The Wild Ethics Of Human Genetic Enhancement - Dr Jonathan Anomaly

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 0:00 Even before you have gene editing or embryo selection, which has just come online, what we've had is increased genetic inequality in the last century. Why would we have that? Well, women's education. So for the first time, women are getting actually more education than men, and because of their choosiness and their preferences, what's happening is, like, a female doctor will just marry a male surgeon or a, a really successful male lawyer. Intelligence is the number one trait along which people assortatively mate. We're already getting increasing genetic inequalities in the West without any of this technology. What'll the technology do? It'll accelerate those inequalities.

Chris Williamson 0:39 (wind blowing) What do people misunderstand

Chris Williamson 0:41 about what eugenics is and means?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 0:44 Good question. So I would say eugenics, in the broadest sense, is any attempt to harness the knowledge that we have about heredity to influence the traits of our kids. And in that sense, eugenics is as old as people, and actually much older. Um, you know, any mammal that uses sexual selection, um, ends up in such a situation where females choose males on the basis of traits that will partly influence their own welfare, but will also influence the welfare of their kids. And so, in a way, eugenics is as old as you can think, uh, uh, as old as humanity. But the, the term dates back to 1883 and, uh, Francis Galton, who coined the term, and I would say the reason that that term was invented and the concepts of eugenics, in a really explicit way, made a comeback, is that we had a few things happen in the 1800s. First, we get Mendel's experiments on pea plants, so we started getting to know a little bit more about how heredity works, um, a little bit more about what eventually became called genes. Gene, the, the term gene wasn't actually coined until 1905, but we, we understood there must be some unit of heredity that somehow blends and recombines to shape traits. So first, it starts with Mendel, then, of course, Darwin comes up with his theory of evolution by natural selection applied to all animals, not just plants, including people, and his cousin, Francis Galton, who studied the heredity of specific traits that we care about in humans. Intelligence, so he wrote a book called Hereditary Genius, but also just banal traits like height and skin color and hair texture and stuff like that. And in fact, in fact, Francis Galton was the first to invent twin studies. So this is the idea that we now use in behavioral genetics, where he thought, "Hey, here's a thought experiment. What would happen if we took identical twins and fraternal twins and raised them apart and just saw how they ended up? Like, would they be really similar, really different?" And as you know, uh, fraternal twins share half of their DNA. Um, identical twins share all of their DNA. And so he thought of this really cool natural experiment to tease out what part of our personality, our physicality is due to nature, nurture, et cetera. So, so in short, what you get is this kind of Golden Age in the 1800s where we're starting to discover how evolution works, how heredity works, and then this thought that, "Well, maybe we can control it to some extent in the same way we do for animals and the same way we do for plants." I mean, look at what corn used to look like 3,000 years ago. It's this pathetic little weed that yields a few calories, and through selective breeding, obviously we make it more nutritious, more delicious. You know, you take those honeycrisp apples, like, they didn't start that way. They were these sort of bitter fruits, and now they taste like just pure sugar. You know, you can amp up the vitamin C, you can do these kinds of things, and of course it gets dangerous when you talk about selective breeding for, for people, and we'll get into that, but it's pretty clear once you understand heredity, one of your first thoughts is gonna be like, "Okay, how does this influence, like, my choice of mates, what kind of children I'm gonna end up with, and how do those children end up influencing the traits of people around us and the overall social welfare of people?"

Chris Williamson 4:01 What do you think people are concerned about when the word eugenics comes up?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 4:05 Obviously Nazism. Um, and I, I think this is partly an innocent explanation, it's partly, um... Yeah, I mean, the Nazis did engage in the worst forms of eugenics you can imagine, which is involuntarily, uh, sterilizing their own citizens, and I mean Germans in this case. They actually sterilized about 300,000 of their own disabled citizens. Of course, mass murder that Germans engaged in. And so to that extent, we rightly associate it with some of the evils in the past. Also American sterilizations. But there's also a less innocent, and I think, um, more sinister explanation for why we associate with Nazi Germany, and that is the kind of woke Left. So they like to take terms and hijack them such that you can't have certain kinds of thoughts. Right? So for example, we all have thoughts like, "I really care about the traits of my children," and to the extent that I'm engaged in a long-term relationship, I mean, of course what I really care about is the personality of the other person. I'm not just thinking, "Oh, her genes are gonna end up in my kids." But the thought does occur to you that your kids are gonna be something like, you know, a combination of the parents, and you know, sort of that extent, like, thinking about heredity and thinking about how our choices influence outcomes for our kids is completely natural, and a lot on the radical left want to make this thought almost impossible to have. And so they call almost anything that involves genetic explanations eugenics. And so I think that's the, the, uh, darker reasons that we associate it with Nazi Germany. Not the good reason, which is, yeah, we have to be careful and learn from those, those episodes in history, but it's also just the manipulation of thought. Um, so yeah.

Chris Williamson 5:53 It seems like an odd paradox that occurs especially with people from the super progressive Left, because on one hand, they want to have this sort of-... blank slate approach to things, which allows for pure meritocracy to come through, but also seem to be quite against meritocratic systems as well, because implied in that is that the people that don't succeed were somehow responsible for their own failure. But the solution to that is, well, let's fold in the heritability question, let's fold in behavioral genetics into this, which doesn't give everybody the same starting point, like, by design, but that is so off the table that it ends up being this pretzel-shaped loop-the-loop in a desperate attempt to kind of zero out or square the circle of this conversation.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 6:41 That is exactly right, and it's fascinating because the early eugenicists after Galton, and I mean especially in England and the United States, were progressives, um, because, why, because they thought science could help us advance our species. Obviously it can, right? Vaccines, contraception. There are of course downsides to that that you've discussed on your show. But, you know, contraception, at least in principle, you know, women can now control their reproductive choices and decide when and whether to go to work, and that sort of thing. And similarly, well, the left thought, "We can control the traits of our children." So this does show you, because the early eugenicists were progressives. There's no doubt about that. It does show you there's nothing inherent to the left that attaches them to the blank slate, but there is this tradition going back to Marx and the French Revolution and Rousseau, and especially now with the woke Left, whereby they've put all their cards on the blank slate, this, this doctrine that any disparities we see before us are the product of oppression, unjust discrimination, uh, deprivation in the household, or bad schools or something. And by doing that, they're, they're actually hamstringing themselves, because as this technology, and, and we can talk about the technology now, but as the technology that's gonna allow us to shape the traits of our children, um, is more and more developed and available, especially using in vitro fertilization, and embryo selection, and so on, they're gonna face an increasing cognitive dissonance, whereby on the one hand, they're gonna have every incentive to use this. I mean, everyone recognizes heredity powerfully shapes the traits of our kids, but on the other hand, their official public position is gonna be to denounce it, because it's gonna blow up their entire worldview. Once you have a price on the false belief in the blank slate, once you have to pay a price, for example, foregoing the use of technologies that might improve the welfare of your children, what you publicly say and privately believe I think will become more and more different until the blank slate is blown up, and far leftists are gonna have to just publicly endorse, eventually, uh, the reality of heredity.

Chris Williamson 8:57 That's fascinating.

Chris Williamson 8:59 What's the difference then between eugenics and genetic enhancement, and embryo selection?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 9:06 Yeah, good question. I think there is no difference. Um, I think it's pretty clear that genetic enhancement is a youthful euphemism for eugenics. And some euphemisms are useful. I mean, the truth is, you know, it can disarm people when you say you're defending eugenics. Um, I've certainly done that to people. Your, our mutual friend, Diana Fleischman, likes to get under people's skin by using the word eugenics. Um, so yeah, some bioethicists and others have used the term genetic enhancement instead, and, you know, you might say on the one hand, that, that's kind of nice because it doesn't have these emotional associations with it. On the other hand, it's the same thing, and so the idea is, look, when we're talking about eugenics or genetic enhancement, we're talking about, um, paying attention to the genetic traits of our kids, whether we're intentionally altering them or actually intentionally refraining from altering them. For example, um, you know, CRISPR-Cas9 can technically be used now to edit the genes of an embryo, but there's so many off-target mutations that it would be incredibly dangerous for you to try to do that right now. And I would say that the decision to refrain from doing that is itself a form of either eugenics or genetic enhancement. You're using your knowledge of heredity and how the technology works to shape the genetic endowment of your kids. So in principle, genetic enhancement is a euphemism. It's supposed to disarm your opponent so that you don't think about some of the downsides of eugenics, but the reality is, we've always made these distinctions in philosophy and in other adjacent disciplines, between voluntary eugenics and coercive eugenics, between eugenics or genetic enhancement, if you wanna call it that, that is aimed at improving the welfare of your child or improving the welfare of all children, right? So again, I'm not, I'm not big on definitions. It's clear why we've chosen this other definition, and we, we tend to use genetic enhancement, but as you've probably seen from reactions to the work I've written, and Diana Fleischman as well, what they're gonna do if you use genetic enhancement is just call you a eugenicist anyway. So at that point, why not just say, "Okay, call me what you want." What's really important is, like, what are the policy implications of this? What are the responsibilities that scientists and parents have to use this technology for the benefit of their kids and for humankind rather than misuse it in the form of mass sterilizations and murder, which happened in Nazi Germany?

Chris Williamson 11:34 I mean, any time that I've ever had a conversation about behavioral genetics, the people that didn't watch the entire episode have a problem and call it eugenics. I'm like, you, you're, you're pointing your finger at Robert Plomin, like, the f- what was he, the fourth or the ninth most cited psychologist of the 1900s-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 11:55 Right.

Chris Williamson 11:55 ... the entire century.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 11:57 Right.

Chris Williamson 11:57 And he's, he's in the top 10 most cited psychologists, like the most stellar research career, you know, tens of thousands of twin pairs that he's done with his research in the UK, and then, uh-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 12:12 ... all over the world-

Chris Williamson 12:13 Yeah, it's-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 12:13 ... in Sweden, in Japan. I mean, yeah, we have overwhelming evidence for heritability.

Chris Williamson 12:17 Yeah, and then Stuart Ritchie comes on.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 12:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:19 Stuart Ritchie comes on to have another discussion about behavioral genetics.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 12:21 Yep.

Chris Williamson 12:21 And it's like, there is, um, u- u- understandably, I suppose, sensitivity around anything that could slippery-slope its way down to forced sterilization of particular groups of people. And it is a little bit of a shame, looking back, that the first widespread adoption of eugenics en masse was done by a group that used it for such malign purposes that there is now this quite arduous game that you need to play in an attempt to talk about, "Okay, well, h- how can we maybe limit some really bad genetic traits that occur within people?" Like, everybody's already doing it through the way that they choose their mates in any case, visually. Like, what the fuck do you think you're actually attracted-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 13:03 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:04 ... to when you choose the partner? Uh, but, uh-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 13:06 Right.

Chris Williamson 13:06 ... so why should anybody be in support of genetic enhancement?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 13:12 Good. Yeah, and actually, let me back up and answer the final part of your previous question first, and then give arguments for enhancement. You, you mentioned there's a difference between eugenics, genetic enhancement, which I said are just kind of euphemisms, and then embryo selection. So let me say something really quickly about what's on the table right now. So of course, we've always had mate selection. And even going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, they thought explicitly about the biological basis of society. They actually thought the main virtue of a political society is to create a kind of biomass that, in turn, produces a certain kind of culture. In Sparta, it was a fighting culture. In Athens, it was a bit wiser for some period of time. But even they understood that, like, biology shapes culture and vice versa. It made a comeback again and, and got its official name, eugenics, because of Darwin and Galton and all of this. And then fast-forward a century and a half, and, like, why are we talking about it all of a sudden now? Partly, it's because of behavioral genetics. We now really understand how heritable certain traits are. It's partly because of computational genetics. We're now seeing, like, how the actual genes work to produce those traits. But it's also because of technology like in vitro fertilization, the science of genome-wide association studies, and what's called polygenic risk scores. So let me kind of develop each of those. So since the '70s, in, in the US and England and now the whole world, we've had this process of in vitro fertilization. At first, it was just for infertile or gay couples, where you could artificially stimulate the production of eggs for women, and then, you know, you artificially inseminate those eggs. And then you have a choice, like, "Which, which embryo am I going to implant?" And it's fairly obvious, if you're only gonna implant one, or if that one fails, maybe a second one, out of, let's say, 10 or 20, you're not gonna do it at random. I mean, you could do it at random, but that seems insane, in the same way it's insane to choose a mate at random, right? "Let's just throw the dice, and who, you know, whoever it lands on, the, the nearest girl to me, I'm gonna pick her to marry me." Nobody does that. And so what you have in the '70s is you can test for aneuploidy, you can test for Down syndrome, these sorts of things, Tay-Sachs, these really simple disorders that are caused by a single gene or a set of small, small set of genes. And obviously, you're gonna not select that one, and then you'll select one of the other ones. But what's happened in the last, say, 20, 30 years is ... well, 10 years really, we have these genome-wide association studies from the UK Biobank, from the Japan Biobank. There are about 10 or 12 of these around the world, where you take millions of people, and you genetically sequence them. And then what you can do is see which ones develop, let's say, type 1 diabetes, uh, breast cancer, which ones tend to have more educational attainment or even just score higher on IQ tests, which ones are taller. And after enough samples, what you can do is just associate these hundreds or thousands of tiny genetic variants with traits, and then, with some probability, what you can do is, for example, now with IVF, sequence each of the embryos. And it's, it's really not dangerous at all. You just take a tiny clip of that embryo and run it through a kind of ... well, through a sequencer, through an algorithm, and you develop what's called a polygenic risk score. And the idea is, most of the traits we care about, intelligence, most forms of cancer, it's not caused by a single gene disorder, it's caused by hundreds or thousands of variants. And what you can do then, or now, is assign scores to different embryos. And now what people can do is say, "Not only do I not want the embryo with Tay-Sachs, I also don't want the embryo that's at extreme risk of, of heart disease or schizophrenia," or, and this is now possible, I know people who are capable of doing it, intelligence. So what you can now do is assign a set of polygenic risk scores to those embryos and select the one in accordance with whatever it is that you want. So couples are gonna select probably some more for health than intelligence, some maybe care more about intelligence. Eventually, it's gonna be personality and even political orientation, which are to some degree heritable. And that's really why all of this is making a comeback now. So tying together eugenics, genetic enhancement, and embryo selection, it's really the, the viability of doing embryo selection in a more fine-grained way than ever before that's kind of bringing back the debate on, on eugenics and genetic enhancement.

Chris Williamson 17:43 With this technology on the table, does it make it immoral as a parent who is aware of it to not use it on your child?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 17:52 I think so, but that's a pretty controversial view. Um, actually, let me ca- let me qualify that. Um, in large parts of the world, most people won't have enough money to go through IVF, for example. So is it immoral to do what you can't do? No. Um, in philosophy, we have this famous saying, "Ought implies can." And if you can't do it, then there's no obligation for you to do it.... but I would say that the more you understand the technology and can afford it, the stronger your obligation is, potentially, to use it. And that's kind of hedging, hedging my claim, but I think that's, that's right, it should be hedged. I still think, for example, that the best thing that you can do for your kids is choose the right mate, partly just because of the environmental conditions you're gonna raise them in, but also because, let's face it, if IQ is heritable by about 80% by adulthood, if lots of personality traits are 50% heritable, you know, I'm not an IQ maximizer, but I want my kid to be conscientious. I want him to have friends and to be able to interact in socially productive ways, and frankly, just, like, make the world a better place, you know? And if you want those kinds of traits, the best thing you can do is select a mate. And then after that, you know, the cheaper the technology and the more powerful it is, if you can subtly influence those traits so that they're a little bit nicer, little smarter, little, a little more likely to succeed in life, I think you should do it. I think that's fairly obvious. But I will say this, I think the reason that people are hesitant to make claims like that is, first of all, there are infertile people, and you don't wanna make them feel bad, right? So it's sort of like there's this implicit message that if you say, "Oh, you know, you should have, like, a lot of kids, you know? And you should really care about the traits they have," and some people can't, or some people, let's say, are at the, well, let's just put it mildly, on the left side of the bell curve of IQ or health or whatever, saying, "You should have genius kids," when it's, like, not really possible is, is a bit of a slap in the face to them. So I do think there are strong obligations here, but I understand why people are hesitant to acknowledge it.

Chris Williamson 20:05 Is there something particularly different about selecting from an existing combination of your genetic material and your partner's genetic material, and somehow editing or creating genes themselves within the existing pair? So with one of these situations, you're selecting from raw materials that you provide, and in the other one, when the technology perhaps advances further, you may be able to go in and edit and change genes already. Is there something morally different about those two, do you think?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 20:41 I think the moral difference would only stem from the empirical realities. So for example, like right now, CRISPR has this problem... Uh, I should say CRISPR is the gene editing system that we learned from bacteria. Bacteria have been fighting phage viruses that invade them for billions of years, so they've co-evolved, right? Um, what CRISPR evolved as in bacteria is a way of sequencing and disabling various genes and viruses that attack them. So CRISPR actually uses... Uh, it works quite well. Um, we learned to use this from bacteria. The problem is if you were to CRISPR an embryo right now and you wanted to change hundreds or thousands of variants, because that's what actually produces complex traits, there would be a lot of, a lot of mutations that you would inadvertently produce. But now let's say that y- you take that away, right? Well, that changes the moral calculus, because, like, if you knew for sure, for certain, right? And this is purely hypothetical. You knew there would be zero downstream mutations and the only thing there would be is, like, decreased risk of heart disease, well, of course, you know, you should use it, and you should... You'd have a strong obligation to use it. And it's-

Chris Williamson 21:52 Even if, even if you and your partner didn't have the raw genetic material to create the reduced risk of heart disease?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 21:59 That's right. That's right. And, and, and look, we already say this, like, you know, at the extremes, governments take chi- children away from their parents when they refuse to feed them enough, when they basically create an environment that ensures that they're not gonna develop properly. And so we do make moral claims about what parents owe to their children, like adequate nutrition and exercise, and like, you know, put them in school. Don't just, like, keep them home and don't teach them anything. And the same thing is gonna happen for genetics to the extent that our knowledge improves. The problem right now is like, yeah, you wouldn't use CRISPR, but it's really more for, you know, scientific reasons that lead you to that moral conclusion. So yeah, I actually don't think that there are intrinsic moral reasons not to use it. Here's another, another point though that's worth making. There's actually a really good scientific objection to using CRISPR right now on complex traits and that is the pleiotropy objection. Pleiotropy occurs when one genetic variant or a set of variants produces multiple phenotypic consequences. So there's, like, one simple example that's often used, and that is there's a genetic variant in East Asians that causes both dry ear wax and low body odor, odor, right?

Chris Williamson 23:16 (laughs)

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 23:16 And it's like, "Why? Who fucking..." You know, you can give God knows what evolutionary reasons or explanations for that, but it's true. It just, you know... So one of them is either neutral or, or maybe they're both positive, but, like, it's kind of trivial. There's probably lots and lots of pleiotropy throughout nature, and until you actually understand what genes do, and we actually are a fair way from understanding the total effects of all genes. One problem is by tinkering with one gene, you could inadvertently s- select in favor of a healthy trait and against, um, another trait where that trait is actually even more healthy, right? So you end up with, like, a net cost by fucking around with the genome before you actually know what every gene does. Now, there's a reply to that, and, and one of the interesting replies is that even before we know what every variant does, it turns out there's something called positive pleiotropy, and, um, Genomic Prediction, a company that already does this...What they do is they've created an overall health index, such that it turns out when you select against a set of variants that cause one disease, it's also more likely to reduce a whole suite of other diseases. And that's partly because, again, there are genes or sets of genes that basically are just bad for you, especially some of the more recent de novo mutations. Everyone throughout their lifetime acquires new mutations. Like, think of the freckles on your, your skin, you know, and, and other kinds of defects that we get that's visible, and we pass along those defects. That was one reason that Francis Galton and Charles Darwin worried about developed societies like England. He said, "Basically, it's inevitable that we're gonna accumulate more and more deleterious mutations because our medical system and our welfare programs basically ensure that everyone survives and can reproduce." Whereas when you have more ancestral environments, you get purifying selection. When there's a set of de novo mutations that produce health risks, et cetera, they're likely to be selected out. They're like-

Chris Williamson 25:24 Oh, because the-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 25:25 ... or like it's

Narrator 25:25 ... the-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 25:25 ... or they die, et cetera. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 25:27 ... the technology and the social safety net that you're given has raised the minimum level of health that somebody can s- uh, sorry, yeah, lowered the minimum level of health that somebody can survive at. A person that previously would have existed for five years or 10 years now lives until they're 70 or 80 because all of the support that they're given, which the side effect of that would be a weakening of your immune system. And if you have those sorts of genes being reproduced back into the gene pool, that then makes downstream from that a, quote unquote, "weaker society."

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 26:02 Yeah, although I wouldn't quite put it that way, because what, what, what the key is, is that you're more likely to live through your reproductive age. So it's not that you live longer, it's that you don't die when you're 20 when you-

Chris Williamson 26:13 Right.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 26:13 ... do something stupid, or, you know, you can, you know, famously, you can just get bifocals if you can't see very well, right?

Chris Williamson 26:20 Mm-hmm.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 26:21 Which is good, you know, and, and Darwin and Galton were, were quite happy. I mean, they said, "Look, we're ambivalent about this, and we support a lot of the social safety nets there are. We certainly don't think, like, we should abandon modern medicine or, or antibiotics or something." But the net effect of that has to be, just the logic of it has to be that we're accumulating deleterious mutations such that essentially, since we don't have purifying selection anymore, we're gonna build these up. Now, John Tooby, the evolutionary psychologist, wrote a really cool essay some years ago. It's, it's only two pages long, so all of your viewers can, can read it quickly, and it's called The Race between Germline Gene Editing and Genetic Meltdown, and it plays on exactly this logic. Like, we are in this weird race whereby the richer we are, the more inevitably, um, deleterious mutations we'll get, and that will lead to a kind of j- slow genetic meltdown, unless we have ways of editing those out or using embryo selection to select them out. So this is like, this is just part of being human. Like, we, we get these massive boosts, and it's, it's kind of like on the cultural level, like poor societies can't afford to go woke. They can't afford insane beliefs like men and women have the same capacities. This is why, you know, y- you show these videos of, of s- (laughs) you know, like Lia Thomas or whatever, the transgender swimmer at Penn, where I used to teach, to an African tribe, and they're just confused. It's just really confusing to them. And in the same way that when... It's only when you get really rich, like wealthy as a culture, that you can afford to believe things that are actually at odds with reality itself. So too, when you get rich, you can actually sort of impoverish, at the genetic level, the individual and the group, unless there's some way of altering those genes.

Chris Williamson 28:14 Mm-hmm.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 28:15 So yeah.

Chris Williamson 28:16 Going into

Chris Williamson 28:18 a conversation I had a little while ago with David Goggins about the equivalent of the Overton window but for discomfort.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 28:24 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 28:24 So you could imagine that in the, um, the maximum amount of human experience you could have would be from 0 to 100, from pain to pleasure, and what we have managed to do in the modern world is constrain the guardrails, I would actually say, on both sides. I think there's less dread, but there's also less awe as well. And what that means is that people are hypersensitized as soon as they step outside of that. And this is kind of the same, but with regards to genetics. But what we've seen is a, um, degree of security and comfort that has come around through advanced healthcare, through more social security and social support-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 29:00 Yep.

Chris Williamson 29:00 ... and so on and so forth.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 29:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:02 Uh, and yeah, we see this within our own lives. You know, the person... E- everybody has an inclination, even the most, you know, progressive, woke-y person has the inclination of the silver spoon, coddled, aristocratic family wanker-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 29:16 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 29:16 ... and they also understand that when they are faced with adversity, they're probably going to struggle. I think that one of the concerns-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 29:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:23 ... would be from this, again, the slippery slope down into the bad, coercive form of eugenics, is, "Well, what about the freckled community? Are you saying that we need to get rid of the freckled community? What about them?"

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 29:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:34 "Are you denying their personhood and their identity?"

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 29:36 Yep.

Chris Williamson 29:37 "How can you?"

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 29:37 Yep.

Chris Williamson 29:37 "How can you? What about deafness? What about the deaf community? That's a non-insignificant portion of people. Are you saying that they're, they're somehow, uh, uh, less, suboptimal in a way that means that we ought to get rid of them and all of their future progeny? What if we need to select out from them and th- they can't have children?"

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 29:53 Yup. Yeah, it's great, and that's a common objection, and you know, I used to not take it as seriously as I do now, but there is one way to take it seriously and give a pretty good answer to. On the one hand, I think it's clear that if you're having children, you can select, let's say, an embryo, it's a more direct form of selection, it's clear you should select a kid that can hear, right? And if they wanna make themselves deaf later, they can do that. It's a lot harder to reverse it in the opposite direction.Um, it is true that in principle, we could imagine a world where people get more callous toward minorities that have various kinds of disabilities, and that did happen in the 1930s. Hitler actually deemed the old, quote, "Useless eaters," right? They're- they're consuming more resources than they're producing, and so they're- they're- they're on the chopping block, right? I mean, it's happened before. And in fact, in human history, it was pretty common when resources are scarce, especially. Take, you know, Eskimos famously, if you get too old or too sick, they just kind of push you out of the igloo and onto the ice, and it's- it's your time. You know? I mean, it's not uncommon in human history. Might it make a comeback? I think in principle, yes, but it also shows that genes aren't everything. The power of culture is real, and when you look at the last 40 years, in, let's say the US or UK, despite all the social pathologies, which we can talk about, there's actually been a really remarkable move toward moral inclusion, and so when you think about, like, disability rights, those have actually increased in recent years, not decreased. So, it's perfectly compatible, I think, to have a world in which you say, "Look, if you're born unable to hear or you have various disabilities, we should have all kinds of laws and norms that protect you." But that's not inconsistent with saying, nevertheless, like, it's something to be avoided. Like, one of my best students, just to give an anecdote, from Duke University, um, broke his neck. He was about to enter Duke, uh, 10 years ago on a diving scholarship and an academic scholarship. He actually did enter on an academic scholarship, and he got into a diving accident the summer before he entered, broke his neck. He was in a wheelchair the whole time. Remarkable kid. He ended up one of the best students I've ever had. Got a Rhodes Scholarship and went out, did his PhD at Oxford, and now he's working in politics here in the US. But I asked him, actually, when I was in a controversy over this eugenic stuff, um, we spent the summer together in Oxford, I was writing a book at the time, and I was like, "You know, surely, you know, you would want a cure for your current condition." He's like, "Of course." (laughs) Like, you know, like, on the one hand, he's- he's going around arguing for disability rights, and on the other hand, he doesn't want to be disabled. Why would you want to be, right? So, I think a lot of these scholars, um, on the one hand, they have a genuine moral concern. Like, we really should protect, both socially and legally, the disabled, and have, if anything, even more empathy for them. But that's not inconsistent with selecting against disability, and I think a lot of- a lot of noise to the contrary is pure virtue signaling, right? People want to appear morally better than other people, and so they pretend like people who care about health are somehow against the disabled, which is just bullshit. I- I- I don't think we should listen to them. I don't think we should take some of their objections at face value because they themselves don't believe it.

Chris Williamson 33:19 Just to round out

Chris Williamson 33:21 the discussion about genetic interventions, is it your view that they're not morally different from environmental interventions, from stepping in to take the children away from the parents that aren't feeding them, et cetera?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 33:35 Well, they're different in- in a qualitative sense. I mean, of course there's a different mechanism, right? Um, but they're not necessarily different in their consequences. Like, if you drink alcohol as a- a pregnant woman or you consume a lot of sushi, which has fish like tuna that has high levels of mercury in it, right? You actually have a serious risk of impairing the brain development of your kid. Or back in the '70s, like when we had lead in gasoline and paint, a lot of kids were born with like a 20, 30 point IQ deficit because at that crucial age when your head is developing in the womb in the first few years, you know you're likely to get this irreversible brain damage. Is that different than selecting in favor of a low IQ kid at the genetic level? And my answer is no, to the extent that they're both bad for the kid and they're both in some ways irreversible. So, um, you know, environmental deprivation or enhancement can be just as reversible or irreversible as genetic- genetic ones can be, although genetics tend to be a little more permanent. You might say, okay, one of the things though about toying with or tinkering with embryos is that once you've decided to genetically edit, um, you know, some environmental enhancements or alterations can be undone. Not always, like with the examples I gave, but, you know, genetics can't be undone. But that's not true, right? If we have the power to edit a gene in one generation, it's likely we're going to have even more power in the next generation to un-edit if, you know, you think that there's a better addition or subtraction or whatever. So, I actually don't think in principle it's any different than a lot of environmental innerv- innovations, or- or sorry, interventions. Um, but people have a tendency to think it is because genes are essential and environment is somehow more flexible. It's not always true.

Chris Williamson 35:28 Is it a case of a naturalistic fallacy as well? That just, this is the way that it's always been, there's something that feels... The same way as, uh, the person who would be maybe fine with taking antibiotics to get rid of some infection that they have, wouldn't be okay with taking a vaccine.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 35:46 Yeah. Um, I think, I think that's true, but also when you look back at- at history, there- there was resistance to, not so much antibiotics, but certainly vaccines, um, life extension like artificial respirators. There were church leaders that were against these things, right? Because i- if it's your time, you know, God- God is taking you for a reason. And so, you know, the idea that you would use a respirator to artificially extend life is clearly immoral, right? Now it's immoral according to them if you- if you take it away, right? (laughs) Um, so a lot of this is naturalistic fallacy, because we've always done it this way, it must be good, as opposed to this new technology.Um, some of it is, you know, legitimate skepticism toward new technologies. I mean, look at the way the COVID vaccine was, was pushed by elites. Like, my view was always pretty moderate on this. Like, it looks like probably old people are better off taking it, young people probably don't need it. Um, but, but the reality, as you saw, right, is that there was just this push, like everyone should have five boosters, you know. Fetuses should be given the COVID shot. I mean, just total insanity, the politicization of science. And the reality is, this is how, this is how it works with almost all new interventions. But let me mention actually briefly, last week, um, there was a really interesting study that was published in the journal of Science, and it was a comprehensive survey of American adults, and there were thousands involved, and they asked them about their attitudes toward embryo selection, and specifically for cognitive ability. So they asked them, like, "How comfortable are you giving your kid, like, SAT prep lessons, right, to give them an advantage?" And, and almost everyone said yes. Amazingly, like 10% said that's immoral. I, I don't know why, but whatever. Um, most people say, yeah, of course, you know, classes, environmental interv- interventions are okay. Okay, what about, like, genetic interventions, like using embryo selection with polygenic scores to select for cognitive ability? And it turned out the majority of Americans were actually in favor of it, and the numbers go up as you go younger, which is reproductive age. And not only that, but people were asked separately, like, if a lot of people you know and respect, because people tend to follow leaders, right? That's why they look to Hollywood or professors or journalists or politicians. If those people were using it, would you be more or less likely to use it? And of course, almost everyone said more. And so I think what's gonna happen here is, like a lot of other technological innovation, there's gonna be skepticism at first, some of it sincere, just like, and legitimate, right? "I don't know what this is. This seems a little dangerous," to, "Okay, this looks a little less dangerous," to, "Well, we have a moral obligation to do it, right? And now let's, like, subsidize it for everyone." Um, that's my view on what's gonna happen, and I think that article in Science pretty clearly shows that's the kind of pattern.

Chris Williamson 38:36 What are the

Chris Williamson 38:37 genetic enhancement capabilities that we've got at the moment?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 38:40 Good. Um, we can minimize a variety of the likelihood that a variety of mental and physical diseases manifest themselves. So for example, you can select against schizophrenia, coronary artery disease, type 1 diabetes. There's a lot of physical traits. You could, if you wanted to, select in favor of height and cognitive ability. Although, the predictors aren't as good for-

Chris Williamson 39:04 We can do that now?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 39:04 You can do that now, yeah. Yeah. I know people who are definitely capable of doing it now, and I think within a few years, it'll probably be widely done. I think it's gonna be China leading the way. They now have universally subsidized IVF, and once you have subsidized IVF, in vitro fertilization, it's just a really quick and easy step to sequence those embryos and test them for cognitive ability. So I think it's gonna happen there more than anywhere else first, but yeah, just to give a hypothetical example, if you have 10, 12 embryos, um, what you're gonna get in terms of IQ gains between the lowest and the highest scoring embryo is roughly nine, nine and a half points. It's a pretty, pretty decent spread.

Chris Williamson 39:45 Nearly a standard deviation.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 39:47 Yeah, yeah. Close to a standard deviation. Um, that number's gonna increase once we get more knowledge of genetics, but there's, there are upper limits to this, right? Because first of all, there's only so much genetic diversity that you produce between two people. But there is something coming on the horizon. Those of your, your viewers who are not happy with this technology are gonna be even less happy with what I say now, and that is that there's a new technique called in vitro gametogenesis, IVG, which will allow you to take an adult cell, let's say a s- a, an, uh, a skin cell, a hair cell, it could be blood or bone, turn it into, uh, an induced pluripotent stem cell, and that's the kind of cell that embryos have, right? They're pluripotent stem cells. That's, that's why the stem cell debate was so important, right? If you have a stem cell, um, and it's undifferentiated, you can turn it into any kind of cell, right? That's why you could, like, potentially grow, like, a liver in a Petri dish or, like, uh, a skin, a batch of skin so that if you're a burn victim, you could actually use one of your skin cells and produce a whole patch of skin, right? Um, but similarly, if you can do that, you can produce an egg cell. And when you think about the implications of that, I could take, potentially, a skin cell from a 60-year-old woman and turn it into a pluripotent stem cell, turn that into an egg cell, and if she had, um, someone who could carry the child for her and a sperm donor, well, your grandmother could be having children and her own children past menopause. But a bigger implication is that even if a gene in an embryo were never edited using CRISPR or anything else, using this technique, we could have not 10 embryos to select from, but potentially 500, 1,000. Why not? Once it scales and gets cheaper, now couples are gonna have tremendous genetic variation from which to select. And my vision of the future is ... I'm, I'm not saying I even endorse this, I think this is what shall happen, like it or not, is that, you know, in 50 years, in 70 years, I, I don't know what the timeframe is exactly. We're already, we're already using IVF to select for polygenic traits, but there's probably gonna be some combination of, of IVF using polygenic risk scores plus IVG increasing the number of embryos from which you choose, plus some light touching up with CRISPR. Once you, once you make it more accurate and it produces fewer downstream mutations, probably what you'll wanna do is, yeah, again, select from a large number of embryos, and then whatever residual mutations are producing some elevated risk of cancer, disease, maybe, um, aging ...... um, you'll wanna, you know, CRISPR those out a little bit, and I think you're gonna be able to produce, through that process, people who live longer, who are smarter, who are healthier and happier.

Chris Williamson 42:42 Dude, that's wild.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 42:43 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 42:43 That's absolutely- I, I finished off-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 42:45 Yes.

Chris Williamson 42:45 ... a conversation. Are you familiar with Richard Wrangham's work? Goodness Paradox?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 42:50 Oh, yeah. Someone just gave me his book, actually. Yeah, I've read that.

Chris Williamson 42:53 Really good.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 42:54 So tell me-

Chris Williamson 42:54 Really good.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 42:55 Tell me about it. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:56 So, uh, we had this really fascinating conversation. He is a primatologist, anthropologist, uh, looked at the development, the co-evolution, uh, of human aggression over time. And his hypothesis is that we have gone through self-domestication, humans have self-domesticated ourselves, and if you look at previous, uh, iterations of homo, you will find that they had longer faces, that they had heavier brow ridges, that they were-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 43:29 Right.

Chris Williamson 43:29 ... less puppified, right? And his argument-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 43:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:32 ... is that any individual, typically a male, who was overly dominant and tyrannical, would have been killed by the alpha alliance, as he calls. This was facilitated by a combination of, uh, coalitional warfare or hunting that was, whatever, two million years old, and then about 300 to 400,000 years ago, when we got the ability to coordinate through language, you could have a, a very cleverly put together plan with you and your alpha alliance buddies. You take down this tyrant at the top, and what that means is that any man who crossed a threshold of sufficient aggression would be selected out of the, the gene pool. Now, some of them-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 44:07 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:07 ... would have reproduced, but on, on average, they're going to re- reproduce less. And what that means is that, over time, you are deselecting for... So we, we self-bred, the same way as we domesticated-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 44:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:17 ... dogs and, and cows. We did that to ourselves. Now, we get all the way through this fantastic conversation, which is really, really interesting, and then he gets toward the end, or the very, very end, and he says... I was like, "Okay, so what, what do you think the future has in store?" You know, we're in this sort of novel evolutionary environment, there's selection pressures previously that would have caused particular tyrannies, uh, tyrannical individuals to have been stopped. You know, maybe they're now in jail, maybe they're now doing something else, but they're not being killed. And he says, "Well, I think actually, rolling forward, if you look at what's going to be available genetically, we're just going to get rid of the Y chromosome overall, that we're just going to be able-"

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 44:50 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 44:50 "... to have women who can-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 44:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:52 ... self-reproduce, uh, who don't need that, and that males will be completely taken out of the species." And he made a case that that would be the moral thing to do, that almost all war, almost all aggression comes from the Y chromosome. He said it would be a, a socially, civilisationally immoral thing to not do, to not get rid of men. And I was... This was the final, the final thing that he said, and I was like, (laughs) "We've been going for an hour and 25 minutes." And I'm like-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 45:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:21 ... "Richard, I need to... We'll run this back, and I'll, we'll s- we'll start from now, and then we'll go again, uh, in future." But that was the- the sort of the lasting, uh, echo that I was left with. Um, what, what do you think about getting rid of the Y chromosome from the future of human civilization?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 45:38 Closed. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 45:40 (laughs)

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 45:40 Yeah. Um, yeah, it's, I think you and I can agree on this. Um, yeah, I mean, you can get into some territory that makes you really controversial, but, I mean, you already do this on your show, I guess. I, I think there are masculine virtues that are important and civilization-building and civilization-preserving. I mean, also, I mean, okay, it's true that women have higher levels of affective empathy, they start wars less and so on. They do engage in massive psychological warfare, as you know. There's a lot of (laughs) intersex warfare, it's just of a different kind than, than ours. Um, but yeah, I think the masculine virtues are real and important and, um, civilization-affirming. So, I don't like the vision. I think he's right, I know he's right, and he's more of an expert than I am, but I've read a lot on gene-culture coevolution. I think this is one of the most interesting areas of the last, I don't know, 30 years of research. Joseph Henrich at Harvard and, you know, Jonathan Haidt, the political psychologist, we've all sort of started to think in these terms. Peter Turchin. Actually, the opposite side of the argument you just gave. You know, he has a book, uh, called Ultra Society: How Ten Thousand Years of War Made Us the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. One of the great things about war and, and mass conflict is that it incentivizes coordination among existing groups and cooperation. So, it produces a kind of local altruism, or you might call it parochial altruism, whereby it is true, we don't have universal love for all humans, and, and men especially don't have this. Women tend to have a little bit more of that universal altruism. On the other hand, this is a good thing, because it allows us to bond together with a tribe. It, this, this is what sports is, obviously, right? This is why men like sports more than women do. Um, it allows us to identify a tribe, to set goals, to achieve those goals in meaningful ways. It gives us a reason to live in the morning, to get up in the morning, right? So, I actually think that he's right. Genes and cultures co-evolve. We've self-domesticated, although that was a kind of emergent order. It was a kind of Smithian or Darwinian invisible hand process. Nobody planned that, obviously, right? Um, if anything, it was the opposite. People going to war or doing things like killing the alpha male, and, and violently killing them and enjoying the process of just destroying them, right, that actually made us more cooperative or, or more docile in some ways. But do we want to get-

Chris Williamson 48:13 But think about it this-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 48:13 ... still more docile? I don't know about that. I don't want to.

Chris Williamson 48:16 No, and think about it this way. In retrospect, if you were to say, "Is it moral or was it moral to kill the most violent members of your tribe?" You know, that's-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 48:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:27 ... that's eugenics. That's coercive eugenics.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 48:30 Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Williamson 48:30 In fact, that's, that's murder.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 48:31 Absolutely.

Chris Williamson 48:31 It's just straight-up murder.... and, and yet-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 48:34 Yes.

Chris Williamson 48:34 ... downstream from that, you can say, "Okay, we were able to create a, um, genetic, social, cultural landscape which is more optimal, more peaceful, more, uh, coalitional, more coordinated, more altruistic than it would have been had we have allowed all of these tyrr- tyrannical males to have continued-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 48:57 That's right.

Chris Williamson 48:57 ... to exist." And you go, "Okay, so it was bad at the time, but it was good after the fact." This, to me-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 49:03 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 49:03 ... just, it's not motivated reasoning, but it's kind of like availability bias. It's like, "Look, so you're living in the world that you're in now, so in retrospect, the thing that we did was the thing that was good." And it-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 49:12 Right.

Chris Williamson 49:12 ... it's just a v- a very sort of difficult, messy scenario to get into. Uh, another element here, to just jump off the back of what you're saying to do with the masculine virtues that we have, at the moment, I think that, especially in a post-Me Too world, what a lot of cultural, popular culture tried to do was to sanitize some of the more toxic elements of aggressive male behavior, both sexually, socially, interpersonally, et cetera. But what ended up happening was it sterilized all male behavior. And I think the only reason that we are able to see that as anything approximating not totally terrible is because we're in a time of severe peace. You know? There are, there is no alien civilization which is coming over the edge of the solar system toward us. But if that was to happen, one of the first things that I would suggest is, okay, all porn immediately gets switched off, all video games immediately get switched off, all social media, except for necessary communication, gets switched off. Because what-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 50:11 Right.

Chris Williamson 50:11 ... you're going to do is, you'll be familiar with Diana Fleischman's uncanny vulvas theory, that you get this titrated dose of porn that kind of satisfies men's reproductive values, which is why we haven't seen young male syndrome and all of these guys causing havoc and stuff. Um, this is my male sedation hypothesis, that if we take away the sedatives, the porn, the video games, the social media, you're going to amp up that amount of aggression. Now, yeah, absolutely, if there isn't anything for those men to direct it at, if it's not, um, 18th century Portugal and you're putting them all on galleon ships to go explore the New World because only the eldest son is the person that gets into a, uh, into a marriage, then yeah. It, they're gonna turn that inward. They're gonna push over granny graffiti walls and start pillaging. But if you have an enemy that you can point them to, then it's really useful. So what you're saying now is that the, uh, like, sociopolitical landscape that we are in has created a world in which useless men are perhaps slightly more optimal than dangerous men. But that's not necessarily always going to be the case.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 51:14 Yes. And this was, also, this was Nietzsche's worry in, well, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where he coins the term Superman and Last Man, right? Who is the last man? Well, the last man, he says, first of all, values equality above all else. Um, and he values momentary pleasures above danger. He basically is the, the man that has been emasculated. And he says, "Behold, the last man." This is what we're becoming in, in peaceful Europe. Now, Europe wasn't that peaceful in the 20th century all the time, but actually, it's one of the most peaceful centuries in human history, despite the two World Wars. And, and Nietzsche was really worried that when we remove all of these threats and all of these cues that activate precisely what you said, we're just gonna become pathetic men. We're gonna become last men. And he, of course, advocated the Superman, which was some alternative, alternative vision, the, the Ubermensch. Um, there's another interesting aspect of this, which is we not only don't have these kinds of social cues, but we now have relaxed sexual selection by women. So, women have always been the choosers of men, right? Most women, historically, leave surviving offspring. And large numbers of men either leave none or leave very few compared to th- the kind of dominant men, the smartest men, the most whatever, athletic men, whatever the case is. And what we have is a scenario now where we not only value monogamy above all else, but in Western societies, we have these government social welfare programs such that, you know, traditionally, a woman would need to, to select for moral virtues, like how likely is this guy to stick around, help me raise my family, my children, help actually defend my tribe and my family as a whole and defend me? That's a kinda moral virtue. Is he smart? Is he gonna be able to solve the kinda novel problems that inevitably arise over time, where there's novel threats, maybe we go to war at some point? Um, is he physically capable of defending me? So they would select on all these traits. And now, the government is essentially the father, and they can basically just get pregnant by whoever, some, you know, muscley dude with no brains. And, and the government is gonna take care of that person. The government is essentially gonna subsidize childcare and so on. Now, I understand there are arguments for this, but this has to have massive civilizational and genetic consequences. Women don't have incentives to select for the best man in the sense of the most virtuous, the smartest, the most creative, um, because the government is essentially solving the problems that a male would have been tasked with solving originally. So, that's just to add to this idea that, you know, cultures shape genetics. They always have, whether it is advertent or inadvertent. And right now, it's not like we can sort of say, like, "Okay, cool. Like, history produced what we are now. Let's just stay with what we've got now." Well, we're not staying anywhere, right? Culture is already producing massive genetic changes. And the ability to either, um, change our culture or more deliberately change our children through these genetic technologies, these are gonna be available. They're options on the table.... and you can't just sort of plug your ears and go, "No, no, no. I'm just gonna sort of stay away from all of it." Like, the decision to do nothing is a decision to shape future humans in very specific ways, whether you like it or not. So-

Chris Williamson 54:52 What, what

Chris Williamson 54:54 are the main characteristics that you think people are going to want to enhance when the technology is fully available, there's no downstream risks?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 55:03 Yeah. Well, a clue is just, uh, well, you can do surveys now, but you know, as economists like to say, "Actions reveal preferences." Whatever you ask people, look at what they do, not at what they say. So sometimes they'll tell the truth, but you know, your average New York Times columnist is a blank slate-ist, right? So they're gonna say, "Oh, intelligence, I don't even know what that means. IQ tests just measure the ability to take IQ tests. They're just nonsense." But in their private lives, they're (laughs) obsessed with intelligence, right? The way they select their grad students, their mate, the way they brag about their kid being at Princeton, you know, and not that state school, you know, Rutgers or whatever, right? So these people are obsessed with it. So one thing is, you could ask people, but you know, they like to lie for political reasons. But watch what people do, how they select their mates, and, and more specifically, watch how they act at the sperm or egg bank when, for example, they're a gay couple or an infertile couple, or they just electively are, are choosing sperm or eggs because they didn't find a mate that they, that they like. And here's what they choose. So here's what women choose in sperm clinics. Intelligence or signs of intelligence, so they ask about educational attainment. "Where'd you go to school? What'd you study?" Um, athletic ability, health. They like it when people were a member of a team, a sports team. That shows that they're not only healthy, but cooperative, et cetera. Um, and then they ask for things like kindness, which may be surprising to people, but it's true. Um, when women can select, um, in, in the IVF market or in the sperm market, as opposed to in the mating market, they more directly select exactly what traits they want. So you know, women may famously, like, date the asshole, as they call him, right? Like, "I know he treats me like shit, but God, I'm just so attracted to him." Nobody acts like that in the sperm clinic when they're actually deliberately selecting children. Instead what they opt for is kindness.

Chris Williamson 56:55 So they're much more, they're, they're much more transactional in that kind of a way, or m- or much more direct, perhaps.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 57:01 They are. And women are... Even though extroverted guys do better on the dating market, women are pretty, pretty clear that while they'll, they're equally likely to choose introverts as extroverts when they're selecting, let's say, the father of their children when it's like a sperm donor. But I think that sums up to, like, how are people gonna choose? Well, take a look at what they're already doing in those markets. And I think that probably is not only good evidence that they'll do this when it comes to, like, gene editing and embryo selection, but it turns out it's like, really optimistic. Like some people are, they're afraid, well, what you're gonna choose is male psychopaths, right? Why? Because while they're more socially dominant and they're gonna make more money, well first of all, that's not true. Psychopaths mostly end up in prison. And despite what people say, it's not true that most CEOs are psychopaths. They may be more disproportionately represented there than in other occupations like family medicine or something. But for the most part, psychopaths don't live good lives, and people know that, and they don't wanna choose psychopaths. They actually wanna choose people who are reasonably nice, but nevertheless retaliatory because they don't want them to be taken advantage of in a world where not everybody else is nice. So I think that's how they're gonna choose. I think it's pretty clear.

Chris Williamson 58:16 Are there any theoretical limits to increasing IQ?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 58:21 I don't know of any, but I do know that there may be some really small risks on the really high end of IQ. So, there have been some claims that, you know, above a certain threshold, that some mental disorders are more likely to be found, but those papers don't replicate well at all, um, and there aren't very many of them. So, I don't think there's really much evidence at all that there are downsides to a high IQ. Um, there's like, a really, really small correlation, maybe 0.1 or 0.2, between extremely high IQ and Asperger's. Um, but what that is, is the really high form, high functioning form of autism. It's not low functioning autism where the kid is totally dependent on the parents for the rest of their lives. It's more like, you know, the nerdy professor who is always like, classifying everything. You know, they live perfectly good lives. Maybe they're just geeks or whatever, right? So, there is some risk of that at the high end of IQ, but it's not well studied and the upside is extremely high. I mean, the probability that you'll earn a PhD or earn more than $200,000 a year or be successful in the mating market, these things actually go up and up and up with IQ. And moreover-

Chris Williamson 59:33 For men.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 59:33 What's that? (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:34 For men, IQ and, uh, female mating success isn't fantastically well correlated.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 59:40 Oh, I see. I see. Um, in other words, like, there may be thresholds to how well you do. Well, I know the probability of divorce goes down. So I don't know about actually finding a mate, but keeping your mate is more likely to be true after a certain level.

Chris Williamson 59:54 Yeah, IQ is-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 59:55 But there may be different explanations for that. So lower IQ people tend to get divorced more, for example.

Chris Williamson 1:00:00 Mm.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:00:01 Um, is that a good thing? Is it a bad-

Chris Williamson 1:00:02 And also-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:00:03 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:03 ... you may have, uh, higher IQ women may also correlate with more disagreeability perhaps, which would perhaps make it more difficult for them to get into a relationship with a man who's looking for a slightly more agreeable woman.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:00:15 That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know the evidence there, but it sounds plausible. And um, yeah, so there may be some downside risks. And since women are choosier than men, as you know, and higher IQ women earn more money than men, it may be that there's the risk that there's like, no one left in the dating pool to find if you're like, you know, a knockout with 150 IQ making a quarter of a million a year. (laughs) Like, there's just no eligible bachelors.

Chris Williamson 1:00:40 Correct.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:00:40 I suppose that is more of a risk for women than men.

Chris Williamson 1:00:42 Yeah, correct. It's, that's what I've deemed the tall girl problem. So if you sit on top-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:00:46 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:00:46 ... of your own, uh, dominance or competence hierarchy and you're looking to date up and across, you're, you're stood on Everest-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:00:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:52 ... trying to find something higher to, to get up to.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:00:54 That's-

Chris Williamson 1:00:54 Okay, so, uh-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:00:55 Good metaphor. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:00:57 ... that's cognitive and intelligence enhancement. Uh, personality, for instance, what, what are the sort of things that people will want to do there? Conscientiousness, presumably, industriousness?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:01:08 Yeah. Clearly. And, um, you know, I think when we get into personality traits, that's where it is just trade-offs all the way down, right? So conscientiousness tends to be a good thing. There's no doubt about that. Where you think about ... You create plans and you follow them, right? And that's more likely to get you things like health, wealth, uh, friends, 'cause you remember their birthdays, you remember what they, what they really like, and you give them the gift that, "Oh, wow, I can't believe you remembered that," right? On, on Valentine's Day or on my birthday or whatever. So conscientious is really good. Other traits are mixed bags, but even conscientiousness, if you selected for the most conscientious person you could possibly select for, it may be that on both sides of the bell curve at the extremes, they end up producing psychopathologies like obsessive-compulsive disorder or something like that on the extreme of conscientiousness. And the downsides, right? If you're selecting against it, those are fairly obvious, right? You might be really good at, like, exploiting other people in the moment, but you don't really think enough about the future or, you know, um, thinking about the needs of others and responding appropriately. But then you take stuff like openness, right? So take OCEAN, right? Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. I think, again, there's trade-offs. So like, when you go high on openness, that actually inadvertently selects in favor of political liberalism. Um, is that good or bad? (laughs) I don't know. Depends on the distribution of traits in the society that we have and, and what you want. You know? Um, you know, so liberalism ... And, and that's a poorly defined term because we now tend to connect liberals, which would have included like Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, with also like the most extreme progressives, which I mean, there's really no overlap between them, but in America, for whatever reason, we just call anyone on the left a liberal. What I really mean is high openness is gonna correspond with something like classical liberalism, like thinking about people as individuals, being maximally open to new experiences. But again, if you're really open, you're not only more likely to be liberal in that sense, the classical liberal sense, you're probably gonna be more subject to exploitation by people who are not so open and who are more tribal than you are. And so, you can think about the downsides of even openness, which is a pretty good trait, right? You're willing to learn from others. You're open to new experiences. Ah, shit. Somebody just took advantage of your openness and your, your trustingness. So I think when it comes to these things, it's gonna be trade-offs all the way down. It's gonna be really interesting because I don't know, maybe introverts will prefer introverts, or if they're extremely introverted and they actually see that, they're really shy, for example, they'll probably wanna select the opposite. I don't know. What do you think?

Chris Williamson 1:03:54 I w-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:03:54 What do you think people will select for? What would you select for?

Chris Williamson 1:03:57 If it was me, certainly conscientiousness, but you, you don't want anything to probably be above 80% or below 20%, right? If you take-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:04:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:04:05 ... yourself into the 90th percentile of anything, there's probably going to be some weird externalities that come from that. Uh, you, do you want introversion or extroversion? You go, "Well, I ... It's so, everything's so idiosyncratic and the openness thing ... Oh, well, I've got conscientiousness plus openness." Okay. Well, this mean, might mean that they're an incredibly great hardworking artist that is able to both see their craft and be able to be sufficiently disciplined to move it forward. But what if they fall in love with trying to be an accountant and they can't focus on a spreadsheet because they're constantly-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:04:39 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:04:39 ... trying to think about new ideas and new ways to do it? So it's very, very difficult to do. I think that there's definitely some, you know, base pairs or whatever that you want to try and get together. So one of the things-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:04:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:04:50 ... I'm most fascinated by is attractiveness, about whether or not people would be able to select for attractiveness. You can think about Fisherian runaway, where, you know, big eyes or big boobs or a big bum or wide shoulders or low muscle fi- uh, body fat or whatever are things that, um, assortatively or in terms of mate selection, people are already looking for, but when it comes to selecting your kids, w- I guess one slightly uncontroversial thing that most people would look to select for would be symmetry in the face?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:05:23 That's right. And, and some of the other body proportions, maybe, yeah, we all have our own tastes there, but they're kind of within a, a window, right? I mean, you know, when you think of waist-to-hips ratios, there's kind of a golden ratio of I guess it's 0.7. Again, our mutual friends, Dana Fleischman, Geoffrey Miller, people like this can tell you more about it, but, um, still within that range, like you said, different kinds of curves or height in men or shoulder width, some of which are totally unnecessary and maybe counterproductive from the standpoint of like, I don't know, being able to walk or live in the world in a way that feels good to you, right? That those are more ways of attracting mates and so on. So I think there's gonna be these trade-offs.

Chris Williamson 1:06:04 Even longevity as well, right? Like lo-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:06:05 What's that?

Chris Williamson 1:06:05 P- people that are over, I think is it people that are over 6'4" tend to live less long than people that are under 6'4"?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:06:11 (coughs) Yeah, and have more, you know, back problems and things like that. So, I mean, and this is an interesting point too, when you think about height, um, yeah, it's clear that people wanna select on height more for men than women if they have boys rather than girls. They want the boys to be tall. Um, those are sexually selected traits, and they understand like, that correlates with even financial success, perceived authority if you're in politics or business, right? We've all seen the famous like, debates with politicians, and you know, Trump even makes like the, the tiny hands argument for Marco Rubio. Like, people really do, amazingly, have these associations. If you have small, thin hands as a man, like ...... you're probably not gonna win a war or something (laughs) , right? Or if you're short. And that may or may not be true, but people have these associations. So yeah, with, with runaway selection, I guess the issue is you might be afraid that some of these traits people select on, like height or body shape, will go to these extremes that will actually give you disabilities. But one obvious reply to that is the one you just gave, which is, there's a kind of self-equilibration, such that if there's a movement toward those extremes and they actually have those really bad side effects, you're gonna, you're gonna select in the opposite direction, I think. Um, so in some cases, you're actually gonna deliberately select against those because you don't want the side effects. And in other cases, like facial symmetry, everybody wants it and for good reason. Why? Because it's an indication of something like either, uh, genetic fitness, so you have a low genetic mutation load, low oxidative stress, or low parasite load. And parasite load is at least partly, partly a function of the environment, but partly a function of your immune system, which is mostly genetic, right? An adaptive immune system. So when you select, interestingly, in favor of facial symmetry, and even to a lesser extent male height, because taller than average men actually are healthier. I say this as an exactly averaged sized man at 5'9". Um, there's some evidence for that. When you select for some of those aesthetic traits, you're inadvertently selecting in favor of health.

Chris Williamson 1:08:14 Oh, so-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:08:14 People may not know that-

Chris Williamson 1:08:15 That's what, uh-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:08:15 ... but that's why, that's why you find that attractive in the opposite sex.

Chris Williamson 1:08:19 That's that positive polygenic risk thing again.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:08:24 Oh, positive pleiotropy. Yeah, that's right.

Chris Williamson 1:08:26 That's it.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:08:26 That's exactly right. Yeah. And it's, it's an unconscious force that's been sculpted through sexual selection. What do you find attractive? Nobody finds attractive massive asymmetry. Quite the opposite. Like, if your eyes are even the slightest bit asymmetrical, people immediately see it and they're like, "That's weird." Right? I mean, you're not supposed to say that out loud, but that's the reaction they have. And that's for good reason. We've been honed through sexual, and, and natural selection forever.

Chris Williamson 1:08:53 I mean, that's the, that, that's what we sort of mentioned toward the start, and I really wanna try and hammer it home, that-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:08:58 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:08:59 ... every single person that has ever had sex or chosen a partner is already genetically selecting your kids, even if they wore a condom and you were on the pill. You are already doing this. There are genetic markers that you can see in your partner. I remember once, uh, I, I think Jeffrey told me that he, he rolled over in bed and looked at Diana and said, "You're such a lovely bundle of fitness signals." Um-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:09:26 (laughs) beautiful.

Chris Williamson 1:09:27 (laughs) Yeah, which is the, I imagine, one of the most romantic things that he would s-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:09:30 Talk dirty to me, baby.

Chris Williamson 1:09:30 Yeah, exactly. (laughs)

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:09:32 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:09:32 Te- tell me more about my polygenic risk scores.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:09:34 Yeah, that's right.

Chris Williamson 1:09:35 But the point being that why is it that men want waist-to-hip ratio? Why is it that women want high shoulder-to-waist ratio from men? What is it with facial symmetry? What is it with good skin, not skin that's covered in legions? What is it with a full head of healthy-looking hair? What is it with good, straight teeth? What is it with not bad breath, not bad body odor? You know, pick whatever it is that you find attractive. Unless it's a very particular kind of quirk-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:10:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:10:00 ... almost all of the things that you pick are already these kinds of genetic markers. Like, humor in men, well, humor is not that far away from intelligence, right? The ability-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:10:11 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:10:11 ... to be funny is quite tightly, uh, tied to social intelligence as well as straight-up IQ, because in order to be funny-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:10:18 Exactly right.

Chris Williamson 1:10:18 ... you need to be quick. So okay-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:10:21 That's right.

Chris Williamson 1:10:21 ... like what is it that makes (laughs) being humorous attractive? Well, it's because that person has genes that if you had a child with them would make funny children, so the sexy son or sexy daughter hypothesis-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:10:32 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:10:32 ... you know, works again. So, uh, I think it can get all a little, uh, sterile sometimes when talking about the, the individual traits and we're selecting them and, you know, it can, it can sound, sound a little, um, detached from the humanity of it all. But we're doing this in a rough, human way in any case. We're doing this-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:10:50 That's right.

Chris Williamson 1:10:50 ... in an analog fashion already. It's just that we're now moving into a slightly more digital, slightly more targeted world.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:10:56 That's a really good way to put it, um, and in fact, one book about the future of this is by Craig Venter, who was the first to sequence the human genome in the year 2000. And he does a lot of what's called synthetic biology now. But his book is called Life at the Speed of Light, and what he meant with the light metaphor is not just that we're moving faster and faster through cultural evolution, scientific advancement, but we're now into the age of digital biology. And he means that both metaphorically and literally. Before, we understood in an analog way, like Mendel understood there have to be little units of inheritance. Somehow, like traits are being transmitted. Um, and now what we can do is just tell you exactly which variants are producing which traits. Um, we were already doing it before. It's just a more precise way of doing it. I, I, I wanna say something though about what you just said. I, I love it. I mean, with the, with the humor point, you know, I've always thought about this as a way of creatively solving problems. Like you said, it's a form of social intelligence. It's a form of inference. It's playing on other people's expectations and then leading them down like a left curve. A- and so what you're doing is you're showing, through this really interesting display, that you understand how other people think and can manipulate it. Not in a bad way, um, but you can relate to them so well that you know exactly what they're gonna anticipate, and then the conclusion of the joke almost always ends up being something very different than they were thinking, and that's what makes it funny.

Chris Williamson 1:12:25 It's a kind of, uh, a kind of trustworthy empathy, in a way.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:12:29 Yes, exactly. It's cognitive empathy. It's exactly what, um, well, psychopaths have it to some degree. They have this Machiavellian empathy. But autistics, severely autistic kids don't. They don't have a good theory of mind. And so what you're doing with jokes is showing intelligence, showing a s- a kind of social intelligence, and then cognitive empathy. But I wanted to say one other thing that you picked up on that was fascinating that I've never thought of before.You said for a lot of traits, you would wanna, like, choose between, I don't know, the 20th and 80th percentile. You wouldn't wanna go too far out. Well, and then you said 90th for something else, maybe conscientiousness. And one thing that I've seen on this evidence of the way that women choose sperm donors is they actually do choose intelligence up to about the 90th or 95th degree or percentile, and then their desire for it actually goes down a little bit. It flattens off and goes down. And I always wonder whether these heuristics we have, like, are some Darwinian wisdom, like there really is something to this, it gets dangerous above a certain level, or whether it's just a heuristic we've developed that is a kind of stereotype that's bullshit, that's false. I don't know. But it's- it's really interesting that you have this intuitive sense, and the data shows that women completely agree with that. They actually start getting scared on the extremes. So-

Chris Williamson 1:13:51 I just figure that anything where you tune it up toward absolutes-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:13:56 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:13:56 ... is going to end up having some pretty strange downstream consequences. I mean, Cal Newport talks about this with the fact that email shouldn't be free. Email should cost five cents to send-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:14:08 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:14:08 ... because it would change the entire landscape. But when you drive the price or the cost of anything down to zero, you end up with very odd externalities. It's the same way as if you tried to-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:14:20 Really interesting.

Chris Williamson 1:14:20 ... eradicate absolutely all in-group or out-group biases from the world. If you wanted to get rid of all of them-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:14:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:14:27 ... you end up with some super bizarre externalities. If you want to drive them down to, let's say, 10%, then you- you probably end up with way fewer.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:14:38 That's a great analogy. And of course, on a, maybe this is controversial, maybe not, but on a social level, we can see this. So take, like, Sweden over the last 30 years. They've gone through these waves where they accept refugees, and whatever your opinion on that, doesn't matter much, but, you know, some of the refugees they were taking were committing a disproportionate amount of the crime and so on. And you know, their response was, "Okay, then we'll just stop collecting crime statistics so we don't know who's committing the crime." And, and- and here's what I was getting at with, with this point. There's a kind of pathological altruism where you actually not only don't have extreme in-group preference, right, like racism and so on, but you actively have no in-group preference to the point where you actually allow yourself to just be subjugated by outside forces. So there was a judge in Sweden some years ago who, upon hearing that one of these refugees had raped a bunch of women, um, there was a, there was... he was a refugee claimant, and initially there was a ruling like he should be sent back to Somalia, I think it was. And the judge said, "Well, no, if we send him back to Somalia, that's an even more dangerous place than Sweden, and so we're gonna keep him here in Sweden because, like, we really wanna protect this guy, you know? It's not his fault that he's a rapist." And like-

Chris Williamson 1:15:54 Bring all of your rapists here.

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:15:56 (laughs) Exactly. Talk about pathological altruism. I mean, that's a- that's a case where it's like, look, we all understand in-group preference can be bad, right? There's no doubt about that. A lot of historic wars were kind of pathological form of in-group preference. But is the opposite really so great? And you know, you talked about, you know, this previous guest, and I, that sounds like a fantastic conversation, but I think you and I have the same sense of resistance toward that final point he made, right? If we could only all become women, it would be great. And it's like, no. Like how much of life, how much of the greatness of life is driven by competition and in-group preference? Actually, a lot of it is. Team sports would disappear without that. That high that you get when you're... You know, I like to go to the boxing gym. I like to do pickup sports. Surfing, we don't really get this because it's more individualistic, but I love team sports even though I'm better at the individual ones like surfing. I'm not that good at basketball, but I love it because of that high you get where you bond with your team and you have that almost, it's not hatred, but yeah, kind of disrespect for the out-group (laughs) . And- and- and it's- it's fun. It leads you to achieve great things, and that's true throughout life, right? Your team is like motivated to distinguish themselves. And what would happen if we got rid of that? I think it would be terrible.

Chris Williamson 1:17:16 What can you foresee as some of the potentially negative societal impacts of this technology? Let's say that it is... Well, actually first off, what is the kind of timeline that we're looking at to be able to get us to-

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:17:31 Good.

Chris Williamson 1:17:31 ... uh, an appreciable amount of enhancement/selection capacity for the traits that we've spoken about, and other ones like morality and religiosity and dominance and blah, blah?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:17:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:17:42 Uh, and then downstream from that, what are the societal concerns and impacts?

Dr Jonathan Anomaly 1:17:47 Really good question. So, um, predictions are always, you know, things that we regret in retrospect, most people e- even when you get them right, it's probably because you were partly lucky. Like, I was like, you know, my friends who, you know, predicted Trump was gonna win. It was like, okay, you know, it's not that high (laughs) . You know, it's not like, you know, it was just completely impossible that he would win. Like even- even the pundits thought it was like a 20% chance. I mean, so some predictions come out right by chance. Uh, let me give you like a rough, a rough prediction on where we're going. Polygenic risk scores for embryo selection are already here. They're getting more powerful every year. We can already do it from in- for intelligence. Um, I think we'll hit the limits of those though, again, until we get more genetic diversity through things like in vitro gem- gametogenesis or if people wanted to, to opt for like sperm and egg donation rather than husbands and wives. I don't think that's necessarily the best society (laughs) , but like some people will do that. I know a lot of people from college, women who hit their 40s and they just didn't find the right guy, and they're doing that. They're just, they're-... selecting a sperm and then they're going to, on top of it, select embryos. So that's already happening. It's gonna get more and more powerful for, like, the next 10 years. In vitro gametogenesis, like, powers that up even more. My view is, you know, I'm not an expert on gene editing, but I've talked to some experts. In particular, I'm thinking of one guy, I guess I won't name him, um, at the Broad Institute. I guess this can be controversial, so I won't name him, but he's actually pretty skeptical that gene editing will happen for even 50 years, like on a mass scale, if ever. So for reasons I don't fully understand, he thinks this problem of downstream mutations is a big one and there may be no way to fully correct that. Even if that's true, I still think we're gonna manipulate individual genes because the risks are lower if it's just, like, this one gene, the one that causes Tay-Sachs, for example. But if it turns out there's always some probability of these downstream errors when you're manipulating highly polygenic traits, it may be that, I don't know, gene editing is 20 or 30 years away or even 100 or... I- it, it's, it's really hard to know. Um, so I think that the main game in town for now is embryo selection and again, going back, mate selection. But I will say something about the inequality issue. I think that's an important one. I do think inequalities, just like inequalities of wealth above a certain level, can lead to a lack of social cohesion for obvious reasons, right? It's kind of like a winner-take-all system. Like, I don't think polygamy is such a bad thing in terms of, like, the genetic effects of it, right? If, if the smartest or strongest or whatever the traits are that you want are having a disproportionate share of the children, like, that's actually good for future generations. On the other hand, it leads to massive social instability, right? This is one, one reason monogamy evolved, is to kind of control the, you know, the, the, the alpha males and to lead to more stability. Um, but yeah, we can get these, like, genetic inequalities either through, again, hypergamy or polygamy, but you can also get them through assortative mating, and we're already doing it. Even before you have gene