The Wild Ethics Of Human Genetic Enhancement - Dr Jonathan Anomaly

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.

(wind blowing) What do people misunderstand about what eugenics is and means?

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?"