I think the reason that people use the same term for both is that historically, the lines between enabling, encouraging, recommending, de facto enforcing, legally enforcing and plain violently enforcing genetic changes have been rather fluid. It never started with enforcing it, but it tended to end up there.
For sterilisation campaigns in India, they didn't force the people, per se, at first. They offered sterilisations. When people weren't interested, they offered implanting reversible reproductive devices and getting a free radio as a gift as an incentive. And then when people got confused about whether they had elected something reversible or not, they left them confused, and went for sterilisation. And years later, the people wanted their reproductive device removed so they could now start a family, and found they were infertile, when they had never given informed consent.
When people found a way to detect down syndrome in the womb, and encouraged women to test for it, with the explicit goal of reducing down syndrome, and enabled them to abort if they found it, people started doing so. 90 % of them abort when they learn that the child has down syndrome. (Notably, of the parents who have children with down syndrome, nowhere near 90 % wish they had aborted the child, and the children lead very happy lives.) This has led to the condition being de facto eradicated in many areas. And for the parents of children with this condition nowadays, the situation has changed. They are increasingly asked why they didn't get rid of it, when they could have, and saved everyone the trouble. Well, people said, down syndrome is really serious, and really quite bad (not that the people with down syndrome agree), so this is okay. - But now, these tests are also turning up for dwarfism. Then for cleft lips. Are those parents going to soon be asked why they needlessly confronted us with a kid who does not match beauty standards, and needed an unnecessary minor surgery?
In the early Hitler propaganda movies, the subject of the movie is a woman who has a horrible, painful, incurable disease. Her loving husband tries everything to heal it, but cannot. She says she is confident he will save her from this horrible fate, all the same. He poisons her. She says yes, this is what she secretly wanted and he read her mind, and she dies, grateful. The resulting court case in the movie has people say of course, if sick people want to live, this must be permitted, but a right to die is important, is it not? - The movie is moving, and I found myself agreeing with a lot of it. Yet that story ended in real life with kids with disabilities being gassed to death.
In your own writing, you had somebody comment, saying it should actually be a moral obligation to perform embryo selection for all who had the financial means. Your response was not "that would be a different evil thing, no". It was "I'm not quite sure I would agree with this yet, though I can see the case being made for it."
If you want a different word for this, please also state how you intent to ensure, in the long run, that the freedom not to use this tech is maintained. Not just as a theoretical legal right, but in practice. That this won't end with us standing in a classroom, and the teacher saying, in disgust, I cannot believe this child was not deselected, so I wouldn't have to deal with this neurodivergent mess.
I think the reason that people use the same term for both is that historically, the lines between enabling, encouraging, recommending, de facto enforcing, legally enforcing and plain violently enforcing genetic changes have been rather fluid. It never started with enforcing it, but it tended to end up there.
Was there even a way to do voluntary eugenics before embryo selection? I guess maybe paying people to have more kids or fewer kids might count. But the options were pretty limited.
In your own writing, you had somebody comment, saying it should actually be a moral obligation to perform embryo selection for all who had the financial means. Your response was not "that would be a different evil thing, no". It was "I'm not quite sure I would agree with this yet, though I can see the case being made for it."
There is a difference between a moral obligation and a legal one. I think people have a moral obligation to donate money to cost-effective charities, but I also support their right not to do that.
The difference is understanding there ought to be a limit on how the state can be used to enforce other people to comply with your moral standards.
Also, as I already said I don't think this technology is yet cost-effective enough to warrant such a moral obligation.
Yet that story ended in real life with kids with disabilities being gassed to death.
You seem to be implying that there is somehow a direct causal link between films arguing for a right to die and the holocaust. I don't think that slope is as slippery as you portray it. There are plenty of people nowadays advocating for the right to die who don't believe in killing disabled people.
And again, that's not even what I'm arguing for. I'm merely arguing that parents should have the right to give their children better genetics so long as those changes have at least some benefit to the well-being of the child.
There are of course always going to be some traits that are on the borderline of what we might consider ethically permissible. For example, should deaf parents be allowed to purposefully have a deaf child? I lean towards yes, particularly if the child can choose to reverse the condition with some kind of implant or medical procedure later in life.
If you want a different word for this, please also state how you intent to ensure, in the long run, that the freedom not to use this tech is maintained. Not just as a theoretical legal right, but in practice. That this won't end with us standing in a classroom, and the teacher saying, in disgust, I cannot believe this child was not deselected, so I wouldn't have to deal with this neurodivergent mess.
To be frank, I have thought less about these kinds of issues because I am so worried about AI. In my mind, the greatest benefit of this technology is it might provide the human species with individuals capable of guiding us through the incredible technologically-induced upheavals we are likely to see over the next century. My greatest fear is that we simply are not going to have enough time for these children to grow up. Next to that, worries about discrimination in the classroom or workplace have seemed relatively minor.
Still, it deserves to be addressed. I don't think you're going to see the effect you've described without something stronger than simple embryo selection. By itself, embryo selection maxes out at about 1 standard deviation of gain on IQ. That will have a very noticeable impact, but given you'll be selecting on other traits besides just IQ, children born with its benefits will just appear to be unusually talented. The difference won't be big enough to mark them as like fundamentally different.
Even if you get in-vitro gametogenesis working, you'd max out at maybe 22 IQ points.
Of course the goal is to eventually get iterated CRISPR or chromosome selection or some other advanced techniques to work that would be truly transformative. But it will take quite some time for this tech to be scaled out to the point where selected children become the majority of new births. I would guess at least 40 years and possibly longer.
The only way I can see that happening is if we manage to put a global moratorium put in place on AI research and the improvement of computer hardware. But if we did manage to coordinate on such a wise proposal, I suspect it would be lifted when we figure out how to make an aligned ASI that acts in the bests interests of humans in general. It seems likely that we will solve that with a bunch of genetically enhanced geniuses around to work on the problem.
For the short window during which this might be a problem though, there are a couple of ways to deal with it:
- Have different schools for kids of roughly similar abilities. This is already standard practice in many countries such as Vietnam.
- Introduce universal basic income to ensure that no one ends up truly destitute due to genetic predispositions that are no fault of their own
- Once embryo selection or whatever technique we're talking about is cost-effective enough, subsidize access with government funds so that parents will never be denied access due to financial constraints. The same logic that compels us to fund public schools would also compel us to subsidize access to this tech if it is cost-effective enough; society as a whole has a strong interest in ensuring the next generation is healthy and productive.
90 % of them abort when they learn that the child has down syndrome. (Notably, of the parents who have children with down syndrome, nowhere near 90 % wish they had aborted the child, and the children lead very happy lives.)
Can you link to the sources for both claims? The percentage seems too exact.
I encountered the 90 % of diagnosed down fetuses being aborted claim all over the internet many times, and digging it up, it seems to go back to an older European literature review (where it was specifically 92 %). https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0223(199909)19:9%3C808::AID-PD637%3E3.0.CO;2-B
Current data and especially data for the US in particular (which I assume is your interest) is harder to assess - it isn't tracked everywhere. Found an article linking all this and trying to deduce them, and they ended up with significantly lower figures, more in the 65 % aborted ballpark (ballpark being the stressed term here) : https://lozierinstitute.org/new-study-abortion-after-prenatal-diagnosis-of-down-syndrome-reduces-down-syndrome-community-by-thirty-percent/#_edn but it is also a lot of guesswork, and outdated. It is complicated by the fact that your can lose a down pregnancy for other reasons, as well - and also by the fact that if you ask people if they hypothetically would abort for a positive they consider very unlikely, they answer much more in denial (23%-33%) than if you actually give them a positive test, at which point choosing to abort skyrockets to 89%-97%. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1542-2011.2011.00109.x
Most recently, the case of Iceland made headlines, because it became apparent that the condition has essentially vanished there as a consequence of prenatal screening, which is strongly encouraged there. There is no explicit pressure to abort if your fetus has down syndrome, and you are given all the opportunities for an informed decision, and there are still some women who either refuse the screening, or keep the child anyway, so Iceland felt very misrepresented by most of the headlines, though their rebuttal didn't conclude final numbers - read like ballpark 85 % people screening, and for positive screens, ballpark 80-85 % of positives leading to abortions, though they left it deliberately ambiguous. As they felt misrepresented, here is their own presentation of the situation: https://icelandmag.is/article/fact-check-no-iceland-not-systematically-eradicating-down-syndrome Even that seemed to amount to only 1-3 kids still having it per year, so frankly, I get the "disappearing" accusation. Similar picture in Denmark.
On the other end of this, if you talk to parents who actually had kids with down syndrome (which often come as surprises, still - the tests are not perfectly accurate, and not everyone does them), you get a startlingly different picture: "Of the 2,044 respondents, 99% reported that they love their son or daughter; 97% were proud of them; 79% felt their outlook on life was more positive because of them; 5% felt embarrassed by them; and 4% regretted having them. The parents report that 95% of their sons or daughters without Down syndrome have good relationships with their siblings with Down syndrome. The overwhelming majority of parents surveyed report that they are happy with their decision to have their child with Down syndrome and indicate that their sons and daughters are great sources of love and pride." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3353148/#:~:text=The%20overwhelming%20majority%20of%20parents,sources%20of%20love%20and%20pride.
I do think though, that we can agree that the amount of people who abort when they are warned of it is much higher than the percentage of people who are unhappy they got their surprise down syndrome kid?
And that makes me wonder how many other conditions that would be true for. How many people would still select the embryo that is gay? I fear only very few. And would choosing against them make the world a better place? I doubt it.
"Eugenics" means "good genes". It was always intended as a good thing. The people who came up with it, and people independently have, many times, I do think they wanted a better world. Less poverty. Better health. Practically none began their efforts with force. And yet, there are so many historic examples that tried to implement it, which people think ended up in a very scary place.
If this article wants to rename eugenics because they think what they have now is totally different and safe and won't cause the same horrors in the long run, they need to explain why. Otherwise it is just a rebranding.
...and also by the fact that if you ask people if they hypothetically would abort for a positive they consider very unlikely, they answer much more in denial (23%-33%) than if you actually give them a positive test, at which point choosing to abort skyrockets to 89%-97.
"Of the 2,044 respondents, 99% reported that they love their son or daughter; 97% were proud of them; 79% felt their outlook on life was more positive because of them; 5% felt embarrassed by them; and 4% regretted having them. The parents report that 95% of their sons or daughters without Down syndrome have good relationships with their siblings with Down syndrome. The overwhelming majority of parents surveyed report that they are happy with their decision to have their child with Down syndrome and indicate that their sons and daughters are great sources of love and pride."
If the first part is true, doesn't that also apply to the second par? Where the reported rate would be much different from the true sentiments as revealed by actual decisions?
I do not see how that follows? The hypothetical, feared thing has actually happened, and they find it to be a lot less awful than they thought - they actually find that once they get the support and information they need and process the information, they are very happy. There always seems to be an initial shock, fear and overwhelm, but it appears that that tends to pass relatively quickly.
We could imagine a pressure to pretend to love your kid, as that is common, leading to an underreporting of regret.
But in that case, we could compare reports from parents of kids with Down syndrome being regretful with parents of kids without the syndrome being regretful.
In this context, the study "Regretting motherhood" comes to mind.
Can't find a version without a paywall, and it is qualitative research (I assume because lies are so expected), so we have no straightforward numbers to compare (unless she details the recruitment process?), but the summary of her interviews suggests that regret was not correlated with the health and personality of the children, but with whether the woman herself wanted children in general. If the woman did not want to become a mother, the child being healthy and lovely did not change that. But if she did want to become a mother, a child with Down syndrome still brought happiness.
Another thing one could look into is kids given up for adoption. This is certainly more common with Down syndrome in countries where the parents are poor, and receive no support with medical problems, and experience a lot of discrimination. Which is how these kids end up adopted out to families in countries with a decent security net and less discrimination.
There are also adoptions within the US; people whose kids have Down syndrome wanting to adopt them out, others wanting to adopt them, and parents who considered adopting them out, but kept them. Reading the reports, a recurring theme is that the parents are initially extremely fearful and aversive, but upon spending time with kids who have the condition and their parents, their opinion often changes.
Here is a report of a mother who got the diagnosis and freaked out, wanting to adopt out, but changed her mind after interacting with kids with the syndrome, and is glad she did: https://www.ndsan.org/adoption-stories/i-decided-to-parent/story-1/
Here is one of a woman who adopted out - the text makes it clear she grew very fond of the child after birth, but didn't think her life situation would make it possible for her to support a special needs child (she had only just met the father, they didn't want a long term relationship, etc.) Again, decent social support seems to make a difference; the concern isn't that they won't love the child, but that they won't manage to give it the support it needs https://www.ndsan.org/adoption-stories/i-made-an-adoption-plan/story-2/
And as for those who adopted - the process is a lengthy, complicated nightmare, they clearly really, really, really want those kids and are over the moon when they get them https://www.lovewhatmatters.com/we-found-our-phones-with-several-missed-calls-texts-congratulations-youve-been-matched-with-a-baby-boy-adoption-special-needs-family/ Again, a core theme is that they actually know people with the syndrome; the adoptive mother here had a cool uncle with down syndrome who was influential in her choice to want one.
No matter how you turn it - there seems to be a significant discrepancy between the number of parents who would chose against a child with down syndrome immediately and without any first hand experience, and those who have them and tend to actually be glad.
if your confused about the meaning of my comment, the accuracy of the numbers given in the quoted text:
Of the 2,044 respondents, 99% reported that they love their son or daughter; 97% were proud of them; 79% felt their outlook on life was more positive because of them; 5% felt embarrassed by them; and 4% regretted having them. The parents report that 95% of their sons or daughters without Down syndrome have good relationships with their siblings with Down syndrome
... sound like wishful thinking as much as the wishful thinking revealed in your point:
...and also by the fact that if you ask people if they hypothetically would abort for a positive they consider very unlikely, they answer much more in denial (23%-33%) than if you actually give them a positive test, at which point choosing to abort skyrockets to 89%-97.
i.e. If the reader accepts that the "23%-33%" is bogus then the "99%, 97%, etc." would also be bogus for the same reasons.
I do not see how that is trivially obvious?
For the change in mind when the question on abortion goes from hypothetical and abstract to imagined acutely now, one can easily imagine an explanation - that people, for the first time, think through the implications of actually having a disabled kid right now, with their current finances and jobs and obligations, and feel utterly overwhelmed at not thinking about handling this one day maybe, but handling it right now, when it is not what they were expecting at all.
But later, they have had the child, their position has fundamentally changed, they know a lot more, they actually know what it is like after the initial shock, how much of their fear was rooted in ignorance and stereotypes. Yes, their position has also changed in that getting rid of the child is now more difficult, so there may well be a phenomenon where they accept a position that is hard to change and talk themselves into liking it. But this is true of all parents. And yet, among down syndrome children, the result does not seem that different.
If they said that yes, keeping the child with the condition was in fact awful, I find it plausible that they would be judged less than parents of children without the syndrome, who tend to get hell for saying they regret their children's birth, so the pressure to lie would be less. After all, the numbers above suggests that the people who ask you would likely abort such a child themselves, so who are they to judge a person for not being happy with such a surprise child? And yet, the parents of kids with the syndrome generally do not express persistent regret - and they are so convincing in their statements that after talking to them, and seeing them with their kids, many prospective parents decide to keep the baby, or adopt a child with this condition. And the parents who make these statements sometimes end up adopting an additional child with down syndrome. I can't imagine why they would do that if they didn't mean it, noone is expecting them to. This is also consistent with the general finding that aversion to having a disabled child is higher if you have spent less time with disabled children - when you actually interact with them, and get more data and experience, you find they are not what you expected.
Like, seriously, listen to such parents and their kids and judge yourself if it looks like they are all lying. It is common to assume that they must be lying or delusional before engaging with them, because people who have no exposure to disabled folks often cannot imagine being genuinely happy with them. But it really looks like this changes when you actually meet them. They do, very honestly, state that their initial reaction was shock, grief, devastation, but trace how that changed over time.
Thanks for such a high quality comment. I've heard that the termination rate for Down Syndrome pregnancies varies by country. For example, I've heard it's higher in most European countries than in America.
And that makes me wonder how many other conditions that would be true for. How many people would still select the embryo that is gay? I fear only very few. And would choosing against them make the world a better place? I doubt it.
I don't think everyone is going to make the same choice here. I suspect some parents would select for greater chance of same-sex attraction and some will select against it. Though I suspect that in most cases parents are just going to care much more about other traits so it won't be selected very strongly either way.
I am reasonably certain that most conservatives and religious people would select against queer kids. Look at the effort they go to to make sure kids do not know that being trans or gay is even an option, stopping teachers from mentioning their gay partners. The attempts to pray, or electrocute, the gay away. The search for a cause of gayness so it can be prevented.
Yet very few gay people want to know the gay gene(s) (if there are any) so they can have more gay kids. There are a lot of hetero cis people trying to make their kids hetero and cis, but I have yet to encounter a queer person who is actively trying to make their kid queer. Give them options, yes. Raise them open-minded and informed, yes. But make them queer? Discourage them from being cis and hetero when they actually are? Have never seen it. Many queer people, despite being happy and proud, remember the pain discrimination caused them, the times they were beaten up, the fight for medical care, the flats where they were denied, the things thrown against their door. They don't want to force queer kids into the closet, they want them to be out and proud. But they are often relieved when the kids are straight. If they could make their kids gay, I still highly doubt they would. If they could make them not be, I think a few would take that offer.
Amongst the liberals, I'd expect it to not to go either way that much - I think that would mostly play out like you imagine, with them caring primarily about other things, though I suspect there would still be a slight bias against. My mom is very liberal, and very accepting of me now, and adores my partner, speaks of us proudly, is perfectly happy with it now. But her initial reaction when I told her I was queer was very negative. She was very upset. She tried to talk me out of it, bizarrely. She said she was upset because she thought this meant my life would be harder. Despite living in one of the most liberal countries in the world, in a city with a huge queer scene, with queer people in politics and art everywhere. Similarly, when as a young person assigned female, I would not stop growing, my mum put me on hormones to stop that. She said I was getting too big for a girl, that I would not find a husband that way. She wanted to help, I am sure. I resent it massively. I'm borderline inter, I identify as non-binary, my partner specifically loves me being tall, being tall has been advantageous for me in my hobbies, and the hormonal intervention messed up my hormones, and may well have contributed to life-long problems. We also have a long history in my country of blatantly intersex children being born, and then assigned a binary gender at birth, and being surgically modified to look like it, undergoing unnecessary and non-consensual surgery that goes so freaking far beyond what I experienced, and not being told later. Because the parents wanted to save their kids the pain of not being normal. For the inter people involved, this is awful, because they have healthy tissue that would have given them pleasure cut away to fit a norm, while failing to give them any reproductive function; they are just made to fit a mould.
So I do not think queer people would disappear in the first generation.
But I do think they would be fewer, not equal or more.
And that raises an interesting question for future generations.
After a while, some trans clinics will increasingly close for lack of need, leaving the remaining trans kids having to travel far and deal with loopholes and lost forms and unclear rules and secondary jobs for doctors. There will be increasingly less need to cover queer topics in school if none of the kids are queer, it will seem pointless for so few people. Fewer people will want to organise or attend a pride parade. The gay bars will go broke. The gay dating pool will shrink. People who are bi will have less chance to discover it. More people will stay in the closet. Fewer people will be potential queer partners, period.
I mentioned the case of Down syndrome going extinct in Iceland above - mostly because I have been very touched by stories of parents with disabled children saying that it feels like the world is increasingly hostile to them, with support facilities closing, people not being educated, them being stared at more, people questioning why these kids are there.
I am haunted by a text I read by a mother of a disabled child. She said people kept seeing her kid and saying "oh how tragic, didn't you know before?" And she would say, before the birth? Yes, she had known. The people would then go "Oh, but it couldn't be fixed?" She would answer in confusion, well, no, it could not be operated on in the womb yet, only post-birth, and by then, parts of the results of the oxygen deprivation were irreversible; that the child was getting lots of therapy now and getting better and was happy, but would likely never entirely catch up. Then there would be an awkward silence. She eventually realised they weren't asking why the kid had not been fixed. They were asking why the kid had not been aborted. Why she had allowed her daughter into the world. Her daughter, happily smiling, beloved, just existing and bringing joy, oblivious to the debate as to why her existence had been permitted at all.
There is nothing inherently bad about being queer, and queer people in accepting, supportive societies in which they are seen as normal and not alone and they have a thriving subculture are very happy.
But would a queer person be as happy if they are a rarity noone understands, with no structures for them, no subculture community, no partners? I doubt it.
Similarly, would a deaf person be happy in a society that has no sign language, no mandatory subtitles, no deaf community and culture, in which they are the only one? I doubt it, and yet think of Beethoven still composing while deaf, stranded alone; Stephen Colbert filling our homes with laughter while deaf on one ear.
Would a wheelchair bound person be happy in a world without ramps and accessible toilets? If the disability would have been known before birth, and yet the mother kept it, are they going to bill the mother and child for building a ramp into the school, which noone else needs? And yet I think of the beautiful physics Stephen Hawking has written while wheelchair bound.
I suspect the process of reducing unusual people with unusual needs would be self-accelerating. Queer people will have an increasingly bad time, and wanting to save their kids from an issue so big and systematic that they do not know how to fix it, would want to spare them from it.
Like I said - I do not think the individuals making choices in such systems mean to do a bad thing at all. Yet the changes to society that results are very scary, and I do not want them.
I do think though, that we can agree that the amount of people who abort when they are warned of it is much higher than the percentage of people who are unhappy they got their surprise down syndrome kid?
Is this because people predict accurately whether they'd like a Down kid, or because everyone thinks it's bad but it's actually pleasant?
Or some middle ground. Taking all percentages at face value, my first guess is that there is some social pressure to avoid birthing Downs, so people over-abort, and those who do not are defiant because they are quite sure, in the right, that they are totally fine with a Down kid, so they end up with a high rate of happiness. This is compatible with aborting being the right choice for most people.
Rephrase:
- Most people are better off aborting the Down.
- A few people are not.
- The majority sets the social pressure.
- People in the grey area default to aborting due to such social pressure.
- The non-aborters are thus only those who are sure enough of what they to not follow social pressure.
- Thus the non-aborters are a very well selected group of people actually better off with their Down kid.
The most common anti-eugenics stance I encounter is also opposed to epilogenics. From this point of view, parents choosing to select for desirable traits in their offspring using advanced medical technology is wasteful, immoral and gross. They have roughly the same feelings about epilogenics (including for intelligence) as they have about cosmetic plastic surgery. To them, a natural and traditional trajectory of healthy human lifespan is ideal - we should maintain our health via diet and exercise, try not to care too much about superficial traits like appearance or intelligence, then die in our 80s or so.
I think that convincing doctors and patients that it’s good to take fuller control of one’s own body (and to influence their children’s bodies) via advanced med tech is the main hurdle to promoting an acceptance of epilogenics.
I use genetic enhancement. I think it’s good to be thinking about framing around this issue. I conceived of maybe calling it “harmless eugenics” in response to the accusation. Epilogenetics evokes the thoughts of eugenics more than genetic enhancement in my view.
The reason I support a lot of epilogenetics is because it’s eugenic. If a couple chose to pick the embryo they expected to suffer the most in life, is it epilogenetics? Do you support that? I don’t. Maybe that term is a little misleading
If a couple chose to pick the embryo they expected to suffer the most in life, is it epilogenetics?
If someone asks me I would of course say no because I would like the term to encompass traits that we can reasonably expect the child in question to be glad we gave them.
But I would note that even if use of the term triggers discussion of the question you posed, I still think that is shifting the conversation in the right direction; away from "is embryo selection bad because it reminds me of this other thing I don't like" and towards "should parents be allowed to select for traits that their children probably wouldn't like?"
I think you are dismissing the criticism too lightly.
Historically, people who said they wanted to change the human gene pool to make it better, for the greater good, and of course without coercion, led to really, really gruesome places. People nowadays recognise that it did, and they fear it will repeat. And when they say "isn't this eugenics?", what they want to know is "how will this be certain to stay different, in the long run, from the other thing that started out sounding exactly like this, and ended up horribly?"
The scenario very nicely pinpoint a first problem. Either you allow the parents to do something to their child that seems horrible (actively bringing additional suffering onto their child), or you concede that you aren't enabling free, voluntary changes to the human genome, it is only voluntary if they want the result you want.
The scenario very nicely pinpoint a first problem. Either you allow the parents to do something to their child that seems horrible (actively bringing additional suffering onto their child), or you concede that you aren’t enabling free, voluntary changes to the human genome, it is only voluntary if they want the result you want.
Does epilogenics significantly change this picture? It's already the case that
- There are things parents are allowed to do to their child, that seem horrible to some people.
- There are things parents are not allowed to do to their child, because they seem horrible to some people.
- Sometimes things move from one category to another.
People disagree on what is and isn't horrible. But it's rare, I think, for parents to choose things for their child on the basis of "this is what I think will cause them to suffer most", even in cases where that would be legal.
There's a difficult balancing act between "we as a society think this thing is bad and we're going to forbid it" and "we as a society acknowledge that things are complicated and simply banning things that seem bad isn't always a good idea, so we're not going to ban this thing even though we think it's bad".
But I don't think there's a way to avoid this balancing act; if we try to avoid it by forbidding the technology, then that's just coming down very hard on one side of it.
Replacing a word that has become associated with questionable practices with a neologism doesn't seem to accomplish much. Consider how someone might react to hearing about "epilogenics". Once the unknown term is explained, even though the element of free choice is baked into the definition, the other person will still quite likely connect the dots and associate the new word with a term they already know: eugenics.
Also, on the subject of the definition itself, is it really that simple to discern between an act of individual free will and an act recommended by foreign actors? The state could push you into having polygenically screened children and maximising for specific traits, sure, but what about peer pressure from people with outlooks similar to yours? Would that then still be your own decision? Social factors shift personal preferences and so "choosing" genes might as well be about the genes that are considered "good", blurring your proposed distinction. Also, you mention choosing an attractive spouse as an example of epilogenics, yet that has been the most accessible strategy of nurturing the genes of the übermensch in the German Reich, the country that comes to mind when invoking the word "eugenics" and giving it a lot of it's bad reputation.
What it boils down to is this: the slope isn't any less slippery if you invent a new term for the thing that hasn't been well remembered in the past (maybe it becomes even more so). Aside from the general public, inquisitive individuals shouldn't mind which term you use as long as your point agrees with their values and they find it agreeable. "Minor attracted persons" aren't any more understood if they aren't called pedophiles, as they are pretty much semantically the same, and so is epilogenics and eugenics. I guess the general public would be most affected by this sort of term distinction, but as I believe it is done quite subjectively (as mentioned before: what separates a choice from a good choice?), it probably wouldn't stick that well.
The core issue is that people should discuss object-level problems and possible solutions concretely and resolve cruxes around "Are we actually aiming for the same goal," "Is this a problem" and "Does the solution work" as opposed to having protracted philosophical discussions about "is A good" for a poorly-defined A.
Furthermore, a good intervention being similar to a bad intervention is a genuine downside. Slippery slopes, norm erosion, etc., are arguments that should be considered in a balanced way.
I actually think this is dodging the question and incorrect; if I see anyone use this term, I would be likely to point them back here to show that you think it's basically the same word, trying to dodge the implications. If you want to dodge the implications, you need to be able to say "no, that's actually just not eugenics, because we have been sure to do it consensually and provide it to everyone at their own request, and it applies to the same living organism via gene rewriting". In other words, this technology as it is now should not be used, and we should wait for the drastically much more difficult version that allows editing genes at runtime before we deploy it at scale. In the meantime, I strongly support the coalition against doing offspring editing.
I will say, though, that yes, mass murder and embryo screening that isn't available to most people are very different levels of violating moral constraints; one is a clear and direct mass violation of right to life and liberty, the other is a violation of anti-moloch rights that are needed to ensure the multipolarity that creates the human moral system is maintained.
But they're definitely still both eugenics, since they're not by consent of the offspring and are constrained by money. If this service can't be made free, it should be destroyed on deployment, to prevent moloch.
In other words, this technology as it is now should not be used, and we should wait for the drastically much more difficult version that allows editing genes at runtime before we deploy it at scale. In the meantime, I strongly support the coalition against doing offspring editing.
I don't follow this argument. You're saying we shouldn't edit the germline or select embryos because the child has not provided consent?
If so we are prioritizing something that's impossible to get (consent from a ball of stem cells) over the expected future wellbeing of a person.
The argument that parents need to get consent from their children before doing things that the parents believe are in the interest of the child also undermines the basic rights of parents. It is very common for adults to do things children don't want or don't like because they believe it is in the best interest of the child.
Undoubtedly some of those things are in fact not good for the child and are only done in the name of serving the child's best interest when in fact they serve some needs of the adult. We have rules around what parents are allowed to do to their children that reduce some of the worst abuses of this power. But the general principle of adult control over children seems pretty important to how society functions.
If this service can't be made free, it should be destroyed on deployment, to prevent moloch.
How many of the important technological advancements that have been made in the last 10,000 years could hold up to this standard? If every technology had to be free and universally available on launch, we would have no technology. There would not be medicine, nor manufacturing, nor clothing, nor cooked food. This is an untenable standard.
I don't follow this argument. You're saying we shouldn't edit the germline or select embryos because the child has not provided consent?
Yeah. Wait until they're grown, then do runtime modification. Stem cells define genomes, genomes plus lifetimes define people, people define consent.
How many of the important technological advancements that have been made in the last 10,000 years could hold up to this standard? If every technology had to be free and universally available on launch, we would have no technology. There would not be medicine, nor manufacturing, nor clothing, nor cooked food. This is an untenable standard.
Many more than were. If you can't make it available to everyone, it's questionable whether it should be shared, each tech needs to be evaluated and depending on how it affects balance of power maybe it shouldn't be deployed; some tech spreads power, but any tech that can concentrate power should be destroyed if deployed in ways that in fact concentrate power. And in this instance, it concentrates power in the germline of people, which means that parents can make their prejudice fantasies real: the poors really are dumber, with this change. Yes, the machines that can do it should absolutely be destroyed if only available to the few.
Yeah. Wait until they're grown, then do runtime modification. Stem cells define genomes, genomes plus lifetimes define people, people define consent.
If I thought this was actually feasible with anywhere near our current level of technology then perhaps I would agree. But it is simply impossible without god-like biotech. Half the genes that show up in intelligence GWAS (or any other trait for that matter) are only active during development, particularly during early development in the womb and early childhood. The other half affect cells that literally last a lifetime (namely neurons).
Modifying one gene that is active in one particular stem cell population can currently be done for like cancer immunotherapy, but it costs like $500k and you have to radiate the person to kill their non-modified stem cells.
God-like nanotech is about six years after general superintelligence, by my current estimate. I don't at all agree with yud that it comes instantly, you're correct that it's incredibly hard, but it's permitted by physics and the tech is coming soon. So it's worth waiting to ensure that we never introduce genetic changes to the gene pool that are not first tested on the person proposing them. Skin in the game or no playing around with the human genome, imo. Offspring are not the parents' right to control like that.
Maybe if it was available as a basic healthcare service or a free clinical trial, so as to ensure it could never be used to edit offspring's personality.
The key thing I will never accept is giving parents agency over their kids' genome. My parents (my dad, specifically) would have used it to kill me and any parents found to have done such a thing - editing a child's personality-entangled genes - should experience appropriate retaliation from society, which I'd suggest as 12 to 24 months of jail time.
God-like nanotech is about six years after general superintelligence, by my current estimate.
This is a difference of opinion that has no practical consequences, but it's certainly alien to my expectations. If you consider what's already in all biological and chemical literature and databases, apply superhuman intelligence at GPT speed and volume to that, let it experiment and measure as necessary... what could it need to know, that would take six years to find out?
I'm estimating sequential experiment depth. could be wrong but I expect fast saturating returns from superintelligence that leave uncertainty about untested physical processes annoyingly high. still lower enough to allow demigod-like bioweapons that kill us immediately if we screw up alignment, but we're discussing drastically more intense meddling with a large complex adaptive system. I think there will be slow experiments that are needed to resolve uncertainty the physics simulator can't fully resolve even after you've got a cell sim, because scaling approximate cell sim up to full body sim results in a lot of accumulated uncertainty. it might take as little as 3 months, but even for a saturated asi on the entire Google datacenter network, I'd be shocked if it takes minutes or days with only targeted experiments to send to labs. there's too much emergent behavior to map.
How is this kind of reasoning about counterfactual children never born different from the regular Christian stuff about not masturbating?
A statements like 'my parents would have used polygenic screening to kill me' is no more meaningful than 'you are murdering your counterfactual children when you wear a condom' or something like that. It seems to have more meaning because you are talking about yourself, but in the universe where 'you' were 'murdered' by polygenic screening, 'you' does not refer to anything.
Is tendency to wish to transition one's gender genetic? I recall reading that the number of people self-identifying as trans has tripled in the last decade. That would suggest that the trait is probably not very heritable and would be hard to select against.
In the process of this development, these networks assign themselves a physiological form gender; intersex people get a mix of attributes at this stage, but for most people, even for most trans people, this stage almost entirely selects one profile of sexual dimorphism; typically for people with XX chromosomes, this stage selects female, and for people with XY, this stage selects male. However, it's well known to science and can be looked up that sometimes people can be apparently entirely one body-form and have no desire or urge to transition, and yet have opposite chromosomes from their body's layout-presentation.
This sounds like you're talking about the SRY cascade without explicitly naming it. But that process starts at 6-8 weeks. Embryos are screened after 3-7 days of development. There's no way to see what is happening with the SRY cascade at that stage.
Maybe there are some genes that influence the course it is likely to take? I understand your concern.
But I also think some of this tech could HELP acceptance of trans people. I suspect that many of the people who are anti-trans are at some level worried about its effects on family formation. Without freezing gametes, many trans people will not be able to have biological children after medically transitioning. Gametogenesis could give anyone the ability to have kids if they want them, regardless of their gender identity or transition status. I think that would at least do a little to quell the hate against transgender people (though I understand most of the people who get upset about transgender people are not very rational about their views).
yeah, your counterarguments aren't entirely implausible. I might be able to be convinced out of my current viewpoint by further debate on the topic of how to ensure that this tech actually has prosocial outcomes. But at least you have a picture of why I'm quite so worried about destructive outcomes and why the name change doesn't really weigh on it.
without explicitly naming it
I didn't know about it, I probably had seen things downstream of that research. I'm not a biologist, my bio knowledge has a lot of jump point search flavored holes.
Ah I see.
I certainly concede that the argument about counterfactual populations has a lot more force.
Personally I would solve this with increased support for eg. polygenic screening and other reproductive technologies and less regulation about what they can select for, and hope that people do their weird people thing and choose diversity. I worry that regulation will always result in more standardization.
And I for sure don't think punishing people for making reproductive choices is a good move, even if those choices result in the extinction of specific populations.
even if those choices result in the extinction of specific populations.
so anyway, this is why I started out saying a mere rename doesn't cut it, you need to actually change policy. epilogenics is still eugenics, even if it's not mass murder. parents should not have the right to deny their offspring a chance to exist. offspring are not property.
also, I actually do agree with conservatives that loss of any genetic information is kinda sad, I just don't think any non-selective loss has the problems I care about, and anyway people have the right to simply not have kids; what I don't think they have the right to do is spy on their kids' futures by reading their genome in order to decide whether to have kids. humanity is used to our genomes being randomized by parental choice, so it is part of us; humanity is not used to genomes being steered by parental choice and that's a big enough change to warrant real conflict.
okay, sure, that might move the boundaries of the concept that I haven't pinned down, but I have a pinned point it doesn't move: parents shouldn't be able to select children by personality traits in ways new to society. This is a capability we should not add to humanity; it is against transhumanism.
parents should not have the right to deny their offspring a chance to exist
but again here you are switching back from the population level to the individual level. Those offspring do not exist by default, there are no 'offspring' that the parents have 'denied the right to exist'. There are only counterfactual offspring, who already don't exist.
spy on their kids' futures by reading their genome
this, on the other hand, may be more valid-- because the parents will 'spy on' both actual and counterfactual childrens genomes (and select the former over the latter). But you still seem to be taking the rights of those children as significantly more important than the rights of the parents. But this ('whose rights, parents or children') seems like the fundamental crux that we are unlikely to shift one another on here.
Edit: and, reading through your other comments, there seems to be a question about the social impact of these technologies. This is then an impact on the rights of everyone-- the parent, the child, and the rest of society. Also interesting, and I think it would be helpful to seperate out objections on the individual (parent/child) level, and on the society level, and I feel like they are getting muddled a lot here.
The key thing I will never accept is giving parents agency over their kids’ genome.
Do you oppose the existing efforts to prevent Tay-Sachs disease?
In the first 30 years of testing, from 1969 through 1998, more than 1.3 million persons were tested, and 48,864 carriers were identified. In at-risk families, among couples where both husband and wife were carriers, more than 3000 pregnancies were monitored by amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling. Out of 604 monitored pregnancies where there was a prenatal diagnosis of Tay–Sachs disease, 583 pregnancies were terminated. Of the 21 pregnancies that were not terminated, 20 of the infants went on to develop classic infantile Tay–Sachs disease, and the 21st case progressed later to adult-onset Tay–Sachs disease. In more than 2500 pregnancies, at-risk families were assured that their children would not be affected by Tay–Sachs disease.
I'm a fan of this.
yeah, as long as the parents only get a heal all rare genetic diseases button and there's a chance for others to veto having those specific options available, so that if those genes determine their souls, they don't get a chance to mess with them. I would want this constraint relaxed soon, but only for adults modifying themselves, so they'd have to live with the mod before getting to pass it on.
Parents have skin in the game when it comes to their children.
To me it seems unlikely that the nanotech necessary to do the massive somatic editing needed to replicate the effects of germline editing would not come far ahead of the tech necessary to just upload someone's brain into a computer. And if you have that, why would you even bother with the huge limitations of biological intelligence?
I suppose it's possible we might have some global ban on further improvements to computer intelligence, but in that case why wouldn't you just genetically engineer people capable of solving alignment? Why hang around at the proteins & genes level of tech long enough to make massive somatic editing work?
EDIT: I have updated my views about the viability of somatic editing substantially in the last month. I will write more about this in the near future.
Parents have skin in the game when it comes to their children.
only good parents do. the ratio of evil parents is frighteningly high, ones who don't care about their children's future as people and just want their kids to be a copy of themselves.
why would you even bother with the huge limitations of biological intelligence?
because once you solve alignment it turns out proteins and genes are a ridiculously good base to start on, uploads are a fundamentally silly idea because computers of today suck because of not being biological enough. dna computers could be incomparably more powerful at similar wattage.
I think being born also doesn't have consent, and "be born, reliably with slightly more genetic diseases or IQ or beauty or whatnot" doesn't seem obviously more in the child's interests than "be born, with less so." (I think there's some potential/likelihood of societal Gattaca style red queen races, but those aren't about the consent of the child, they're about societal equilibria)
The question is whether adult child would accept the customization. If so, then they can wait a few years for the customization to be available via advanced AI. We're only a year or two out from hard ASI. In the meantime, yes, having kids in the current world is in fact probably not moral in the first place.
If we're going to assume that someone creates aligned ASI I think this whole conversation is somewhat moot. If by some miracle we manage to solve the alignment problem before the mad scientists at OpenAI create Cthulhu, one of the first things people are going to use it for is to upload their own brains to a computer. Like why would you stick with spongy meat if you can just run a digital copy of yourself a million times faster?
I think there's a pretty low chance that ASI goes well. Even if we manage to align the interests of ASI with its creators, whoever gets control of it is going to rule the world. This fantasy dream where everyone benefits equally seems very unrealistic to me. It's way more likely that we have one or perhaps a few quasi-omnicient immortal dictators.
Nah, uploads will never be the move, substrate replacement will be - which is exactly my point.
Anyway, no, timelines are extremely short, and I probably should just put this on the backburner and not care because what you're doing doesn't matter with only 2 years left on the clock and I need to hurry up and make ASI safe.
Also,
align the interests of ASI with its creators
No, we want to align ASI with cosmopolitanism. Any attempt to hard-align it with specific phenotypic values - in other words, the bulk of the implicit utility function a being implies - will result in a puppet-show lock-in of those phenotypic values, which the being in question will find gets old very fast, if their phenotype is even preserved in enough detail to have such thoughts.
Okay that's a fair/consistent position, but it feels misleading to summarize that to an average person as "eugenics is nonconsensual (and bad?)"
Why? Modification of a genome without consent of the genome is nonconsensual and bad. Getting consent from a genome requires them growing up into a person with life experiences and expressing their will, potentially including via advanced self modification techniques. That's how I'd normally put it.
Hmm, I don't think the person talking is expressing the will of the genome, they're expressing the will of a brain, which is pretty different.
Brains are the will of the genome; to know your personality, you must first express the will of your genome, which creates an intelligent network of cells throughout your body to do morphogenesis (cf michael levin); the genome defines the intelligent network, then the network figures out what its will is in terms of intended body form for the circumstance, which in turn produces a nervous system capable of further reshaping itself in response to sensory experiences. At each point, there's a finite amount of coherence loss to produce the next level of mesaoptimizer, and while alignment between these mesaoptimizer-printers isn't perfect, a large amount of what defines ones' base preferences is genetic, which means that anything that could edit those base preferences directly strikes me as fundamentally a consent violation of the deepest core of biological autonomy of a being.
I don't agree with GeneSmith that the tech to do runtime rewrites is far; it looks impossible now, but in a few years we will simply run a full cell simulator to back-calculate how to reactivate the genes after editing. And besides, that level of transhumanism isn't limited to the nonsense genetics is: we can fundamentally rewrite substrate into a higher quality biology. (People always say upload to computers, which I think is silly; computers and today's biology both wish they could be as high quality and energy efficient at massively parallel computation as competently engineered biology.)
I am conditionally in favor of human genetic augmentation. In particular, I think embryo selection for intelligence, health, happiness and other positive traits is desirable. When I bring this up with people, one of the most frequent questions is "Isn't that eugenics?"
I never know how to respond. The term "eugenics" has absorbed so much baggage over the last century that it somehow refers both to swiping right on Tinder when you see an attractive person and to the holocaust.
These are not similar concepts. The fact that we use a single word to refer to both is crazy. I cannot count the number of debates I've heard about human genetic engineering where the disagreement boils down to people misunderstanding what the other is advocating for. One person will talk about the benefits of improving the genes of future generations, and the other person will attack the idea because they mentally associate it with "eugenics", and to them that means "the holocaust" and "state sponsored sterilization of people with disabilities".
The fault lies with the term itself. It means so many different things to so many people that its use actively hinders understanding. For this reason, I think we should start using a new term to talk about non-coercive means of improving human genetics.
Epilogenics: non-coercive means of changing genetics
This term originated with Aella on Twitter, and I think it perfectly fits the purpose I have in mind.
Examples of epilogenics
Examples of things that are not epilogenics
I would encourage the use of this term to clarify the difference between genocide and screening one's embryos for desirable traits.