Genetic Traditions & The Future
As we’ve repeatedly emphasized in previous chapters of this book, a primary goal of our personal House culture is to make each successive generation of children better—not just memetically, but physically. With that being the case, we must do more than just have children with partners carefully selected to shore up weak spots in our own ideological and genetic makeup. We strongly encourage our descendants to use genetic screening, engineering, cloning, cybernetics—really, any technology that moves us toward this goal. We have done as much as we can on this front personally, being quite open about our choice to leverage polygenic risk score selection when choosing between embryos.[[102]](#_ftn102)
“Oh no,” you might be thinking.
“But ensuring your kids have good genes is eugenics!”
If selecting embryos based on polygenic risk scores is eugenics, so is selecting a partner based on traits you’d like to see in your children. In fact, polygenic risk score selection of embryos is arguably less morally questionable than selecting partners based on desirable traits, as with polygenic risk score selection, nobody involved is being eliminated from the gene pool; parents are merely picking the best roll of the dice on their various combinations of shared genes.
What about Orthodox Jews who commonly get genetically screened and use this information when choosing a partner to ensure their kids don’t get Tay-Sachs (a genetic condition common in that population)? Are they “evil eugenicists” for adopting this as a regular cultural practice in order to protect their kids? Of course not. Very few people really believe this form of the eugenics accusation.
Heck, by the reasoning of our eugenics-accusers, even laws that prevent brothers and sisters from marrying are eugenics—after all, those laws exist because kids born of those unions are more likely to have genetic problems. This is why almost all religions and cultures are incest-phobic: Because most religions and cultures believe, at least moderately, in ensuring their kids have the best genes possible.
The truth is, most of the “gotcha” warriors complaining about how something reeks of eugenics really don’t care—not in the way they are pretending to, at least. Simone’s mom died young from a form of cancer parents could screen for in embryos. Are our critics really going to stand behind this “anti-eugenics” position when a choice not to screen would boost an innocent child’s odds of unnecessary suffering and premature death? At least when a Jehovah’s Witness prevents a doctor from giving their little child a blood transfusion, they are only killing their kid; someone who genuinely wanted to stop all genetic selection apparently wouldn’t be happy until they stopped us from protecting ours.
Polygenic risk score selection certainly isn’t the first form of reproductive technology that has been subjected to moral outrage. Very similar fears were raised with equal disgust and panic when IVF technology was first released[[103]](#_ftn103) and now 33% of people in the U.S. have used IVF or know someone who has (2% of births happen through reproductive technology, more than double over the past decade).[[104]](#_ftn104)
One of our sensitivity readers explained to us that some people might find embryo selection based on polygenic risk scores to be immoral because we are engaging in a form of preventative healthcare others can’t afford. What!? This was such an insane argument we debated including it. No matter what the medical procedure is, there will always be some people who can’t afford it. Are these people really arguing that all medical procedures someone else can’t afford are immoral? Does this apply to people in other countries? Heck, in that case, a tooth cleaning—or the use of bug spray and mosquito netting to avoid malaria—would be immoral. But even more insanely, if authorities were to actually ban this type of selection process because some people couldn’t afford it, rich people would still be able to fly abroad and get it done. Governments would only be effectively banning polygenic risk score selection for people with more modest means, which would only serve to widen the gap between those who can and cannot afford this technology, thus deepening systemic inequality.
When someone tags people who choose better genes for their own kids with the word “eugenics,” they cheapen the horrors meant to be prevented by the word’s negative stigma. People who cry “eugenics!” at the drop of a hat make actual eugenics, such as government initiatives forcibly sterilizing people and choosing who people marry, much more likely to rise. This is the same form of degradation that plagued the word “racist”—people started calling every little threat to the cultural supervirus racist and the word began to lose its gravity, ultimately driving an increase in actual, dangerous racism. A person willing to chance an increase in the risk of real state-level eugenics just so they can win an online flame war shows exactly their real moral position on these issues.
Eugenics as a pejorative should be used only when referring to alterations to the human genome driven by racial and ethnic bias, laws that control who can breed, or cases of forced sterilization. It should be blindingly obvious that our interests in reproductive technology are not driven by racial or ethnic bias and we have no aspirations to control others.
We argue “eugenics” should only be used to refer to ethnically and racially-driven interest in intentionally altering a population’s gene pool—or forced sterilization—because this is what someone is trying to convey when they call someone else a eugenicist in a public space. They use the word “eugenicist” instead of “transhumanist” because they want their audience to assume their target is racist or an advocate for forced sterilization, which spares them the hassle of arguing against their victims’ actual logic. They know very well we don’t advocate for any form of racial discrimination, nor do we advocate for forced sterilization, but they need other people to think those things about us so people don’t ask why our critics are trying to prevent us from lowering the chance our kids die of cancer or why they support, through their extreme reasoning, the legalization of siblings having children together.
What we advocate for is fairly vanilla—if aggressive—transhumanism: Improving and transforming the human condition with technology. Be against transhumanism all you want, but don’t call it eugenics.
And as a side note, we are avidly against forced sterilization and if you are as well, instead of misleading people on Twitter into thinking we support it, why don’t you actually do something about it? Thirty-one states allow for forced sterilization—over half the U.S.—and 17 states allow forced sterilizations of disabled children.[[105]](#_ftn105) Do you just like the word “eugenics” as a weapon, or do you actually hate the practice of eugenics and want to do something about it?
When it comes to transhumanism, we acknowledge many are still very hesitant. “I am OK with people selecting partners or genes to reduce the odds of their kids getting cancer and I will admit that is not eugenics—or at least I’ll say it’s not immoral,” you may be thinking, “but just don’t touch the stuff tied to things like attractiveness or intelligence.”
But where’s the line? When weighing different polygenic risk scores while selecting which embryo to transfer for our first daughter, we paid extra attention to embryos with lower probabilities of developing depression, brain fog, and anxiety. Are these attributes too close to intelligence? If we hadn’t emphasized those scores, would we be responsible if our daughter committed suicide or found herself unable to work due to debilitating anxiety? Should you pressure someone to not reduce their kids’ odds of suffering from certain maladies by calling the action “eugenics,” are you responsible for their kids’ unnecessary high risks of suffering? By our moral framework, yes.
Many critics of polygenic risk score selection argue that the process merely alters the odds of certain outcomes while not totally preventing their possibility. A religious extremist might make the same argument when refusing a blood transfusion for their child—that the transfusion only increases odds of survival while not guaranteeing it. When a person chooses to drive drunk, they merely increase their odds of committing vehicular manslaughter but are still very much responsible for taking that risk and imposing it on others.
“What if we lose something of genetic importance in this process?” you might be wondering. “What if we select against something and then it turns out to be important in a few hundred years?”
Think about this for a moment. You know as well as we do that most populations having kids well above population rate are highly technophobic. There is zero chance that we’ll move into a future in which the entire world’s genes get altered—and even if there was that chance in the future, humans would still be able to leverage a large genetic library of pre-altered humans for reference. Moreover, we think people can be trusted to make both reasonable and varied decisions about their selections. Different populations value (and need) different traits and will select for them accordingly; it’s not as though we’re headed toward a genetic monoculture just because people become increasingly empowered in gene selection and editing. Do you really think a Black family is going to select for blond-haired, blue-eyed, Aryan traits? Take us as an example: While we, personally, have been very careful about what we select against, we don’t select against contemporarily unpopular traits that we believe may provide an advantage (like autism—with which both Simone and one of our kids has been diagnosed).
But what about dysgenic risks introduced by in vitro fertilization (IVF)? This is an argument often made by right-leaning survival-of-the-fittest “Sciencey” types. The argument holds that by granting people who cannot have kids naturally the ability to have kids via IVF, we are degrading the human genome. They argue this can be seen in kids born of IVF having higher rates of asthma,[[106]](#_ftn106) ADHD,[[107]](#_ftn107) and high blood pressure / diabetes.[[108]](#_ftn108) To be clear, even the group arguing this is transparent that IVF itself does not cause these maladies (outside of the rare ICSI procedure) but that IVF broadens the range of people who can have kids to include groups more likely to have these issues (older and fatter people). This can be seen in families who have one child through IVF and another naturally not seeing any issues at higher rates in their IVF child.[[109]](#_ftn109)
This argument can sound smart given how technical it is until you consider the worldview of those making it, at which point it becomes easily the most smooth-brained argument of all. Specifically, if you read, watch, and listen to content made by those who pose this argument, you will see that most also assert that, IVF aside, humanity is adopting tons of dysgenic genetic conditions just because it is no longer the case that most “unfit” humans die before being able to give birth. People making this argument often even go so far as to complain about the negative genetic effects from not having around 46.2% of babies die before reaching adulthood.[[110]](#_ftn110) They predict that because of this, our species will eventually collapse.
The reason this argument is so doltish is that those who make it are correct that due to modern medical care and social support, fewer maladies are being ruthlessly edited out of the human genome; but the only way around this is through polygenic risk score selection, which requires IVF.
To give you an analogy, this would be like a person who thought:
- The planet’s ecology is collapsing due to pollution and this will lead to our species extinction.
- There is nothing we can do about this ecological collapse.
- With more rocket testing, we could successfully colonize a different planet and seed it with a new biome just as rich as the one we have on earth, but the rocket testing creates pollution, so we had better not do that.
These people admit that rockets (polygenic risk score selection) are our only way out of our current predicament in the long term but want to ban them because in the short term they make things incrementally worse. Given how transparently illogical it is, we suspect people express this belief not because they think it is logically sound, but because it makes them feel tough and manly to express it. They aesthetically believe that “only the toughest and fittest” should reproduce and ignore that technology renders this perspective antiquated.
Selecting for good genes in a mate is part of everyday life. It’s a tacit reality experienced by every person who is passed over for a date because they are not attractive enough, not tall enough, or somehow lacking traits that very likely have genetic correlates.[[111]](#_ftn111) What online keyboard warriors hate is that while they are a “eugenicist” based on how hot someone is, we are sorting based on mental traits. Our interest in mental trait selection forces people with a deep cultural supervirus infection to make one of the following inconvenient admissions:
- Mental traits are not heritable and what we are doing is toothless and hence morally neutral and inoffensive—which means criticism of polygenic risk score selection is weird and arbitrary.
- Mental traits are heritable and what we are doing makes our culture a threat—but this also means the entire supervirus ideology is a lie.[[112]](#_ftn112)
Some people bite that bullet. They say: “I’ll buy that genes play a role in a person’s IQ and sociological profile. I just don’t want some kids to have an unfair advantage.” **In saying this, they reveal their hand: They reveal they know some families already have a genetic advantage. They just don’t want to change the existing power structure of our society.** Just as the Quakers used the German Protestants to maintain their power without ever actually helping them, the cultural supervirus’s internal power structure benefits from holding people down while paying lip service to them.
Those who the cultural supervirus has elevated cannot maintain their power if they do not stack the deck in their favor. They do this by reaching out with their fascist state hand and taking a firm grasp of others’ family planning process. In so doing, they reveal what they have prioritized all along: Maintaining power. They never really planned on helping anyone in a way that would durably and structurally change the system. If some people really are born less intelligent than others, then the only way to create real equality is through making genetic selection open, accessible, and affordable to everyone. If genes don’t relate to IQ, then what we are doing is entirely inoffensive.
Now a person might say: “No, what I am really afraid of is some kids having a huge advantage over others.”
OK, so what’s your end goal? If you really believe polygenic risk score selection (or perhaps gene editing) to be so terrifyingly effective, then we are in the process of developing technology that could make some humans orders of magnitude smarter than we are now in just a few generations. A myriad of positive externalities would result from an increase in average IQs given that IQ is significantly negatively correlated with murder, assault, robbery, motor vehicle theft, theft and burglary.[[113]](#_ftn113) Think of the problems we could solve with that ability. Poverty: Gone. Carbon: Sequestered. Do you really want to stop all that just to preserve our existing system of systemic inequality?
Those arguing against transhumanism are arguing over an aesthetic, not a real risk—like an environmentalist fighting to shut down an already-constructed nuclear power plant before building environmentally friendly alternatives when the only alternative available is Russian crude oil or coal. Neither the cultural supervirus nor its zombified victims care about logic; the virus only cares about acquiring resources and perpetuating itself. Fortunately, the virus is a sterilizing disease and almost none of its husks reproduce above repopulation rate, hence our grandkids likely won’t have to deal with them.
Most of the hatred for improving the human condition comes from a fear of change—a desire to keep the species and our current way of life unchanged. This is why we say when people say they hate what we stand for, they mean they hate transhumanism—not eugenics. They use the word “eugenics” to dismiss us as racists and don’t want to mentally engage with the idea that many issues of systemic inequality could be addressed if we would only unlock this Pandora’s box.
Don’t get us wrong; we know as well as anyone else that Pandora’s box contains demons and new vices with which our species has yet to grapple, but how many lives is it really worth to keep it locked? How many people have to die in poverty? How many kids have to die slowly from screenable cancers? How many centuries must our species stagnate before you are finally comfortable letting some sliver of it step into the future?
We also sometimes hear arguments along the lines of: “But the science is not as accurate as you are implying!” or: “You could not possibly have that much of an effect with just a few edits!” First, a recent study with a 3,000,000-person sample size shows that DNA tests are now better at predicting educational success than even SAT scores.[[114]](#_ftn114) In addition, once the technology is perfected, we can see that at the population level only 30 edits to a genome would move a population up one standard deviation of IQ within one generation and animal studies imply this can be done without an upper limit (given perfect technology and information about where the true causal variants are). For further discussion of this subject, visit page 782 of the Appendix for an overview of the math of DNA editing.
Finally, if we are wrong, so what? This technology is improving every day. At some point you have to stop dithering and take a stand other than: “The technology is not yet effective.”