will bounce around in the heads of parents ... and they may lead them to have kids the old-fashioned way.
Likely not in the near future, but I see it happening hundreds of years from now.
Perhaps servility and humility. Doing what's told? I bet lot of moms and dictators would love that.
Eternal happiness. Why shower, when you are happy as you are? Why eat when you are already happy?
EDIT: The point is, our traits depend on environment. If it changes, we change as well. We might think we control our environment, but so far, I doubt that's possible.
On the very, very minor end of the spectrum: If I could guarantee that my child (or i) would never have a cold, I would choose that for sure. There is zero downside. My resulting life will not be excessively perfect; people being mean in high school will still scar people for life, etc.
I'm also not sure we can vaccinate against the cold, I think it's like the flu, it mutates too quickly.
At least today, it shouldn't seem to be the same as not having immunization shots and being a risk to others.
Confronting adversity and pushing our limits is great, but imposing unnecessary adversity on our children, when there is an alternative, is no good.
It's strange how this sort of sentiment appears whenever you talk about genetics, yet I never see anyone praise the virtues of imperfection when it comes to taking prenatal vitamins or not eating too much fish during pregnancy.
I think we watched different movies. Sure the scene on the treadmills showed that he could barely keep up, but he still kept up. To say that he "selfishly endanger[ed]" his crewmates is a bit hyperbolic.
This is a valid criticism, it's far easier to portray this issue as black/white, when in reality, it is unbelievably complex.
Nature of course, does not permit pure defects to exist for any substantial period of time. They are viciously eliminated from the gene pool. The ones that stick around are a double-edged sword. A lot of benefit here, some detriment there. And we separate them and decry the detriment ... but you can't have one without the other.
I am fearful of the day when we start eliminating these genes, that clearly have a detriment, but may also have a clear and more substantial benefit that is not readily apparent.
The computational power of natural selection over millions of years through trillions of permutations is unfathomable and does not rely on the necessity of human cognition. We are playing with fire when we start playing whack-a-mole with genes.
I'm all for trying, but we should tread carefully.
Making all children tall and with perfect teeth is probably not a great idea. On the other hand, wiping out the mutation responsible for cystic fibrosis, say, would be a big win. Even wiping out the sickle cell mutation would probably be fine at this point, unless you're planning for your descendants to be slightly better off if they end up in the tropics after civilization collapses.
There's a lot of middle ground where things are unclear, but we shouldn't be too eager to extend that mystery to the edges and let that stop us from ending some unpleasant conditions.
The eugenicist story of Yao Ming's upbringing, if true, would be far more innocuous than thousands of known programs. And of course, every year there is another rumble that they are leading in the march to human cloning. It seems a possible path to becoming the world's only superpower, unless the smart people just turn on each other without enough dumber people to order around, or some other country somehow gets superhuman AI first.
http://www.vice.com/read/chinas-taking-over-the-world-with-a...
On top of that the distopia just ended up feeling shallow. We're never given any reason as to why society drops any pretense at meritocracy just because of the availability of genetically optimized babies (to say nothing of the handwaving around genetic markers for fuzzy traits like intelligence nor the idea that environment plays a nontrivial part in development). The most major discrimination is that a space flight agency doesn't want an astronaut with a high probability of dieing mid mission. That's not only perfectly reasonable it's also what we do now. Vincent never would be allowed on a NASA space flight anymore than he should have been allowed on the GATTACA flight.
Gattaca is a film everyone should see if only to understand that the lay person has no business weighing in on issues of scientific ethics. A tale of human exceptionalism that does a great job of ignoring any of the science it claims to take inspiration from.
Just did, available on Amazon Prime for streaming. Just as good as I remembered.
> There is nothing noble about hiding a heart condition in order to become a crucial member on an expedition that will almost certainly kill you.
There's something disgusting about telling people what they can and can't do without actually testing whether they can do it or not.
You see, when you test actual ability, you're confirming an almost infinite amount of data points all at once. Your picture is complete and no understanding is necessary. It's a binary proposition. You either can or can't.
When you test for a genetic disposition ... it's just that. A disposition. You're testing only a single data point. That data point might be very important ... or it might not. Either way, it's a terrible way to determine actual ability.
He wasn't negligent in the slightest. It was all the useless genetic testing. They should have been testing his ability. If they did that, there wouldn't be a movie or anything to be outraged over.
> On top of that the distopia just ended up feeling shallow.
The movie is over 20 years old. I'd say it held up as well as could be expected.
> We're never given any reason as to why society drops any pretense at meritocracy just because of the availability of genetically optimized babies
Laziness. Why go through the trouble of testing ability, which is very hard ... vs pressing a button on a computer?
> The most major discrimination is that a space flight agency doesn't want an astronaut with a high probability of dieing mid mission.
The movie made it clear that this discrimination was pervasive in every walk of life ... which makes sense. Why hire a genetically inferior person if you can determine that through the press of a button?
> That's not only perfectly reasonable it's also what we do now.
No we don't. We do actual physical testing. We set up physical parameters that the person must clearly demonstrate. I mean, that's why they call it a physical.
> Vincent never would be allowed on a NASA space flight anymore than he should have been allowed on the GATTACA flight.
No, he wouldn't. You're right. Because he's myopic. Which by the way, is not a genetically inherited defect, although it was thought to be at the time the movie was made.
But if the assumption that genetics played a part in myopia was perpetuated in the future as it is in the movie, that would be a truly sad state of affairs.
You would have people being discriminated against for no valid rational reason. That's the point of this movie. Genetics very rarely determine a certainty. Merely a probability.
> Gattaca is a film everyone should see if only to understand that the lay person has no business weighing in on issues of scientific ethics.
Wow. I don't think scientists should have a monopoly on ethics. Pass.
It's funny because personality is still about 50% genetic (though it can be complex: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/under-the-influence/201... )
For instance in Twin studies, we regularly find that if one twin becomes an addict, so will the other, even if they're raised differently.
Compassion also seems to be partly genetic as well.
I've long wondered about this. How much of this is social inertia of 'next step' in your life and how much is intrinsic desire to do so.
Another element:
I didn't plan on having a kid, I just didn't take consistent enough precaution and had one pregnancy over a ten year relationship.
I don't regret it, but I wouldn't have had children if it was done through careful pre-planning.
The birth rate isn't dropping because people don't like natural conception. It's dropping because they're choosing not to have babies. When people want a baby, the vast majority have nothing against the typical technique.
Your insistence that these two unrelated issues are somehow linked puzzles me.
If you think any significant number of people adopt children because they just want to avoid pregnancy and birth, you're the one just making things up. I'm sure you can find a few people who do this, but their numbers are utterly insignificant.
A few reasons why this should join the "pills will replace food" drama:
- a long-term trend in wealthier societies has been to get more control on how they have and raise children. Birth control, education, etc. Less, "more valuable" children. Getting (and losing) a child has more individual and social significance today than in 17th century Europe where 30-50% kids would die before adulthood
- another trend is for people to look and welcome ways to bypass biological constraint. Low fertility, age, more recently known genetical defects.
- a very recent trend among very select groups has now embraced the idea of "perfect children".
Now will this last trend ever go mainstream? Are people willing to _pay_ to "improve" or even only pick some traits of their children?
Or will most people have to resort to artificial reproduction because of low fertility and longer life expectancy?
And then does any of this mean "the end of sex"?
To become a market, artificial reproduction would need to be reliable ("I want my kids to get blue eyes") and confortable. I'm not a specialist, but I get from my 23andme data that so little is determined by our genes. And we're very far from understanding how genes affect each others.
Among my friends who resorted to artificial insemination for various reasons, they had sex - a lot. Hormones are here to stay.
Humans are complex organisms and this (along with the "uploaded brain" fad) forget about the chemistry that shapes intelligence, behaviors, life.
People would couldn't will soon be able to get kids. Some will possibly choose to pick a few traits. Most of the planet is _for many generations_ going to have sex.
Right now, anyway, IVF is anything but.
Also, we were given the option every cycle to selectively reduce [2] embryos if too many took (luckily, that was never necessary). This was in the US.
/u/gyardley mentions that its not easy, convenient, and painless. The most expensive procedure in IVF is where you stimulate a woman's ovaries in order for them to overproduce eggs for ultrasound-guided retrieval (using an extremely long, large bore needle); as soon as medical science is close enough to converting stem cells filtered out of blood into reproductive tissue (and we're extremely close, believe me; I have done my homework), IVF will be an outpatient procedure no more expensive than an expensive dental appointment.
If they had dumped 10 embryos each cycle the story would have been different.
Now, it is true that IVF is currently being used when everything else has failed, so it's possible that it would be much less painful for perfectly healthy mothers/couples, especially if the technology improves a lot in the future. My advice: don't count on IVF as a family planning tool.
What about epigenetics? If some proto-übermensch were afforded - due to automization and superior talents - to live a far more leisurely life than our own, and spend it with drugs, food, and entertainment, wouldn't that cause genetic regression?
I think the problem with Gattaca is that the movie was so damn good at tackling the issue it's made itself the sole narrative that we understand, even though science has advanced tremendously in concepts such as epigenetics and the microbiome. We need a new narrative to understand our new situation.
They'd drift if it wasn't maintained. Mutations would always be slipping in.
Besides, sometimes there are trade offs with no clear winning picture. Sub-Saharan Africans with sickle cell syndrome are also more resistant to malaria. What's worse? What's more necessary? How do we know malaria won't be a bigger problem tomorrow?
In general terms we know what a good specimen looks like and the specific traits that they have. We can only build to that because:
>sickle cell syndrome are also more resistant to malaria
This is evolution by process of elimination, and unfortunetaly elimination means lack of breeding from disadvantaged phenotypes. We've largely uncoupled reproduction from evolutionary advantages anyway, and just like humans are so dedicated to controlling the world in they inhabit, we'll insist on controlling the finest details of reproduction too.
You can't just make one generation of genetically filtered children and figure everything's going to be good now, we have all the "bad parts" eradicated, because that's not how genes work. In addition, if you read the paper, it mentioned something on the order of a dozen embryos, and doing a genetic analysis of each one. Using this technique, you'd be able to filter out, perhaps a handful of disease, maybe pick out one with green eyes if that's what you wanted (and your genes allowed), but you're not going to gene-by-gene eliminate every chance of bad combinations with every other combination of genes on the planet, barring mutations. That's ridiculous.
It's probably more telling to look at the people looking forward to that scenario than the scenario itself.
It's as conceivable that we could adapt by making it socially and economically feasible for young women to have children at the height of their fertility, rather than normalizing surrogacy, eugenics, and mass abortion. Those things are fine in limited circumstances, of course—even if each is under legal limitations in most Western countries (I hadn't realized that surrogacy was banned in most of Western Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogacy ).
I'm pretty sure U.S. society isn't the one responsible for the fact that raising a child consumes significant resources and makes obtaining other goals much harder. The time spent caring for a baby makes it harder to complete higher education. Even if offered help, a baby takes a lot of time.
Also, this isn't something that only applies to young women. A single father has to sacrifice a lot of time to raise a child. While the initial pregnancy is not as bad for the single father to deal with, the time spent with a child that could be spent on anything else is a significant factor for the next 18 years.
Do you have children?
The challenges that are brought on by children aren't unique to the US. Getting an education and/or performing at a high-level at your job are very difficult to do if you are raising children. Doubly so for women who are typically the primary caregiver for infants.
Europe has lower birth rates than the US[1], despite having more friendly vacation and parental policies.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/11/birth-rates-...
The relationship between our genes and the high-level traits we care about is complex and non-orthogonal; it will be difficult to isolate the genes for a specific trait without producing unintended consequences. With standard sexual selection we are able to judge by the end result (especially if you can observe the other person's family prior to reproduction, and you see what recessive traits they may possess).
Wonder what this will do for demographics?
Modern Medicinal science is amazing, but in this field I could easily imagine a scifi future where humans are no longer able to naturally reproduce. Is there any concern with this in the scientific community or is this just my writer's imagination on an unfounded basis?
Some of us undoubtedly will still be able, and those and their children will inherit the earth as it always happened.
There are too many possibilities and if they get good maybe they will adopt a model of intuition like "AlphaGo" to win. But intuition often fails and life isn't as binary as picking winners and losers.
I think the chaotic domain of the Cynefin framework describes this situation the best. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_Framework
Probing or sensing is insufficient, acting must occur.
Maybe a simulation could be sufficient way of acting?
We don't know where 'Politicians are able to do 100ky policy planning' comes in the tech-tree, though :D
From the current state of affairs, it appears to be still far out in the future...
The author therefore predicts that more and more people, and women in particular, will prefer it in the future.
I suspect that if sex/ sexuality were not in such an odd cultural space, ideas like this would either rarely arise, or at least never raise an eyebrow.
Reproduction without sex.
Much the same way we look back at past civilizations and wonder how humans ever survived childbirth without modern medicine.
The author might be off on timeline but I'm pretty sure this will become common practice before very long. Some people won't like it, some people will resist, sure. It won't matter. Eventually they will be like the anti vax crowd. And everyone else will say "look what you are doing to your kids!".... there ought to be a law! And then there probably will be a law. And it will be I'm pretty sure, in the end, a huge gain for the human race.