Is It Ethical To Hand-Pick Your Child’s Genes? - Dr Jonathan Anomaly

Modern IQ tests are reasonably valid and predictive (education, income, marital stability, crime) and strongly heritable, yet post-war revulsion toward eugenics led elites to stigmatize any genetic explanation of group or individual differences. Anomaly argues that denying IQ’s reality fuels envy-based politics and misguided policies that punish high contributors under the guise of rectifying “privilege.”

Current IVF clinics can screen embryos for polygenic risks like diabetes, heart disease, and schizophrenia, and at least one company Anomaly advises can select for higher predicted cognitive ability, with 20–25 IQ point spreads possible across a batch of embryos. He expects companies and governments (e.g., Israel, China) to expand and subsidize this, making selection for health and cognition increasingly common.

People draw a moral line between preventing disease (e.g., avoiding Tay-Sachs, cancer risk) and enhancing traits (height, IQ, longevity), yet Anomaly argues many “enhancements” (braces, glasses, muscle preservation) simply counter natural decline or mutation load. In practice, the same logic that justifies disease prevention often supports selecting for traits that robustly contribute to a wider range of good lives.

By keeping more people alive and reproductive despite serious genetic disadvantages (poor eyesight, childhood cancers, monogenic diseases), advanced healthcare allows deleterious mutations to accumulate. Anomaly uses a “Chesterton’s Post” metaphor: if you want to keep today’s functional baseline, you must actively counter entropy—via embryo selection or gene editing—rather than pretending evolution has stopped.

Selecting for intelligence or lower disease burden likely yields positive externalities—more innovation, productivity, and cooperation over longer time horizons. But some traits (e.g., extreme height or pure status traits) risk zero-sum arms races where everyone pays costs without net societal gain, though Anomaly expects many such races (like excessive height) to be self-limiting because of health and mating trade-offs.