The morality of sperm donation | Hacker News Reader

The morality of sperm donation

gwern.net

50 pointsmike_esspe40 comments

Wow, they go through this whole spiel without even asking the question of whether or not IQ is hereditary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

Apparently it is but all the "countless good outcomes" and "positive externalities" quoted in the article boil down to job performance, income, and literacy. As long as you're going to start a eugenics campaign why not throw some other criteria in there like life satisfaction, propensity for illness, muscular strength, generosity, tendency for violence, lack of elitism, or any one of a million other possible objectives.

That was my first thought - when I read "IQ" I already hit the back button. Genes alone are not enough to explain _anything_ - Gene expression, influenced by upbringing, environmental factors etc., better hits the target.

Studies of twins consistently show a heritability of about 85% for adult IQ and executive function (focus vs. ADHD). The postnatal environment has little effect unless it is severely neglectful or deprived.

Edit: added "postnatal".

Do these twins grow up in comparable environments? Another thing to consider: gene expression and brain development is kicked off in the womb, and twins most often share the same mother. I'm not sure your argument applies here.

That's the point of twin studies: comparing genetically identical subjects who grew up in different environments.

The prenatal influence cannot, practically, be investigated at this point in history.

The prenatal influence has been directly tested. They compare pairs of non-identical siblings, some who are twins and some who are not. The same pregnancy pairs are about as similar to each other as the other pairs. So the prenatal environment either has little effect, or it has a significant but highly nonlinear effect. (Once again, this assumes no extreme hardship.)

Interesting, thanks.

Some of the studies use twins raised in the same household, some use twins adopted by different families. They get very similar results.

Although you believe this is the case, a family should be allowed to select what they view as the "best" donor possible

Scientific evidence on heritability is inconclusive at this point, from what I understand, there was a recent article on this http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732416230457830...?

"People have chosen to ignore the genetics of intelligence for a long time," said Mr. Zhao, who hopes to publish his team's initial findings this summer. "People believe it's a controversial topic, especially in the West. That's not the case in China," where IQ studies are regarded more as a scientific challenge and therefore are easier to fund.

The Wikipedia article pointed to [1] cites the heritability of IQ from 0.5 to 0.9, settling in between 0.75 and 0.85. I had always believed it to be 0.5 and was surprised at how heritable IQ is, with 57% to 73% of offspring intelligence being explicable by the parents' IQs. Note that "job performance, income, and literacy" are predicted, to varying degrees, by childhood IQ.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

> Wow, they go through this whole spiel without even asking the question of whether or not IQ is hereditary.

But they do ask exactly that.

In Germany, a recent court ruling means it is impossible to donate anonymously. Another court ruling makes it impossible to get out of child support. EDIT: Child support only ends after around 5 years of university study.

I predict mail-order sperm or sperm bank tourism. Especially for high acheivers' sperm.

So the sperm donor has to pay child support??

Not yet. The doctor has been ordered to disclose the donor's identity (which, AFAIR, he claims to not to know anymore). If the identity is known, the father then could be sued for child support.

> If the identity is known, the father then could be sued for child support.

Neither is it sure that would actually happen (it did in the US, not in Germany yet though) nor does that seem in the interest of the child in this specific case

As far as I know only the US had sperm donors pay child support so far.

News article about anonymity in Germany for sperm donors: http://www.dw.de/no-anonymity-for-sperm-donors-court-rules/a...

> As far as I know only the US had sperm donors pay child support so far.

I did not think that this kind of insanity was possible outside of a mental institution but apparently it is.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/01/02/us-sperm-donor...

The insanity is that it's not the woman who recieved the donation who was fighting for child support but the state.

The UK too has removed the right of sperm donors to be anonymous[1]. The scary part about it was that they did it after the fact. So people who donated on the grounds of anonymity then had the rules change on them after-the-fact.

So if you donated today who knows what the rules/responsibilities might be tomorrow?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_donation#United_Kingdom

Do you have a link to that ruling? AFAIR, the 2002 law change made it harder for the _social_ father to get out of child support.

This had little to do with morality but was interesting nonetheless.

It's a hairline from Eugenics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

If you look in the sidebar of the article, its summary was:

> Is sperm donating a worthwhile form of positive eugenics?

So yes, the author is well aware that he's talking about eugenics, and plainly isn't bothered by it. The problem with eugenics has never been the concept per se, but rather, the methods used to achieve it. Sperm donation is wholly voluntary.

Maybe, but voluntarism is only part of the moral equation.

So-called genetic "designer babies" are widely considered morally problematic but that process is totally voluntary; and in general eugenics provides an echo-chamber for certain discriminatory beliefs. In a very strong way what we're talking about is capitalism, which does the same thing -- unregulated markets adapt to whatever discrimination allows them to have more customers.

So I agree with the comment a couple levels above -- there is a strong batch of ethical concerns here beyond just "there are kids out there who biologically trace you as their father/mother" and it's a bit of a pity that those concerns were not strongly addressed.

I think what we have here is a case of status quo bias -- new things get subjected to more intense ethical scrutiny because they're new. Selective breeding of humans has been around for as long as there have been humans; it's what people do when they choose a mate. Evolutionarily, this is simply a matter of trying to choose the most advantageous genes to mix with yours, to maximize the expected propagation of your own genes. In practice, it is a eugenics program on a vast scale, and nobody seems to have a problem with it, despite the fact that it "provides an echo-chamber for certain discriminatory beliefs" and can lead to inbreeding if you're reckless.

All that sperm banks do is amplify this selection.

Of course one thing they don't cover is the possibility of the fact that more sperm bank kids means more of an opportunity for accidental inbreeding. I have seen news stories discussing concern over the fact that the most popular donors may have fathered 150 or more children(!). the chance of such half-siblings ending up married to eachother with kids of their own raises all kinds of questions which are omited in the article.

No thanks. I think sperm banks should be discouraged (perhaps tax them heavily).

This is solvable by running a cheap DNA test for both parties.

It's also solvable by simply having more donors, which is exactly what the article is advocating for

Why not just have a public registry of sperm donors and a limit that says "may not be used for more than 5 inseminations per donor"

Cost? Who would cover the bills for such public registry's office and staffing needs?

The number is also a meaningless baseline - 5 inseminations in a rural community might lead to a higher probability of inbreeding that 5 inseminations in Los Angeles, CA. Patterns of social mobility differ greatly across various geographies.

> Cost? Who would cover the bills for such public registry's office and staffing needs?

Excise taxes on services for artificial insemination.

Interesting point that there is greater demand for qualified sperm doners despite being paid far less than egg doners which are in surplus.

As often happens with articles by the same author upon submission here, the article kindly submitted today has prompted some comments that may not take into account all the back-and-forth in the article. The article wraps up with,

"All this is suggestive and interesting, but not complete. To make a solid utilitarian case we would need to establish:

"What is the average IQ or general genetic quality of donors?

"What is the marginal increase in each offspring?

The comments posted here before I arrived in the discussion mostly relate to the first two issues. They make assumptions based on outdated popular literature that don't correctly estimate the likely return from the proposal. The genetics of human behavior is a topic I discuss every day with scientists who are members of the Behavior Genetics Association, including the association's current president, and it's a long, hard, uphill climb to help popular understanding of human genetics get connected with the latest research findings.

First of all, there is no good way to identify genes that may have a favorable effect on phenotype for IQ.

Chabris, C. F., Hebert, B. M., Benjamin, D. J., Beauchamp, J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M., ... & Laibson, D. (2012). Most reported genetic associations with general intelligence are probably false positives. Psychological Science.

http://coglab.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Chabris2012a-FalsePositiv...

"At the time most of the results we attempted to replicate were obtained, candidate-gene studies of complex traits were commonplace in medical genetics research. Such studies are now rarely published in leading journals. Our results add IQ to the list of phenotypes that must be approached with great caution when considering published molecular genetic associations. In our view, excitement over the value of behavioral and molecular genetic studies in the social sciences should be tempered—as it has been in the medical sciences—by a recognition that, for complex phenotypes, individual common genetic variants of the sort assayed by SNP microarrays are likely to have very small effects.

"Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Failing to exercise such caution may hamper scientific progress by allowing for the proliferation of potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not realize that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public may lead to incorrect perceptions about the state of knowledge in the field, especially knowledge concerning genetic variants that have been described as 'genes for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."

Second, whatever the calculated figure is for "heritability" of IQ by the classic twin study method or its modern refinements, heritability of IQ has nothing whatever to do with malleability (or, if you prefer this terminology, controllability) of human intelligence. That point has been made by the leading researchers on human behavior genetics in their recent articles that I frequently post in comments here on HN. It is a very common conceptual blunder, which should be corrected in any well edited genetics textbook, to confuse broad heritability estimates with statements about how malleable human traits are. The two concepts actually have no relationship at all. Highly heritable traits can be very malleable, and the other way around. In particular, a statement made in an earlier HN post

if everybody had the same genes, ~80% of the variation in intelligence would be eliminated

blatantly misunderstands what heritability figures show (besides also being wrong on the best estimate of the broad heritability of IQ). Here's a citation for a good review article on the subject that you can read online in full:

Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

This review article includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

Another interesting review article,

Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

admits the disappointment of behavioral genetics researchers.

"But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, itӳ easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science.

"Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isnӴ an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a momentӳ thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place."

So we have no idea how to compare the trade-off between trying to influence people's IQs with shuffling different genes into them from the beginning of life versus influencing their IQs by improving their environments (at a critical stage of development? throughout life?) and we don't know which might have greater or more lasting effect.

Today, we can't even say that a person with a higher IQ than another person necessarily has better genes for IQ. The review article Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182

http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/...

looks at some famous genetic experiments to show how little is explained by gene frequencies even in thoroughly studied populations defined by artificial selection.

"Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA and height, the likely influences of gene-environment correlations and interactions on their developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances. This would be especially the case if height and GCA and other psychological traits are only single facets of multifaceted traits actually under more systematic genetic regulation, such as overall body size and balance between processing capacity and stimulus reactivity. Genetic influences on individual differences in psychological characteristics are real and important but are unlikely to be straightforward and deterministic. We will understand them best through investigation of their manifestation in biological and social developmental processes."

The new gene study for IQ going on in China, discussed in comments in this thread and on Hacker News this week, has just been responded to by the president of the Behavior Genetics Association.

http://ericturkheimer.blogspot.com/2013/02/steve-hsu-replied...

Yes, given that we now know that the genetic influence on IQ is going through thousands upon thousands of SNPs and genes with tiny effects each, it's unlikely that we're going to be doing anything fancy with the genetics of IQ anytime soon. (At best we might get something like Hsu's suggestion that we engage in embryo selection by making the best guess at which embryo has the most favorable set.) So from a sperm donation perspective, it's going to be hard to beat simply measuring phenotypic IQ and correlates.

> So we have no idea how to compare the trade-off between trying to influence people's IQs with shuffling different genes into them from the beginning of life versus influencing their IQs by improving their environments (at a critical stage of development? throughout life?) and we don't know which might have greater or more lasting effect.

They're not necessarily exclusive, of course. But since governments and charities already spend a ton on things like Headstart despite their long history of seeing IQ gains fading out, and the low-hanging fruit of nutritional interventions like pre-natal* iodization already taken, we would probably get more bang for the buck by looking at genetics - since no one is doing anything about that.

* I say pre-natal because I've been compiling post-natal studies on iodization in http://www.gwern.net/Iodine and one outlier aside, the effect on IQ or other cognitive effects is basically zero.

Warning: redirect loop ahead.

I can't believe there are sites in 2013 that break the Back button.

What redirect loop?

So you mean that I could acheive Genghis Khan-like levels of genetic patrimony just by becoming a sperm donor?

It's tempting. I'm not sure I could endure the social stigma of being a sperm donor, though.

Is there really a stigma?

I guess, like anything, the question is why you're doing it.

If you're doing it for $20 then that's perhaps more serving of a stigma than doing it to help out because you have friends who are unable have children due to the guy. Certainly you'd be a hero to them and wouldn't have a stigma.

Why is always the question to ask before you judge

From a woman's perspective, if you are healthy and have a good mental disposition, it's great that you donate. There are a lot of reasons donation is valuable and I don't think there is any stigma among modern citizens.

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