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While the Sweeney jeans add is clearly an overreaction to fake eugenics downthread, it does seem like real, hard, embryo selection eugenics is here, or at least right around the corner. Scott Alexander's article released yesterday, Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection, says:
The gist of the article is that while the science is still in its infancy and there are a lot of challenges to overcome, these companies are not just selling vaporware. There's real embryo selection based on traits happening, that is going to be significant for babies being born now.
Of course this article is just another confirmation of science fiction becoming reality, but it's still shocking to see from my perspective. You'd think we would at least have a discussion as to whether this should be legal or not, but unfortunately given how crippled out legislative apparatus is, tech companies continue to just push ahead with zero fear of regulatory change. They're willing to take the risk.
Now I personally have religious reasons to oppose this sort of intervention, but even if you don't, it's not hard to imagine the insane societal consequences of allowing free for all designer babies. As one hyperbolic comment on the slate star subreddit says:
While this comment is pretty over the top, I still think there's a strong point here! Gattaca was a cautionary tale, not a user's manual. Then again, I suppose the general zeitgeist considers the prole class to be so whipped, and coddled with bread and circuses, that our materialistic transhumanist tech overlords can simply do whatever they want, even if it will end up condemning "natural-born" people to permanent servitude.
The culture war lines here would've been pretty clear a while ago, but now it's muddled. Will the religious right be able to turn their coalition against this? Will the left see this as inequality on steroids? Will an uneasy alliance be made to ban this technology from the light of day? Only time will tell.
Yeah, I think we've seen this coming down the pipe for quite some time. The main limiting factor of the tech is that it relies on IVF, which is pretty unpleasant to use (from what I've heard) compared to the natural process, and is additionally quite expensive. For that reason I expect this particular enterprise to be a very slow burn. Perhaps costs come down over time, but I suspect that reduced costs will march right along with reduced quality, and the inevitable lawsuits for implanting the wrong couple's child are going to be very culture-warry.
That said, I'm of two minds on the overall concept of human genetic manipulation, or rather of one slightly more subtle mind that doesn't take a simple yes/no.
The great advantage of genetic manipulation is that it allows us to clean out bad mutations in the absolute gentlest way possible. For instance, Jews are absolutely loaded down with genetic disease, and currently have to do pre-mating genetic testing to find out if they're at risk. Nature's tender way of keeping the rates of the most serious disorders down is to kill the child, typically in a fairly slow and painful fashion. I would understand anyone who had a recessive gene for those disorders paying to make sure that their children carried none at all, to spare them the heartbreak of having to worry about their own children. To make it more personal, my own eyes are extremely bad and I am currently slowly going blind, although surgery should ameliorate the worst of it. If I could, with a wave of my hand, ensure that my eyes die with me and do not burden my children, then I would. Who would want to saddle their children with such burdens, save that they are (as of right now) unavoidable? Natural selection is a powerful force, but it is not a kind one, and one of man's duties is to rise above the worst of nature.
(For anyone personally opposed to IVF specifically on pro-life grounds, imagine that we develop superb gene-editing technology such that it's possible to replace selected genes in a naturally implanted embryo. Very sci-fi, I know, but I hope the thought experiment explains the above sentiment.)
On the other hand, what I expect the technology to be used for is stupid, arrogant decisions about who the child shall be. This seems to be what Nucleus is trying to offer: height, weight, and even down to eye color. These traits are obviously superficial, and reflect the desire of a parent for a "better" child while only looking at the very vague surface of what that means. But, as anyone here is likely to know, random traits are randomly distributed (often on a Gaussian scale), and the more you filter your results on one axis the more you'll have to tolerate imperfections on the others. So if you filter the child on height, BMI, eye color, you'll have to make some compromises on ADHD and IQ, most likely. Compounding this is the problem that extreme outliers in a given trait are increasingly likely to be compromised in other traits (as the height starts to undermine bodily integrity, say), and so anyone who just picks out the max IQ baby is likely to have some unfortunate genetic weaknesses. Personally, I also have my money on our understanding of many of these traits being much weaker than we think, and whatever we think we're getting is not going to be what we actually want, but that's a different argument.
My central objection to this kind of picking and choosing, however, is that much of the power of natural selection comes from its inherent randomness. Without prejudice (okay, maybe with a little prejudice in sexual selection and some genetic integrity mechanisms), a candidate is randomly assembled and evaluated. Their success is purely on the merits; there is no intelligent force with an axe to grind, there is no finger on the scales. Regardless of what anyone thinks, a given set of traits and genes does or does not work, and the next generation codifies that. When we step in, we are assuming knowledge over the entire enterprise. The feedback loop gets limited to what we think we want, not what works or doesn't. You see this time and time again in any situation where human guidance is put over some kind of development or evolution without external validation, where the decisions made get increasingly fashionable and decreasingly connected with real results. The classic example is military developments during peacetime, where illusions about (say) the efficacy of the bayonet charge or static artillery or the battleship get built up year over year until the actual test of war comes and shatters them. I suspect that human self-selection of traits is going to enter this same internal cycle of arrogance. The feedback cycle for success or failure is so slow that it exceeds the lives of the people responsible for the earlier decisions, and worse yet, the evaluative capacity of later generations is going to be shaped by those earlier generations. Don't get me wrong, feedback WILL come, nature WILL reassert herself, just as she will inevitably do for our current fertility crisis, but the longer the illusions hold the uglier it's going to get for everyone. And what's at the core of it, I believe, is the human intuition that we have reduced to a science a domain that is frankly beyond our analysis. We must be humble, and recognize that the best we have is heuristics, and that going further than that is arrogant and foolish.
This problem is, of course, only compounded by the fact that doctors will be regarded as the experts on human trait selection, when in fact they are only experts on identifying gene clusters and giving vague approximations of what they do. I hope people will not confuse the two, but based on how we confuse doctors' technical expertise for moral or strategic guidance already, I don't have high hopes for the future on that count.
I'm not convinced. Humanity has a long and successful history of breeding for strict usefulness - which often ends up being the same as fitness.
Wild hogs interbreeding with escaped factory farming sows have led to feral hog sounders orders is magnitude more troublesome than wild hogs ever where in the past.
Pick any natural environment that ever had wild horses. You'll find a breed of domesticated horse that, when allowed to go feral, would outcompete the native wild horses, and quickly. Humans have made them larger/stronger/sturdier than nature ever could.
My fear is that selective breeding will allow humans to do the same to their children. And just like street dogs, which effortlessly outcompete coyotes and wolves in urban environments, those designer babies could end up strictly superior in the environment they are made for. As with the hogs, some interbreeding with the "wild" population might improve the end result significantly.
Now, with horses, hogs and dogs we need thousands of generations to get results. The question is how much this process is accelerated by direct gene selection.
We also have a history of breeding fragility. Dogs are the usual example. As far as I know, wolves (or sometimes hybrids) remain more fit anywhere with their range, and a lot of dogs are useless (e.g. toy breeds) or damaged (e.g. overly-large German Shepherds with hip dysplasia). Ornamental plants, too. Sometimes they seed and "go wild", and typically later generations lose their showiness very quickly.
Come on, that's obviously only a side effect of our bored decadence. We made those long after we got good guard dogs, shepherds, rat terriers, badger chasers and a dozens of more useful specializations.
And sure, we might well fear a repeat of that tendency when we start selecting traits in our children, but in the end parents still want their kids to be successful, not ornamental. But yes, I hope for the sake of our grand daughters that chest size is not determined by a small number of genes.
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