Sociological problems with Transhumanist arguments for genetic engineering

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attentive linked me Transhumanism and the Limits of Democracy by Ronald Bailey and reading it I had so many things I wanted to complain to the author about I decided to write them down. I wrote this ages ago, I'm posting it now because I got inspired to write another post riffing on the same ideas.

I have very little patience for Transhumanists on the whole, they tend too much towards capitalist libertarian bootstrap myths which seem to inevitably contain the belief that the poor deserve what they get. But sometimes it's cathartic to enumerate why someone I disagree with is wrong :)

I have less of a problem with the first half or so on the tension between democracy and minority rights, which is what attentive was referring to, and it makes for somewhat interesting reading.

But then the author argues that the state should have no say in who gets to have children, or how much control they have over how those children turn out. On the first point I quite agree. But I think the second argument concentrates too much on the individual effects of "improvements" and not enough on the larger scale.

Note: he doesn't talk about major changes, and so neither will I. I think it's worth just looking at the ethical issues around minor tweaking first.

I think the argument that children would not actually mind being born free of disease or with slightly better intelligence etc is fairly sound, though I have a feeling there's more to it than he says (this is an issue I'm still feeling my way around) I liked the point that from the child's perspective having your genes screened for a given defect is no different than having surgery to correct it in the womb, and noone objects to that. I also think he's right that having your genes tweaked in this fairly minor way doesn't take away your free will any more than random chance genetics do (though as with clones, I think the expectation that you will follow a preselected blueprint might cause issues)

But: Genetic variation relies on randomness. Any individual example of minor genetic tweaking doesn't stand out from the noise, but if it happens a lot then the overall shape of the noise will change and this could have huge effects on society.

I think he misses the (or at least a) point of CS Lewis's objection: yes, from a personal perspective, having your IQ(*) shifted up 20 Points on purpose isn't any different than having it happen by accident. But if for example all the parents of a given generation decide to make their kids 20 IQ points smarter then the following generation has no control over the fact that they are, overall, significantly smarter than your average generation of kids. Maybe society needs a certain proportion of the population to be below average intelligence to function smoothly.

In the Selfish Gene there's some stuff about Game Theory and the complicated dynamics of personality types in a society. Say personality type A is the "best" thing to be in the current mix of phenotypes. Who's to say that if the proportion of type A personalities gets too high, the whole society won't shift out of it's current equilibrium into something totally different (and possibly bad). And maybe in this new equilibrium being a Type A is bad. (See Type A= ambitious leader)

To give a really coarse grained example, look at China: thanks to a whole mess of reasons which go beyond the scope of this post, many parents have chosen to have boys instead of girls. There's nothing significant about any individual instance of having a boy instead of a girl, but the overall trend means there's a huge gender disparity now which is having effects on Chinese society².

Beyond all that there's also the fact that I really don't believe that we can tell which genes will or will not be useful in the future. We don't want to turn into some designer crop monoculture. Of course I wouldn't argue for keeping the gene for cystic fibrosis at it's current prevalance just for some possible future benefit to humanity³, but things could theoretically be taken too far in the opposite direction.

But suppose that it's not EVERYONE who gets the treatment. Well, that has it's own problems.

I am simply amused at the sheer naiveté of:

The enhancements that are likely to be available in the relatively near term to people now living will be pharmacological—pills and shots to increase strength, lighten moods, and improve memory. Consequently, such interventions could be distributed to nearly everybody who wanted them.

Yes, because that's certainly how medical advances get distributed now.

The way I see it, it is already the case that the children of the rich and powerful tend to end up more rich and powerful on average. If the rich and powerful are able to have "better" children they will then have two advantages over everyone else, cementing their role as the next generation of rich and powerful. Yet he doesn't even seem to recognise this as a problem, all he worries about is the danger of slavery and genocide, and then dismisses them as problems which simply won't happen in a sufficiently liberal society because of basic human decency and enlightened philosophy.

Do we live in the same world? What's his example of a rational decent society that doesn't kill or oppress innocent people based on irrational bias..America? It is to laugh. I guess you could argue that overall "society" has tended to progress to being less oppressive (though the gap between rich and poor is larger now than it used to be) but I'm really not convinced that the rate of this "progress" will outstrip our ability to control genetics fast enough to prevent further and more entrenched stratification of society. Also see: Gatacca.

So. I'm not arguing that all genetic enhancements should be banned, or that they couldn't improve society. I agree that any attempt to control them could very easily go down the oh-so-slippery state-control-of-reproduction road. But giving people free reign to do whatever the hell they like could have some pretty serious negative effects too. What I'm saying is that deciding between these options is hard, and shouldn't be controlled by too much starry-eyed idealist dogma.

1)And yes, LOL at IQ being something that objective
2)I have no idea how accurate it is, but a brief google found China's future: a nation of single men?.
3)There are other arguments for keeping those genes around, I think along the lines that stopping any children with that illness being born is a form of disablism. But I must admit that I don't entirely understand how that's different from saying that discouraging pregnant women from drinking is prejudiced against children with foetal alcohol syndrome. I guess there's the fact that you're aborting (or choosing not to implant) the disabled embryo rather than stopping an able bodied embryo from becoming disabled. Anyway, I'm willing to be persuaded on this point, but it doesn't change the fact that I think preserving genetic diversity is not by itself enough reason to force people to have "bad" genes.

Comments

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Yeah it's pretty dispiriting. And the more I learn about what people actually working and living in Aboriginal communities think is the best thing to do the more I realise how wrongheaded public policy and opinion is :(

[attentive]

Just got back from Darwin myself and although I didn't see much, three things jumped out:

- lots of indigenous people compared to Perth
- lots of indigenous people in different walks of life with different levels of disadvantage
- the smallness of the place, its saturation in general (housing and rent are WAY more expensive than Perth which indicates to me there are bottlenecks in building new homes) and the consequent difficulties with infrastructure and labour for any public works project such as the NT housing scheme

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*nods*

Even just analysing the records of people from remote aboriginal communities it was clear that the bureaucracy just isn't designed to cope with their context eg people moving across state lines regularly with minimal contact with the government machine means it's very hard to keep track of stuff like electoral enrollment and medical records, or even birth dates. So we don't even know how many people there are needing the resources.