They also want the public to understand the ethical issues surrounding the technique, which could be used to cure genetic diseases, but also to enhance qualities like beauty or intelligence. The latter is a path that many ethicists believe should never be taken.
In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations, so assuming we had a well-understood and safe method for artificially selecting for them then there should be no ethical quandaries beyond "but, that's cheating!" There are no scorekeepers of the universe, nobody's going to give us karmic demerits for finding a shortcut. The only risks are scientific, like the obvious potential loss of diversity of the gene pool as we converge on certain universal traits.
From another perspective, what if we could identify genes which bring the value of a trait below the baseline? For example, imagine we could identify the gene which would cause someone's teeth to be so bad as to require braces to correct later in life, but it would still be a largely superficial genetic change largely related to "beauty". Should some people be made to suffer or "earn" straight teeth while others are born with it? Why should this be true of any traits?
In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations, so assuming we had a well-understood and safe method for artificially selecting for them then there should be no ethical quandaries beyond "but, that's cheating!"
Or creating a permanent underclass from those who were unfortunate to have parents who couldn't or wouldn't give them the enhancements - and for that to carry forwards as jobs, and the wealth to advance your children, increasingly go to those who have been modified.
In effect, if you found something and it really worked, you might well lock a large portion of the population out of any realistic chance of meaningfully participating in the future.
(Though I suppose one might argue that this is the case now, with education and good environments going primarily to the wealthy. The difference would be in the degree to which the path was locked in.)
Sounds a lot like the plot of Gattaca, and I agree that would be an awful potential effect. I do not think it's insurmountable, however, and I agree that it's unfortunately fairly close to today's current class divide.
However, I don't think such a thing could happen "overnight" as you suggest. In order for those genetic enhancements to become commonplace they will need at least several generations of trials, especially to explore how various genes interact. This long process could well lower the barrier for the less privileged to participate.
The cost of a germ-line genetic enhancement is front-loaded on the first generation to get it. After that, the cost of sperm is incredibly cheap.
Newly-developed gene modifications will first appear in children of the wealthy. The sons of the rich will have plenty of one night stands. Many of them will be with women who have timed their ovulation and will collect the used prophylactics on their way to the bathroom. If you're poor, you just need to teach your daughters how to pick the right marks, and your grandchildren can inherit many of the traits that the rich are willing to pay for.
But this problem will only last a few generations due to purely technical limitations. The politics now will only determine whether gene modifications will be available on the open market or grey market in the future, because they will definitely be available on the black market and in the "secondary" market.
Who's creating any underclass? There's no reason to expect you won't just take a pill to change our eye color etc. It could be cheap and available. Not yet time to pull the emergency stop cord, because of imagined inequalities in a system that's not even been engineered yet.
Have you observed how the real world works? There are many diseases whose cures/preventions are "cheap and available" yet still continue to kill millions in the "underclasses."
GP made a fair point, and was not overly sarcastic.
EDIT: I appreciate the urge to have a kinder and gentler HN, but let's not start cluttering up threads more than we have to with references to the guidelines. It's meta, and meta kills.
Have you seen the unregulated medical systems in 3rd world countries? Easier access to antibiotics etc than in Malibu. Failure to cure diseases may be more about culture than price. Not warranted to jump straight to Gattica horror stories.
There are indeed many examples of this, especially in third-world countries ruled by dictators or superstitions, or a combination of the two. But that doesn't stop us from creating those cures/preventions for ourselves, because it's still the right thing to do.
We may eventually get through to them, at any rate. See Bill Gates and Polio vaccines, for example.
Hardly permanent, I'd say; eventually they would be outcompeted to extinction by H. s. mutabamus, in the same way H. s. sapiens (is thought to have) outcompeted neanderthalensis.
I agree. "Survival of the fittest" does not bode well for that underclass. At best they will naturally go extinct. At worst they will be exterminated or enslaved.
That is a purely scientific scenario and therefore can be understood and accounted for. The ethical question is how we identify and resolve them safely.
It is also mostly moot, as genetic interactions are already a part of everyday conceptions. Many of today's genetic afflictions are due to parents' genes interacting unexpectedly. See Lorenzo's Oil[1], for example.
In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations,
What are you talking about?
The concept of beauty changes every generation (so what would we select for?), and IQ/fertility has, at best no definitive correlation (and many would argue it has a negative correlation)[0].
I'm talking about self-driven evolution. In the past it was selecting for traits which suited the environment of the time, and perhaps that did not include intelligence per se, but the concept remains valid.
I also never claimed that in all of human history we always chose the same traits for beauty, but we have always selected for what we felt like "beauty" was at the time, even if that meant selecting against an "uglier" option. It was never a straight line, and it probably never will be.
Beauty changing every generation may actually be a boon to the process, as well. If the majority of one generation selected for a particular beauty trait then it would lose its appeal, driving diversity as less people selected for it or more people selected alternatives.
We humans are a fickle lot, at least until we find the fickle gene.
You seem to forget that being attractive and having more kids are in no way correlated. Ugly people have kids too.
If you're not saying we're selecting for intelligence or beauty, then what are you saying? You claim "the concept holds true", but I'm not sure what the greater concept you're trying to explain is. That humans are still evolving?
You seem to forget that being attractive and having more kids are in no way correlated.
Attractiveness plays absolutely no role in reproduction? I honestly don't know how to respond to that, I hope you've just phrased it poorly.
I'm not saying we're not selecting for intelligence or beauty, I'm saying we're not selecting for the same intelligence and beauty every generation. A few thousand years ago intelligence was being able to tie a pointy rock to the end of a stick, and that sure played a role in natural selection. "Intelligence" as I intended to convey is broadly defined, it's not just the modern definition of IQ but the skills to survive and thrive in the environment of the time.
Attractiveness plays absolutely no role in reproduction? I honestly don't know how to respond to that, I hope you've just phrased it poorly.
I have not worded it incorrectly. Attractive people may have kids, but so do ugly people, and ugly people have kids with attractive people, too. There is currently no known link between attractiveness and offspring. Your "common knowledge" is failing you here.
But wait, so you're trying to tell me that this sentence:
In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations
Is supposed to have meant this:
I'm saying we're not selecting for the same intelligence and beauty every generation.
And yes, my two sentences are one and the same. A trait is a category, such as hair color. We can select for that trait without always selecting specifically red hair, for example. In fact, at one point we selected against red hair in some cultures [1]. Similarly, as I described earlier, intelligence today is often defined as IQ or literacy while intelligence in the past might have been toolmaking, memory (for verbal history/storytelling), or navigational skills.
That's why I don't see any ethical quandaries about genetic modifications for beauty, because it's highly unlikely to lead to homogeneity and even if it did, if everyone is beautiful then nobody is, which means people would immediately find new definitions for beauty and pursue those instead.
In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations, so assuming we had a well-understood and safe method for artificially selecting for them then there should be no ethical quandaries beyond "but, that's cheating!" There are no scorekeepers of the universe, nobody's going to give us karmic demerits for finding a shortcut.
I like the "there are no scorekeepers of the universe" line.
The ability for humans to use the intelligence that evolution has provided them for whatever they see fit, including the ability to better themselves and better the species as a whole (or, sadly and unfortunately, to hurt each other), should be considered part of the evolutionary process. Just because humans have intelligence doesn't mean they exist outside of evolution. In fact, not using our evolved intelligence to influence our genetic makeup is avoiding thinking about how and why we have this intelligence to begin with.
The ability for an organism to influence the genetic makeup of itself and its descending, through either gross methods like breeding/natural selection or discrete methods like genetic engineering/modification is really just one step out of many on the evolutionary ladder.
Here's an interesting heuristic: if an action is morally bad, then its inverse is morally good. Does that seem plausible? If blinding a child is bad, then curing their blindness is good, etc.
Applied to this situation: if it's morally bad to enhance the intelligence of a child beyond that of their peers, then it should be morally good to diminish the intelligence of a genius child to be more average. If it's bad to enhance the intelligence of an entire generation, it should be morally good to switch back to leaded paint and gasoline.
Or my favorite, from slatestarcodex I think (I can't find the link): if it would be morally bad to cure heroin addiction with a pill rather than the "hard way" with will power, then it should be morally good to addict schoolchildren to heroin. (In other words, if the chance to build character has more value than not being addicted to heroin, then we should be addicting _more_ people to heroin).
No, I don't think that heuristic passes the sniff test. There are lots of situations where the doing the functional opposite of a morally wrong action is also morally wrong. It's wrong for me to take $50 from you and give it to Bob, and still wrong for me to take $50 from Bob and give it to you. It's wrong to kill babies and wrong to force women to create babies. In these cases the moral inverse isn't to do something that creates the opposite effect, but to just not do the bad thing. Changing a kid's genes so he's smarter may or may not be immoral but it's not related to whether changing a smart kid's genes so he's normal intelligence, at least not in such a formal logic kind of way.
By inverse, I mean reversing states of the world. If Alice and Bob have exactly equal wealth, then transferring $50 from Alice and giving it to Bob decreases total utility, because of the decreasing marginal utility of money. If Bob now has $100 more wealth than Alice, then transferring $50 from Bob to Alice increases total utility by the same amount. If by "take" you meant steal, then returning the stolen money is obviously also a good thing.
If it's wrong to kill babies, then it's good to resuscitate ones that have died (assuming they're in the same state they would have been: no brain damage, etc.)
If making one average child a genius is bad for the world, then making one genius child average must be good for the world.
If you're a utilitarian, then the heuristic is basically a tautology: If moving from state A to state B decreases utility by X, then moving from state B to state A increases utility by the same amount.
Comments
In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations, so assuming we had a well-understood and safe method for artificially selecting for them then there should be no ethical quandaries beyond "but, that's cheating!" There are no scorekeepers of the universe, nobody's going to give us karmic demerits for finding a shortcut. The only risks are scientific, like the obvious potential loss of diversity of the gene pool as we converge on certain universal traits.
From another perspective, what if we could identify genes which bring the value of a trait below the baseline? For example, imagine we could identify the gene which would cause someone's teeth to be so bad as to require braces to correct later in life, but it would still be a largely superficial genetic change largely related to "beauty". Should some people be made to suffer or "earn" straight teeth while others are born with it? Why should this be true of any traits?
Or creating a permanent underclass from those who were unfortunate to have parents who couldn't or wouldn't give them the enhancements - and for that to carry forwards as jobs, and the wealth to advance your children, increasingly go to those who have been modified.
In effect, if you found something and it really worked, you might well lock a large portion of the population out of any realistic chance of meaningfully participating in the future.
(Though I suppose one might argue that this is the case now, with education and good environments going primarily to the wealthy. The difference would be in the degree to which the path was locked in.)
Sounds a lot like the plot of Gattaca, and I agree that would be an awful potential effect. I do not think it's insurmountable, however, and I agree that it's unfortunately fairly close to today's current class divide.
However, I don't think such a thing could happen "overnight" as you suggest. In order for those genetic enhancements to become commonplace they will need at least several generations of trials, especially to explore how various genes interact. This long process could well lower the barrier for the less privileged to participate.
The cost of a germ-line genetic enhancement is front-loaded on the first generation to get it. After that, the cost of sperm is incredibly cheap.
Newly-developed gene modifications will first appear in children of the wealthy. The sons of the rich will have plenty of one night stands. Many of them will be with women who have timed their ovulation and will collect the used prophylactics on their way to the bathroom. If you're poor, you just need to teach your daughters how to pick the right marks, and your grandchildren can inherit many of the traits that the rich are willing to pay for.
But this problem will only last a few generations due to purely technical limitations. The politics now will only determine whether gene modifications will be available on the open market or grey market in the future, because they will definitely be available on the black market and in the "secondary" market.
Who's creating any underclass? There's no reason to expect you won't just take a pill to change our eye color etc. It could be cheap and available. Not yet time to pull the emergency stop cord, because of imagined inequalities in a system that's not even been engineered yet.
Have you observed how the real world works? There are many diseases whose cures/preventions are "cheap and available" yet still continue to kill millions in the "underclasses."
This point could have been made without the sarcasm, please see guidelines on being overly negative: http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline
GP made a fair point, and was not overly sarcastic.
EDIT: I appreciate the urge to have a kinder and gentler HN, but let's not start cluttering up threads more than we have to with references to the guidelines. It's meta, and meta kills.
Have you seen the unregulated medical systems in 3rd world countries? Easier access to antibiotics etc than in Malibu. Failure to cure diseases may be more about culture than price. Not warranted to jump straight to Gattica horror stories.
There are indeed many examples of this, especially in third-world countries ruled by dictators or superstitions, or a combination of the two. But that doesn't stop us from creating those cures/preventions for ourselves, because it's still the right thing to do.
We may eventually get through to them, at any rate. See Bill Gates and Polio vaccines, for example.
Hardly permanent, I'd say; eventually they would be outcompeted to extinction by H. s. mutabamus, in the same way H. s. sapiens (is thought to have) outcompeted neanderthalensis.
I agree. "Survival of the fittest" does not bode well for that underclass. At best they will naturally go extinct. At worst they will be exterminated or enslaved.
Thus we see the moral trainwreck that is Social Darwinism.
What we are not quite confident about is if one gene may have two or more different affects that we have yet to discover.
Artificially changing selective genes without thinking that another gene may be needed to counterbalance one change is the possibility most worrying.
That is a purely scientific scenario and therefore can be understood and accounted for. The ethical question is how we identify and resolve them safely.
It is also mostly moot, as genetic interactions are already a part of everyday conceptions. Many of today's genetic afflictions are due to parents' genes interacting unexpectedly. See Lorenzo's Oil[1], for example.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Odone
What are you talking about?
The concept of beauty changes every generation (so what would we select for?), and IQ/fertility has, at best no definitive correlation (and many would argue it has a negative correlation)[0].
I'm talking about self-driven evolution. In the past it was selecting for traits which suited the environment of the time, and perhaps that did not include intelligence per se, but the concept remains valid.
I also never claimed that in all of human history we always chose the same traits for beauty, but we have always selected for what we felt like "beauty" was at the time, even if that meant selecting against an "uglier" option. It was never a straight line, and it probably never will be.
Beauty changing every generation may actually be a boon to the process, as well. If the majority of one generation selected for a particular beauty trait then it would lose its appeal, driving diversity as less people selected for it or more people selected alternatives.
We humans are a fickle lot, at least until we find the fickle gene.
You seem to forget that being attractive and having more kids are in no way correlated. Ugly people have kids too.
If you're not saying we're selecting for intelligence or beauty, then what are you saying? You claim "the concept holds true", but I'm not sure what the greater concept you're trying to explain is. That humans are still evolving?
Attractiveness plays absolutely no role in reproduction? I honestly don't know how to respond to that, I hope you've just phrased it poorly.
I'm not saying we're not selecting for intelligence or beauty, I'm saying we're not selecting for the same intelligence and beauty every generation. A few thousand years ago intelligence was being able to tie a pointy rock to the end of a stick, and that sure played a role in natural selection. "Intelligence" as I intended to convey is broadly defined, it's not just the modern definition of IQ but the skills to survive and thrive in the environment of the time.
I have not worded it incorrectly. Attractive people may have kids, but so do ugly people, and ugly people have kids with attractive people, too. There is currently no known link between attractiveness and offspring. Your "common knowledge" is failing you here.
But wait, so you're trying to tell me that this sentence:
Is supposed to have meant this:
?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peafowl#Plumage_colours_as_attr...
And yes, my two sentences are one and the same. A trait is a category, such as hair color. We can select for that trait without always selecting specifically red hair, for example. In fact, at one point we selected against red hair in some cultures [1]. Similarly, as I described earlier, intelligence today is often defined as IQ or literacy while intelligence in the past might have been toolmaking, memory (for verbal history/storytelling), or navigational skills.
That's why I don't see any ethical quandaries about genetic modifications for beauty, because it's highly unlikely to lead to homogeneity and even if it did, if everyone is beautiful then nobody is, which means people would immediately find new definitions for beauty and pursue those instead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair#Prejudice_and_discrim...
Did you just link to the peafowl to try and show that in humans, attractiveness and offspring are related?
In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations, so assuming we had a well-understood and safe method for artificially selecting for them then there should be no ethical quandaries beyond "but, that's cheating!" There are no scorekeepers of the universe, nobody's going to give us karmic demerits for finding a shortcut.
I like the "there are no scorekeepers of the universe" line.
The ability for humans to use the intelligence that evolution has provided them for whatever they see fit, including the ability to better themselves and better the species as a whole (or, sadly and unfortunately, to hurt each other), should be considered part of the evolutionary process. Just because humans have intelligence doesn't mean they exist outside of evolution. In fact, not using our evolved intelligence to influence our genetic makeup is avoiding thinking about how and why we have this intelligence to begin with.
The ability for an organism to influence the genetic makeup of itself and its descending, through either gross methods like breeding/natural selection or discrete methods like genetic engineering/modification is really just one step out of many on the evolutionary ladder.
Here's an interesting heuristic: if an action is morally bad, then its inverse is morally good. Does that seem plausible? If blinding a child is bad, then curing their blindness is good, etc.
Applied to this situation: if it's morally bad to enhance the intelligence of a child beyond that of their peers, then it should be morally good to diminish the intelligence of a genius child to be more average. If it's bad to enhance the intelligence of an entire generation, it should be morally good to switch back to leaded paint and gasoline.
Or my favorite, from slatestarcodex I think (I can't find the link): if it would be morally bad to cure heroin addiction with a pill rather than the "hard way" with will power, then it should be morally good to addict schoolchildren to heroin. (In other words, if the chance to build character has more value than not being addicted to heroin, then we should be addicting _more_ people to heroin).
No, I don't think that heuristic passes the sniff test. There are lots of situations where the doing the functional opposite of a morally wrong action is also morally wrong. It's wrong for me to take $50 from you and give it to Bob, and still wrong for me to take $50 from Bob and give it to you. It's wrong to kill babies and wrong to force women to create babies. In these cases the moral inverse isn't to do something that creates the opposite effect, but to just not do the bad thing. Changing a kid's genes so he's smarter may or may not be immoral but it's not related to whether changing a smart kid's genes so he's normal intelligence, at least not in such a formal logic kind of way.
By inverse, I mean reversing states of the world. If Alice and Bob have exactly equal wealth, then transferring $50 from Alice and giving it to Bob decreases total utility, because of the decreasing marginal utility of money. If Bob now has $100 more wealth than Alice, then transferring $50 from Bob to Alice increases total utility by the same amount. If by "take" you meant steal, then returning the stolen money is obviously also a good thing.
If it's wrong to kill babies, then it's good to resuscitate ones that have died (assuming they're in the same state they would have been: no brain damage, etc.)
If making one average child a genius is bad for the world, then making one genius child average must be good for the world.
If you're a utilitarian, then the heuristic is basically a tautology: If moving from state A to state B decreases utility by X, then moving from state B to state A increases utility by the same amount.
There does exist a moral neutral. Not everything is "good" or "bad".