Modern WisdomIs It Ethical To Hand-Pick Your Child’s Genes? - Dr Jonathan Anomaly
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,053 words- 0:00 – 3:56
Why IQ Annoys People
- CWChris Williamson
Why do people really dislike conversations about IQ?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
I think it's pretty straightforward, and that is norms that followed the end of the Second World War. So what ends up happening in the 1920s and '30s is IQ tests were already pretty decent by then. They did have some bias back, back in the day when they were invented, but they were relatively good at gauging cognitive ability. But what ended, what ended up happening is some people misused IQ to justify, for example, uh, restrictive immigration policies in the United States first. And then, you know, after World War II, actually interestingly, a quick divergence here, Hitler had Jews and, and non-Jews, Gentiles cognitively tested, and he found that Jews consistently scored higher on IQ tests than Germans did, and he banned IQ tests, um, in Germany.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
So it's not-
- CWChris Williamson
So actually being anti-IQ is a Nazi policy.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Is pro-Nazi, that's right, right, right.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
So... But, but at least according to the lore, and, and some of this lore is true, some of the, some of the hardcore coercive eugenicists in the 1920s and '30s did notice cognitive differences between populations. And even though Hitler found the reverse between, you know, Jews and, and Gentiles, what, than what he wanted to find, it became stigmatized after the Second World War because at least some people, even if not Hitler, were using cognitive differences to justify restrictive immigration policies and also potentially supremacy over other groups. So you can think of the British Empire and, you know, why should the French have colonies? Why should the British have colonies? Well, we're smarter, we're better than them, that sort of thing. I- I'm not French or, or British by the way, but, you know, there's at least the sense that they could be misused for these things, and, and, and sometimes they were. And so I think what happened after the Second World War is not just that IQ was shunned and the genetics of IQ, but really genetic explanations for any group differences and even for individual differences, because it became part of a dangerous package whereby you could use this research to mistreat groups of people.
- CWChris Williamson
Can you just explain, uh, group differences and individual differences, what that means in a genetic context, how it's different?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Sure. I mean, look, we all understand first of all what intelligence is, broadly speaking. I should just say that, um, intelligence is roughly the ability to creatively solve problems. It's not just memory, it's not just recall, it's the ability to kind of draw conclusions from evidence and so on. And we recognize it in, in dogs, we recognize it in cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are some of the brightest animals on Earth, which is why I don't eat them, by the way. (laughs) Um, that's a kind of species of octopus. And so we, we all know that there are individual differences in intelligence. We see it in our dogs, we see it in cuttlefish, we see it in people. And obviously the genetics of this is just such that, you know, there, there are genetic explanations for why people differ in height, in weight, in muscle mass, and in intelligence. And that's not to say that the environment doesn't matter, that you can't get better, for example, at taking IQ tests or solving cognitive problems, but there are pretty strict genetic limits on that, right? You're not gonna train your way into becoming Einstein. And so that, that's individual ins-, uh, differences in IQ. Um, there's clearly a mostly genetic basis, it's true across the animal kingdom, and it's probably gonna be true across groups too, um, whether we wanna talk about that or not. I mean, it s- it seems obvious, just like height, there are height differences, there are speed differences. Right now we're all watching the Olympics, and y- you do see patterns, right? Ethiopians tend to be really good at long-distance running and West Africans tend to be really good at short-distance running. And so there are gonna be these differences between individuals and groups, and genes are gonna have something to do with it.
- 3:56 – 9:48
Is IQ a Reliable Measurement?
- CWChris Williamson
What... Uh, I've, I've heard a lot of criticism about the accuracy of IQ tests. "IQ actually doesn't predict anything at all. The tests don't, uh, test what they say that they're going to. Uh, they're easily gamified." W- what's the, how much legitimacy is there to the skepticism around IQ, and, uh, w- what is that? Is that coming from sort of people that have done rigorous science? Is that coming from people that are motivated for sort of social justice reasons?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Look, the tests have been going on for over a century now, and I think it's pretty clear some of the early versions o-, of the tests had some cultural biases. Um, so for example, if you gave the test to someone who was illiterate or who wasn't, uh, familiar with some of the common concepts like, you know, show pictures of a rabbit and then show a rabbit without ears or with ears and ask people, "What's wrong with this picture with the rabbit without ears?" Well, some people are gonna get that wrong if they've never seen a rabbit or if they've never (laughs) heard the word rabbit or something like that. Those kinds of biases were pretty quickly fixed, however, and for the last 80 or so years, IQ tests have been pretty reliable. I would never, ever take too seriously one gauge of anything, right? Other than maybe height. Actually, height is gonna be pretty accurate, (laughs) we can still measure it in inches or in centimeters. But probably cognitive tests, IQ tests are gonna leave some important things off. Nevertheless, one reason to think that they're pretty good at gauging general cognitive ability is they test a whole wide variety of different abilities. So yes, there's some mathematical stuff, really simple math though, not calculus. There's some spatial reasoning abilities, there's verbal reasoning, there's inferential reasoning where you've got a set of premises, what follows from the premises, really basic logic. And so I think it's pretty clear that the results from IQ tests can be well replicated. And there's something called Spearman's Hypothesis which goes way back almost 100 years, and the basic idea is something like this: any time you try to, to measure any kind of cognitive ability...... you end up getting this general factor whereby different tests, um, correlate with each other so that there is some general factor of intelligence often called G or general cognitive ability. And IQ tests have gotten better at sort of gauging that even if they li- leave certain things out. And, um, yeah, we're, we're studying the genetics of this pretty well now. There's, there's of course many years of behavioral genetics research where you separate identical twins and non-identical twins at birth and then gauge their cognitive ability across a lifetime. And of course, you know, genetic twins, identical twins tend to score almost exactly the same, and fraternal twins score very differently. And so there is something going on with IQ even if it's not everything we care about.
- CWChris Williamson
What are the holes in the, uh, assessment of IQ, of IQ as a, a concept, or G, or whatever you wanna call it?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Well, I think it's just that, like, first of all, unless you're taking IQ tests many, many times across your life, which most of us aren't doing, right? There are gonna be certain things that, you know, you do better or worse on just based on the test itself or on how well you slept or whatever the night before. There are gonna be little, little holes like that. And probably there are some people with really good memories and poor spatial reasoning and vice versa, and so on. And so I just think you have to be really careful with just sort of saying like, "Look, here's your IQ test score. Here's how smart you are." Nevertheless, um, we know there's a whole bunch of traits that, that, that are highly correlative with IQ. And these are things like educational attainment, not surprising. You know, people who score better on IQ tests, especially on G, the general factor of intelligence, they tend to make more money, they tend to get more educational attainment, and especially in more difficult fields like physics or chemistry. My IQ is probably not high enough to do especially well on either of those. Um, but here are some of the more interesting things that, that I think most people don't know about. IQ is a pretty decent predictor of things like marital stability, addictive behavior, and this is after you've corrected for socioeconomic status. Here's another one that might shock you. IQ is a decent predictor at predicting criminality. And you might ask, "Well, why? Why would that be the case, especially after you correct for socioeconomic status?" I mean, an obvious thing is, if you have low socioeconomic status, you might think, "Okay, you're both gonna have a lower IQ and you're more prone to criminality, but that's just because you're poor. You need to steal things in order to stay alive." Again, once you correct for socioeconomic status, you still get these correlations, and IQ is inversely, um, correlated with certain things and positively correlated with others. So smarter people tend to, tend to engage in less criminality. Now why is that? That's an interesting question. You might have a story where it goes in one of two directions. It may be that, you know, there's some trait that's correlated with intelligence, like, um, long-term planning, self-control. So it's actually not IQ at all that's causing more criminality. It's something like... That is low IQ causing criminality. It's something like lower IQ people tend to have, uh, shorter time horizons and less self-control, and that is true. And so they're gonna be more prone to criminality.
- CWChris Williamson
Couple of interesting things there. First that you say sort of, uh, competence in one area seems to correlate with competence in another. So the shape rotator/word cell dichotomy, uh, isn't sort of necessarily true, that people are kind of... They tend to... The rising tide of, of intelligence seems to lift sort of everybody's capacity within that, although you do get, uh, some stuff s- skewed around. I wonder as well
- 9:48 – 15:39
Risks of Making Some People More Valuable
- CWChris Williamson
if, uh, a little bit of it is that because all of these other benefits kind of come along for the ride as a byproduct with IQ, it becomes increasingly, uh, more slippery to say, "Well, these people are worth more."
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
"They're worth more to society. They're less likely to be a criminal. They're more likely to have a job. They're more likely to be in a stable relationship and not hurt, you know, th- those emotionally around them, and s-" You know, it... Just keep on scaling this up. We revere people that have got education. We revere people that have got a higher, um, job title. We revere people that have got a nicer car, which is downstream from the earning potential, which is from their job, which is from their education, which is from their IQ. And all of these things sort of come along for the ride to make, uh, an image of a desirable person who, you know, it'd be very rare for you to say, "Would you like to have a child?" Or, "Would you like for one of your friends to be in some accident?" And after this, they were more likely to be a criminal or they were more likely to, uh, struggle in school, or they were less likely to get a promotion at work, or they were less, you know, less self-control, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that it, it kind of gets into the topic that we spoke about last time, we're gonna talk about today, sort of genetic enhancement, the, uh, virtue of, sort of philosophical underpinnings of it, um, that it, it's perilously close, and this is the, you know, the criticisms of better or worse people-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
That's right.
- CWChris Williamson
... preferable or less preferable traits. But even that, y- you know, the moral... It, it's this sort of messy line between moral equivalence. How much does this person actually have value? Are they equal? Are they better? And I think that because IQ is kind of this epicenter of it all and so much stuff is downstream from it, arguably maybe as, you know, height might have some more, or it'd be probably not too far off, um, uh, you know... Would someone trade one standard deviation of height for one standard deviation of IQ? I don't know, but it would, you know, be an interesting experiment to run in a virtual reality. But yeah, I just think, um, you know, it, it, it really gets to the point of better or worse, more valuable-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
That's right.
- CWChris Williamson
... or less valuable.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah, let me say something about that before we turn to sort of embryo selection and the genetics of this stuff. I think that that is true, that there is a real risk. And among my friends who are IQ realists, I actually think some of them...... tend to overplay IQ relative, for example, to personality traits. You mentioned a superficial one like height, but you mentioned it of course because it's true. Um, taller people tend to make more income, women tend to prefer taller men on the mating market, and there are psychological studies we talked about last time showing that not only that taller people tend to be regarded as more authoritative, but people who are regarded as more authoritative or attractive who you've never seen in person before are often thought to be taller than they are. So I mentioned Tom Cruise last time as a, as a typical example of that. And that shows you it is a bias, and that also shows you we should be careful to succumb to that bias. So for example, we do tend to make these value judgments. Um, more attractive people are in some sense better, which is why they're on television, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Which is why people tend to want to watch them on soap operas rather than less attractive people. And I think this is an actual real problem in politics. We want to be sure that we have, for example, anti-discrimination laws so that, you know, if someone basically, uh, an employer preferentially hires someone simply because they're attractive, if we really did have good evidence that that was true, I do think they have a case for a lawsuit. And I think we should structure our society in that way so that we don't necessarily just value people based on how attractive or smart they are. Nevertheless, there are actually moral risks to denying IQ and its importance in everyday life, because if you don't understand that this is a real phenomenon and that some people have more of it than others, then what you're gonna end up saying is, "Look, there's a class of people who are just privileged." You know, you hear these terms all the time, like, um, you know, whether it's toxic masculinity or male privilege or white privilege or Asian, Asian privilege or whatever. And, and the same thing goes for, you know, again, aesthetic privilege actually. People don't use that term very much, but they should. There is actually a worry that, um, if you don't acknowledge that some people are smarter than others for largely genetic reasons, then you're gonna think that their income is undeserved and you're gonna become envious of them, and you're gonna create social policies that basically say, "Look, let's punish the high IQ people and reward, you know, the others." Now, that's fine if, if you have a theory of fairness that says you should do that, because maybe IQ is largely unearned because your genetics are unearned. Fine, I can deal with that. That's called luck egalitarianism in philosophy, and there are good arguments for that. But there are also purely envy-based arguments that are destructive of any kind of political order that says let's punish the smart people and reward those at the other end of the bell curve. Um, there's a, of course, a parable for this that many people have read from Kurt Vonnegut. It's a little three-page story about a handicapper general, and it takes place in the future where everyone is finally equal in terms of resources, income, you know, the size of your house, et cetera, but some people are smarter than others. So what do they do? They come up with a brain implant and they zap them every 20 seconds, so they can't string thoughts together and come up with the kind of innovations, the kind of medical innovations that, that benefit all of us. And so just as there's a risk to overplaying IQ and to conflating it with moral value, um, I think there's also a risk to denying the reality of IQ and the genetic basis of it, and that risk is designing political institutions so that you punish the people who are actually creating a lot of the value in the world.
- 15:39 – 20:27
Will Embryo Selection Be the Next Big Thing?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
- CWChris Williamson
Getting into genetic enhancement and the sort of, uh, selection, uh, effectiveness, y- this is something that you're absolutely knee-deep in. I, I think this is going to be the big area of conversation for the next decade. I th- I, I can't... I mean, AI, yes, um, it is going to make changes on the surface and it's going to be more immediate, but this, the potential for gene embryo selection for you to be able to fertilize with your partner, 10 harvested eggs, and then be able to do your polygenic risk scores and look at a whole host of traits, I think that is the big new technology over the next few decades, and I think it's going to probably be the biggest change that we're going to see. May- be- between that and AI, I think are the two things that are neck and neck. Where, where's your sort of money lie in that?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
I think that's right, and I have a lot of uncertainty over AI. So it's, it's fairly obvious that weak AI, in contrast to strong AI, it's already here. Weak AI is just basically algorithms that can substitute for human thinking. Self-driving cars, um, programs that solve math problems, that's weak AI. Or, you know, IBM's program Big Blue that can beat every chess player in the world handily. Okay, fine, that's here, that's gonna be very disruptive, and I think actually very good overall, but it's gonna be disruptive of certain jobs. Strong AI, where you've actually got a conscious being that is, that has a theory of mind, that's conscious, and so on, however you, however you define that. I really have no idea if or when it's coming. I assume at some point in the future it will, but I really don't know. One thing I do know that's coming though and that's already here is the capacity to select genes for intelligence and make our kids slightly brighter. And here I'm not talking about CRISPR, um, I'm not talking about gene editing, which is almost certainly coming, probably a decade or two away. Um, AI will actually facilitate that if we get, if we get AGI. Um, but I'm talking about using in vitro fertilization, generating a bunch of embryos and then selecting among those embryos. Everybody produces quite a bit of genetic diversity. If you have, let's say, 8, 10, 15 embryos, you know, y- you might get 20, 25 IQ points difference between the highest and the lowest scoring. And right now, I actually know there are companies of course that-... will let you select for health traits, polygenic health traits like diabetes, heart disease, schizophrenia. These have enormous value for future people in, in terms of health, longevity, and so on. But there's at least one company that, that I actually work with, um, hasn't publicly launched yet, but that can select for cognitive ability. And, you know, if you're, if you're doing IVF anyway, why not select among the brightest embryos? I don't think it's the only thing you should select. You should probably look at health traits and what runs in your family. And eventually, we're gonna be able to select for personality. Like I said, a lot of, a lot of my friends who, you know, who sort of understand the reality of IQ and its importance, they'll often overplay it relative to, let's say, conscientiousness or openness, which to me actually have a lot of value because I want my kids to, you know, to, to respect other people, to compete, not only to compete, but to compete fairly in the business world, um, and to be able to sort of set tasks and goals and complete them on time. That's conscientiousness. So basically, that's gonna come very soon. IQ is already here if you wanna select for it. Certainly anyone can contact me if they're (laughs) interested in that. And I think in the coming years, you know, there are gonna be many other companies that end up doing this, and there's gonna be almost an arms race for who can offer which traits. And, um, this is gonna become not just a reality, but I think it'll become widespread.
- CWChris Williamson
It leads to a very interesting situation, which is that y- y- you kind of have an arms race. Well, if m- other families are able to do this and I'm not able to do this, you end up with sort of two classes of people, those that can select and those that can't.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah, I think it's gonna be in the same way that there's not just gonna be two classes genetically as, as pictured in Gattaca. There's gonna be thousands or millions of, of ways in which we diverge. There's gonna be a kind of spectrum. So too with access. It's not gonna be like you have it or you don't. Um, you know, we've talked about before and you talk many times about mate selection, which is clearly the most important thing, right? If, if you have a sperm or egg donor or your husband or wife just happens to be really bright or conscientious, that's already gonna stack the genetic deck in favor of your kids being with them.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, that,
- 20:27 – 27:51
Humans Are Already Selecting Traits in Partners
- CWChris Williamson
that would be something I think important to put in, which is, you know, for anybody, and e- even me, before I became friends with you, before we started having these conversations more deeply, there's just this post 1943 ick around anything that gets kind of close to selection, traits, preference, reproduction, who is, who isn't, why do we want this one and not the other, all of that. Um, but everybody is a eugenicist in some form because why did you pick your partner? Why did you choose that partner over another one? Oh, it's because they were attractive and because they were this and because they were that. But when you get down to the absolute root of it, why is it that we're attracted to symmetrical faces and not non-symmetrical faces? Well, it's because of mutational load and how, how resilient you've been to the, uh, perturbments that you've had thus far in your life. Why is it that we prefer people that are taller? Well, sexy son hypothesis. You know, we know that the partner that we're with is going to pass traits on to our children. It, it, the, the most interesting thing is what happens when you allow, um, women to choose sperm donors, because what you get there is a woman that is purely choosing genetic material detached from their attraction to the person that deposits or supplies them with the genetic material. And, uh, you, you... It's, it's evident. It's evident what people... They want somebody that's kind. Right? Okay, well, that's going to be a kind child, right? A smart child. They don't want somebody that's unhealthy. They don't want somebody that's full of disease. So yeah, just the, the fact that you already do a proxy rough-hewn version of this where you just roll the dice with which sperm gets to which egg fastest, like it's all... it's... we're already there. We've been there since the beginning of time, since, you know, uh, reproduction through sex started.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah, I think that's right. And so you're, you're, you're already stacking the genetic deck in favor in, in a certain direction. We're all trying to find the best mate we can. I mean, I don't want to put it in terms of, you know, spreadsheet mentality. We're not ticking boxes necessarily, but as you put it, the kinds of traits that we're adapted to be attracted to obviously are cues of, of social success. And think of, think of how much weight women place not just on achievement, but, you know, achievement in a social context, right? Like you can, you could be on a, on a date, and, and I listened to your episode, um, a few days ago that launched, uh, Dating Advice for Men, which was really interesting, you know, and, and the guest, I forget her name, um-
- CWChris Williamson
Blaine, yeah.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Blaine, yeah. She was sort of saying, you know, one mistake men make is they kind of like... they talk too much and they kind of list off their traits like it's a resume. And that might all be true, but women want to see you in action. Are you socially dominant in a group? And not just dominant in some sadistic sense, but dominant in the sense that you command the attention of other people, they listen to you because they trust you. Why do they trust you? Well, there's information there. They trust you probably because they have experience of you solving problems well, of you coordinating other people in a kind of altruistic way. Like, "Here's the plan. Here's how we're gonna succeed as a group, and here's how we're gonna beat the other group," et cetera. And so, yeah, women are already looking for proxies of these. Men are too, of course. They're slightly different proxies. But then when you get into embryo selection or, you know, again, before that even, sperm or egg selection, if you're doing that, that's what's really revealing the things that you care about most. And I mean, I might add, like when I used to teach this stuff at university, you know, this was before I used... I, I wrote about the topic, but I'd teach other people's writings. And a common distinction that people will make, and I've seen it among ordinary people too, is between treating diseases that already exist and enhancing existing capacities.This seems to be a conceptual and moral line that people wanna draw. Or in the context of embryo selection, we might say, "Look, it's okay to prevent certain known diseases." So you can select an embryo that doesn't have Down syndrome, that doesn't have a single gene or monogenic condition like Tay-Sachs. But that's very different than selecting an embryo that's a little bit higher than average on height or IQ or on longevity, right? We can, we can predict longevity by putting a bunch of diseases together and then having a kind of disease adjusted life year metric and, you know, choosing on the right-hand side of that bell curve. And I understand the- the kind of motivation behind this. You might think like, "Look, it's one thing to kind of say, 'Yeah, diseases are bad.' We know that for sure, right? We can see them manifest themselves, but what are we gonna get when we select in favor of these traits? You know, when we select on the right side of the bell curve, so to speak, of intelligence, of..." And, you know, you might worry that there's some unknown there. Now, I actually think this line breaks down pretty quickly. Um, let me pick on British people because you're British. Um, for whatever reason, Brits seem to have, on average, worse teeth than Chinese. (laughs) Maybe that's not true actually. Let me pick a different group. No, let's say Arabs. I don't... (laughs) I've lived in the Middle East, you know. Arabs don't seem to have as crooked a teeth as Brits do when they're kids, you know. Um, um, and, you know, Brits get braces. We all get braces these days, you know. I was just in South America, and it's a little poorer down there, and you see a lot of 30, 40-year-olds getting braces for the first time. And you think, "What's going on here?" This is an enhancement. Crooked teeth are normal for our species. They're especially normal for Brits for whatever reason. And yet we think it's perfectly fine to enhance crooked teeth by putting braces on. Similarly, it's perfectly normal for our species to, with age, over the age of 40, lose muscle mass, which is relevant for your audience, you know, the people who are listening for- for workout advice, you know. Um, it's perfectly normal to lose eyesight. I'm 48 now, and I'm from a family of pilots. We have just perfect vision, or I should say had, until this year, and I have my goddamn glasses right in front of me here. For the first time, I started having difficulty seeing small text, and it's blurry to me. Now, is that normal? Yes, it is. If we could select in- in favor of having eyesight, better eyesight longer, more muscle mass later in life, would we do it? I sure as hell know I would do it. I think you would do it. And so, you know, we have these intuitive lines. It sort of makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint to have these stark distinctions. Look, we know these diseases, they're bad, let's sele- select against them, right? We've seen them manifest. But there's this unknown territory of genetically enhancing ourselves, and that seems scary and mysterious. But in a way, it's not. You know, we know what causes bad eyesight. It's just like the- the micro muscles around your eyes just kind of getting worse. We know that we're, in some sense, programmed to die, um, and we're more and more prone to cancer as we get older. So is it an enhancement to select an embryo at lower risk of adult cancer? In a way, the answer is yes, but I also think it's morally fine. So the- the- the treatment enhancement distinction is, it's conceptually interesting. I- I understand why people make it, but I don't think it's either morally or very conceptually coherent or significant.
- 27:51 – 33:44
Moral Challenges of Genetic Enhancement
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Well, it definitely leads to some difficult situations that you get into. Okay, so if we got rid of all of the potential risks for disease, that's a longevity increase, but, uh, you're only allowed to do it up to some kind of arbitrary waterline ceiling thing, and then beyond that that... I- I- I do think, even from our last conversation where we spoke about the sort of difference between selecting between different offspring, so, uh, genetic selection, and modifying the traits of the same offspring, which would be enhancement, like actually getting in and tinkering with the, with the genes, which we're not- not at this stage to be able to do, um, it does, to me, feel like a fundamental difference between the two, uh, given that you can't... You know, o- one of the things that you could be concerned about if you were enhancing an existing embryo with- w- by g- going in and tinkering with the genetic material is that that embryo didn't ask for them to have- to be, uh, taller than they were going to be, or for them to be smarter than they were going to be or whatever. But when it comes to selecting between different embryos, it's like, well, the only way that you were going to be born was if you were selected. And you are the way that you are. You are the way that you were always going to be. So I- I feel like this sort of first stage of embryo selection is, uh, going to encounter some challenges. And then when we get to the next stage of genetic enhancement, that's going to encounter new philosophical challenges morally. Yeah, I think that's right. And a couple of things that you said. First is consent. You know, so typically in medical ethics, what's the foundational principle? It's informed consent. You know, your doctor doesn't have the right to act paternalistic toward you, to tell you, "You should select this embryo. Why? Because I like it." Or, "You should take this cancer treatment because it's gonna cure you." You're allowed to say, "Look, I know it's more likely to cure me, but I'm a Jehovah's Witness," let's say, "and I don't want it." You know, you're allowed to do that. And so, you know, that- that, I think, is the right principle to- to act from. Informed consent should be the bedrock of medical ethics. It certainly is in legal ethics. Um-But it really doesn't apply when it comes to children, because no children ask to be born, right? It's impossible. So whether it's you just, you know, having sex with your wife and the sperm that happens to join, you know, you coulda done it the night before or the night after and it would've been a different sperm fertilizing that egg.
- CWChris Williamson
It was a... Sorry, the-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, Brian Klaas told me about the fact that, um, you know, when you're having sex, especially if you're trying to have children, that because of the way that your physiology moves, the difference between this thrust and the next thrust-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... is the difference between a different child being born. And I was like, well, just in case any men weren't suffering with enough performance anxiety already, the knowledge that-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... the amount of duration that they s- they last for during, uh, sex is going to be massively... and it's gonna completely change our entire future based on whether it's now, or is it now, or is it now?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Totally. Exactly, yeah. So kids, kids never consent to being born. But you might ask yourself, this is a kind of philosophical principle, um, you know, and it has to do with hypothetical consent, like if you were to consent to something or if some being could, it would be something like, what are the traits that it would consent to having if it had a choice? Now, it'll, it never will in the case of a child being born, but it would probably be things like generally having a healthy immune system, being reasonably bright, not necessarily a genius, um, because those are the, the, the kind of all-purpose goods that, that lead to a variety of different good lives. There, there are so many different ways in which you could have a good life. But the last thing it would select in favor of is severe disability, or extremely low intelligence, or something like that, or poor self-control. Um, and so it's obvious, like the things that people would select for in general if they were the ones doing the selecting, you know, if they were choosing their parents, but they can't. And so I think, you know, as long as your life is reasonably worth living, which is almost all lives, right? There are very few cases to the contrary. Um, you should be happy with your life, and, and, and parents, you know, I would trust parents to do this rather than, I don't know, the government or something like that. Now, to your other point though about why do we have this treatment enhancement distinction, you sort of said, "Yeah, I can't kinda shake the idea that maybe it is, it is a, a worthwhile distinction." I do think in some context, it is. So think about socialized healthcare. Um, to some extent, we all live in a system of socialized healthcare 'cause we have insurance pools, and as soon as we're in an insurance pool, we're forced to share the costs and benefits of one another's choices. And in England, it's just one giant forced insurance pool, right? And in cases like this, you know, you have to allocate scarce resources. And what we wouldn't want, you know, we would want the government to say, "Look, if you're doing IVF, maybe we should also subsidize the ability to select against severe disease." It's totally uncontroversial, right? Or at least, yeah, I think for most people you'd wanna prioritize that, but you wouldn't wanna have subsidies for, like, aesthetic enhancements where it's like all you're doing is you're spending state resources, meaning my tax money...
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
... to, I don't know, give your kid a slight advantage, which actually may have a slight negative effect on everyone else (laughs) because if your kid is taller than everyone else, that means mine is relatively shorter. And so actually, in the allocation of scarce resources where we're in a, uh, a kind of forced, um, a, a, a situation of forced allocation, um, where we're sharing each other's resources, in those situations, I think it's worth prioritizing treatment of existing disease or prevention of disease over, let's say, aesthetic enhancement. I feel like that actually makes sense.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, alleviates a potential future burden.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Exactly. A burden on everyone in that case, right? Yeah.
- 33:44 – 40:48
Are Our Genes Mutating & Eroding?
- CWChris Williamson
Talk to me about this sort of gene erosion and this increasing mutation load. This... I read a, a very spicy short article, uh, taken from something John Tooby wrote a while ago, and I, I kind of can't stop seeing it now.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
That's right, yeah. I th- I briefly mentioned it on your show last time actually, about a year and a half ago, and, uh, Louise Perry is now talking about it too, so I see that as a victory for not so much enhancement as science. I think this is something everyone should know about. Um, it's something Darwin wrote about in 1871 in The Descent of Man, although indirectly, because the word gene didn't even exist back then. But the idea is something like this, um, you know, we have in nature a set of forces that, uh, you know, purify the population, not in the kind of Nazi sense of purification, not racial purification, but purification in the sense that, you know, evolutionary biology works like this. You know, we've, we've got a set of people. They have children. They mix their genes. There are a bunch of random mutations that accumulate in your lifetime. You know, the most obvious cases of those are like freckles on your skin. You know, that's a mutation from the sun. But here, we're talking about mutations that you pass onto your children. Most of those mutations are gonna be bad. They just have to be, right? By definition, they're either neutral or bad, and then rarely, those mutations are good and lead to, to, to some new innovation at a genetic level. Well, when we have a kind of civilization with advanced healthcare and, um, nursing homes for the elderly and so on, but what we're really talking about is healthcare for children, if you have diseases, um, when you're a kid or during your reproductive years, uh, that we can now treat, so I mentioned poor eyesight that we can treat with glasses or LASIK surgery, childhood cancers that we can often treat with chemotherapy, there's a whole range of diseases that we can treat now by adjusting the environment to make it easier for you to survive and reproduce, or by actually just giving you medical care if you can't afford it. Those are gonna imply, almost by definition, that we're gonna be passing along, uh, genes and traits that are unfavorable from the standpoint of genetic fitness or from the standpoint of human welfare. And again, Darwin understood it in the point i- in terms of just sort of human welfare, but we can put it in terms of genetic fitness as well. So we're, we're almost certainly accumulating deleterious mutations in civilized societies and passing those along. Those are gonna be accumulating.Now, I think what's interesting about this is... I actually wanna give a metaphor which Louise Perry, uh, introduced when, when I was doing an interview with her last year. And I sh- I should have put this in the first edition of my book. I did put it in the second edition, thanks to you and her. And the metaphor is something a lot of people have heard of, it's Chesterton's Fence. So G.K. Ch- Chesterton is a famous, uh, British conservative, religious conservative, and, and just a brilliant writer. And the metaphor of Chesterton's Fence is something like this. In the context of social reform, many of the kind of socialists in the early 20th century, they were, they were a little too eager to tear down existing structures, you know, social norms, legal institutions, and so on, without thinking about why those things were there to begin with and what is gonna replace them. And I think this is just obviously a great metaphor for a lot of things. And so when you think about Chesterton's Fence in the context of genetics, you might think, "We should be cautious before we... forget about gene editing, that's obvious, we should be cautious there. But even with embryo selection or e- I guess even mate selection, maybe we should be (laughs) cautious with what we do, you know, before we, I don't know, radically influence the genetics of our children." And I think that's a, that's a really good point, but what I wanna bring up now is, um, a term, I guess... I guess I coined it, but it's really Chesterton's idea, I call it Chesterton's Post, and it's from an earlier essay in 1908 that he wrote, um, and actually, let me see if I can quote it, yeah, I do have it here from my book, so Chesterton says in 1908, "Conservatism is based on the idea that if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are, but you do not. If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change." And again, think about this muta- mutation accumulation thing here, evolution doesn't stop. "If you leave a white post alone, it will soon be a black post, um, if you particularly want it to be white, you must always be painting it over and over again. Broadly," he says, "if you want the old white post, you must have a new white post." And let me extend the metaphor to an old Greek metaphor, um, of a boat where, you know, everyone who owns a boat, I certainly don't have the money to own a boat, but we all know that you have to constantly maintain it because the salt water erodes it, so you're changing planks one at a time, so to speak, right? And at some point it's basically a new boat, but you still call it your boat. And the metaphor here is conservatives, of which G.K. Chesterton is a conservative, they often make the mistake that if you wanna stay where you are now, you can just kinda take a snapshot and freeze everything, but in fact, entropy is this universal force that dissolves boats in the water, that dissolves molecules in the universe, and that de- degrades our genome over time. And so I've actually argued that just Chesterton, who is a, a vehement opponent of eugenics, but by which he meant state-sponsored coercive eugenics, Chesterton himself should probably endorse voluntary eugenics or genetic enhancement, because if you like where we are now, well, you'd probably wanna do one of two things; you either wanna select in favor of a low disease burden and low genetic load or reintroduce the really harsh mistress that is purifying selection-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
...that is go back to the Middle Ages, stop taking your antibiotics and vaccines-
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
...and just allow people basically to have a huge number of kids, most of whom die before reproductive age. So I actually think that this is an essay everyone should read, it's called The Race Between Germline Gene Editing and Genetic Meltdown, um, and we don't necessarily need gene editing, but we could use embryo selection to minimize overall disease burden and therefore stay where we are now.
- CWChris Williamson
That's super interesting. I, I hadn't thought... I, I've learned about this sort of gene erosion thing, uh, the slow dwindling toward us all becoming aliens with big heads and skinny bodies.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
(laughs) Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, but I, I didn't consider that a countervailing force would just be i- even without the, uh, enhancement, just straight up, "Okay, well, if we continue to select a, uh, disproportionately, uh, uh, optimal, um, set of embryos across the board, and if that becomes d- more democratized, more democratized..." Um-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
It's kind of interesting,
- 40:48 – 48:56
Will This Help the Declining Birth Rate?
- CWChris Williamson
you know, I had, uh, Malcolm Collins on the show last year, uh, really interesting, I, I... You know, unique guy, and the fact that he's at the forefront of talking about birth rate decline, uh, is, is, is pretty cool. One of the things I've been considering is kind of the intersection of declining birth rates with this soon-to-come-online reproductive technology, especially given that some of the groups that have the highest birth rates are religious groups for whom I imagine genetic selection because of IVG and the potential for you having unused embryos left over at the end of this reproductive span for your wife, uh, that they're not going to do that, so it's the, the groups that are reproducing more highly at the moment are going to be the ones that are potentially unable to use this technology or unwilling because of some ethical consideration that they have as part of the sort of religio- Have you considered all of these-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Good, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... different things together?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah, and, and let me go back to that, one of those feeds into your previous point, some people will be unable to use this. I actually think, like, one solution to this is gonna be governments, um, subsidizing IVF. China and Israel are already doing this to boost their birth rate, and I think it's actually a decent idea because if you're older, um, it is gonna be harder to reproduce, and so if you have crashing birth rates, one way to, to, to-... boost it a bit is to subsidize IVF, but once you do that, it's a short step between selecting among those embryos. Because when you do IVF, you have multiple embryos, you're either gonna select at random or you're gonna select the one with the better genetic profile according to you, not according to the government, hopefully. And generally, that's gonna be the one with the lower disease burden and so on. So I actually think there's two things that are gonna follow from this, um, this initial unequal access. Governments will see IVF and then eventually, you know, companies that do genetic selection on top of IVF, as a thing to promote, not only to prevent big inequalities, but also to pro- to promote birthrates. And so I see this as incredibly optimistic actually. I think it'll start in China and Israel and it'll go from there to other parts of the world. Now, you mentioned religious groups that are unable or unwilling, um, so yeah, again, government subsidies might help for this, for IVF, um, or insurance subsidies. I know Tesla, you know, uh, right down the street from us, there's of course Tesla and Elon Musk companies, and Elon of course has used IVF and embryo selection. Tesla offers, um, IVF and frozen eggs and that sort of thing, and I think this is, you know, going to be more and more common. Now, with religious groups, I do worry that some are gonna have a prohibition against this, and their kids, not in the first generation but over two or three or ten generations, could suffer serious, um, genetic disadvantages because of the choices their parents made. Some of them are gonna adopt and endorse, um, using IVF and embryo selection and so on, others won't. But I don't endorse the government coming in and forcing them to do it. Um, I think the risks are-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Whatever the opposite of forced sterilization is, forced s- selection reproduction.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Forced using of it, yeah, exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
I don't think governments are especially competent to do that. But I will say one more thing, um, and this goes to the point of what you mentioned with, uh, deleterious mutations accumulating in the absence of embryo selection. That is a fact. So if we wanna stay where we are now and simply not deteriorate, here's an example where religious groups should endorse and actually use embryo selection. So in Islam, for a long, long time, maybe a thousand years, it's been common to engage in cousin marriage. And in fact, that is the norm around the world but especially in Islam, and it's not in Europe for one really interesting reason, and there's a paper on this actually. It's called Intensive Kinship Connect- uh, Intensive Kinship, uh, Selection, the Catholic Church, and Global Psychological Variation. That's the name of the paper. This is from 2019, and what it argued is that the Catholic Church had prohibitions on first and even second cousin marriage for more than a thousand years, and this actually had an effect on the European population. Not only did they have lower disease burdens, but they were selected for various kinds of norms, and you see this in every European society, including their offshoots like Canada, Australia, the United States. Higher trust, more of a sense of an impersonal set of fairness rules, and less corruption in the sense of favoring your kin over non-kin. And these authors have argued that that is actually partly a result of an inadvertent ban on cousin marriage by the Catholic Church. Now, I don't know if this is true, these are two of the best scholars in the world, Joseph Henrich at Harvard and Jonathan Schultz, um, who's an economist and statistician at George Mason. Um, this has been replicated by a few teams, but this is wild. So when you think about what, (laughs) what banning cousin marriage can do, just doing that, right, that can have tremendous genetic, uh, effects. And in the Middle East, I'll just put some meat on this bone, I actually think the people that are gonna take up embryo selection first as it becomes more out in the open and more popular are Arabs in the Middle East, Bangladeshis, and Africans in East Africa. Why? Because they engage in more cousin marriage and as you know, I mean, as everybody knows, right, European kings who were doing sibling and cousin marriage ended up with all kinds of crazy deformities, low cognitive ability, I mean, it toppled entire regimes, right? And what you have in the Middle East is the expression of rare alleles where if both parents have them, you ga- you have this devastating disease, you get cognitive impairments, and you get all kinds of deformities including heart disease and all of these things at much higher rates in those places that engage in cousin marriage than those that don't. And this is a religious practice, this is within Islam or certain branches of it. So I actually think interestingly, the people who should use genetic selection the most are gonna be religious groups, and some of them will, and others won't, and they're gonna put their kids at all kinds of disadvantages.
- CWChris Williamson
That is so fascinating, the fact that you have certain religious groups which have got smaller genetic pools? What, how would you refer to that, less genetic variation?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah, exactly, and that-
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
... includes, you know, my pool. I mean, I'm half Ashkenazi Jew, and Ashkenazis were down to a, a tiny bottleneck of only a few hundred people in the Middle Ages, and then they expanded quite a bit in medieval Europe, and this is why Ashkenazis ha- have a big disease burden, right? This is why every Ashkenazi, including the most extreme religious person, the kind of crazy orthodox people you see in Brooklyn or Israel, they all get the Tay-Sachs test before they go on a first date. Um, this is straight-up eugenics and it's straight-up genetic selection. They know they're at risk of these things and so it's better to marry someone who doesn't have that deleterious allele.
- CWChris Williamson
So, well actually, that's one point. Does that mean that as a, uh, Ashkenazi Jew who does have that allele, it's super difficult for you to date?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah, you have to, you have to find someone who doesn't, et cetera. So, um-... yeah, you have to worry about it being expressed if you're both carriers. Um, if you're not, it's not a problem.
- CWChris Williamson
As if the mating crisis wasn't hard enough as it is-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
(laughs) Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
... to cut out 50% of the... So, yeah, I mean, it's... Dude, that's so interesting. You've got this, this sort of smaller genetic pool, and from that one of the ways that these religious groups could, uh, combat the- the downstream effects is to sort of offset the entropy or off- offset that sort of deleterious nature by going in and ensure, okay, we're okay here, we're okay there. And then after a period of time, maybe that gets you to such a robust, uh, genetic, uh, standpoint. Yeah, what are... What are some of the other-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Precisely.
- CWChris Williamson
What
- 48:56 – 56:45
Should We Be Worried About Embryo Selection?
- CWChris Williamson
are some of the other reasons to be worried about genetic selection? What else have you got concerns about?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Um, let's see. I mean, look, one of the reasons I wrote a book about this long before I was involved kind of in the industry, so to speak, um, is... Uh, you know, I studied economics and philosophy. And so I think in terms of what are the situations in which individually rational choices, these micro-level choices we make every day, can sum up to an overall pattern that's either better than our individual choice or much worse from a social standpoint. So the better case is the Adam Smith case about trade, right? So each of us, the, the butcher, the brewer, and the baker is just trying to get a good deal, right? The end result is lower prices, higher quality products. That's, that's the economic case for free trade, right? Um, that doesn't mean infinitely free trade, but other things equal, better off to leave people free to own their own property, specialize in what they're good at, and then exchange with one another on mutually agreeable terms. The overall social product is better for everyone, right? We end up with these rich societies. Um, and, and of course, you see that, right? It starts in Britain in the Industrial Revolution, it spreads from there, and every society that has private property and market exposure ends up much richer than it was. So that's like the classic economic case where it's positive sum. But economists often focus on these negative sum games where it's like, yeah, I buy gas, or let, let's say I buy energy from a coal company. That coal company produces energy in a way that's really dirty, they're putting, um, all kinds of pollution in the atmosphere. Let's take the case of China, for example. Uh, you know, it could contribute to global warming. Even if you're not worried about global warming, it's a fact, it produces pollution that is bad for your lungs, right? It can reduce lifespan, increase cancer. So those are cases where economists sort of study them 'cause it's just kind of a, an intellectual puzzle. It's fun to try to solve them. What's producing this overall pattern, and then how can we, how can we incentivize people to act in ways that would be better for everyone rather than worse? It could be a tax on pollution. It could be, you know, some kinda control on how people produce energy, et cetera. And then I thought, what is the ultimate collective action problem across societies, across countries, and across generations? And it's genetic selection. What'll happen when everyone has the ability to select embryos or edit those embryos eventually? Is it gonna be collectively a good thing or a bad thing? Um, and so I wrote a book about this and I thought, you know, each chapter was on a different topic, like cognitive enhancement, aesthetic enhancement, immuno enhancement, et cetera, and, and then moral enhancement, which I think is the most interesting one. Maybe we can talk about it. But, you know, basically, um, I think that the risk is there are some arms races that can be collectively self-defeating. Again, take a case like male height. If we each selected an embryo for the tallest possible boy, we, we ignored everything else, so we just get tall boys. Well, now you've got a situation where populations are taller, but there's no relative advantage if everyone else is equally tall. And at some point, there actually may be health risks to being really tall, like cardiac disorders and so on, right? If you look at NBA players, these are not the longest lived people, right? They live shorter lives and worse lives in, in old age than gymnasts do. Why? Because there's a greater burden on their, on their joints, on their heart, et cetera. And so there's actually benefits to being shorter, not taller. So are we gonna have this collectively self-defeating arms race?
- CWChris Williamson
I think just on that point, there are a couple of interesting pieces of insight. Uh, at least when it comes to mate selection, it seems like the height, uh, differential is based, at least in part, it's anchored to the height of the woman, not just the relative height of other men around them. So on average, women say they want a partner that's 21 centimeters taller than they are. Uh, now, if we get to the stage where the parents of women, of females start to increase their height, yes, then we have a true arms race on our hands. Uh, and also, I know that there's some really interesting data around whatever it is, like only three times in history the shorter presidential candidate has won.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, there, there definitely are some big, big advantages to height, but when you kind of really take the reins off, uh, I, I would guess that that's going to be self-limiting before we get to a, a physiological kind of problem.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Exactly. And I like the word that you used, self-limiting. I would say self-equilibrating, just to use a more technical game theoretic term, but it's the same thing. Um, first of all, men tend to prefer short women, not tall women. Um, and, and, and vice versa. So it's not clear you're gonna get-
- CWChris Williamson
Imagine if we end up with this fee-fi-fo-fum fucking group of guys-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... and a bunch of four-foot-eleven women.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Um, but yeah, I mean, at the, the... You know, the serious point is like this arms race is probably self-equilibrating also because even if you didn't have that, you know, short women, tall men, and they cancel each other out, when, when parents are selecting an embryo, let's say, or, or, or whatever, you know, a sperm or egg, as we said, at the sperm or egg bank... Not, not that everyone's doing that, that's the minority, of course, but the ones that are doing that, you know, they're thinking about what makes for a good life, and they're gonna know that being extremely tall, like way outside of the mean, is gonna have these health effects. So it's gonna be self-equilibrating. There's-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
You know, people know that above, say, 6'4", 6'5", there's not a big advantage in terms of attractiveness-
- CWChris Williamson
Unless you want to get into the NBA.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
... and there's gonna be disadvantage.Exactly. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Because-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Unless you just want that. Yeah. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
In- in- in- interesting bit of basketball trivia for you, for every inch in height that you grow, it doubles the chance of you being in the NBA, and that's just, that keeps going. So 6'1" is-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Unbelievable.
- CWChris Williamson
... twice as likely as 6', 6'2" is twice as likely as 6'1". It goes all the way up. What are the-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
And less likely to be a gymnast, right? (laughs) I'm sure it's-
- CWChris Williamson
I would- I would imagine too.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
... the same, the same scale.
- CWChris Williamson
You snap yourself in half.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Um, what about, uh, sex ratio imbalance? You know, this is maybe the most-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah, exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
... basic, I would guess, of genetic selection that, okay, well, we can pick between boys and girl. We don't know what sort of a boy, we don't know what sort of a girl, but we can pick the sex that we want our child to be. Have you looked at any data ar- do humans, modern humans, just have some discriminatory preference over, for boys over girls?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah, I mean, I think we touched on this a little last time. I mean the, I have a hunch that... I actually don't have evidence for this directly, but I have a hunch that women will be slightly preferred in advanced or rich societies and men preferred in poor ones. Why? Because the sheer value of just muscle mass, right, that sort of thing. Or the, the tiny advantage that men have in spatial reasoning, just on average. That's gonna be really important when you're working with your hands and tools in, in poorer societies. In richer societies, the ability to sit still, you know, this is why like, guys, I hated school, you know. And a lot of guys have ADHD, which, eh, at the extremes that's probably a real disease, but I think some of it's a bit fake. You know, like, boys are diagnosed with it more because boys are programmed more to, to be fidgety, right? To, to use their hands and run around and compete. And so I think actually in the modern environment, women are a safer bet and there may be a slight preference for them. I don't know, I don't think there's definitive evidence yet. But again, I do think there are some worries that this could be out of hand a bit in the far future. However, self-equilibration again, because if the current population is trending toward females, well, hell man, my son is gonna have pretty good, pretty good odds. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Women are men.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Exactly. So you've talked about it in the context of like dating apps and this sort of thing. But like yeah, I mean, in terms of the overall population, big benefits to being a ...
- 56:45 – 1:04:53
What Genetics Tells Us About Morals
- CWChris Williamson
moral enhancement, certainly one of the things that most people probably wouldn't be thinking about when it comes to embryo selection, or maybe, maybe you can select for height, maybe would people choose sort of eye color or s- because a blue-eyed boy would be pretty or something. Maybe they can... But morality, I, I think we sort of as- I don't know where we think it comes from. It's sort of born out of the things that we learn, the culture we're in, our socialization, our values, our virtues. Um, w- what, what does genetics have to say about morality and moral enhancement?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah. Yeah. Clearly, a lot of our values come from our culture obviously. You know, religious cultures tend to be, in particular Christianity, Islam, there are secular versions of morality. I mean, actually the woke left is, you know, it's often called a religion. It is a set of moral rules, you know, whether you like it or not. You know, it's got a, it's got a strict set of rules and so on. So, we don't seem to be able to escape either religion in some sense and certainly not morality, and the two are often tied together for good reason. Darwin speculated, and I think he's right, that the two co-evolved to get us to solve collective action problems, right? We're, we're of course naturally a little bit selfish, maybe a lot selfish, and then through kin selection, we tend to, we tend to favor our close relatives. That, that's true in general. But then what do we do when we're in groups of 100, 200, in a tribal scenario? There are always incentives to favor ourselves and our, and our small group, our family over the overall group, let alone a group of 10,000 or 300 million in the modern United States. How do we get people to cooperate? And some of that is kind of social technology called morality or social norms, which embody various kinds of practices and information. You know, we line up in front of a bus and that makes it better for all of us. You know, this time, I could do better if I, you know, clobber the old lady and get to the front, right? But overall, if we have norms that say respect older people and respect the line, we're all gonna sort of have a way to coordinate our actions and achieve mutually beneficial goals. That's what morality is. But a big part of it, of course, is you can't get people to behave according to social norms unless they're inclined to do so, right? This is why psychopaths will follow the norms when people are watching and they won't do it when they're not watching. Um, and the more you are in the direction, this is not a binary thing, like you either are a psychopath or you're not, you have dark triad traits or you don't, these are all, um, these are all degrees to which we, you know, have propensities like this. And as with everything else, you know, there's a, a big genetic influence on it. So it's both in terms of influencing our, our overall, like, affective empathy, which is to say like when we see someone in trouble, are we inclined to wanna help them, just naturally? That's affective empathy. Some of us are more inclined than others toward that. But also personality traits. So for example, the big five, if you are higher in openness and in conscientiousness, which I think are generally good things, you tend to be a team player more and you tend to pay attention to other people's needs and respond appropriately. And so in terms of moral enhancement, what would you do? It would be something like increasing affective empathy or conscientiousness or whatever. Now, I don't think you should infinitely do this, and one of the reasons I wrote this book is I was annoyed by one of my colleagues back when I was in academic, and I actually wrote with this colleague. I like him a lot. His name is Julian Savulescu, um, he's head of the Center for Practical Ethics at Oxford, and he wrote a book called Unfit for the Future and he was really worried about these collective action problems on a global scale, like climate change, nuclear war.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
You know, Toby Ord has written this book, The Precipice, on this as well. And-
- CWChris Williamson
I love it. It's one of my top five books ever.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah, it's a good book. Um, but you know-One of the ways that they say we should respond to this is, "Let's just make people nicer, and then they'll cooperate more and we'll have fewer existential risks." And my response to this, thinking in game theoretic terms is, first of all, if a lot of people are making their kids just unconditional cooperators, there are gonna be some that see, (laughs) you know, either they're selecting intentionally or they're not, and their kids are more selfish than average. They're gonna take advantage of those kids. And in game theory, as in biology, we have these terms. You don't want to be an unconditional cooperator. You wanna be a reciprocal altruist or a conditional cooperator. And in fact, by doing that, you not only make the world better for yourself, because when you find a kind of parasitic kind of personality, you know, you stay away from them, right? The actual psychopath, shun them, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
And when you find someone who's nice and cooperative, you cooperate with them, and a lot of people are in between that. And so what you really wanna do is be disposed, on the one hand, to mete out severe punishments, even at a personal cost to yourself, to the psychopathic types, but extend actually quite a bit of decency to normal types and, and really even amp up cooperation.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, so you kind of want a... It's the wrong term. Moral flexibility is not, is not the right thing, but you want a range within which you can understand-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
That's right.
- CWChris Williamson
... you wanna be able to be firm and be gentle, and the more firm and the more gentle that you can be, probably the better.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Exactly. And in fact, um, I don't wanna get into the details of game theory, but, but when you do these, um, they're called prisoner's dilemma tournaments, and you can iterate it many times over, or public goods games. You know, we could get into that, but maybe it'll bore your audience. I don't know. Um, either way, what you find in those games is the best outcome is be- is to cooperate with people when you identify them and amp up cooperation, right, to get active enjoyment in finding the cooperators, you know, kinda like what we do in team sports when you find someone who's willing to pass even when they might have taken credit for the goal, but you had a slightly better odds or ability to get the goal. And the people who are willing to do that, we really enjoy being around them for good reason.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
They, they make it better for the team, but you wanna also be the kind of person who will actually be willing to lose a game to punish that asshole who simply won't pass. I like to use this as a, as a metaphor. Think of the World Cup in, it was circa 2010 when Germany just absolutely destroyed Brazil in the World Cup, seven to one. It should've been, like, 12 to nothing. It almost was, but in the last minute, there was a pity goal for Brazil. And it was because these individual Brazilian players were probably better than the individual Germans, but they were just show-offs. And the Germans were engaged in this, like, precision passing. You know, "I'm gonna sacrifice a bit of my welfare and a bit of camera time so that I can make sure my team wins." And they destroyed them. Um, and in fact, E.O. Wilson has this great, you know, the, the great evolutionary biologist recently passed away. He has a, a really great line, which is, "When we think about groups of people, um, selfishness actually wins within a group, but groups of selfish people lose to groups of altruistic people."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
And so when we're thinking about, when we're thinking about moral enhancement, we should think about evolutionary psychology, which I know you know a lot about and think a lot about, and think about what, what kinds of problems did our moral conscience and our moral practices evolve to solve? And that is collective action problems where there are individual benefits to defecting from this overall group goal, um, but there are big benefits over time if you can program yourself to kind of cooperate, whether it's hunting, whether it's warfare, whether it's sports, in accordance with those group goals. And how do we do that? We find the cooperators and we have these emotions that positively respond to cooperators, and, uh, not only negatively treat the non-cooperators, but give us joy in fucking killing those people, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Finding them and just slaughtering them, and so we have this weird set of dispositions where it's called moralistic aggression, actually. And moralistic aggression is a good thing because it leads to cooperative outcomes being more likely to materialize.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes, uh, positive reinforcement for the good things, negative reinforcement for the bad things.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
Didn't
- 1:04:53 – 1:10:08
The Genetics of Collaboration
- CWChris Williamson
I learn from you that IQ also plays a role in cooperation, collaboration, inter-group stuff?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah, there's... It's, it's interesting. Um, I actually don't think it's IQ per se, but what we found, um, my colleague, Garrett Jones, has done a lot of tests, actually prisoner's dilemmas, uh, tests. So he gets his groups of his students to play these games where there are individual benefits to, to, um, going your own way but, but collective benefits to cooperating with the group. And what he found is that, again, corrected for socioeconomic status, smarter people tend to be more cooperative in these kinds of collective action problems or prisoner's dilemma games. Now, I think it's not intelligence per se. I could be wrong about this. And it's certainly not that n- that smarter people are nicer. What I think is going on is that... And he, and he does too. Smarter people tend to have longer time horizons, and so they see the advantage over long periods of time of taking the, taking the decision now to give up some benefits in the short term-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
... in order to foster group benefits in the long term. And this is, again, probably why, um, smarter people tend to stay out of prison more. It's because they tend to, even if they're actually not very good people, they tend to see the individual benefits-
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
... of doing the thing that's socially-
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
... beneficial-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, that's so, so-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
... and has positive externalities.
- CWChris Williamson
Great. So sort of selfishness is shortsightedness in many ways. It's this sort of-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
In many ways, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, this, this... Not exclusively, but it's this sort of, um, uh, one of the ways that you can arrive at selfishness is by being shortsighted. Maybe that would be better to say.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And if you're not able to accurately predict the long, long-term repercussions of you fucking this person over or you saying that particular thing-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, or maybe it doesn't even appear in your mind. You know, we, we, we look at...... a lot of people, and I think this is one of the problems with the world being run, uh, by, uh, at least moderately well-educated people, uh, that have got probably IQs at standard or above. The problem of that is that they often look to the behavior of people who maybe don't have that same sort of computing power and assume that, "Well, the only way that you could elect to go and rob this particular store or go and do this particular sort of reprehensible thing is if you fully understood... He knew, they knew the, what was gonna happen. He knew what he was doing." It's like, did he? Did he?
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, if this is someone that's in the bottom, you know, 10% of IQ distribution or whatever, or this is someone that's got some unbelievable psychopathic pathology or whatever, I'm not saying that, you know, these are good people. They, you know, deserve, like, to be let off the hook or whatever. But I think that it- it gives a more nuanced explanation of why people do the things that they do. And using-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... your theory of mind and saying, "What situation would I need to be in in order for me to do that?" doesn't take into account, and this is the problem with fucking blank slate-ism, because it does flatten that playing field.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Let me put a couple of points together there. I- I like that. Um, first of all, yeah, I mean, morality is complicated. It's a set of norms where we fear violating those norms because we just fear being punished selfishly. But also, it's a set of moral dispositions where, you know, most of us enjoy treating other people with kindness. You know, you don't just help the person who's in a wheelchair through the door when other people are looking. You- you do it even when no one's looking, and that's- that's, of course, you deserve more moral credit when you do that. But the- the reality is, like, moral behavior is super complicated. It's a mixture of selfishness and long-term thinking and- and genuine altruism, and it's hard to detect what's what in any particular case. But- but the smarter person with a good theory of mind who's not necessarily consciously thinking about it, but kind of instinctively understands there are benefits to long-term cooperation, they tend to follow these mutually beneficial rules. And therefore, there are these, like, positive externalities. In fact, going back to Garrett Jones, he and I have a paper on this, um, called Cognitive Enhancement and Network Effects: How Individual Traits Influence Social Welfare, and we gave an argument, this is back in 2020, for why voluntary embryo selection for IQ would actually be a pro-social thing. Um, not just because it's making people nicer. It's probably not. You should have other reasons to make them nicer maybe.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
But because it has these effects and- and it also produces, you know, smarter people produce more wealth in the world, more innovations, et cetera. And so what does that do? It enables us to create a society where we're so wealthy we don't have to worry about, "Should I commit crime or not?" You can just get a job, and you're fine. Like, you can actually (laughs) ... You know, wealthier societies can- can afford to treat strangers with kindness rather than hostility because you're not constantly worried about how to put a meal on the table or something. So, it's interesting. These things interact, um, moral behavior and intelligence in ways that are really kind of counterintuitive, to be honest, but- but they seem real.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, the ability- the ability to work out the repercussions of your actions to-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... you know,
- 1:10:08 – 1:18:13
Ethical Arguments for Genetic Enhancement
- CWChris Williamson
again, it's- it- it... I understand why many people that are maybe first being introduced to this, people who don't like the idea of individual differences from genetic factors or group differences due to genetic factors can understand why it- it feels so icky every time that you say the word genetic or genetics. I've just got this-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... like Pavlovian fucking ick response to it, which I still, after thinking about this for, you know, 18 months, I still-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
(laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
... haven't really actually been able to get myself past, which, you know, maybe shows just how ingrained that is. You know, eugenics and- and sort of the horrors of Nazi Germany and- and that period just did so much to really cloud any discussion that even veers in the remote sort of region of that direction. Um, but if you were to say to someone, um, "Do you think it would be better for there to be less crime in future?" Because the very people that many of the, uh, I guess skeptics or critics of genetic enhancement people from the left, well, one of the reasons that you're trying to do this, at least originally, was that you wanted to raise up the working class. You wanted to improve the situations of poverty, uh, the- the, of strife and struggle for the sort of normal working man, the proletariat. And you go, "Okay, well, you can... This is something that can be quite, it- it can be achieved." Um, but if you assume or i- if your worldview is that the only reason that you get different outcomes is because of different opportunities, because of exclusively structural, systemic, societal factors, this is not something... this is not an opportunity to, uh, uh, that- that presents itself. And I think we both said last time that a lot of the people who do have this sort of blank slate view of humans are going to be faced with a very difficult, um, like, literally an unlimited conveyor belt of difficult decisions. First off, what are you gonna do with your child? If this technology is on the table and you can afford it and your right-leaning colleague at work has decided that they're going to get it because they don't have the same ick factor that you and your particular group do, then okay, well, that's fine, but your children are maybe going to have a less robust immune system, or they're maybe gonna need glasses at five years old, or, you know, maybe the risk for autism is higher, or maybe they're going to be in a more externalizing behavior, and they're more likely to go to jail. That doesn't seem very good. So, okay, so put your money where your mouth is personally. And then when it comes to what happens more socially too, you think, well, if we can show that this kind of intervention, that these kinds of genetic selections actually do make for less crime, actually do make for this, you go, "Well, where's that effect coming from?" Because it's still the same racist, bigoted, transphobic, homophobic-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
(laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, environment, uh, for the first time ever-... were actually able to manipulate the genetic environment, not just the post-womb environment, or were able to select before the genet- bef- be- before the womb. Um-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yep.
- CWChris Williamson
... because up until now the only, the only, i- if you deny the genetic reality, the only acceptable explanation was environment, because that's the only thing that ever, uh, sort of oscillates. Whereas now-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
That's right.
- CWChris Williamson
... we actually can d- we can get in there and, you know, who knows? Maybe there is a country. Maybe in 50 years we look back and we go, "Wow, China, their crime rates declined by, you k- 50% over... and they didn't do what the guy in El Salvador did." Um, and-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Bukele.
- CWChris Williamson
... you know. Yeah. And we-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... we don't... We have, uh, uh, the opportunity to do that. It- it's fascinating.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
You know, by the way, that there is a very naughty paper written about... uh, it was in the 1990s. Uh, and the idea behind this paper, it was an economist, was that the abortion ban in certain American states in the 1970s being lifted because of Roe v. Wade resulted in a much lower crime rate in the 1990s. And the way that happened is children, unwanted children, who weren't born but otherwise would have been forced to be born, because now there was the opportunity for abortion-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
... actually ended up resulting in fewer of those children, and therefore less crime. And the way that they tested that hypothesis is look at the states in which abortion was legal before Roe v. Wade versus those in which it was illegal. And what you see is dropping crime rates 20 years later in the states in which it was illegal and became legal. Now this is-
- CWChris Williamson
Surely that would be, surely that would be m- more of an environmental, uh, insight than a genetic one, unless people that get abortions happen to have some particular genetic predisposition that then gets passed down to their kids.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
It could be, it could be either or both.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
And of course the kind of people who wanted an abortion but couldn't afford to go to another state-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
... to do it might be a certain kind of person, or unwilling to do it, or whatever.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
I don't want to weigh in on that. I'm just saying that that argument has been made. Um, it's, it's an interesting one. It was in the book Freakanomics as well. So, it's a very mainstream economist who did it named Steven Levitt. (clears throat) But in terms of the point that you made on blank slatism and the kind of cognitive dissonance that elites have, well, there's this phrase, you know, blank slatists in the streets, hereditarian between the sheets.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
And, you know, we all see this. I was in academia where, you know, (sighs) maybe I don't care that much about IQ, although we're talking about it right now. I mean, I'm just telling you, putting my cards on the table, I don't want to be an IQ maximizer for my own kids. I know some people who would be. I care more about personality traits and health, even though I think IQ matters a bit. But my colleagues who had denounced me for even talking about IQ, I mean, they're the ultimate IQ realists, again, because they're obsessed with it in selecting their spouse, in thinking about, "I want the smartest grad students, I want to appear to be smart, um, and I want to please my colleagues." So they have a lot of cognitive dissonance. In fact, blank slatism has always been selective. They don't really believe it in their private lives, which is why I said blank slatist in the streets, hereditarian between the sheets, but they also don't even fully apply this, um, consistently. So, a very famous and widely read book is Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. And he argued in this book, the point of this book is actually pretty interesting in, in many ways, showing, like, history is partly determined by, like, what diseases happened to be near your tribe at the time, or did climate change, you know, happen really dramatically in Iceland at this time? And that's gonna have effects on, you know, who lives and who dies, who succeeds. Tha- that's all true. But he says, he's, he's so obsessed with being a blank slatist and showing, like, it's all just arbitrary, like, "Why is England, you know, richer than whatever, Somalia or something?" Um, and so he says on page 22, "It's always struck me that the New Guineans that I work with are, on average, much smarter than the, than Europeans and Americans." So he throws that in there, like, as if we're supposed to just go, "Wait, you're a blank slatist but you're actively saying this group that has Stone Age technology is obviously smarter than Brits or Americans or whatever." And it's like, okay, I get it. This is, this is a political game you're playing. You're not even a blank slatist.
- CWChris Williamson
(gasps)
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
You're a selective blank slatist. So, again, this is stuff that we inherited from the war. I understand why we inherit it. We inherited it because there were claims made, especially by Germans, "Look, we're racially superior to other groups." This is a justification for, you know, colonialism, hegemony, and war. And so what happened is this overreaction where we're supposed to think there are just no differences. And people make even this absurd claim while we're watching the Olympics that Africans are not faster runners than, let's say, Europeans. That is fucking crazy.
- 1:18:13 – 1:26:46
The Olympic Female Boxing Situation
- CWChris Williamson
know-
- JADr Jonathan Anomaly
(laughs) Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Italian boxer quits bout, sparking furor over gender at Olympics. The Italian Angela Carini stopped fighting only 46 seconds into a matchup against Imane Khelif of Algeria, who had been barred from a woman's event last year. An Italian boxer abandoned her bout, the Italian boxer withdrew after she had the shit kicked out of her. Khelif, 25, was permitted to compete at the Olympics even though she had been barred last year after boxing officials said she did not meet eligibility requirements to compete in a woman's event. Another athlete also barred from last y- last year's, uh, championship under similar circumstances, Lin Yu-ting has also been cleared to fight in Paris. The presence in the women's competition have, have been the latest flashpoint in the politically charged debate over gender and fair play in sports. There was... uh, uh, the IOC doesn't use quite the same, uh, set of criteria to judge, um, uh, sex, gender, uh, that this particular previous competition did, but it seems like you have two biological males-... competing in the one sport that you shouldn't have biological males competing against women in, which is the one where they literally punch each other in the face.
Episode duration: 1:47:39
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