House spending panel drops U.S. ban on gene-edited babies
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
Everyone seems to be making a leap from high IQ --> dominating the world. Sure, your average world leader is probably has a higher IQ, on average, than her constituents. But this relationship is not causal, nor is it reversible. Simply making babies "smarter" is not going to result in them ruling the world in a few years and causing massive generational strife. If you'd like examples, I recommend checking out a MENSA meeting (Kidding, there's some perfectly nice people there). But the point still stands -- social standing, zip code, parental achievement, and even height are all important factors in success; intelligence is only one facet of a successful individual.
This is, of course, assuming that we can freely increase intelligence with no repercussions -- are these high IQ individuals at risk of [schizophrenia](http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/000607.html), or other mental disease?
I would also like to point out that the biggest real gains will come to those who move first. You can't be 5 sigma out when everyone else has the same gene modifications as you.
The whole "IQ is a curse" thing is mostly cherry picking. IQ basicly improves everything about a person: https://www.gwern.net/iq
It is not associated with any illnesses, save for poor eyesight.
As for attractiveness... A lot of that correlation is caused by the lower end of the scale (genetic diseases are generally regarded as unattractive while also lowering IQ, correlations with poor nutrition, etc). But behavior is also a component of attractiveness, and (all else equal) IQ helps there.
That is going to be a mixed bag, at best.
But yeah, other factors outweigh this significantly. If you grow up in an extremely poor area with limited resources, then having an IQ that's twice the national average is probably not going to help that much. Even in places with a working political system, things like economic class, your parents, plain luck, etc have a huge impact on your chances.
And heck, even then it's not guaranteed. People don't vote 100% rationally, and the politician who does well is often less the guy who knows most about the issues affecting the day/has a better academic pedigree and more the one average Joe can see themselves going out for a drink with.
Even then there's still a good risk of this potential high IQ politician having the 'wrong' political views (which would make them virtually unelectable), the media not taking them to them well (which could destroy their reputation) or people in general just not liking them for whatever petty reason.
As you say, merely making them smarter won't result in them ruling the world, and nor will improving every other characteristic/quality necessarily do the same.
We're just at the start of understanding how the genome and proteome interact, let alone the development from one cell to one trillion. Likely, barring some very extreme and barbaric live-human tests, we'll never really know how this all works.
Gene editing will be mostly used in beneficial ways, not in these extreme ways. Diseases will be bred out of our species, cancers will be sequenced and then better chemo will be used against them (already happening), CRISPR CAS-9 will be used for sensory restoration techniques like elminating color-blindness and hearling loss. Sure, a few million eyes will be blue instead of brown, and sure, there will be a lot of taller people.
But, due to the complexity of development, the genome, and the (correct) adversion to human experimentation, things as complex as 'smartness' or 'tenacity' or 'beauty' will not be modified in such extreme ways.
You realize that all of the studies cited in that link show that schizophrenia positively correlates with lower IQ, right, and that higher IQ is protective? (Which is correct, as the inverse correlation between IQ & schizophrenia has been documented for a very long time, and is re-documented on the genetic level now that we have schizophrenia PGSes.)
And iterated embryo selection (which does not require knowing the causal variants, just the predictive ones) will also be possible, and offers 5+ SDs.
Gwern has a great write about about it here: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
With this in mind, does anyone really think China and Singapore will not embrace this? And if they do it and we do not we would be as children compared to them.
Have you considered the possibility that it's a good thing that China's isn't letting subjective feeling about morality stand in the way of progress?
It's easy to get stuck in a rut where we fear new technology, pre-emptively declare it unethical, and never experience the benefits. IMHO, the west has gone way too far over the past few decades in the direction of risk aversion and the "precautionary principle", and China's boldness is a much-needed corrective.
I am not arguing here that Capitalism does not work, it works very well... I am not arguing banning technology either. All that I am arguing is that there are other paradigms outside of those where technology is progress and progress is good. This paradigm is a very convincing paradigm because of how well it works in Capitalist society and how it generates wealth and helps accumulate power.
Even if you're going to argue that the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term detriments: surprise, you're still applying morality.
We don't come close to having an understanding of genetics, and without that understanding, we risk unleashing horrible new genetic defects and illnesses for literally generations.
I think it's hilarious that all the anti-CRISPR/anti-gene-editing people bring up dystopias when it's pretty obvious they want to live in a very Harrison Bergeron world.
What about the future ramification of stagnation? Or ignoring progress? Most of the world seems to be ignoring climate change, and somehow hoping for it to go away.
Some claim to care, but those are just hollow words for the most part, as the world is hooked on cheap (dirty) energy.
Asia has none of these problems, and will thus force us to get over our scruples.
It seems to me that if that happen the big division (us and them) will not be along national lines, but generational. So, we would be like children, compared to our children, anyway.
Maybe I'm growing old, but sometimes I already feel like that.
I would like to point out that there is no higher, just fit for purpose. If you give these technologies to businesses and to governments they will use it instrumentally to create stronger soldiers that can take more abuse or build better workers that don't feel any negative emotions and can work longer hours. In the current environment this is stupid.
Just look at what we have done to dogs, you want to see human equivalent to pugs or chiwawas.... or rottweilers?... or hell chickens.
Humans are not capable of creating such a thing, they will create something like it but it will not be what you desire.
Bad examples could be any of the following:
> brilliant and hard working
Introverted thinker. Works long hours, does not challenge authority. Chinese work pretty hard for next to no pay, why can't you be more like them?
> resistant to depression
Lobotomized individuals are pretty resistant to depression as well.
> physically fit
Sure looks like a body builder, and has all sorts of rage issues from the excessive testosterone in her system.
> physically attractive
We all look pretty good compared to chimps.
> cancer resistant
Sure let's engineer humans to better tolerate the pollution in our cities so we can pollute more.
We also don't know what the long term effects of making changes like this are.
It will take hundreds of edits to raise IQ several SDs. I think this will be very feasible in 10 to 20 years.
High IQs might have deleterious side effects, but even ignoring the possibility of those ever being fixed- given the association of IQ with negative side effects, if I offered you a pill that would give you an IQ of 80, would you take it?
If we raised the intelligence of everyone future child that would have had an IQ of 80 or below to 100, would that not be an improvement to the human condition? If we eliminated genetic diseases, would that not be an improvement?
Intelligence is the red queen and an arms race, if you start raising anyone's IQ then you will have to raise everyone's IQ. If you do so genetically, then you will be genetically modifying pretty much everyone.
Since the technology and its long term implications are not understood at all, it's basically a giant experiment on the whole of human race. Not to mention other unexpected side-effects like the genomics wars from Star Trek where your enhanced people start wanting to rule the world and are cunning enough to do it. Another example if Ozymandias from the Watchmen, imagine someone with that level of intelligence wanting to fix the problems of the world... by any means necessary.
You don't know what you are getting yourself into, and optimism won't fix that. And if you go wrong you will probably have a genocide on your hands, either them the genetically enhanced killing you or you killing them.
I mean you could create a theory like the Nazis had if you were genetically enhanced people that would be scientifically true. Where does that leave the rest of humanity? No more than Jews to the Nazis. If the Nazis had given Jews a choice to join them and become Nazis by genetically engineering themselves to being the Blue Eyed Aryan race, would that have made Nazism okay?
Current human populations are actually being somewhat negatively selected for intelligence, since at least in the developed world fertility is inversely correlated with education (except at the insignificant extreme high end).
Gene editing will be pursued around the globe, and countries that fail to embrace it may be left behind in health and wellness. However, let’s not radically rush to science fiction level conclusions (stated as fact) of megahumans without any evidence that it may be possible.
[Edited for an incorrect use of hyperbole around the math of 5x standard devs. I removed it from the post as I am acknowledging that using excess hyperbole in a post specifically directed at criticism of wild predictions is beyond ironic and unfair to the OP above.]
Iterated embryo selection and/or direct genetic engineering will be able to do this. It breaks no physical laws, it is in concert with what we have already observed and our understanding of cognitive genomics is getting to the point that it is becoming increasingly obvious to anyone paying attention that we will be able to select/edit for intelligence comparable to John von Neumann.
Look at the "Known for" section of his Wikipedia page to see what such people will be capable of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
"That sounds vaguely like a science fiction story" is a very poor heuristic for determining if something is possible.
My criticism is specifically directed at your timelines and foregone conclusions that intelligence is as easy to increase via artificial embryo selection as more observable traits such as size by observing alleles.
I stand by my statement that I would bet every penny I have against your proposed 5-10 yr timeline of simple half st.dev increases in IQ.
Playing random lottery and hoping not to draw the gene-defect ticket while only evolve on a scale of 1,000s of generations is better? We might not even have 1,000 generations left on this planet.
"Not dying of infectious diseases in childhood" used to be a luxury of the rich too, but it didn't ossify into a permanent class marker.
"Not dying of poverty in childhood" was never a luxury of the elite, and it always ossified into a permanent class marker.
• C-Sections now account for 30% of all births, compared to 5% in 1970.
• Preliminary evidence suggests that babies born via C-Section are themselves more likely to have children that require C-Sections.
Source: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/12/7/13855350/c-...
Assuming this applies to other traits as well—as evolutionary theory suggests it should—what are the long term consequences for humanity? This line of thinking has led past leaders down some very dark paths, which I am fully uninterested in traveling.
But, what is the ethical alternative? The only one I can think of is to take control of our evolution directly, rather than allowing natural selection—or lack thereof—to run its course. And thank god, it actually looks like modern science will make this possible!
It can become a problem in humans, but as our evolution may be self-directed, we might also decide that larger cranium-to-pelvis ratios make it easier to educate those babies to become obstetric surgeons.
And eventually, it might be prudent to gene-hack the plumbing, to reroute the birth canal so that it does not pass through the pelvic opening. Then enormous-head mutations could more easily survive without intervention.
Go on.
You know... the same way we're going to genetically modify humans to be smarter, faster, and more attractive?
I really hope we do not end up in a world where c-sections are the only way.
I even more prematurity the solution instead?
Will some bad things happen? Yes, like when humanity learned about atom fission. But the overall result is a net positive: lots of energy for everyone (and yes, that includes Iran) and no world war since then, even with major tensions like during the cold war.
As someone else said, there seems to be a curious wrapped view in the West that did not exist some generation before. Just even looking at old tv shows (Star Trek TOS) you can see people had faith that the future would be better. And the future kept its promises - lower mortality, longer lifespan, a dramatic reduction in poverty worldwide, etc. But the very few movies where you still see this positive stance are usually not made in the West.
For some reason it has fashionable to signal the future will be a dystopia. Sorry, no - there is no future, just what we are doing. If you do not like what you do, maybe do something else to make the world a better place? Or at least, don't complain about your own choices.
Fortunately, many countries in say Asia do not have the binders the West has. And please, do not say that they are "backwards" and will "evolve" their morals to see the light and adopt your own biased views. In my book, it's the West that's getting backwards and entering into some new middle age based on the new religion of environmentalism and naturalism.
Whatever. I personally do not care which country furthers humanity scientific progress, and I will take any advance as a "win" for team humanity.
> Will some bad things happen? Yes, like when humanity learned about atom fission. But the overall result is a net positive: lots of energy for everyone (and yes, that includes Iran) and no world war since then, even with major tensions like during the cold war.
The fact that we haven't (yet) destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons is mostly thanks to sheer dumb luck, which becomes obvious when you start really looking at the history of nuclear weapons: all the close calls, the combination locks on warheads set to 000000, etc. Using fission as your go-to example of "See? It's OK, we can handle world-ending technologies" is just appallingly wrong, it actually demonstrates precisely the opposite. We can't be trusted with fission and only still have it because political realities mean we can't get rid of it.
Or to put it another way, in any given year there is an X% chance we destroy civilization with fission. X is probably considerably less than 1%, but it isn't zero, and so the Law of Large Numbers essentially demands if we keep rolling the dice without total disarmament, sooner or later they will come up snake eyes. What you want here is to introduce new ELE-enabling technologies, essentially multiplying X by a constant. Madness.
The fact that we are alive seems to demonstrate precisely the opposite. You also conveniently forgot how many countries engaged in bilateral disarming programs (well, maybe Ukraine shouldn't have...) and how it generally makes sense because these nuclear weapons are expansive to maintain.
Still, you consider global atomic war a recurring risk every year, because you do not trust fellow human beings taking the right decision: "we can't be trusted".
This is why I believe this opposition comes from wrapped world views, a lack of trust in the future and future generations.
It seems like a sad way to live. Meanwhile, the world is improving, little by little.
No, it doesn't. That's the whole thrust of my post. We are alive only because we've gotten extremely lucky so far, not because we're actually smart enough to handle this stuff. Adding new ELE technologies on top of the ones we already have is just pushing that luck.
People stupid => survival is luck, he says
Survival => people not stupid.
Throwing more arguments at each other won't resolve anything- your arguments are both internally consistent, but they run opposite to each other. You can't refute one just by saying the other, they're rooted different axiomatic takes on the same dataset. You have to attack the axioms.
This is assuming that any train can easily be manipulated like intelligence, and that it is isn't polygenic (there are over 500 genes), and that by editing them you won't cause other problems along the way:
If you don't get to decide for other people the criteria for pairing up and having children, why should you get to decide for them which fertilized embryos they choose to implant and raise?
As for genetic engineering of food? All domestication is genetic engineering. GMO just accelerates the process, and it's allowed us to maintain extremely high yields that feed the world population. Would you kill half the people on the planet to undo the green revolution? Is biotechnology that much of a moral offense to you?
Given our lack of moral / ethical maturity as a species in general (just look back at the early days of any tech and the experiments on humans), I'm just projecting out the likely outcome of having this at hand.
While most of us wouldn't abuse this, you're giving the tools to do this out to a species with 7 billion members, so even if 1 smart person in 7 billion or any person in the future decides to abuse this tech to harm humanity somehow, then it can / will happen. And even if every single person who ever uses it only tries to "improve things", then at best we can expect something like our current environmental engineering efforts (e.g. some good, mostly disaster).
I've heard about this law before (so it's not obscure) but I never knew this. I wonder how many other common laws were just inserted into other laws behind closed doors that affect us every day.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00726-5
Title: "Adopt a moratorium on heritable genome editing"
I don't care what you do with your genes or your kids' genes.
Having said that, there's this slippery-slope we get on where we say something like "Here's this new thing that gives us X. We've never done it before and we're really not sure what the side effects are, but X is pretty cool! Since other people are doing X, we have to do it as well!"
You can run that line of argument with dozens of cutting-edge scientific topics. At the extreme, you end up with some version of "Anything that might make us better than the other guys, we are forced to do -- even if it has terrible consequences"
Since that extreme does not work for me, there must be some limiting factor here that we're not talking about. I do not know what that factor is. It does make sense, however, that asking for public funding along these lines doesn't look like a good way to keep the peace. Eugenics wasn't a good idea, was it? Forced sterilization? How about encouraged or paid-for sterilization? Please keep these as rhetorical questions -- the only reason I brought them up is to show that "better humans through genetics" doesn't have a very happy history.
One might argue that this has already been done, and the results are now running the legislature.
Atheists do not believe adults have souls either, but are opposed to killing them. All you have to do is consider the unborn child alive to be opposed to killing it, it's not necessarily a religious argument.
There exists at least one that believes one's right to life is not an absolute moral principle, but predicated upon a reciprocal respect for the rights of others. Thus, it is morally acceptable to kill an adult that violates the moral compact for human rights, or threatens its continued existence.
Without a religious mandate, there is no guarantee that any single atheist would share any specific belief with another atheist, other than the one that defines them as a class--that either supernatural entities do not exist, or they exist but also lack the authority to be considered gods rather than ordinary persons, morally equal to all other persons.
As a fetus does not yet possess a capacity for moral reasoning, and a pregnant mother likely does, I find that fetuses do not qualify as people, and have no inherent rights, possessing only those derived from their relationship with their mother, and from any other persons who may have a contractual relationship with her.
So in a contest of rights between a fetus and its mother, I believe the latter has exclusive and uncontested right to do anything she likes to the former, to include destroying it or editing its DNA, and no state has any interest whatsoever in interfering. A uterus is the exclusive property of the woman; the fetus is incompetent to lease, and has no squatter's rights. The only other persons who might even have standing would be the biological father of the fetus and any persons in an implicit or explicit reproductive contract with the mother, such as a marriage or surrogacy agreement, made prior to pregnancy. And none of those could restrain the actions of the mother; they could only sue in civil court for remedy following a breach.
As secular moralities go, I'd expect vegans to oppose abortion and gene-editing, and libertarians to oppose any form of state control over those. No others come to mind that have principles coherent across the entire class with respect to unborn fetuses.
And if you reply that someone else can care for the child, your argument also allows for killing mentally disabled children and adults.
Giving humans value only because they are useful is abhorrent to me, I find that humans have inherent value.
The ward can't be expected to prevail over their own guardian, so other people with moral agency have to be prepared to remove and replace a bad guardian.
Without guardianship and advocacy by others, those people could be abused at will. A bad guardian could prevent abuse from everyone except themselves, assuming a monopoly over the abuse of their wards.
But you can't exactly replace a mother in the middle of a pregnancy, can you? Certainly not without doing harm to her. Thus, I am unwilling to advocate for a fetus to the detriment of its mother. It's pointless. You can't help that fetus until after it's a baby, and it won't ever become a baby if that's not something the mother is willing to do.
When the state forces a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term by prohibitions and threats of force, that is itself an abusive relationship with a large imbalance in power.
A fetus has no inherent value. It is worth what its mother says it is worth, anywhere from zero to one whole person. That's why a battery that causes a miscarriage can be considered a murder, but an abortion is not. Once that baby is born, it will likely be considered a whole person from then onward, because there's probably always going to be a potential guardian around that's willing to bid that high. But when you find a class of person like homeless folk unable to manage their own affairs due to mental illness, that's when you see that they have fewer rights in fact, because there's a dearth of people willing to act as their guardians. They have no inherent value, and no value borrowed from others, so predators can beat them up and steal their stuff, and nothing happens to fix it.
Giving value to those who have no inherent value--so they may live in our society as equals before the law--is virtuous, but in order for that to happen, someone with inherent value has to lend some of theirs. Not everyone is willing to give themselves for the sake of someone who will likely never be able to return that favor. Some people don't have enough excess to spare anything. Some people always need to turn a profit.
If you oppose abortion, and don't already have some adopted children or an unrelated adult dependent, you might just be fooling yourself about how virtuous you really are. When you bid someone else's value up to a whole person, you must be prepared to pay that bid if you win, by becoming their guardian and defending them against anyone who would treat them as less than a whole person.
It is all a matter of perspective.