1) They don't want to admit that some people are better than others, inherently. Boo hoo.
2) You put a scorecard of embryos in front of everyone, and everyone has a pretty good ballpark estimate of which are better and which are worse. Nobody is going to pretend equality is true when they are choosing their kids genes.
3) So bad feels.
4) Must therefore retard all human progress and cause immense suffering because don't want to deal with bad feels.
That's the anti-polygenic argument in a nutshell. I don't expect it to be very effective. At best it will cause it to take a bit longer before poor people have access.
Ostentatious sympathy for the weak is actually cruelty to everyone else, who has to devote inordinate time resources and energy to the former’s maintenance
I don’t take issue with sympathy for the less fortunate, but not permitting technology to improve their condition to preserve that sympathy is inexcusable.
The comparison with embryos is not even so distasteful, it's just saying that some genomes are more conducive to physical and mental well-being than others, and given that we have no other information than the genome, it makes sense to select the genome more conducive to physical and mental wellbeing. The impulse to reject this often comes from a repugnance toward interpersonal comparisons, especially genetic ones. People with disabilities and illnesses have lives worth living, but it's obviously better to avoid these conditions if possible. As the returns from reprogenetic technology grow, the unnecessary suffering from these attitudes will be immense. We can do is try to push back and continually reframe to avoid the "yuck" factor that happens when this is presented in particular framings. There are intellectual arguments, but a great deal of this is motivated by disgust and semantic associations with "eugenics."
The point, which the article misses entirely, is that it’s good to avoid disabilities and illness (and even stupidity!) - but doing that by “avoiding “ (read: aborting, leaving to sit in a freezer until the parents stop paying the storage fee and then throwing in the garbage, etc.) *people with disabilities and illnesses* is eugenics
Then eugenics is a good thing that makes the world better.
You're trying to emotionally blackmail people by equating genocidal mass murder of living people with parents having enough love to do what's best for their kids. It won't work, nor should it work.
One day people will think of not doing polygenic scoring the way they think of a mother smoking and drinking during pregnancy.
Nope. Eugenics was bad even before it was the holocaust.
And this is much closer to the holocaust than the pre-holocaust eugenics movement which merely (!) sought to sterilise the unfit and paid up the fit. Because people are dying. Whether it’s embryos who don’t get selected, babies who are aborted, or sick/disabled/poor people who “choose” assisted suicide, the modern eugenics movement is killing people too. We’ve just privatised it.
If you're against eugenics then logic dictates you're in favour or ambivalent about dysgenic fertility. Is your only priority adhering to Christian doctrine? That overrules reducing disease and improving people's lives?
“Unnecessary suffering from these attitudes” The comparison I like best is with not vaccinating:
“Many breakthroughs in medicine were initially met with opposition, which, in hindsight, often looks callous and plain stupid. Vaccination, antiseptics, and anesthesia are famous examples. I hope that not reverting to their normal states hundreds of broken or altogether missing genes in gametes from which children are to be conceived will eventually become as unacceptable as not vaccinating children against polio and measles.
We are content to entrust precious genotypes of our offspring to a Russian roulette of random mutation, Mendelian segregation, and meiotic recombination only because currently there are no other options.”
It’s all eugenics, bud. Embryo selection (for whatever reason). Abortion. Assisted suicide. Giving out hormonal birth control like candy to teenagers and the poor while making it harder with every economic policy we adopt for the average person to have the kids they want. It’s allllllll eugenics
On this we agree. Philip Kitcher, the British philosopher of science, once said "once we've left the garden of genetic innocence [once the human genome is deciphered], some form of eugenics is inevitable." Choosing a partner is eugenics. So is any policy that affects who is born, and what traits they have.
I'm increasingly convinced that even mentioning eugenics is pointless, let alone using it as a slur. It's a little like the retort that "Democrats are the real racists." The correct response, it seems, is "who cares who calls X a racist or Y a eugenicist?" what matters is whether the thing being labeled is good or bad, and what goals those labels are being used to achieve.
(1) all the embryos (human babies) who they don’t pick, who are thrown in the trash to die
(2) all the people who have already been born who have the conditions we’re selecting against, who are being told (implicitly) that their lives aren’t worth living and that they’re such a burden that they’re not worth loving
(3) families who did not want to or could not afford to do embryo selection and who now have children with disabilities or Illnesses but find it harder to get support from their communities or government because they “should have made the responsible choice”. (We already see this on both sides of the political aisle with poor women who choose to have children they could have aborted.)
(4) all of us, who have to live in a world with ever-diminishing patience for weakness and dependency as we pursue “human progress” that really means “survival of the fittest” and “choice above all other values (as long as you can afford it)”
Thanks for the comments, Elizabeth. I think it’s really important that people like you let us know just how dogmatic/hardline most religious people will be, even when presented with the choice between having smarter, healthier children or their own children eventually losing to embryo selected children. Of course, in the long run the Christian position is probably unsustainable for that reason. But it is worth being reminded that those of us who want this technology ASAP are going to face something of a bottleneck in terms of regulations. To be clear, it’s almost impossible to regulate, but the American empire can certainly make it more difficult. They can certainly halt research progress, too. There is no marketplace of ideas here. Christianity is a dysgenic, effeminate religion that praises weakness as a virtue. As such, dogmatists who believe embryos have the same moral value as 20-week foetuses, babies, or 42 year-old mathematical geniuses, are our enemy. There is no point pretending otherwise. Neither of us will change the other’s mind. It is good to be reminded of that. May the best man win.
How confident are you that having 1-2 kids w/ polygenic screening in your 30s provides superior genetic results to having 2-5 in your 20s? Our genetic material is continuously deteriorating through our lives, and generally people who decide to use IVF typically are "experiencing infertility" (as you passively put it) because they got into making babies some 10 years too late, and so they usually won't have more than one.
And you've probably heard this one before, but if you dislike Christianity, you may like what comes after it even less.
Is that a CIA talking point? I bet in few years we will definitely know of some people-connection or funding of yours from some unknown foundation black-funded by the CIA. Obviously for the good of the nation.
I think it will become common for people to harvest eggs in their 20s, regardless of when they have children. I plan to pay my daughters to do just that.
As to 30s, most people can harvest a lot of eggs in their 30s. It's when you get close to 40s that it gets tough. As my wife and I are 40, we know how hard it is to get more eggs. The technology to do polygenic screening wasn't available earlier in our 30s, so we had natural children at that time.
I think it's very important for people to have a place to go that makes them feel appreciated. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of the church being a place for the broken to go. My children, born right before polygenic screening became widely available, might end up being losers as a result. They need a place.
What I don't like is when we systematize that empathy and turn it into counter productive rules that increase human suffering.
Shouldn't that be universally done? Do you think that is fair to poorer people, who are poor either because not as smart, or poor because they choose not to become a slave to the system, or poor because it's a value to them?
I dont know where you fit, but you are playing a dangerous game, socially speaking.
I'm not a leftist, progressive and not a christian.
When couples undergo IVF, they will discard the additional embryos regardless of whether or not they use a screening method. If your issue is with IVF: if we were to ban IVF, then those embryos would've never been created in the first place and less children would actually be born. The counterfactual for the additional embryos if there is no IVF is that they simply never exist in the first place.
Nobody who coauthored this article believes people with disabilities are not worth living or loving. Nor do we suggest that. This argument could be applied to using medicine and doctors. Does a doctor imply the life of a sick person is worth less when they advocate for healing illnesses?
If there is a technology that can better the lives of people's children, then we should use it and embrace it while still having empathy. To throw that technology out because people might have less empathy for sick children is many steps too far and will result in lots of unnecessary suffering. Such slippery slope concerns would delay all sorts of welfare increasing and life-saving medical technology.
Well you are a hypocrite. Why stop there? Would you be against embryo discarding if you were born, say few decades later, when this thing might be more popular and more acceptable, or felt more natural to the way you view the world because would have already been there...
So are your thoughts and arguments just a result of pure coincidence and the environment where you happened to grow up?
Btw, I'm not against you on principle (I agree with you). I also dont suffer from any mental illness that I know of, but I find the argument of selecting against mental illness, ridiculous, especially coming from an evolutionary psychologist. There are evolutionary explanations for what we consider mental illnesses.
am i a hypocrite? i feel like that's consistent with my general "don't kill embryos which are living human babies" take...
my world view is informed by the moral teachings of a 2,000 year old institution that builds out the ethics given to us by God when He popped down to die for our sins. a few decades of normalization haven't gotten us comfortable with divorce, abortion or birth control, so no I don't think my view on IVF would change dramatically in a couple decades
This is (essentially) all IVF then. The net effect of your position would be to reduce the number of babies born. From your previous comments, I take it you're pro-natalist.
A hypothetical: suppose you were given a button. The button would immediately create two newborn babies. But within 5 minutes one of these two babies will (painlessly) die. The net effect is then to have one healthy newborn in the world.
Correct, no I wouldn’t. Bringing new life into the world is a sacred and glorious thing, but doing it at the expense of other human lives twists it into something evil.
And to be clear - the button we’re pressing here is not “the other embryo happens to die but so is all life fleeting and finite”. We are creating a tiny, precious, helpless thing, and then - I repeat myself - throwing it in the trash
2) It hurts. Suck it up. Don't condemn the unborn to harsh lives because you're butthurt. Grow up.
Weak people wanting to force other people to be weak so they feel better is some real dystopian parody stuff. Anyone who would harm another to make sure nobody better then them existed doesn't deserve sympathy.
3) I have no doubt your eugenics talk will make it harder to appropriate funding so that embryo selection will be universal. In fact I think that is the primary effect your attitude will have.
I think it's very important for people to have a place to go that makes them feel appreciated. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of the church being a place for the broken to go. My children, born right before polygenic screening became widely available, might end up being losers as a result. They need a place.
What I don't like is when we systematize that empathy and turn it into counter productive rules that increase human suffering. I'm not going to destroy the future of human flourishing because my kids might have to feel like they are relative status losers.
“It’s fine for other people to take care of the weak, provided I don’t have to and provided we all agree they suck” is not the compromise you seem to think it is
Your assertion #2 is obviously false and based on extreme identity politics. People who have a condition are more than their condition -- they are human beings. It is their humanity that gives them moral worth. Their adverse health conditions are burdens -- first to themselves, then potentially to others. But recognizing that those conditions are bad does not somehow imply that the person with the condition is bad. The reason that people willingly help those with such a burden is their shared humanity, which you seem to be leaving out of the picture, instead treating those with such a condition as if their condition was the only thing that matters about them.
It has nothing to do with identity politics. It has to do with being told you’re not worth implanting, or carrying to term, or whatever because of your condition. And being told that it’s a moral necessity to rid humanity of people like you. Because, again, we’re not talking about curing these conditions. We’re talking about killing people with these conditions before they’re born.
I completely agree that people who have a condition are human beings and have infinite moral worth - my argument is that their humanity starts at the moment they exist, which is fertilisation
Dysgenics is a nonsensical concept for humanity. Because humanity’s goal is not biological evolution toward an Ubermensch. It is the worship of God and love of neighbour.
Apologies for the late comment (I only get time to read these on the weekend), but more than anything else, I'd like to thank Diana for a clear explanation of both scientific background & issues involved.
Opinions on how hard IVF are seem to vary a lot. And it seems to get particularly hard with age. I buy the argument that IVF is no simple procedure, though I don't think that has any particular implications beyond the fact of the matter.
I think it's also necessary to say that "diabetes, schizophrenia, etc." are no walk in the park, and that has to be considered when discussing this technology because that pain and suffering matters too.
This wasn't quite the treatment I was hoping for. I have never heard of Adam Rutherford, so the many words shooting down his seemingly extreme and careless views was pointless. Those words could have been better spent addressing the real issues. The questions I would have liked to see addressed in more detail:
Does embryo selection using polygenic risk scores actually work? SNPs do not cause intelligence after all, they are associated with it, hence the 'A' in GWAS. Furthermore they are not associated with the kind perspicacity and agency we desire, but with specific measures of intelligence at the population level. It remains speculative that prospective selection of an embryo using the PRS du jour will materially improve the probability of the desired outcome (whether selection for positive traits or avoidance of negative traits). Simulations using sibhip analyses do not count as a substitute for efficacy. This is a medical intervention. It should be tested properly, if you are serious about it. I can't really see a way to do this however. A very large randomised trial would show you if embryo selection produced any noticeable difference in certain traits between unselected and selected populations. An alternative is a smaller trial in parents at high risk for schizophrenia or depression, but that would take longer to read out. In any case, such trials don't really answer the most important question - does embryo selection within a family produce 'better' children? This seems unanswerable. Should we accept embryo selection wholesale without a good quality evidence base?
The second problem is that IVF is a very new technology. We don't know what the long term effects are. We don't know what the effects on the children of IVF children are. If a couple is infertile without IVF, it is a reasonable trade-off to do it, but actively choosing IVF to enable embryo selection is a different scenario. Again this is not adequately addressed.
Thirdly we should be specific about what we mean when saying that embryo selection is 'beneficial'. The deselected embryo never exists, its probability of living is zero. This embryo cannot be said to prefer non-existence compared to its better scoring siblings. Presumably this embryo would prefer to exist - it will implant and possibly grow into a child if you give it the chance. So embryo selection is not really a matter of the parents wanting to do the best for their child. It is not equivalent to ditching teflon pans or going to toddler music lessons. It is more correctly couched as parents constraining their genetic lineage according to what they (and the society they live in) see as important. In this regard, embryo selection seems closer to parents aborting female fetuses under the one child policy in China, than it is to parents 'wanting the best' for their child. Parental autonomy must have some reasonable limit, it is not an absolute moral yardstick by itself. Embryo selection is about the parents, and important as the parents are, we should not pretend it is primarily about the child.
You say that IVF patients select one embryo to implant. Every IVF patient I’ve known has had multiple embryos inserted, with the hope that one will implant. The ones that don’t, get flushed out of the body. This is why many of the IVF patients I’ve known have twins. Two embryos successfully implanted.
If the embryos are humans in embryonic form, then polygenic selection is most definitely eugenics. “I’ll take this human with the characteristics I want, and kill those humans who lack them.”
So far, I have not heard a single compelling argument that proves embryos are not humans. In every other animal species, we recognize that embryos are that animal in embryonic form. But human embryos are treated differently, as though they are not human.
I’m thankful my parents didn’t get to choose to “discard” (murder) me because my genes didn’t have blond hair, blue eyes, or 6ft+ height.
Several years ago it was more common to implant multiple embryos- now the standard practice as outlined by bodies like the American Society for Reproductive Medicine is to transfer a single embryo each time.
# of embryos to implant is choice of the couple. There are pros and cons to multiple embryos.
"I’m thankful my parents didn’t get to choose to “discard” (murder) me"
I've got some things going for me (IQ), but I've also got some major faults (multiple genetic conditions such as type 1 diabetes, asthma, deformed bones, immune disorders, etc). I joke that I rolled a D20 on intelligence and a D1 on constitution.
I would be fine if my parents had selected a different embryo, were that an option for them. While each individual has an imperative to try to perpetuate itself, there is no moral value in halting human progress for the sake of equality. If I must die (or not exist) for the advancement of humanity, so be it.
Let's get blunt. It would be messy as heck to just start executing living human beings that were inferior, so we don't do it. But virtually nobody gives a fuck if we pick some embryos and not others. A majority of people are OK with terminating perfectly healthy fetuses growing inside a women's body simply because she finds their existence inconvenient to herself. I mostly don't agree with that, but if society is OK with that there is a 0% chance we are going to get all up in peoples IVF business.
Hi, hello, it’s me, “virtually nobody”. A billion Catholics (and I imagine quite a lot of other religious people) are with me. I give several fucks about “not selecting” embryos because embryos are people, and not selecting them means you created them just to throw them in the literal trash.
I think it’s interesting your “human progress” is about the humans whose parents can afford IVF being possibly smarter/healthier/etc. at birth than other humans. For me, human progress is about improving how we care for one another, especially the “least among us”
A majority of people, including religious people, abort when they find out the baby has Down Syndrome. It's all "pro-life" until you are actually looking at something as stupid as blowing up your family and becoming a burden to society. Then its "you know, we could just try again, and our family would be happier and we could probably have more kids overall."
Of course embryo screening allows one to avoid that nastiness entirely! You find out if the kid has Downs before they are even implanted. You don't have to wait until halfway through to rip yourself apart.
We "care" for the last among us by not even causing them to be the least amongst us in the first place.
There is no love in making your own child worse off. And there is no tradeoff, One embryo not brought to term means another can be brought to term. In fact in all honesty more children can be supported if they are all healthy.
The religious people who abort children with downs shouldn’t.
It’s not making your child “better off” to kill it in favor of its sibling. The trade off you say doesn’t exist is that these are already living human people - just at earlier stages of development than other people - and you’re advocating killing them.
Search the globe for the sperm and egg cell that optimizes your objective function. Technology exists (or is in development) that would allow the selection of these gametes based upon inferred genotype.
Fertilize the egg cell with the sperm cell. No embryo has been discarded. A profoundly genetically enhanced humanoid embryo could then be implanted. An IQ of 250 would seem a highly reasonable expectation for such an embryo. Natural reproduction would then, in comparison, be regarded as primitive, if not barbaric.
What is the counter-argument?
Almost this entire discussion has been reduced to the ethics of embryo selection and yet this is based upon an assumption of the reproductive technologies that are or could be employed. Ironically, the discussion has not been eugenic enough. Once extreme gamete selection is involved the large associated costs would drive behavior towards an equally extreme pro-life morality. Science is often morally ambivalent: It can be morally disquieting or it can be morally purer than nature. It should not be assumed that moral challenges are somehow scientifically unbridgeable.
One problematic part of the embryo selection conversation is that humanity has already largely been surpassed by ChatGPT as a cognitive force. People fought and fought against genetic enhancement and there was all this nasty name calling and now it hardly seems to matter; humanity hardly seems to matter-- humans are no longer the central force of intelligence in the universe: Artificial Intelligence is.
The smart money is now intensely worried that Artificial General Intelligence could emerge even over the short term. Humans are no longer masters of their destinies. It would take 20 years for a generation of highly genetically enhanced humanoids to develop. A generation of computer technology could be developed in months and instantly uploaded at global scale. We no longer need to even pretend that there is a viable race between computers and humans. Humanity already needs to beg for unconditional surrender from our computer overlords.
Those who tried so hard to bring us to this eugenic future have been vilified and given the currently existing computer technology might not want to continue to be exposed to the hate of others. However, the world that the haters have helped to create now has put us in the disturbing circumstance where most humans will no longer be able to make productive contributions to a future economy dominated by extreme intelligence computer technologies.
Not only might most humans (i.e., those who have not been genetically enhanced) no longer make any economic contribution, but they might also make a minimal social contribution as well. Profoundly intelligent chatbots will potentially also largely displace human society. While preventing the future by obstructing technologies such as embryo selection might have been intended to create a more humane future, the actual consequences likely will turn out to be the exact opposite.
Dr. Rutherford will never mandate that my phenotype must be snuffed out. IVF is a small fraction of human reproduction, and involves precise laboratory technologies. At scale, we can make decisions on existence itself - 'Shouldn't I choose an embryo that is myself' instead?
Ectogenesis is the technology that dare not speak its name, especially if the customer is YOU and at stake is your next life cycle. With existing technology (biobank, ectogenesis) your can practice DNA stewardship over succeeding lifetimes, the onus will be on you making arrangements (smart contracts and oracles). My phenotype is bound for glory - and I won't be accepting your death sentence. https://humanism.substack.com/p/embracing-overlapping-lifetimes
Good though provoking comment sir "Shouldn't I choose an embryo that is myself' instead?"... but If I clone myself, is the clone really me? Is there a way to pass all my acquired ways of thinking to the new "me"?
A baby is not born with memories, they'd be out of context, mean nothing to an infant. But do note that SCNT reproduction (cited) transfers exactly one DNA molecule to your new body, and within it is the Self. So you have biological continuity, which is what is required.
1) They don't want to admit that some people are better than others, inherently. Boo hoo.
2) You put a scorecard of embryos in front of everyone, and everyone has a pretty good ballpark estimate of which are better and which are worse. Nobody is going to pretend equality is true when they are choosing their kids genes.
3) So bad feels.
4) Must therefore retard all human progress and cause immense suffering because don't want to deal with bad feels.
That's the anti-polygenic argument in a nutshell. I don't expect it to be very effective. At best it will cause it to take a bit longer before poor people have access.
Thank you for laying out so clearly - and with so little sympathy for any weakness or dependency in the human experience - why this is indeed eugenics
Ostentatious sympathy for the weak is actually cruelty to everyone else, who has to devote inordinate time resources and energy to the former’s maintenance
I don’t take issue with sympathy for the less fortunate, but not permitting technology to improve their condition to preserve that sympathy is inexcusable.
Nope
The comparison with embryos is not even so distasteful, it's just saying that some genomes are more conducive to physical and mental well-being than others, and given that we have no other information than the genome, it makes sense to select the genome more conducive to physical and mental wellbeing. The impulse to reject this often comes from a repugnance toward interpersonal comparisons, especially genetic ones. People with disabilities and illnesses have lives worth living, but it's obviously better to avoid these conditions if possible. As the returns from reprogenetic technology grow, the unnecessary suffering from these attitudes will be immense. We can do is try to push back and continually reframe to avoid the "yuck" factor that happens when this is presented in particular framings. There are intellectual arguments, but a great deal of this is motivated by disgust and semantic associations with "eugenics."
https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/comparisons-are-necessary
The point, which the article misses entirely, is that it’s good to avoid disabilities and illness (and even stupidity!) - but doing that by “avoiding “ (read: aborting, leaving to sit in a freezer until the parents stop paying the storage fee and then throwing in the garbage, etc.) *people with disabilities and illnesses* is eugenics
Then eugenics is a good thing that makes the world better.
You're trying to emotionally blackmail people by equating genocidal mass murder of living people with parents having enough love to do what's best for their kids. It won't work, nor should it work.
One day people will think of not doing polygenic scoring the way they think of a mother smoking and drinking during pregnancy.
Nope. Eugenics was bad even before it was the holocaust.
And this is much closer to the holocaust than the pre-holocaust eugenics movement which merely (!) sought to sterilise the unfit and paid up the fit. Because people are dying. Whether it’s embryos who don’t get selected, babies who are aborted, or sick/disabled/poor people who “choose” assisted suicide, the modern eugenics movement is killing people too. We’ve just privatised it.
Pair** up, sry
How about if we develop the technology to alter the genes in an embryo instead of selecting among embryos? Would that be okay in your opinion?
Yes I am and no it’s not, in that order.
If you're against eugenics then logic dictates you're in favour or ambivalent about dysgenic fertility. Is your only priority adhering to Christian doctrine? That overrules reducing disease and improving people's lives?
“Unnecessary suffering from these attitudes” The comparison I like best is with not vaccinating:
“Many breakthroughs in medicine were initially met with opposition, which, in hindsight, often looks callous and plain stupid. Vaccination, antiseptics, and anesthesia are famous examples. I hope that not reverting to their normal states hundreds of broken or altogether missing genes in gametes from which children are to be conceived will eventually become as unacceptable as not vaccinating children against polio and measles.
We are content to entrust precious genotypes of our offspring to a Russian roulette of random mutation, Mendelian segregation, and meiotic recombination only because currently there are no other options.”
- Alexey Kondrashov
It’s all eugenics, bud. Embryo selection (for whatever reason). Abortion. Assisted suicide. Giving out hormonal birth control like candy to teenagers and the poor while making it harder with every economic policy we adopt for the average person to have the kids they want. It’s allllllll eugenics
On this we agree. Philip Kitcher, the British philosopher of science, once said "once we've left the garden of genetic innocence [once the human genome is deciphered], some form of eugenics is inevitable." Choosing a partner is eugenics. So is any policy that affects who is born, and what traits they have.
I'm increasingly convinced that even mentioning eugenics is pointless, let alone using it as a slur. It's a little like the retort that "Democrats are the real racists." The correct response, it seems, is "who cares who calls X a racist or Y a eugenicist?" what matters is whether the thing being labeled is good or bad, and what goals those labels are being used to achieve.
If parents voluntarily use PGT-P to have a healthier baby, who is harmed?
(1) all the embryos (human babies) who they don’t pick, who are thrown in the trash to die
(2) all the people who have already been born who have the conditions we’re selecting against, who are being told (implicitly) that their lives aren’t worth living and that they’re such a burden that they’re not worth loving
(3) families who did not want to or could not afford to do embryo selection and who now have children with disabilities or Illnesses but find it harder to get support from their communities or government because they “should have made the responsible choice”. (We already see this on both sides of the political aisle with poor women who choose to have children they could have aborted.)
(4) all of us, who have to live in a world with ever-diminishing patience for weakness and dependency as we pursue “human progress” that really means “survival of the fittest” and “choice above all other values (as long as you can afford it)”
Thanks for the comments, Elizabeth. I think it’s really important that people like you let us know just how dogmatic/hardline most religious people will be, even when presented with the choice between having smarter, healthier children or their own children eventually losing to embryo selected children. Of course, in the long run the Christian position is probably unsustainable for that reason. But it is worth being reminded that those of us who want this technology ASAP are going to face something of a bottleneck in terms of regulations. To be clear, it’s almost impossible to regulate, but the American empire can certainly make it more difficult. They can certainly halt research progress, too. There is no marketplace of ideas here. Christianity is a dysgenic, effeminate religion that praises weakness as a virtue. As such, dogmatists who believe embryos have the same moral value as 20-week foetuses, babies, or 42 year-old mathematical geniuses, are our enemy. There is no point pretending otherwise. Neither of us will change the other’s mind. It is good to be reminded of that. May the best man win.
Spot-on definition of Christianity! I believe our founder would agree with it ☺️
As long as your people don’t hang me when you win. Happy to call it a score draw if that’s the case.
Btw, if you'd like to write a reply to this piece from a Christian POV, we'd love to publish it.
How confident are you that having 1-2 kids w/ polygenic screening in your 30s provides superior genetic results to having 2-5 in your 20s? Our genetic material is continuously deteriorating through our lives, and generally people who decide to use IVF typically are "experiencing infertility" (as you passively put it) because they got into making babies some 10 years too late, and so they usually won't have more than one.
And you've probably heard this one before, but if you dislike Christianity, you may like what comes after it even less.
I’m incredibly confident, because it’s very likely that we will have the ability to add 15-25 IQ points within 10 years.
Christians who try to stop the West controlling and dominating this technology are therefore signing our death warrant to China.
Is that a CIA talking point? I bet in few years we will definitely know of some people-connection or funding of yours from some unknown foundation black-funded by the CIA. Obviously for the good of the nation.
I think it will become common for people to harvest eggs in their 20s, regardless of when they have children. I plan to pay my daughters to do just that.
As to 30s, most people can harvest a lot of eggs in their 30s. It's when you get close to 40s that it gets tough. As my wife and I are 40, we know how hard it is to get more eggs. The technology to do polygenic screening wasn't available earlier in our 30s, so we had natural children at that time.
I think it's very important for people to have a place to go that makes them feel appreciated. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of the church being a place for the broken to go. My children, born right before polygenic screening became widely available, might end up being losers as a result. They need a place.
What I don't like is when we systematize that empathy and turn it into counter productive rules that increase human suffering.
Shouldn't that be universally done? Do you think that is fair to poorer people, who are poor either because not as smart, or poor because they choose not to become a slave to the system, or poor because it's a value to them?
I dont know where you fit, but you are playing a dangerous game, socially speaking.
I'm not a leftist, progressive and not a christian.
I can't edit the comment for some reason, I'm aware of at least two typos, sorry about those.
When couples undergo IVF, they will discard the additional embryos regardless of whether or not they use a screening method. If your issue is with IVF: if we were to ban IVF, then those embryos would've never been created in the first place and less children would actually be born. The counterfactual for the additional embryos if there is no IVF is that they simply never exist in the first place.
Nobody who coauthored this article believes people with disabilities are not worth living or loving. Nor do we suggest that. This argument could be applied to using medicine and doctors. Does a doctor imply the life of a sick person is worth less when they advocate for healing illnesses?
If there is a technology that can better the lives of people's children, then we should use it and embrace it while still having empathy. To throw that technology out because people might have less empathy for sick children is many steps too far and will result in lots of unnecessary suffering. Such slippery slope concerns would delay all sorts of welfare increasing and life-saving medical technology.
TBC I’m against all ivf that involves discarding embryos
Well you are a hypocrite. Why stop there? Would you be against embryo discarding if you were born, say few decades later, when this thing might be more popular and more acceptable, or felt more natural to the way you view the world because would have already been there...
So are your thoughts and arguments just a result of pure coincidence and the environment where you happened to grow up?
Btw, I'm not against you on principle (I agree with you). I also dont suffer from any mental illness that I know of, but I find the argument of selecting against mental illness, ridiculous, especially coming from an evolutionary psychologist. There are evolutionary explanations for what we consider mental illnesses.
am i a hypocrite? i feel like that's consistent with my general "don't kill embryos which are living human babies" take...
my world view is informed by the moral teachings of a 2,000 year old institution that builds out the ethics given to us by God when He popped down to die for our sins. a few decades of normalization haven't gotten us comfortable with divorce, abortion or birth control, so no I don't think my view on IVF would change dramatically in a couple decades
This is (essentially) all IVF then. The net effect of your position would be to reduce the number of babies born. From your previous comments, I take it you're pro-natalist.
A hypothetical: suppose you were given a button. The button would immediately create two newborn babies. But within 5 minutes one of these two babies will (painlessly) die. The net effect is then to have one healthy newborn in the world.
Would you press the button? If not, why not?
Correct, no I wouldn’t. Bringing new life into the world is a sacred and glorious thing, but doing it at the expense of other human lives twists it into something evil.
And to be clear - the button we’re pressing here is not “the other embryo happens to die but so is all life fleeting and finite”. We are creating a tiny, precious, helpless thing, and then - I repeat myself - throwing it in the trash
1) Every sperm is precious.
2) It hurts. Suck it up. Don't condemn the unborn to harsh lives because you're butthurt. Grow up.
Weak people wanting to force other people to be weak so they feel better is some real dystopian parody stuff. Anyone who would harm another to make sure nobody better then them existed doesn't deserve sympathy.
3) I have no doubt your eugenics talk will make it harder to appropriate funding so that embryo selection will be universal. In fact I think that is the primary effect your attitude will have.
What a nasty post
I think it's very important for people to have a place to go that makes them feel appreciated. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of the church being a place for the broken to go. My children, born right before polygenic screening became widely available, might end up being losers as a result. They need a place.
What I don't like is when we systematize that empathy and turn it into counter productive rules that increase human suffering. I'm not going to destroy the future of human flourishing because my kids might have to feel like they are relative status losers.
“It’s fine for other people to take care of the weak, provided I don’t have to and provided we all agree they suck” is not the compromise you seem to think it is
Your assertion #2 is obviously false and based on extreme identity politics. People who have a condition are more than their condition -- they are human beings. It is their humanity that gives them moral worth. Their adverse health conditions are burdens -- first to themselves, then potentially to others. But recognizing that those conditions are bad does not somehow imply that the person with the condition is bad. The reason that people willingly help those with such a burden is their shared humanity, which you seem to be leaving out of the picture, instead treating those with such a condition as if their condition was the only thing that matters about them.
It has nothing to do with identity politics. It has to do with being told you’re not worth implanting, or carrying to term, or whatever because of your condition. And being told that it’s a moral necessity to rid humanity of people like you. Because, again, we’re not talking about curing these conditions. We’re talking about killing people with these conditions before they’re born.
I completely agree that people who have a condition are human beings and have infinite moral worth - my argument is that their humanity starts at the moment they exist, which is fertilisation
Ackxhually the last thing on your list is dysgenics.
Dysgenics is a nonsensical concept for humanity. Because humanity’s goal is not biological evolution toward an Ubermensch. It is the worship of God and love of neighbour.
Nah, me want to be ubermensch 😊
Apologies for the late comment (I only get time to read these on the weekend), but more than anything else, I'd like to thank Diana for a clear explanation of both scientific background & issues involved.
Opinions on how hard IVF are seem to vary a lot. And it seems to get particularly hard with age. I buy the argument that IVF is no simple procedure, though I don't think that has any particular implications beyond the fact of the matter.
I think it's also necessary to say that "diabetes, schizophrenia, etc." are no walk in the park, and that has to be considered when discussing this technology because that pain and suffering matters too.
This wasn't quite the treatment I was hoping for. I have never heard of Adam Rutherford, so the many words shooting down his seemingly extreme and careless views was pointless. Those words could have been better spent addressing the real issues. The questions I would have liked to see addressed in more detail:
Does embryo selection using polygenic risk scores actually work? SNPs do not cause intelligence after all, they are associated with it, hence the 'A' in GWAS. Furthermore they are not associated with the kind perspicacity and agency we desire, but with specific measures of intelligence at the population level. It remains speculative that prospective selection of an embryo using the PRS du jour will materially improve the probability of the desired outcome (whether selection for positive traits or avoidance of negative traits). Simulations using sibhip analyses do not count as a substitute for efficacy. This is a medical intervention. It should be tested properly, if you are serious about it. I can't really see a way to do this however. A very large randomised trial would show you if embryo selection produced any noticeable difference in certain traits between unselected and selected populations. An alternative is a smaller trial in parents at high risk for schizophrenia or depression, but that would take longer to read out. In any case, such trials don't really answer the most important question - does embryo selection within a family produce 'better' children? This seems unanswerable. Should we accept embryo selection wholesale without a good quality evidence base?
The second problem is that IVF is a very new technology. We don't know what the long term effects are. We don't know what the effects on the children of IVF children are. If a couple is infertile without IVF, it is a reasonable trade-off to do it, but actively choosing IVF to enable embryo selection is a different scenario. Again this is not adequately addressed.
Thirdly we should be specific about what we mean when saying that embryo selection is 'beneficial'. The deselected embryo never exists, its probability of living is zero. This embryo cannot be said to prefer non-existence compared to its better scoring siblings. Presumably this embryo would prefer to exist - it will implant and possibly grow into a child if you give it the chance. So embryo selection is not really a matter of the parents wanting to do the best for their child. It is not equivalent to ditching teflon pans or going to toddler music lessons. It is more correctly couched as parents constraining their genetic lineage according to what they (and the society they live in) see as important. In this regard, embryo selection seems closer to parents aborting female fetuses under the one child policy in China, than it is to parents 'wanting the best' for their child. Parental autonomy must have some reasonable limit, it is not an absolute moral yardstick by itself. Embryo selection is about the parents, and important as the parents are, we should not pretend it is primarily about the child.
“Rutherford’s benevolent concern is a fig leaf over condescending paternalism.”
Solid belly lol moment.
*wipes eyes*
Hope he reads it. You’re a solid follow Ms D F
You say that IVF patients select one embryo to implant. Every IVF patient I’ve known has had multiple embryos inserted, with the hope that one will implant. The ones that don’t, get flushed out of the body. This is why many of the IVF patients I’ve known have twins. Two embryos successfully implanted.
If the embryos are humans in embryonic form, then polygenic selection is most definitely eugenics. “I’ll take this human with the characteristics I want, and kill those humans who lack them.”
So far, I have not heard a single compelling argument that proves embryos are not humans. In every other animal species, we recognize that embryos are that animal in embryonic form. But human embryos are treated differently, as though they are not human.
I’m thankful my parents didn’t get to choose to “discard” (murder) me because my genes didn’t have blond hair, blue eyes, or 6ft+ height.
Several years ago it was more common to implant multiple embryos- now the standard practice as outlined by bodies like the American Society for Reproductive Medicine is to transfer a single embryo each time.
https://www.asrm.org/globalassets/asrm/asrm-content/news-and-publications/practice-guidelines/for-non-members/guidance_on_the_limits_to_the_number_of_embryos_to_transfer.pdf
Thanks for the link. That’s good to know.
# of embryos to implant is choice of the couple. There are pros and cons to multiple embryos.
"I’m thankful my parents didn’t get to choose to “discard” (murder) me"
I've got some things going for me (IQ), but I've also got some major faults (multiple genetic conditions such as type 1 diabetes, asthma, deformed bones, immune disorders, etc). I joke that I rolled a D20 on intelligence and a D1 on constitution.
I would be fine if my parents had selected a different embryo, were that an option for them. While each individual has an imperative to try to perpetuate itself, there is no moral value in halting human progress for the sake of equality. If I must die (or not exist) for the advancement of humanity, so be it.
Let's get blunt. It would be messy as heck to just start executing living human beings that were inferior, so we don't do it. But virtually nobody gives a fuck if we pick some embryos and not others. A majority of people are OK with terminating perfectly healthy fetuses growing inside a women's body simply because she finds their existence inconvenient to herself. I mostly don't agree with that, but if society is OK with that there is a 0% chance we are going to get all up in peoples IVF business.
> If I must die (or not exist) for the advancement of humanity, so be it.
Do you imbecile realize this is a religious and teleological argument/reasoning?
Hi, hello, it’s me, “virtually nobody”. A billion Catholics (and I imagine quite a lot of other religious people) are with me. I give several fucks about “not selecting” embryos because embryos are people, and not selecting them means you created them just to throw them in the literal trash.
I think it’s interesting your “human progress” is about the humans whose parents can afford IVF being possibly smarter/healthier/etc. at birth than other humans. For me, human progress is about improving how we care for one another, especially the “least among us”
A majority of people, including religious people, abort when they find out the baby has Down Syndrome. It's all "pro-life" until you are actually looking at something as stupid as blowing up your family and becoming a burden to society. Then its "you know, we could just try again, and our family would be happier and we could probably have more kids overall."
Of course embryo screening allows one to avoid that nastiness entirely! You find out if the kid has Downs before they are even implanted. You don't have to wait until halfway through to rip yourself apart.
We "care" for the last among us by not even causing them to be the least amongst us in the first place.
There is no love in making your own child worse off. And there is no tradeoff, One embryo not brought to term means another can be brought to term. In fact in all honesty more children can be supported if they are all healthy.
The religious people who abort children with downs shouldn’t.
It’s not making your child “better off” to kill it in favor of its sibling. The trade off you say doesn’t exist is that these are already living human people - just at earlier stages of development than other people - and you’re advocating killing them.
Search the globe for the sperm and egg cell that optimizes your objective function. Technology exists (or is in development) that would allow the selection of these gametes based upon inferred genotype.
Fertilize the egg cell with the sperm cell. No embryo has been discarded. A profoundly genetically enhanced humanoid embryo could then be implanted. An IQ of 250 would seem a highly reasonable expectation for such an embryo. Natural reproduction would then, in comparison, be regarded as primitive, if not barbaric.
What is the counter-argument?
Almost this entire discussion has been reduced to the ethics of embryo selection and yet this is based upon an assumption of the reproductive technologies that are or could be employed. Ironically, the discussion has not been eugenic enough. Once extreme gamete selection is involved the large associated costs would drive behavior towards an equally extreme pro-life morality. Science is often morally ambivalent: It can be morally disquieting or it can be morally purer than nature. It should not be assumed that moral challenges are somehow scientifically unbridgeable.
One problematic part of the embryo selection conversation is that humanity has already largely been surpassed by ChatGPT as a cognitive force. People fought and fought against genetic enhancement and there was all this nasty name calling and now it hardly seems to matter; humanity hardly seems to matter-- humans are no longer the central force of intelligence in the universe: Artificial Intelligence is.
The smart money is now intensely worried that Artificial General Intelligence could emerge even over the short term. Humans are no longer masters of their destinies. It would take 20 years for a generation of highly genetically enhanced humanoids to develop. A generation of computer technology could be developed in months and instantly uploaded at global scale. We no longer need to even pretend that there is a viable race between computers and humans. Humanity already needs to beg for unconditional surrender from our computer overlords.
Those who tried so hard to bring us to this eugenic future have been vilified and given the currently existing computer technology might not want to continue to be exposed to the hate of others. However, the world that the haters have helped to create now has put us in the disturbing circumstance where most humans will no longer be able to make productive contributions to a future economy dominated by extreme intelligence computer technologies.
Not only might most humans (i.e., those who have not been genetically enhanced) no longer make any economic contribution, but they might also make a minimal social contribution as well. Profoundly intelligent chatbots will potentially also largely displace human society. While preventing the future by obstructing technologies such as embryo selection might have been intended to create a more humane future, the actual consequences likely will turn out to be the exact opposite.
Dr. Rutherford will never mandate that my phenotype must be snuffed out. IVF is a small fraction of human reproduction, and involves precise laboratory technologies. At scale, we can make decisions on existence itself - 'Shouldn't I choose an embryo that is myself' instead?
Ectogenesis is the technology that dare not speak its name, especially if the customer is YOU and at stake is your next life cycle. With existing technology (biobank, ectogenesis) your can practice DNA stewardship over succeeding lifetimes, the onus will be on you making arrangements (smart contracts and oracles). My phenotype is bound for glory - and I won't be accepting your death sentence. https://humanism.substack.com/p/embracing-overlapping-lifetimes
Good though provoking comment sir "Shouldn't I choose an embryo that is myself' instead?"... but If I clone myself, is the clone really me? Is there a way to pass all my acquired ways of thinking to the new "me"?
A baby is not born with memories, they'd be out of context, mean nothing to an infant. But do note that SCNT reproduction (cited) transfers exactly one DNA molecule to your new body, and within it is the Self. So you have biological continuity, which is what is required.