As a dad to a child born via IVF, this is a positive development. I am pro-IVF, but I also sympathize with concerns about leftover embryos. Solving this challenge through embryo adoption and in other ways is something I care deeply about. At some point I will write up some thoughts on this.
Reproduction tech is amazing in most case, but there will be ethical issues to work through as new technologies and use cases emerge.
Embryo adoption is a win-win! Adoptive parents get to save an embryo while biological parents get to spread their genes even further into the next generation! The one potential downside might, of course, be that actual babies and/or older children won't get adopted at the same rates. Though I've heard that there is currently a shortage of health adoptive white babies here in the US. Seriously.
As a side note, I really do wish that both IVF and surrogacy were much more affordable and accessible for low-income people such as myself.
The total death toll of delays to life extension technology will probably be on the order of 10 billion. One of the worst things to ever happen to humanity.
This is very well argued. For me the biggest risk is the one you raise around homogeneity. As I understand it, there are many genes involved in IQ, perhaps 1300+, and I worry parents shooting for IQ would tend to opt for the same alleles on all those genes. Ditto for health. If this in fact happened I would support some kind of regulatory limits in favour of minimum genetic diversity so we don’t end up ruled by a clone class.
On the contrary, we should expect increasing selective power to result in increasing speciation, not homogenization. Initially small preferential differences can be exponentially cumulative, since these preferences are themselves heritable. For example, let's say I have a preference for athleticism. This preference is itself heritable. If I increase athleticism in my children, due to positive assortative mating, my grandchild will likely have an even STRONGER preference for athleticism. And so on, until you have very clearly distinct groups of humans. This happened historically with traits like blue eyes, but will occur much more quickly as selective tools improve.
I don't think most people want a child that is olympic level but still dumb. Most likely most people will choose athletic, conventionally attractive, smart people with only some tail variance but most of the population being in the middle of the curve
Yeah I don't think anyone will select for stupidity. But the whole idea of a "drone class" that I am responding to has little to do with intelligence and more to do with personality traits like conformity, agreeableness, submissiveness, conscientiousness, rule-following. Selection for athletic competition would bias psychology against these "drone traits."
Strong agree with the caveat that there's one area of biology research does primarily affect the public - infectious diseases. I still lean accelerationist here - I don't know if covid leaked from a lab doing gain-of-function research, but I do know that new innovation in mRNA vaccines stopped the pandemic. Fast research here was good and the only problem is it could have been even faster. But it's less of a slam dunk. Because public health is is public, even something as innocuous as wastewater monitoring could be captured moralists (like monitoring of anti-abortion drugs).
I have one concern I have about embryo selection and genetically modified children: the parents engaging these technologies are probably more likely to be narcissists.
Boosting the IQs of narcissists is somewhat costly. We might end up with more high level white collar crime. Low IQ narcissists usually crash and burn, but high IQ ones can get into politics. Perhaps overtime the system becomes more corrupt and accommodating of these types.
The antidote to this would be ensuring that decent people do embryo selection... or maybe in the long term we can try and select against genes/embryos that are associated with manipulation and psychopathy.
Great post, mainly because you’ve already gamed out the likely objections and provided solid arguments against each. As you noted, in each case the “natural” way is at best equal, but in most cases worse, than the biotech (reproductive) option.
And in a secular society, I consider most religious objections to most things to be irrelevant. No need to go out of one’s way just to irk somebody, but those objections are certainly not close to “veto” level.
Transhumanism would be a disaster for the human species. We would end up created a new set of species and non upgraded humans would be relegated to second class citizens. Do you want the tech elites to live for 300 years while the typical citizen only lives 90? You need to think long and hard about the consequences of transhumanism before advocating for it. I would suggest reading Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari for a different take on transhumanism.
There is a big difference cell phones, pacemakers and the ability to raise the iq of people, downloading your conscience to a machine, or nano bots making sure you never get sick. If you think the elite will allow everyone to gain access to this sort of technology you’re dreaming.
Remember, humans can’t survive on mars. The real plan of the tech elites is to upgrade humans into a new species so we can live anywhere in the universe . It would be the dawn of a new species but the extinction of the human race.
It's weird how the elites keeping technology from the masses is only a thing that happens with technologies that don't exist yet. Technologies that actually exist have pretty much all filtered down to the masses.
I bet that back in the early 20th century, populists had conspiracy theories about how the elites were never going to let the masses have cars, because it would give them too much freedom of movement.
Uh, yes, I do want that; it's strictly preferable to everyone living only 90 years. You're the kind of leftist Richard mentioned in his final paragraphs.
not only become second class > "The impossibility of creating viable offspring between human–posthuman couples will therefore become a diverging moment between both groups." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bioe.13085
War between the (real) chosen and the unchosen...Gaza on steroids... inevitable.
"In biotech, if something screws up, the costs are borne by individuals and families."
I think you need to be more specific about what kinds of biotech count. For instance, lab leak (if true) would be an example of biotech that achieved very fast adoption by everyone on earth with some negative impacts!
Biotechnology is giving us more and more power. Most people will use it for good, but there are some bad actors. I expect the good consequences to vastly outweigh the bad, but we should not pretend that there will be no bad.
“ … a great deal of time between the development of a technique and its adoption”? Really? And that applies, for example, to the mRNA technology behind the Covid response?
I'm down with eugenic selection. What I'm wishy-washy about is the widespread use of IVF for the sake of fertility itself; it would make the least fertile spread their seed far and wide, making reproduction a costlier endeavor for society with each passing generation.
You say that the downsides of bio-accelerationism are purely personal, but I don't see any discussion of the potential for public health risks (with minimal attentiveness these seem very manageable, but with no attentiveness the risk could be very great), or social stability risks (these seem very real to me).
The ability to ensure that your progeny are innately biologically advantaged over those of those with few resources would eliminate one of the few remaining veneers of "equal opportunity" that hold the American social fabric together. The benefits of an entire population being able to raise its IQ by 10 points are obvious, but if we reach that capability, but it's out of reach for 80% of Americans, I would be very worried that this would actually result in French Revolution-style revolt.
>Imagine that tomorrow someone discovers an intervention to give each embryo 10 extra IQ points. Like all technology, it starts out expensive, and some people are just freaked out by it or have a religious objection.
This already exists by the way and it’s as cheap as IVF (gene sequencing costs jackshit). Only bottleneck is that it’s geriatric women who get their eggs extracted atm so you only get a few viable embryos. When young women get their eggs extracted they can get hundreds.
Epigenetic inheritance has been hugely overhyped by pop journalists. We don't know for sure whether it happens at all in humans, and even if it does, the effect is likely very small.
Shared environment matters some, but we know from twin studies that cognitive ability is primarily driven by genetics. Also, environment is largely downstream of parents' genetics. If we could increase the genetic potential of children of poor single mothers by a standard deviation, they would grow up to produce much better environments for their children.
We know for a fact that it's possible for highly intelligent people not to have Habsburg jaws, because the vast majority do not.
Agree. There’s a guy who cloned elite horses for polo matches. All of these biologists who dealt with epigenetics told him it would never work. Well, it did. His horses have done extremely well.
That's more about acquired epigenetic modifications. Unlike inherited epigenetic modifications, these are known to be real and important in long-lived mammals. However, they're strongly influenced by lifestyle and other environmental factors, so I would not expect them to differ greatly between clones raised and trained in the same manner. I'd be curious to find out exactly why researchers didn't think cloning high-performing horses would work.
Genetic engineering for IQ would probably have some positive effects, sure. But I think it's wrong to treat it like it’s a sure bet that will provide you with a 120+ IQ prodigy child. As far as epigenetic effects, I'm referring to things like DNA methylation. DNA methylation alone is affected by hormones, nutrition (and the absorbance/utilization of nutrients), medications, stress, chemical exposure, etc. Genetic engineering alone cannot account for all of that. And yeah the Hapsburg jaw comment is ridiculous i know lol. But it still begs the question; do we really understand the possible negative side effects of having an exceptional IQ? Depression, anxiety, hyper-awareness of both self and environment, etc.
As a dad to a child born via IVF, this is a positive development. I am pro-IVF, but I also sympathize with concerns about leftover embryos. Solving this challenge through embryo adoption and in other ways is something I care deeply about. At some point I will write up some thoughts on this.
Reproduction tech is amazing in most case, but there will be ethical issues to work through as new technologies and use cases emerge.
Embryo adoption is a win-win! Adoptive parents get to save an embryo while biological parents get to spread their genes even further into the next generation! The one potential downside might, of course, be that actual babies and/or older children won't get adopted at the same rates. Though I've heard that there is currently a shortage of health adoptive white babies here in the US. Seriously.
As a side note, I really do wish that both IVF and surrogacy were much more affordable and accessible for low-income people such as myself.
The total death toll of delays to life extension technology will probably be on the order of 10 billion. One of the worst things to ever happen to humanity.
This is very well argued. For me the biggest risk is the one you raise around homogeneity. As I understand it, there are many genes involved in IQ, perhaps 1300+, and I worry parents shooting for IQ would tend to opt for the same alleles on all those genes. Ditto for health. If this in fact happened I would support some kind of regulatory limits in favour of minimum genetic diversity so we don’t end up ruled by a clone class.
On the contrary, we should expect increasing selective power to result in increasing speciation, not homogenization. Initially small preferential differences can be exponentially cumulative, since these preferences are themselves heritable. For example, let's say I have a preference for athleticism. This preference is itself heritable. If I increase athleticism in my children, due to positive assortative mating, my grandchild will likely have an even STRONGER preference for athleticism. And so on, until you have very clearly distinct groups of humans. This happened historically with traits like blue eyes, but will occur much more quickly as selective tools improve.
I don't think most people want a child that is olympic level but still dumb. Most likely most people will choose athletic, conventionally attractive, smart people with only some tail variance but most of the population being in the middle of the curve
Yeah I don't think anyone will select for stupidity. But the whole idea of a "drone class" that I am responding to has little to do with intelligence and more to do with personality traits like conformity, agreeableness, submissiveness, conscientiousness, rule-following. Selection for athletic competition would bias psychology against these "drone traits."
What's wrong with ending up ruled by a clone class?
Strong agree with the caveat that there's one area of biology research does primarily affect the public - infectious diseases. I still lean accelerationist here - I don't know if covid leaked from a lab doing gain-of-function research, but I do know that new innovation in mRNA vaccines stopped the pandemic. Fast research here was good and the only problem is it could have been even faster. But it's less of a slam dunk. Because public health is is public, even something as innocuous as wastewater monitoring could be captured moralists (like monitoring of anti-abortion drugs).
I was talking about reproductive tech, other things can be more complicated.
I have one concern I have about embryo selection and genetically modified children: the parents engaging these technologies are probably more likely to be narcissists.
Boosting the IQs of narcissists is somewhat costly. We might end up with more high level white collar crime. Low IQ narcissists usually crash and burn, but high IQ ones can get into politics. Perhaps overtime the system becomes more corrupt and accommodating of these types.
The antidote to this would be ensuring that decent people do embryo selection... or maybe in the long term we can try and select against genes/embryos that are associated with manipulation and psychopathy.
Great post, mainly because you’ve already gamed out the likely objections and provided solid arguments against each. As you noted, in each case the “natural” way is at best equal, but in most cases worse, than the biotech (reproductive) option.
And in a secular society, I consider most religious objections to most things to be irrelevant. No need to go out of one’s way just to irk somebody, but those objections are certainly not close to “veto” level.
Transhumanism would be a disaster for the human species. We would end up created a new set of species and non upgraded humans would be relegated to second class citizens. Do you want the tech elites to live for 300 years while the typical citizen only lives 90? You need to think long and hard about the consequences of transhumanism before advocating for it. I would suggest reading Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari for a different take on transhumanism.
There is a big difference cell phones, pacemakers and the ability to raise the iq of people, downloading your conscience to a machine, or nano bots making sure you never get sick. If you think the elite will allow everyone to gain access to this sort of technology you’re dreaming.
Remember, humans can’t survive on mars. The real plan of the tech elites is to upgrade humans into a new species so we can live anywhere in the universe . It would be the dawn of a new species but the extinction of the human race.
It's weird how the elites keeping technology from the masses is only a thing that happens with technologies that don't exist yet. Technologies that actually exist have pretty much all filtered down to the masses.
I bet that back in the early 20th century, populists had conspiracy theories about how the elites were never going to let the masses have cars, because it would give them too much freedom of movement.
Uh, yes, I do want that; it's strictly preferable to everyone living only 90 years. You're the kind of leftist Richard mentioned in his final paragraphs.
So do you want dictators living forever ruling forever? Because that’s what will happen.
You need to really think about this. Do you want Trump, Putin, and Xi living for 300 years with 210
IQ and being president for centuries?
Those people not having 210 IQ is a large part of the problem.
not only become second class > "The impossibility of creating viable offspring between human–posthuman couples will therefore become a diverging moment between both groups." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bioe.13085
War between the (real) chosen and the unchosen...Gaza on steroids... inevitable.
"In biotech, if something screws up, the costs are borne by individuals and families."
I think you need to be more specific about what kinds of biotech count. For instance, lab leak (if true) would be an example of biotech that achieved very fast adoption by everyone on earth with some negative impacts!
Biotechnology is giving us more and more power. Most people will use it for good, but there are some bad actors. I expect the good consequences to vastly outweigh the bad, but we should not pretend that there will be no bad.
“ … a great deal of time between the development of a technique and its adoption”? Really? And that applies, for example, to the mRNA technology behind the Covid response?
Yes, mRNA vaccines first started being developed in 2001:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine
> Must I have a strong opinion on everything? I’ve earned the right to punt every once in a while.
Punting is the birthright of everyone. Indeed, it would be better to think of opinions as something that one can earn.
I'm down with eugenic selection. What I'm wishy-washy about is the widespread use of IVF for the sake of fertility itself; it would make the least fertile spread their seed far and wide, making reproduction a costlier endeavor for society with each passing generation.
i suppose you're automatically excluding gain of function research and pharmacology related startups
You say that the downsides of bio-accelerationism are purely personal, but I don't see any discussion of the potential for public health risks (with minimal attentiveness these seem very manageable, but with no attentiveness the risk could be very great), or social stability risks (these seem very real to me).
The ability to ensure that your progeny are innately biologically advantaged over those of those with few resources would eliminate one of the few remaining veneers of "equal opportunity" that hold the American social fabric together. The benefits of an entire population being able to raise its IQ by 10 points are obvious, but if we reach that capability, but it's out of reach for 80% of Americans, I would be very worried that this would actually result in French Revolution-style revolt.
>Imagine that tomorrow someone discovers an intervention to give each embryo 10 extra IQ points. Like all technology, it starts out expensive, and some people are just freaked out by it or have a religious objection.
This already exists by the way and it’s as cheap as IVF (gene sequencing costs jackshit). Only bottleneck is that it’s geriatric women who get their eggs extracted atm so you only get a few viable embryos. When young women get their eggs extracted they can get hundreds.
https://x.com/BronskiJoseph/status/1759279508086038837
Idk man i think genetically engineering IQ would just be the newest snake oil. It seems to disregard all of the epigenetic/environmental factors.
Also what's the end result of genetic homogeneity? Hapsburg jaw? What if the super genius gene is also the Hapsburg jaw gene?
Epigenetic inheritance has been hugely overhyped by pop journalists. We don't know for sure whether it happens at all in humans, and even if it does, the effect is likely very small.
Shared environment matters some, but we know from twin studies that cognitive ability is primarily driven by genetics. Also, environment is largely downstream of parents' genetics. If we could increase the genetic potential of children of poor single mothers by a standard deviation, they would grow up to produce much better environments for their children.
We know for a fact that it's possible for highly intelligent people not to have Habsburg jaws, because the vast majority do not.
Agree. There’s a guy who cloned elite horses for polo matches. All of these biologists who dealt with epigenetics told him it would never work. Well, it did. His horses have done extremely well.
That's more about acquired epigenetic modifications. Unlike inherited epigenetic modifications, these are known to be real and important in long-lived mammals. However, they're strongly influenced by lifestyle and other environmental factors, so I would not expect them to differ greatly between clones raised and trained in the same manner. I'd be curious to find out exactly why researchers didn't think cloning high-performing horses would work.
Genetic engineering for IQ would probably have some positive effects, sure. But I think it's wrong to treat it like it’s a sure bet that will provide you with a 120+ IQ prodigy child. As far as epigenetic effects, I'm referring to things like DNA methylation. DNA methylation alone is affected by hormones, nutrition (and the absorbance/utilization of nutrients), medications, stress, chemical exposure, etc. Genetic engineering alone cannot account for all of that. And yeah the Hapsburg jaw comment is ridiculous i know lol. But it still begs the question; do we really understand the possible negative side effects of having an exceptional IQ? Depression, anxiety, hyper-awareness of both self and environment, etc.
Gattaca but everyone has Hapsburg jaw.