Is It Ethical To Hand-Pick Your Child’s Genes? - Dr Jonathan Anomaly
嘉宾：Dr Jonathan Anomaly
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Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Jonathan Anomaly. He's a philosopher, professor and an author. The concept of hand selecting your baby's traits has been an idea since the dawn of genetic science. This technology is now available, but just how ethical is it to shape your child's destiny and what unseen problems might a world with this science be facing. Expect to learn why so many people dislike any discussions about IQ, what the moral challenges of embryo selection are, why genetic selection is going to be the biggest global talking point over the next decade, whether you are able to fix evolutionary mismatch with embryo selection, Johnny's prediction for the future of multiculturalism
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That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom and MW 20 a checkout. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Jonathan anomaly. Why do people really dislike conversations about IQ? I think it's pretty straightforward and that is norms that followed the end of the second world war. So what ends up happening in the 1920s and 30s is IQ tests were already pretty decent by then. They did have some bias back in the day when they were invented, but they were relatively good at gauging cognitive ability. But what ended up happening is some people misused IQ to justify, for example, restrictive immigration policies in the United States first.
And then, you know, after world war two, actually, interestingly, a quick divergence here, Hitler had Jews and, and non-Jews Gentiles cognitively tested, and he found that Jews consistently scored higher on IQ tests than Germans did, and he banned IQ tests, um, in Germany. So it's not- So actually being anti IQ is a Nazi policy. It's pro-Nazi. That's right. Right.
Right. So, but, but at least according to the lore and, and some of this lore is true. Some of the, some of the hardcore coercive eugenicists in the 1820s and 30s did notice cognitive differences between populations. And even though Hitler found the reverse between Jews and Gentiles within what he wanted to find, it became stigmatized after the Second World War because at least some people, even if not Hitler, were using cognitive differences
to justify restrictive immigration policies and also potentially supremacy over other groups. So you can think of the British Empire and why should the French have colonies? Why should the British have colonies? Well, we're smarter, we're better than them, that sort of thing. I'm not French or British by the way, but there's at least the sense that they could be misused for these things and sometimes they were. And so I think what happened after the second world war is not just that IQ was shunned and the genetics of IQ, but
really genetic explanations for any group differences and even for individual differences because it became part of a dangerous package whereby you could use this research to mistreat groups of people. Can you just explain group differences and individual differences, what that means in a genetic context, how it's different? Sure. I mean, look, we all understand, first of all, what intelligence is, broadly speaking.
I should just say that intelligence is roughly the ability to creatively solve problems. It's not just memory. It's not just recall. It's the ability to kind of draw conclusions from evidence and so on. And we recognize it in dogs, we recognize it in cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are some of the brightest animals on earth, which is why I don't eat them, by the way. That's a kind of species of octopus. And so we all know that there are individual differences in intelligence. We see it in our dogs, we see it in cuttlefish, we see it in people.
And obviously the genetics of this is just such that there are genetic explanations for why people differ in height, in weight, in muscle mass, and in intelligence. And that's not to say that the environment doesn't matter, that you can't get better, for example, at taking IQ tests or solving cognitive problems, but there are pretty strict genetic limits on that, right? You're not gonna train your way into becoming Einstein. And so that's individual differences in IQ. There's clearly a mostly genetic basis. It's true across the animal kingdom. And it's probably gonna be true across groups too,
whether we wanna talk about that or not. I mean, it seems obvious just like height, there are height differences, there are speed differences. Right now, we're all watching the Olympics and you do see patterns, right? Ethiopians tend to be really good at long distance running and West Africans tend to be really good at short distance running. And so there are going to be these differences between individuals and groups and genes are going to have something to do with it. What I've heard a lot of criticism about the accuracy of IQ tests. IQ actually doesn't predict anything at all. The tests don't test what they say that they're going to.
They're easily gamified. What's the how much legitimacy is there to the skepticism around IQ and what is that? Is that coming from sort of people that have done rigorous science? Is that coming from people that are motivated for social justice reasons? Look, the tests have been going on for over a century now and I think it's pretty clear some of the early versions of the tests had some cultural biases. So for example, if you gave the test to someone who is illiterate or who wasn't familiar with some of the common concepts, like show pictures of a rabbit
and then show a rabbit without ears or with ears and ask people what's wrong with this picture with the rabbit without ears. Well, some people are gonna get that wrong if they've never seen a rabbit or if they've never heard the word rabbit or something like that. Those kinds of biases were pretty quickly fixed, however, and for the last 80 or so years, IQ tests have been pretty reliable. I would never ever take too seriously one gauge of anything, right? Other than maybe height.
Actually, height is going to be pretty accurate. We can still measure it in inches or in centimeters. But probably cognitive tests, IQ tests are going to leave some important things off. Nevertheless, one reason to think that they're pretty good at gauging general cognitive ability is they test a whole wide variety of different abilities. So, yes, there's some mathematical stuff, really simple math though, not calculus. There's some spatial reasoning abilities, there's verbal reasoning, there's inferential reasoning where you've got a set of premises, what follows from the premises, really basic logic. And so I think it's pretty clear that the results from IQ tests can be well replicated.
And there's something called Spearman's Hypothesis, which goes way back, almost 100 years. And the basic idea is something like this. Anytime you try to measure any kind of cognitive ability, you end up getting this general factor whereby different tests correlate with each other so that there is some general factor of intelligence often called G or general cognitive ability. And IQ tests have gotten better at sort of gauging that even if they leave certain things out. And yeah, we're studying the genetics of this pretty well now.
There's of course many years of behavioral genetics research where you separate identical twins and non-identical twins at birth and then gauge their cognitive ability across the lifetime. And of course, you know, genetic twins, identical twins tend to score almost exactly the same and fraternal twins score very differently. And so there is something going on with IQ, even if it's not everything we care about. What are the holes in the assessment of IQ, of IQ as a concept or G or whatever you want to call it?
Well, I think it's just that like, first of all, unless you're taking IQ tests, many, many times across your life, which most of us aren't doing, right? There are going to be certain things that, you know, you do better or worse on just based on the test itself or on how well you slept or whatever the night before, there are going to be little, little holes like that. And probably there are some people with really good memories and poor spatial reasoning and vice versa and so on. And so I just think you have to be really careful
with just sort of saying like, look, here's your IQ test score, here's how smart you are. Nevertheless, we know there's a whole bunch of traits that are highly correlative with IQ. And these are things like educational attainment, not surprising. People who score better on IQ tests,
especially on G, the general factor of intelligence, they tend to make more money. They tend to get more educational attainment, and especially in more difficult fields like physics or chemistry. My IQ is probably not high enough to do especially well in either of those. But here are some of the more interesting things that I think most people don't know about. IQ is a pretty
decent predictor of things like marital stability, addictive behavior, and this is after you've corrected for socioeconomic status. Here's another one that might shock you. IQ is a decent predictor at predicting criminality. And you might ask, well, why? Why would that be the case, especially after you correct for socioeconomic status? I mean, an obvious thing is if you have low socioeconomic status, you might think, okay, you're both going to have a lower IQ and you're more prone to criminality, but that's just because you're poor. You need to steal things in order to stay alive. Again, once you correct for socioeconomic status, you still get these correlations and IQ is inversely correlated with certain things and positively correlated with others. So smarter people tend to engage in less criminality. Now, why is that? That's an interesting question.
You might have a story where it goes in one of two directions. It may be that, you know, there's some trait that's correlated with intelligence, like long-term planning, self-control. So it's actually not IQ at all that's causing more criminality. It's something like that is low IQ causing criminality.
It's something like lower IQ people tend to have shorter time horizons and less self control. And that is true. And so they're going to be more prone to criminality. Couple of interesting things there. First that you say sort of competence in one area seems to correlate with competence in another. So the shape rotator word cell dichotomy
isn't sort of necessarily true that people are kind of, they tend to the rising tide of intelligence seems to lift sort of everybody's capacity within that. Although you do get some stuff skewed around. I wonder as well if a little bit of it is that because all of these other benefits kind of come along for the ride as a byproduct with IQ, it becomes
increasingly more slippery to say, well, these people are worth more. They're worth more to society. They're less likely to be a criminal. They're more likely to have a job. They're more likely to be in a stable relationship and not hurt those emotionally around them. Just keep on scaling this up. We revere people that have got education. We revere people that have got education. We revere people that have got a higher, um, job title.
We revere people that have got a nicer car, which is downstream from the earning potential, which is from their job, which is from their education, which is from their IQ and all of these things sort of come along for the ride to make, uh, an image of a desirable person. It would be very rare for you to say, would you like to have a child or would you like for one of your friends to be in some accident and after this, they were more likely to be a criminal
or they were more likely to struggle in school or they were less likely to get a promotion at work or they were less self-control, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that it kind of gets into the topic that we spoke about last time. We're gonna talk about today, sort of genetic enhancement, the virtue of sort of philosophical underpinnings of it. That it's perilously close.
And this is the, you know, the criticisms of better or worse people. Preferable or less preferable traits. But even that, you know, the moral, it's this sort of messy line between moral equivalence. How much does this person actually have value? Are they equal? Are they better?
And I think that because IQ is kind of this epicenter of it all. And so much stuff is downstream from it. Arguably, maybe it's, you know, height might have some more or it'd be probably not too far off. You know, would someone trade one standard deviation of height for one standard deviation of IQ? I don't know, but it would, you know, be an interesting experiment to run in a virtual reality. But yeah, I just think, you know, it really gets to the point of better or worse, more valuable or less valuable. Yeah, let me say something about that before we turn to sort of embryo selection and the genetics of the stuff.
I think that that is true, that there is a real risk. And among my friends who are IQ realists, I actually think some of them tend to overplay IQ relative, for example, to personality traits. You mentioned a superficial one like height, but you mentioned it of course, because it's true. Taller people tend to make more income. Women tend to prefer taller men on the mating market. And there are psychological studies we talked about last time showing that not only that taller people tend to be regarded as more authoritative, but people who are regarded as more authoritative or attractive, who you've never seen in person before, are often thought to be taller than they are. So I mentioned Tom Cruise last time as a typical example of that.
And that shows you it is a bias. And that also shows you we should be careful to succumb to that bias. So for example, we do tend to make these value judgments more attractive. People are in some sense better, which is why they're on television, right? Which is why people tend to want to watch them on soap operas rather than less attractive people. And I think this is an actual real problem in politics. We want to be sure that we have, for example, anti-discrimination laws so that if someone, basically an employer preferentially hires someone simply because
they're attractive, if we really did have good evidence that that was true, I do think they have a case for a lawsuit. And I think we should structure our society in that way so that we don't necessarily just value people based on how attractive or smart they are. Nevertheless, there are actually moral risks to denying IQ and its importance in everyday life because if you don't understand that this is a real phenomenon and that some people have more of it than others, then what you're going to end up saying is, look, there's a class of people who are just privileged.
You hear these terms all the time, whether it's toxic masculinity or male privilege or white privilege or Asian privilege or whatever. And the same thing goes for, you know, again, aesthetic privilege, actually. People don't use that term very much, but they should. There is actually a worry that if you don't acknowledge that some people are smarter than others for largely genetic reasons, then you're going to think that their income is undeserved and you're going to become envious of them. then you're going to think that their income is undeserved and you're going to become envious of them and you're going to create social policies that basically say, look, let's punish the high IQ people and reward the others. Now that's fine if you have a theory of fairness
that says you should do that because maybe IQ is largely unearned because your genetics are unearned. Fine, I can deal with that. That's called luck egalitarianism and philosophy. And there are good arguments for that. But there are also purely envy based arguments that are destructive of any kind of political order that says let's punish the smart people and reward those at the other end of the bell curve. There's of course a parable for this
that many people have read from Kurt Vonnegut. It's a little three page story about a handicapper general. And it takes place in the future where everyone is finally equal in terms of resources, income, the size of your house, et cetera, but some people are smarter than others. So what do they do? They come up with a brain implant
and they zap them every 20 seconds. So they can't string thoughts together and come up with the kind of innovations, the kind of medical innovations that benefit all of us. And so just as there's a risk to overplaying IQ and to conflating it with moral value, I think there's also a risk to denying the reality of IQ and the genetic basis of it.
And that risk is designing political institutions so that you punish the people who are actually creating a lot of the value of the world. Getting into genetic enhancement and the sort of selection effectiveness, this is something that you'll absolutely knee deep in. I think this is going to be the big area of conversation for the next decade.
I can't, I mean, AI, yes, it is going to make changes on the surface and it's going to be more immediate, but this, the potential for gene embryo selection for you to be able to fertilize with your partner, 10 harvested eggs, and then be able to do your polygenic risk scores and look at a whole host of traits. I think that is the big new technology over the next few decades, and I think it's going to probably be the biggest change that we're going to see.
Between that and AI, I think are the two things that are neck and neck. Where's your sort of money lie on that? I think that's right. And I have a lot of uncertainty over AI. So it's, it's fairly obvious that weak AI in contrast to strong AI, it's already here. Weak AI is just basically algorithms that can substitute for human thinking. Self-driving cars, programs that solve math problems. That's weak AI or, you know, IBM's program, Big Blue, that can
beat every chess player in the world handily. Okay, fine. That's here. That's going to be very disruptive and I think actually very good overall, but it's going to be disruptive at certain jobs. Strong AI, where you've actually got a conscious being that has a theory of mind, that's conscious, and so on, however you define that. I really have no idea if or when it's coming. I assume at some point in the future it will, but I really don't know. One thing I do know that's coming though, and that's already here, is the capacity to select genes for intelligence and make our kids slightly brighter. Here I'm not talking about CRISPR.
I'm not talking about gene editing, which is almost certainly coming, probably a decade or two away. AI will actually facilitate that if we get ATI. But I'm talking about using in vitro fertilization, generating a bunch of embryos and then selecting among those embryos. Everybody produces quite a bit of genetic diversity. If
you have, let's say, 8, 10, 15 embryos, you might get 20, 25 IQ points difference between the highest and the lowest scoring. And right now, I actually know there are companies, of course, that will let you select for health traits, polygenic health traits like diabetes, heart disease, schizophrenia. These have enormous value for future people in terms of health, longevity, and so on. But there's at least one company that I actually work with, hasn't publicly launched yet, but that can select for cognitive ability. And if you're doing IVF anyway, why not select among the brightest embryos? I don't think it's the only thing you should select. You should probably look at health traits
and what runs in your family. And eventually we're gonna be able to select for personality. Like I said, a lot of my friends who, you know, who sort of understand the reality of IQ and its importance, they'll often overplay it relative to, let's say, conscientiousness or openness, which to me actually have a lot of value because I want my kids to respect other people,
to compete, not only to compete, but to compete fairly in the business world, and to be able to sort of set tasks and goals and complete them on time. That's conscientiousness. So basically that's gonna come very soon. IQ is already here if you want to select for it. Certainly anyone can contact me if they're interested in that. And I think in the coming years, you know, there are going to be many other companies that end up
doing this and there's going to be almost an arms race for who can offer which traits. And this is going to become not just a reality, but I think it'll become widespread. It leads to a very interesting situation, which is that you kind of have an arms race. Well, if other families are able to do this and I'm not able to do this, you end up with sort of two classes of people, those that can select and those that can't. Yeah, I think it's going to be in the same way that there's not just going to be two classes genetically as pictured in Gattaca. There's going to be thousands or millions of ways in which we diverge. There's going to be a kind of spectrum. So too with access, it's not going to be like you have it or you don't.
You know, we've talked about before and you talk many times about mate selection, which is clearly the most important thing, right? If, if you have a sperm or egg donor or your husband or wife just happens to be really bright or conscientious, that's already going to stack the genetic deck in favor of your kids being that way. That would be something I think important to put in, which is, you know, for anybody and even me before I became friends with you, before we started having these conversations more deeply, there's just this post 1943 ick around anything that gets kind of close to selection, trait, preference, reproduction, who is, who isn't, why do we want this one and not the other, all of that. But everybody is a eugenicist in some form, because why did you pick your partner?
Why did you choose that partner over another one? Oh, it's because they're attractive and because they were this and because they were that. But when you get down to the absolute root of it, why is it that we're attracted to symmetrical faces and not non-symmetrical faces? It's because of the mutational load and how resilient you've been to the perturbments that you've had thus far in your life. Why is it that we prefer people that are taller? What's sexy son hypothesis? You know, we know that the partner that we're with is going to pass traits onto our children.
The most interesting thing is what happens when you allow women to choose sperm donors, because what you get there is a woman that is purely choosing genetic material detached from their attraction to the person that deposits or supplies them with the genetic material. And it's evident, it's evident what people, they want somebody that's kind, right? Okay, well, that's going to be a kind child, right? A smart child. They don't want somebody that's unhealthy. They don't want, that's going to be a kind child, right? A smart child. They don't want somebody that's unhealthy. They don't want somebody that's full of disease.
So yeah, just the fact that you already do a proxy rough-hewn version of this, where you just roll the dice with which sperm gets to which egg fastest. Like it's already there. We've been there since the beginning of time, since, you know, reproduction through sex started. Yeah, I think that's right. And so you're already stacking the genetic deck in favor, in a certain direction. We're all trying to find the best mate we can. I mean, I don't want to put it in terms of,
you know, a spreadsheet mentality. We're not ticking boxes necessarily, but as you put it, the kinds of traits that were adapted to be attracted to obviously are cues of social success. And think of how much weight women place, not just on achievement, but achievement in a social context, right? You could be on a date, and I listened to your episode a few days ago that launched a dating advice for men, which was really interesting. And the guest, I forget her name.
Blaine, yeah. Blaine, yeah. She was sort of saying, one mistake men make is they kind of like, they talk too much and they kind of list off their traits like it's a resume. And that might all be true, but women want to see you in action. Are you socially dominant in a group? And not just dominant in some sadistic sense, but dominant in the sense that you command the attention of other people. They listen to you because they trust you. Why do they trust you? Well, there's information there. They trust you probably because they have experience of you solving problems well, of you coordinating other people in a kind of altruistic way. Like here's the plan, here's how
we're going to succeed as a group and here's how we're going to beat the other group, etc. And so, yeah, women are already looking for proxies of these, men are too, of course, they're slightly different proxies. But then when you get into embryo selection or, you know, again, before that even sperm or egg selection, if you're doing that, that's what's really revealing the things that you care about most. And I mean, I might add like when I used to teach this stuff at university, you know, this is before I used, I wrote about the topic, but I'd teach other people's writings and a common distinction that people will make. And I've seen it among ordinary people too, is between treating diseases that already exist and enhancing existing capacities. This seems to be a conceptual and moral line that people want to draw.
Or in the context of embryo selection, we might say, look, it's okay to prevent certain known diseases. So you can select an embryo that doesn't have Down syndrome, that doesn't have a single gene or monogenic condition like Tay-Sachs, but that's very different than selecting an embryo that's a little bit higher than average on height or IQ or on longevity, right? We can predict longevity by putting a bunch of diseases together and then having a kind of disease-adjusted life-year metric and choosing on the right-hand side of that bell curve. And I the the kind of motivation behind this you might think like look it's one thing to kind of say yeah diseases are bad we know that for sure right we can see them manifest themselves but what are we
gonna get when we select in favor of these traits you know we select on the right side of the bell curve so to speak of intelligence of it you know, you might worry that there's some unknown there. Now I actually think this line breaks down pretty quickly. Let me pick on British people because you're British. For whatever reason, Brits seem to have on average worse teeth than Chinese. Maybe that's not true actually. Let me pick a different group. Let's say Arabs.
I've lived in the Middle East. Arabs don't seem to have as crooked a teeth as Brits do when they're kids. Brits get braces. We all get braces these days. It was just in South America and it's a little poorer down there. You see a lot of 30, 40 year olds getting braces for the first time. You think, what's going on here? This is an enhancement. Crooked teeth are normal for our species. They're especially normal for Brits, for whatever reason. And yet we think it's perfectly fine to enhance crooked teeth by putting
braces on. Similarly, it's perfectly normal for our species to, with age, over the age of 40, lose muscle mass, which is relevant for your audience. You know, the people who are listening for workout advice, you know, it's perfectly normal to lose eyesight. I'm 48 now and I'm from a family of pilots. We have just perfect vision or I should say had until this year and I have my goddamn glasses right in front of me here. For the first time, I started having difficulty seeing small text and it's blurry to me. Now is that normal? Yes it is. If we could select in favor of having eyesight, better eyesight longer, more muscle mass later in life, would we do it? I sure as hell know I would do it. I think
you would do it. And so, you know, we have these intuitive lines, it sort of makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint to have these stark distinctions. Look, we know these diseases, they're bad, let's select against them, right? We've seen them manifest. But there's this unknown territory of genetically enhancing ourselves, and that seems scary and mysterious,
but in a way it's not. You know, we know what causes bad eyesight. It's just like the micro muscles around your eyes just kind of getting worse. We know that we're in some sense programmed to die and we're more and more prone to cancer as we get older. So is it an enhancement to select an embryo at lower risk of adult cancer? In a way, the answer is yes, but I also think it's morally fine. So the treatment enhancement distinction is it's conceptually interesting. I understand why people make it, but I don't think it's either morally or very conceptually
coherent or significant. Well, it definitely leads to some difficult situations that you get into. Okay, so if we got rid of all of the potential risks for disease, that's a longevity increase, but you're only allowed to do it up to some kind of arbitrary waterline ceiling thing. And then beyond that, that's, I do think even from our last conversation where we spoke about the sort of difference between selecting between different offsprings. So genetic selection and modifying the traits of the same offspring, which would be enhancement, like actually getting in and tinkering with the, with genes, which we're not, not at this stage to be able to do.
It does to me feel like a fundamental difference between the two, given that you can't, you know, one of the things that you could be concerned about if you were enhancing an existing embryo by going in and tinkering with the genetic material is that that embryo didn't ask for them to have, to be taller than they were going to be, or for them to be smarter than they were going to be or whatever.
But when it comes to selecting between different embryos, it's like, well, the only way that you were going to be born was if you were selected. And you are the way that you are, you are the way that you were always going to be. So I, I feel like this sort of first stage of embryo selection is going to encounter some challenges. And then when we get to the next stage of genetic enhancement, that's going to encounter new philosophical challenges morally. Yeah, I think that's right. And a couple of things that you said first is consent. You know, so typically in medical ethics, what's the foundational principle? It's informed consent.
You know, your doctor doesn't have the right to act paternalistic toward you, to tell you, you should select this embryo. Why? Because I like it. Or you should take this cancer treatment because it's gonna cure you. You're allowed to say, look, I know it's more likely to cure me,
but I'm a Jehovah's Witness, let's say, and I don't want it. You know, you're allowed to do that. And so, you know, that I it. You're allowed to do that. That I think is the right principle to act from. Informed consent should be the bedrock of medical ethics. It certainly is in legal ethics. But it really doesn't apply when it comes to children because no children asked to be born. It's impossible. So whether it's you just having sex with your wife and the sperm that happens to join, you could have done it the night before or the night after, and it would have been a different sperm for less of an egg.
Sorry, Brian Klass told me about the fact that, you know, when you're having sex, especially if you're trying to have children, that because of the way that your physiology moves, the difference between this thrust and the next thrust is the difference between a different child being born. And I was like, well, just in case any men weren't suffering with enough performance anxiety already, the knowledge that the amount of duration that they last for during sex is going to be massively, it's going to completely change our entire future based on whether it's now or is it now or is it now? Totally. Exactly. Yeah. So kids never consent to being born, but you might ask yourself, this is kind of philosophical principle, you know, and it has to do with hypothetical consent. Like, if you were to consent to something or if some being could, it would be something like,
what are the traits that it would consent to having if it had a choice? Now, it never will in the case of a child being born, but it would probably be things if it had a choice. Now, it never will in the case of a child being born, but it would probably be things like generally having a healthy immune system, being reasonably bright, not necessarily a genius because those are the kind of all-purpose goods that lead to a variety of different good lives. There are so many different ways in which you could have a good life, but the last thing it would select in favor of is severe disability or extremely low intelligence or something like that or poor self-control. And so it's obvious like the things that people would select for in general if they were the ones doing the selecting, you know, if they were choosing their parents, but they can't.
And so I think, you know, as long as your life is reasonably worth living, which is almost all lives, right? There are very few cases to the contrary. You should be happy with your life and parents, you know, I would trust parents to do this rather than, I don't know, the government or something like that. Now, to your other point, though, about why do we have this treatment enhancement distinction, you sort of said, yeah, I can't kind of shake the idea that maybe it is a worthwhile distinction. I do think in some contexts it is. So think about socialized healthcare. To some extent, we all live in a system with socialized healthcare,
because we have insurance pools. And as soon as we're in an insurance pool, we're forced to share the costs and benefits of one another's choices. And in England, it's just one giant forced insurance pool. And in cases like this, you have to allocate scarce resources. And what we wouldn't want, you know, we want the government to say, look, if you're doing IVF, maybe we should also subsidize the ability to select against severe disease.
It's totally uncontroversial, right? Or at least, yeah, I think for most people, you'd want to prioritize that. But you wouldn't want to have subsidies for like aesthetic enhancements where it's like, all you're doing is you're spending state resources, meaning my tax money to, I don't know, give your kid a slight advantage, which actually may have a slight negative effect
on everyone else because if your kid is taller than everyone else, that means mine is relatively shorter. And so actually in the allocation of scarce resources, where we're in a kind of forced, um, uh, a situation of forced allocation, um, where we're sharing each other's resources in those situations, I think it's worth prioritizing treatment of existing disease or prevention of disease over, let's say, aesthetic enhancement.
So that actually makes sense. It alleviates a potential future burden. Exactly, a burden on everyone in that case, right? Yeah. Talk to me about this sort of gene erosion and this increasing mutation load. I read a very spicy short article taken from something John Tooby wrote a while ago
and I kind of can't stop seeing it now. That's right. Yeah, I briefly mentioned on your show last time, actually about a year and a half ago and Louise Perry is now talking about it too. So I see that as a victory for not so much enhancement as science. I think this is something everyone should know about.
It's something Darwin wrote about in 1871 and the descent of man, although indirectly because the word gene didn't even exist back then. But the idea is something like this. We have in nature a set of forces that purify the population, not in the kind of Nazi sense of purification, not racial purification, but purification in the sense that, you know, evolutionary biology works like this. You know, we've got a set of people, they have children, they mix their genes, there are a bunch of random mutations that accumulate in your lifetime. You know, the most obvious cases of those are like freckles on your skin,
you know, that's a mutation from the sun. But here we're talking about mutations that you pass onto your children. Most of those mutations are gonna be bad. They just have to be, right? By definition, they're either neutral or bad. And then rarely those mutations are good and lead to some new innovation at a genetic level. Well, when we have a kind of civilization
with advanced healthcare and nursing homes for the elderly and so on, but we're really talking about is health care for children. If you have diseases when you're a kid or during your reproductive years that we can now treat. So I mentioned poor eyesight that we can treat with glasses or LASIK surgery, childhood cancers that we can often treat with chemotherapy. There's a whole range of diseases that we can treat now by adjusting the environment to make it easier for you to survive and reproduce, or by actually just giving you medical care if you can't afford it. Those are going to imply almost by definition that we're going to be passing along genes and traits that are unfavorable from the standpoint of genetic fitness or from the
standpoint of human welfare. And again, Darwin understood it in the point in terms of just sort of human welfare, but we can put it in terms of genetic fitness as well. So we're almost certainly accumulating deleterious mutations in civilized societies and passing those along. Those are going to be accumulating. Now, I think what's interesting about this is I actually want to give a metaphor which Louise Perry introduced when I was doing an interview with her last year. I should have put this in the first edition of my book. I did put it in the second edition, thanks to you and her. The metaphor is something a lot of people have heard of. It's Chesterton's Fence. G.K. Chesterton is a famous British conservative, religious
conservative, and just a brilliant writer. And the metaphor of Chesterton's Fence is something like this. In the context of social reform, many of the kind of socialists of the early 20th century, they were a little too eager to tear down existing structures, social norms, legal institutions, and so on, without thinking about why those things were there to begin with and what is going to replace them. And I think this is just obviously a great metaphor for a lot of things. And so when you think about Chesterton's fence in the context of genetics, you might think we should be cautious before we forget about gene editing. That's obvious, we should be cautious there.
But even with embryo selection, or I guess even mate selection, maybe we should be cautious with what we do, you know, before we, I don't know, radically influence the genetics of our children. And I think that's a really good point. But what I wanna bring up now is a term, I guess I coined it, but it's really Chesterton's idea. I call it Chesterton's
post and it's from an earlier essay in 1908 that he wrote. And actually, let me see if I can quote it. Yeah, I do have it here from my book. So Chesterton says in 1908, conservatism is based on the idea that if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are, but you do not. If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change. And again, think about this mutation accumulation thing here. Evolution doesn't stop. If you leave a white post alone, it will soon be a black post.
If you particularly want it to be white, you must always be painting it over and over again. Broadly, he says, if you want the old white post, you must have a new white post. And let me extend the metaphor to an old Greek metaphor of a boat where, you know, everyone who owns a boat, I certainly don't have the money to own a boat, but we all know that you have to constantly maintain it because the saltwater erodes it. So you're changing planks one at a time, so to speak, right? And at some point it's basically a new boat, but you still call it your boat. And the metaphor here is conservatives,
of which GK Chesterton is a conservative, they often make the mistake that if you wanna stay where you are now, you can just kind of take a snapshot and freeze everything. But in fact, entropy is this universal force that dissolves boats in the water, that dissolves molecules in the universe, and that degrades our genome over time. And so I've actually argued that just Chesterton, who is a vehement opponent of eugenics, but by which he meant state-sponsored
coercive eugenics, Chesterton himself should probably endorse voluntary eugenics or genetic enhancement because if you like where we are now, well, you'd probably want to do one of two things. You either want to select in favor of a low disease burden and low genetic load, or reintroduce the really harsh mistress that is purifying selection. That is, go back to the Middle Ages, stop taking your antibiotics and vaccines, and just allow people basically to have a huge number of kids, most of whom died before reproductive age.
So I actually think that this is an essay everyone should read. It's called The Race Between Germline Gene Editing and Genetic Meltdown. And we don't necessarily need gene editing, but we could use embryo selection to minimize overall disease burden and therefore stay where we are now. That's super interesting.
I hadn't thought, I've learned about this sort of gene erosion thing, the slow dwindling toward us all becoming aliens with big heads and skinny bodies. Um, but I didn't consider that a countervailing force would just be even without the enhancement just straight up. the enhancement just straight up, okay, well if we continue to select a disproportionately optimal set of embryos across the board and if that becomes more democratized, more democratized. It's kind of interesting, you know, I had Malcolm Collins on the show last year, really interesting, unique guy and the fact that he's at the forefront of talking about birthrate decline is pretty cool. One of the things I've been considering is kind of the
intersection of declining birth rates with this soon to come online reproductive technology, especially given that some of the groups that have the highest birth rates are religious groups, for whom I imagine genetic selection because of IVG and the potential for you having unused embryos left over at the end of this reproductive span for your wife, that they're not going to do that. So it's the groups that are reproducing more highly at the moment are going to be the ones that are potentially unable to use this technology or unwilling because of some ethical consideration that they have as part of their sort of religion.
Have you considered all of these different things together? Yeah, and let me go back that one of those feeds into your previous point, some people will be unable to use this. I actually think like one solution to this is gonna be governments subsidizing IVF. China and Israel are already doing this to boost their birth rate. And I think it's actually a decent idea because if you're older, it is going to be harder to reproduce. And so if you have crashing birth rates, one way to boost it a bit is to subsidize IVF.
But once you do that, it's a short step between selecting among those embryos. Because when you do IVF, you have multiple embryos, you're either going to select at random or you're going to select the one with the better genetic profile according to you, not according to the government, hopefully. And generally, that's going to be the one with the lower disease burden and so on. So I actually think there's two things that are going to follow from this initial unequal access. Governments will see IVF and then eventually companies that do genetic selection on top
of IVF as a thing to promote not only to prevent big inequalities, but also to promote birth rates. I see this as incredibly optimistic actually. I think it'll start in China and Israel and it'll go from there to other parts of the world. Now you mentioned religious groups that are unable or unwilling. So yeah, again, government subsidies might help for this,
for IVF or insurance subsidies. I know Tesla, right down the street from us is of course Tesla and Elon Musk companies and Elon of course Tesla and Elon Musk companies and Elon of course has used IVF and embryo selection. Tesla offers IVF and frozen eggs and that sort of thing. And I think this is, you know, going to be more and more common. Now with religious groups, I do worry that some are going to have a prohibition against this and their kids, not in the first generation, but over two or three or 10 generations could suffer serious,
um, genetic disadvantages because of the choices their parents made. Some of them are going to adapt and endorse, um, using IVF and embryo selection and so on. Others won't, but I don't endorse the government coming in and forcing them to do it. Um, I think the risks of the risks of forced sterilization is forced selection, reproduction, forced using of it. Yeah, exactly. I don't think governments are especially competent to do that, but I will say one
more thing, um, and this goes to the point of what you mentioned with, uh, deleterious mutations accumulating in the absence of embryo selection. That is a fact. So if we want to stay where we are now and simply not deteriorate, here's an example where religious groups should endorse and actually use embryo selection. So in Islam, for a long, long time, maybe a thousand years, it's been common to engage in cousin marriage. And in fact, that is the norm around the world, but especially in Islam, and it's not in Europe for one really interesting reason.
There's a paper on this actually. It's called Intensive Kinship Selection, the Catholic Church, and Global Psychological Variation. That's the name of the paper. This is from 2019. What it argued is that the Catholic Church had prohibitions on first and even second cousin marriage for more than a thousand years. And this actually had an effect on the European population. Not only did they have lower disease burdens, but they were selected for
various kinds of norms. And you see this in every European society including their offshoots like Canada, Australia, the United States, higher trust, more of a sense of an impersonal set of fairness rules, and less corruption in the sense of favoring your kin over non-kin. And these authors have argued that that is actually partly result of an inadvertent ban on cousin marriage by the Catholic Church. Now I don't know if this is true. These are two of the best scholars in the world, Joseph Henrich at Harvard and Jonathan Schultz who's an economist and statistician at George Mason. This has been replicated by a few teams, but this is wild. So when you think about what banning cousin marriage can do, just doing that,
right? That can have tremendous genetic effects. And in the Middle East, I'll just put some meat on this bone. I actually think the people that are going to take up embryo selection first as it becomes more out in the open and more popular are Arabs in the Middle East, Bangladeshis and Africans in East Africa. Why? Because they engage in more cousin marriage. And as you know, I mean, as everybody knows, right, European kings who were doing sibling and cousin marriage ended up with all kinds of crazy deformities, low cognitive ability. I mean, it toppled the entire regimes, right? And what you have in the Middle East is the expression of rare alleles where if both parents have them, you have this devastating disease, you get cognitive impairments and you get all kinds of deformities including heart disease and all of these things
at much higher rates in those places that engage in cousin marriage than those that don't. And this is a religious practice. This is within Islam or certain branches of it. So I actually think interestingly, the people who should use genetic selection the most are going to be religious groups and some of them will. And others won't, and they're going to put their kids at all kinds of disadvantages. That is so fascinating. The fact that you have certain religious groups, which have got smaller genetic pools. What, how would you refer to that less genetic variation?
Yeah, exactly. And that includes, you know, my pool. I mean, I'm half Ashkenazi Jew and Ashkenazis were down to a tiny bottleneck of only a few hundred people in the middle ages. And then they expanded quite a bit in medieval Europe. And this is why Ashkenazis have a big disease burden, right? This is why every Ashkenazi, including the most extreme religious person, the kind of crazy orthodox people you see in Brooklyn or Israel,
they all get the Tay-Sachs test before they go on a first date. This is straight up eugenics and it's straight up genetic selection. They know they're at risk of these things. And so it's better to marry someone who doesn't have that deleterious allele. So, well, actually that's one point. Does that mean that as a Ashkenazi Jew who does have that allele, it's super difficult for you to date? Yeah, you have to, you have to find someone who doesn't et cetera.
So, um, yeah, you have to worry about it being expressed if you're both carriers. If you're not, it's not a problem. As if the mating crisis wasn't hard enough as it is. Cut out 50% of the, so yeah, I mean, it's, dude, that's so interesting. You've got this sort of smaller genetic pool. And from that, one of the ways that these religious groups
could combat the downstream effect is to sort of offset the entropy or offset that sort of deleterious nature by going in and ensure, okay, we're okay here, we're okay there. And then after a period of time, maybe that gets you to such a robust genetic standpoint. What are some of the other reasons to be worried about genetic selection? What else have you got concerns about? Let's see. I mean, look, one of the reasons I wrote a book about this long before I was involved kind of in the industry, so to speak, is, you know, I studied economics and philosophy.
And so I think in terms of what are the situations in which individually rational choices, these micro level choices we make every day, can sum up to an overall pattern that's either better than our individual choice or much worse from a social standpoint. The better case is the Adam Smith case about trade. Each of us, the butcher, the brewer, and the baker is just trying to get a good deal, right? The end result is lower prices, higher quality products. That's the economic case for free trade, right? That doesn't mean infinitely free trade,
but other things equal. Better off to leave people free to own their own property, specialize in what they're good at, and then exchange with one another on mutually agreeable terms. The overall social product is better for everyone, right? We end up with these rich societies. Of course, you see that, right? It starts in Britain and the Industrial Revolution, it spreads from there. And every society that has private property and market exposure ends up much
richer than it was. So that's like the classic economic case where it's positive sum. But was. So that's like the classic economic case where it's positive sum. But economists often focus on these negative sum games where it's like, yeah, I buy gas or let's say I buy energy from a coal company. That coal company produces energy in a way that's really dirty. They're putting all kinds of pollution in the atmosphere. Let's take the case of China, for example, could contribute to global warming. Even if you're not worried about global warming, it's a fact. It produces pollution that is bad for your lungs. It can reduce lifespan, increase cancer. Those are cases where economists study them because it's just an intellectual puzzle. It's fun to try to solve them. What's producing
this overall pattern? Then how can we incentivize people to act in ways that would be better for everyone rather than worse? It could be attacks on pollution. It could be some kind of control on how people produce energy, et cetera. And then I thought, what is the ultimate collective action problem across societies, across countries and across generations
and genetic selection? What'll happen when everyone has the ability to select embryos or edit those embryos eventually? Is it going to be collectively a good thing or a bad thing? And so I wrote a book about this and I thought you know each chapter was on a different topic like cognitive enhancement, aesthetic enhancement, immuno enhancement, etc. And then moral enhancement, which I think is the most interesting one. Maybe we can talk about it, but, you know,
basically I think that the risk is there are some arms races that can be collectively self-defeating. Again, take a case like male height. If we each selected an embryo for the tallest possible boy, we ignored everything else. So we just get tall boys. Well, now you've got a situation where populations are taller, but there's no relative advantage
if everyone else is equally tall. And at some point there actually may be health risks to being really tall, like cardiac disorders and so on. If you look at NBA players, these are not the longest lived people. They live shorter lives and worse lives in old age than gymnasts do. Why? Because there's a greater burden on their joints, on their heart, et cetera. And so there's actually benefits to being shorter, not taller.
So are we going to have this collectively self-defeating arms race? I think just on that point there, a couple of interesting pieces of insight, at least when it comes to mate selection, it seems like the height differential is based, at least in part, it's anchored to the height of the woman, not just the relative height of other men around them. So on average, women say they want a partner that's 21 centimeters taller than they are. Now if we get to the stage where the parents of women, of females, start to increase their height,
yes, then we have a true arms race on our hands. And also I know that there's some really interesting data around whatever it is, like only three times in history, the shorter presidential candidate has won. There definitely are some big advantages to height, but when you kind of really take the reins off, I would guess that that's going to be self-limiting before we get to a physiological kind of problem.
Exactly. And I like the word that you use, self-limiting. I would say self-equilibrating, just to use a more technical game theoretic term, but it's the same thing. First of all, men tend to prefer short women, not tall women. Um, and, and, and vice versa. So it's not clear you're going to get.
Imagine if we end up with this fee, fi fo fum fucking group of guys and a bunch of four foot 11 women. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Um, but yeah, I mean, at the, you know, the serious point is like this arm race is probably self-equilibrating also because even if you didn't have that you know short women tall men and they cancel each other out when when parents are
selecting an embryo let's say or or whatever you know a sperm or egg as we said at the sperm egg bank not not that everyone's doing that that's the minority of course but the ones that are doing that you know they're thinking about what makes for a good life and they're going to know that being extremely tall, like way outside of the mean is going to have these health effects. So it's going to be self-equilibrated. There's, you know, people know that above say six, four, six, five, there's not a big advantage in terms of attractiveness. Unless you want to get into the NBA.
Exactly. Yeah. Unless you just want that. Yeah. Interesting bit of basketball trivia for you. For every inch in height that you grow, it doubles the chance of you being in the NBA. And that's just, that keeps going.
So 6'1'' is twice as likely as 6'. 6'2'' is twice as likely as 6'1'. It goes all the way up. And less likely to be a gymnast, right? I'm sure it's the same scale. I would imagine to just snap yourself in half. What about sex ratio imbalance? You know, this is maybe the most basic, I would guess,
of genetic selection. Okay, well, we can pick between boys and girls. We don't know what sort of a boy, we don't know what sort of a girl, but we can pick the sex that we want our child to be. Have you looked at any data? Do humans, modern humans, just have some discriminatory preference for boys over girls?
Yeah. I mean, I think we touched on this a little last time. I mean, I have a hunch that, I actually don't have evidence for this directly, but I have a hunch that women will be slightly preferred in advanced or rich societies and men preferred in poor ones. Why? Because the sheer value of just muscle mass,
right? That sort of thing. Or the tiny advantage that men have in spatial reasoning, just on average. That's going to be really important when you're working with your hands and tools in poorer societies. In richer societies, the ability to sit still. This is why guys, I hated school, and a lot of guys have ADHD, which at the extremes that's probably a real disease, but I think some of it's a bit fake. You know, like boys are diagnosed with it more because boys are programmed more to be fidgety, right? To use their hands and run around and compete.
And so I think actually in the modern environment, women are a safer bet and there may be a slight preference for them. I don't know, I don't think there's definitive evidence yet, but again, I do think there's some worries that this could be out of hand a bit in the far future. However, self-equilibration again, because if the current population is trending toward females, well, hell man, my son is going to have a pretty good, pretty good odds.
Exactly. So you've talked about it in the context of like dating apps and this sort of thing, but like, yeah, I mean, in terms of the overall population, big benefits to being in a class. Global sex ratio imbalance. All right, so moral enhancement, certainly one of the things that most people
probably wouldn't be thinking about when it comes to embryo selection. Oh, maybe you can select for height. Maybe would people choose sort of eye color or because you blue eyed boy would be pretty or something. Maybe they can, but morality, I think we sort of, I don't know where we think it comes from. It's sort of born out of the things that we learn, the culture
we're in, our socialization, our values, our virtues. What, what does genetics have to say about morality and moral enhancement? Yeah, clearly a lot of our values come from our culture. Obviously, religious cultures tend to be in particular Christianity, Islam, there are secular versions of morality. I mean, actually the woke left is, you know, it's often called a religion. It is a set of moral rules, you know, whether you like it or like it or not. It's got a strict set of rules and so on. So we don't seem to be able to escape either religion in some sense and certainly not morality.
And the two are often tied together for good reason. Darwin speculated, and I think he's right, that the two co-evolved to get us to solve collective action problems, right? Where we're of course naturally a little bit selfish, maybe a lot selfish. And then through kin selection, we tend to favor our close relatives. That's true in general. But then what do we do when we're in groups of 100, 200 in a tribal scenario? There are always incentives to favor ourselves and our small group, our family over
the overall group, let alone a group of 10,000 or 300 million in the modern United States. How do we get people to cooperate? Some of that is kind of social technology called morality or social norms, which embody various kinds of practices and information. We line up in front of a bus and that makes it better for all of us. This time I could do better if I clobber the old lady and get to the front right but overall if we have norms that say respect older people and respect the line we're all gonna sort of have a way to coordinate our actions and achieve mutually beneficial goals. That's what morality is but a big part of it of course is you can't get people to behave according to social norms unless they're
inclined to do so right. This is why psychopaths will follow the norms when people are watching and they won't do it when they're not watching. And the more you are in the direction, this is not a binary thing. Like you either are a psychopath or you're not, you have dark triad traits or you don't. These are all degrees to which we have propensities
like this and as with everything else, there's a big genetic influence on it. So it's both in terms of influencing our overall affective empathy, which is to say, when we see someone in trouble, are we inclined to wanna help them? Just naturally, that's affective empathy. Some of us are more inclined than others toward that.
But also personality traits. So for example, the big five, if you are higher in openness and in conscientiousness, which I think are generally good things, you tend to be a team player more and you tend to pay attention to other people's needs and respond appropriately. And so in terms of moral enhancement, what would you do? It would be something like increasing affective empathy or conscientiousness or whatever. Now, I don't think you should infinitely do this. And one of the reasons I wrote this book is I was annoyed by one of my colleagues back when I was in academic and actually wrote with this colleague.
I like him a lot. His name is Julian Savilescu. He's head of the Center for Practical Ethics at Oxford. And he wrote a book called unfit for the future. And he was really worried about these collective action problems on a global scale, like climate change, nuclear war, you know, Toby Ord has written this book, the precipice on this as well. And I love it. It's one of my top five books ever. Yeah.
It's a good book. Um, but you know, one of the ways that they say we should respond to this is let's just make people nicer and then they'll cooperate more and we'll have fewer existential risks. And my response to this thinking in game theoretic terms is first of all, if a lot of people are making their kids just unconditional cooperators, they're going to be some that see either they're selecting intentionally or they're not and their kids are more selfish than average. They're going to take advantage of those kids. And in game theory, as in biology, we have these terms. You don't want to be an unconditional cooperator. You want to be a
reciprocal altruist or a conditional cooperator. And in fact, by doing that, you not only make the world better for yourself because when you find a kind of parasitic kind of personality, you know, you stay away from them, right? The actual psychopath shun them, right? And when you find someone who's nice and cooperative you cooperate with them and a lot of people are in between that And so what you really want to do is be disposed on the one hand To mete out severe punishments even at a personal cost to yourself to the psychopathic types But extend actually quite a bit of decency to normal types and really even amp up cooperation.
Oh, so you kind of want, uh, the wrong term, moral flexibility is not, is not the right thing, but you want a range within which you can understand. You want to be able to be firm and be gentle and the more firm and the more gentle that you can be probably the better. Exactly. And in fact, um, I don't want to get into the details of game theory, but when you do these, they're called Prisoner's Dilemma Tournaments, and you can iterate it many times over or public goods games.
We could get into that, but maybe it'll bore your audience. I don't know. Either way, what you find in those games is the best outcome is to cooperate with people when you identify them and amp up cooperation, right? To get active enjoyment in finding the cooperators. You know, kind of like what we do in team sports, when you find someone who's willing to pass,
even when they might've taken credit for the goal, but you had a slightly better odds or ability to get the goal. And the people who are willing to do that, we really enjoy being around them for good reason. They make it better for the team, but you want to also be the kind of person who will actually be willing to lose a game to punish that asshole who simply won't pass. I like to use this as a, as a metaphor.
Think of the world cup in, it was circa 2010 when Germany just absolutely destroyed Brazil in the World Cup 7 to 1. It should have been like 12 to nothing. It almost was, but in the last minute there was a pity goal for Brazil. And it was because these individual Brazilian players were probably better than the individual Germans, but they were just show-offs. And the Germans were engaged in this like precision passing. You know, I'm gonna sacrifice a bit of my welfare and a bit of camera time so that I can make sure my team wants and they destroyed them.
Um, and in fact, E.O. Wilson has this great, you know, the, the great evolutionary biologist recently passed away. He has a really great line, which is when we think about groups of people, um, selfishness actually wins within a group, but groups of selfish people lose to groups of altruistic people. And so when we're thinking about moral enhancement, we should think about evolutionary psychology, which I know you know a lot about and think a lot about, and think about what kinds of problems did our moral conscience and our moral practices evolve to solve?
And that is collective action problems where there are individual benefits to defecting from this overall group goal. But there are big benefits over time if you can program yourself to kind of cooperate, whether it's hunting, whether it's warfare, whether it's sports in accordance with those group goals. And how do we do that? We find the cooperators and we have these emotions that positively respond to cooperators and that not only negatively treat the non-cooperators, but give us joy in fucking killing those people, right? Finding them and just slaughtering them. And so we have this weird set of dispositions
where it's called moralistic aggression actually. And moralistic aggression is a good thing because it leads to cooperative outcomes being more likely to materialize. Yes, positive reinforcement for the good things, negative reinforcement for the bad things. Exactly. Didn't I learn from you that IQ also plays a role in
cooperation, collaboration, intergroup stuff? Yeah, it's interesting. I actually don't think it's IQ per se, but what we've found, my colleague Garrett Jones has done a lot of tests, actually Prisoner's Dilemma's test, so he gets his groups of his students to play these games where there are individual benefits to going your own way, but collective benefits to cooperating with the group. And what he found is that, again, corrected for socioeconomic status,
smarter people tend to be more cooperative in these kinds of collective action problems or Prisoner's Dilemma games. Now, I think it's not intelligence per se, I could be wrong about this. And it's certainly not that smarter people are nicer. What I think is going on is that, and he does too, smarter people tend to have longer time horizons.
And so they see the advantage over long periods of time of taking the decision now to give up some benefits in the short term in order to foster group benefits in the long term. And this is again, probably why smarter people tend to stay out of prison more. It's because they tend to, even if they're actually not very good people, they tend to see the individual benefits of doing the thing that's socially beneficial and has positive externalities. So great.
So, so the selfishness is short sightedness in many ways. It's this, not exclusively, but it's this sort of, um, one of the ways that you can arrive at selfishness is by being short sighted. Maybe that would be better to say. And if you're not able to accurately predict the long, long-term repercussions of you fucking this person over or you saying that particular thing, or maybe it doesn't even appear in your mind. You know, we, we, we look at a lot of people and I think this is one of the
problems with the world being run by at least moderately well-educated people that have got probably IQs at standard or above. The problem of that is that they often look to the behavior of people who maybe don't have that same sort of computing power and assume that, well, the only way that you could elect to go and rob this particular store or go and do this particular sort of you could elect to go and rob this particular store or go and do this particular sort of reprehensible thing is if you fully understood, he knew, they knew the, what was going to happen. He knew what he was doing. It's like, did he? Did he?
Like if this is someone that's in the bottom, you know, 10% of IQ distribution or whatever, or this is someone that's got some unbelievable psychopathic pathology or whatever. I'm not saying that, you know, these are good people. They, you know, deserve like to be let off the hook or whatever. But I think that it gives a more nuanced explanation of why people do the things that they do and using your theory of mind and saying what situation would I need to be in, in order for me to do that.
Doesn't take into account. And this is the problem with fucking blank slatism because it does flatten that playing field. Yeah, yeah, good. Yeah, let me put a couple of points together there. I like that. First of all, yeah, I mean, morality is complicated. It's a set of norms where we fear violating those norms
because we just fear being punished selfishly. But also it's a set of moral dispositions where, you know, most of us enjoy treating other people with kindness. You know, you don't just help the person who's in a wheelchair through the door when other people are looking. You do it even when no one's looking and that's, of course, you deserve more moral credit when you do that. But the reality is like moral behavior is super complicated. It's a mixture of selfishness and long-term thinking and genuine altruism. And it's hard to detect what's what in any particular case. But the smarter person with a good theory of mind,
who's not necessarily consciously thinking about it, but kind of instinctively understands their benefits to long-term cooperation, they tend to follow these mutually beneficial rules. And therefore there are these like positive externalities. In fact, going back to Garrett Jones, he and I have a paper on this called Cognitive Enhancement and Network Effects, how individual traits influence social welfare. And we gave an argument, this is back in 2020,
for why voluntary embryo selection for IQ would actually be a pro-social thing. Um, not just because it's making people nicer, it's probably not. You should have other reasons to make them nicer maybe, but because it has these effects and, and it also produces, you know, smarter people produce more wealth in the world, more innovations, et cetera. And so what does that do? It enables us to create a society where we're so wealthy,
we don't have to worry about, should I commit crime or not? You can just get a job and you're fine. Like you can actually, you know, wealthier societies can afford to treat strangers with kindness rather than hostility because you're not constantly worried about how to put a meal on the table or something.
So it's interesting, these things interact, moral behavior and intelligence in ways that are really kind of counterintuitive to be honest, but they seem real. The ability to work out the repercussions of your actions. You know, again, I understand why many people that are maybe first being introduced to this, people who don't like the idea of individual differences from genetic factors or group differences due to genetic factors, can understand why it feels so icky.
Every time that you say the word genetic or genetics, I've just got this like Pavlovian fucking ick response to it, which I still, after thinking about this for 18 months, I still haven't really actually been able to get myself passed, which maybe shows just how ingrained that is. Eugenics and the horrors of Nazi Germany and that period just did so much to really cloud any discussion that even veers in the remote region of that direction.
But if you were to say to someone, do you think it would be better for there to be less crime in future? Because the very people that many of the, I guess, skeptics or critics of genetic enhancement, people from the left, well, one of the reasons that you're trying to do this, at least originally, was that you wanted to raise up the working class.
You wanted to improve the situations of poverty, the strife and struggle for the sort of normal working man, the proletariat. And you go, okay, well, you can, this is something that can be quite, it can be achieved, but if you assume, if your worldview is that the only reason that you get different outcomes is because of different opportunities, because of exclusively structural, systemic, societal factors, this is not something, this is not an opportunity to, that presents itself.
And I think we both said last time that a lot of the people who do have this sort of blank slate view of humans are going to be faced with a very difficult, like literally an unlimited conveyor belt of difficult decisions. First off, what are you gonna do with your child? If this technology is on the table and you can afford it and your right leaning colleague at work has decided that they're going to get it because they don't have the same ick factor
that you and your particular group do, then okay, well, that's fine, but your children are maybe going to have a less robust immune system or they're maybe gonna need glasses at five years old, or, you know, maybe the risk for autism is higher, or maybe they're going to be in a more externalizing behavior and they're more likely to go to jail. That doesn't seem very good. So, okay, so put your money where your mouth is personally.
Then when it comes to what happens more socially too, you think, well, if we can show that this kind of intervention, that these kinds of genetic selections actually do make for less crime, actually do make for this. You go, well, where's that effect coming from? Because it's still the same racist, bigoted, transphobic, homophobic environment. For the first time ever, we're actually able to manipulate the genetic environment, not just the post-womb environment, or we're able to select before the womb. Because up until now, if you deny the genetic reality, the only acceptable explanation was
environment, because that's the only thing that ever sort of oscillates. Whereas now we actually can get in there. And who knows? Maybe there is a country maybe in 50 years we look back and we go wow China their crime rates declined by you know 50% over and they didn't do what the guy in El Salvador did And we have the opportunity to do that. It's fascinating You know, by the way that there is a very naughty paper written about, it was in the 1990s, and the idea behind this paper as an economist was that the abortion ban in certain American
states in the 1970s being lifted because of Roe v. Wade resulted in a much lower crime rate in the 1990s. And the way that happened is children, unwanted children who weren't born, but otherwise would have been forced to be born because now there was the opportunity for abortion actually ended up resulting in fewer of those children and therefore less crime. And the way that they tested that hypothesis is look at the states in which abortion was legal before Roe v. Wade versus those in which it was illegal. And what you see is dropping crime rates 20 years later in the states in which it was illegal and became legal. Surely that would be more of an environmental insight than a genetic one, unless people that get abortions happen to
have some particular genetic predisposition that then gets passed down to their kids. It could be, it could be either or both. And of course the kind of people who wanted an abortion, but couldn't afford to go to another state to do it, might be a certain kind of person or unwilling to do it or whatever. I don't want to weigh in on that. I'm just saying that that argument has been made. Um, it's, it's an interesting one. It was in the book Freakonomics as well. So it's a very mainstream economist who did it named Steven Levitt.
But in terms of the point that you made on blank slatism and the kind of cognitive dissonance that elites have, well, there's this phrase, you know, blanks latest in the streets hereditary in between the sheets. You know, we all see this. I was in academia where, you know, maybe I don't care that much about IQ, although we're talking about it right now. I mean, I'm just telling you, putting my cards on the table, I don't want to be an IQ maximizer for my own kids. I know some people who would be, I care more about personality traits and health, even though I think IQ matters a bit. But my colleagues who would denounce me for even talking about IQ, I mean, they're the ultimate IQ realists, again, because they're obsessed with it in selecting their spouse, in thinking about, I want the smartest grad students, I want to appear to be smart, and I want to please my colleagues. So they have a lot of cognitive dissonance.
In fact, blank slatism has always been selective. They don't really believe it in their private lives, which is why I said blank slatist in the streets, hereditary in between the sheets, but they also don't even fully apply this consistently. So a very famous and widely read book is Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. And he argued in this book, the point of this book is actually pretty interesting in many ways, showing history is partly determined by what diseases happen to be near your tribe at the time or did climate change happen really dramatically in Iceland at this time. And that's going to have effects on who lives and who dies, who succeeds. That's all true. But he says, he's so obsessed with being a blank slate-ist and showing
like, it's all just arbitrary. Like, why is England, you know, richer than whatever Somalia or something? And so he says on page 22, it's always struck me that the New Guineans that I work with are on average much smarter than Europeans and Americans. So he throws that in there like as if we're supposed to just go, wait you're a blank slate us but you're actively saying this group that has stone age technology is obviously smarter than Brits or Americans or whatever. It's like okay I get it. This is a political game you're playing. You're not even a blank slate us. You're a selective blank slate us. So again this is stuff that we inherited from the war. I understand why we inherited it. We
inherited it because there were claims made, especially by Germans, like we're racially superior to other groups. This is a justification for colonialism, hegemony and war. And so what happened is this overreaction or we're supposed to think there are just no differences. And people make even this absurd claim while we're watching the Olympics that Africans are not faster runners than let's say Europeans. That is fucking crazy, right? Like it's just so obvious that for short-term sprinting events, you know, people from Jamaica on average are poorer. Yeah, sure. They practice more maybe, but why do they practice more? Because they're better at it.
Right. I mean, you have to deny so much reality to sort of get you there or men and women, right. We just saw this like transgender boxer. Dude, I need to, we, we need to talk about this. So for the people that don't know Italian Italian boxer quits bout, sparking furor over gender at Olympics. The Italian Angela Carini stopped fighting only 46 seconds into a matchup against Imane Khalifa of Algeria, who had been barred from a woman's event last year, an Italian boxer abandoned her bout. The Italian boxer withdrew after she had the shit kicked out of her.
Khalifa 25 was permitted to compete at the Olympics, even though she had been barred last year after boxing officials said she did not meet eligibility requirements to compete in a woman's event. Another athlete also barred from last year's championship under similar circumstances, Lin Yu Ting has also been cleared to fight in Paris. The presence in the women's competition of being the latest flash point in the politically charged debate of agenda and fair play in sports. There was the IOC doesn't use quite the same set of criteria to judge,
sex, gender, that this particular previous competition did, but it seems like you have two biological males competing in the one sport that you shouldn't have biological males competing against women in, which is the one where they literally punch each other in the face. Yeah. I mean, I would go farther and say other sports. I was a professor at Penn when the transgender swimmer, Leah Thomas, switched teams. And one of my students actually has now come out, you know, finally and over the last year or
so and said, not only did I oppose this from the beginning and I'm talking about it now, now that I've graduated, but our coach told us not to talk about it. We're going to get in trouble if we even question this person's gender. I mean, this is wild. And I mean, just putting this all together, denying, you know, you might say, oh, we're obsessed with genetics because, oh, we're talking about genetic influence on things. I'm not. I actually just think like we should acknowledge a genetic role. We should acknowledge a social role.
Social norms matter. Parenting matters. All of it matters. But by denying any role for genetics is not taking the moral high ground. It's causing women to be oppressed in the name of women's liberation and it's causing, as you said, to make your previous point, if the best or most effective way of advancing your children's prospects is to, if you're doing, for example, IVF and embryo selection, just to take that case, is to select one that has a low disease burden and relatively high cognitive ability and you say look we're
gonna deny that genetics matters and we're gonna make this illegal or shun people for doing it you're actually oppressing the people that you're currently claiming to defend by saying oh you're structurally oppressed and it's bad schools and you know whatever whatever racism, xenophobia, you know, wait a minute, why don't you just acknowledge reality on its own terms? Schooling matters, society matters, parenting matters, and genetics sure as hell matters and let people make use of the best available technology to actually increase their children's prospects. If you cared about inequality, that would be the thing that you'd really want to target. Why do you think people don't?
I think they will soon. In fact, I have an essay coming out and I'm giving some talks on this lately called Breaking the Blank Slate. What I argue in this is more or less the following. We have this cognitive dissonance by the elites we've talked about. We inherited it, again, post-World War II norms. It's starting to break down already. More people, of course, are pushing back on the transgender stuff. I think they're going to do the same for the genetics in general. I think what's going to happen is the following. Companies come out very publicly in the coming years and they offer, for example, embryo selection for various traits, including personality, intelligence. It's going to be harder and harder to deny that these things are real, that they're influenced by genes.
Elites are going to publicly condemn it while privately using it. I can name some people, I won't do it, but who are already doing this. I've dealt with them actually, working with companies that do this. And what's gonna happen is people will eventually figure out, wait, the elites are playing a game here. They actually are taking advantage of their inside knowledge that these things are highly heritable.
They're using it to the best of their ability and telling us like, oh, you know, we shouldn't do this, it's wrong. And I think this cognitive dissonance will grow until we get elites. And by elites, I mean, often they're fake elites, but journalists, professors, et cetera, people in positions of power, whereby eventually they're just going to come out and say it like, I'm doing it. I think it's fine.
You should do it too, and then we're gonna get a preference cascade, right? Right now we're in, let me give you an analogy. It's like we're in East Germany in 1988, and everyone knows communism is bullshit, and everyone knows even the Stasi in East Germany know it's bullshit. It causes poverty and misery,
and it's just we're spending more money on monitoring people to make sure they affirm the official ideology. Everyone knows it's fake. Um, and basically what's going to happen is as people in positions of power come out and say, look, this, this is real. I'm doing it. Um, it's fine. We're going to get a massive preference cascade. What's that? What's a preference cascade? A preference cascade is basically where we've got these people publicly lying about what they privately know. And so they're expressing false preferences, right? This is called preference falsification. My old colleague Timur Karan at Duke University, we were colleagues for about seven years in the political science department. He invented this
term and it was a book called Private Truths, Public Lies. He invents this term of preference falsification. What he basically said is a lot of elites play this game and it's inter-elite competition. They have this ideology, all this gender stuff, for example, ordinary people, they don't care. They know it's bullshit. It's the elites in academia and journalism that do it. Oh, we have to call him she, her, and he, him, and all that stuff. But they know what the reality is privately. And so what happens is, once you get this pressure cooker cooker and it's often not evidence and arguments, right? I've given evidence and arguments, people just brush it off or call me a
eugenicist or something. But when the technology comes out into the open and people are actively doing this and knowing that they're doing it, other people know they're doing it, then what happens is you realize, oh, okay, their real preference is actually to do genetic enhancement, and it's fine, and it works, and lots of people are gonna do it. And suddenly, you get this falsified preference becoming the openly stated preference,
which is it's okay to do this, heritability is real, blank slate is false, and then rapidly, everyone else adopts this. In the same way. Rapidly everyone sees through the lie of communism. Once the first person starts breaking the wall and then the policeman follows him, then everyone gets on the wall, destroys it. And they're like, we always knew communism was bullshit. My hope is, by the way, this week that Venezuela follows suit. So Venezuela is very close to my heart. I know a lot of Venezuelans because I worked in Ecuador and, um, I know how
many smart and great Venezuelans are in the world. I know a lot of them in Austin here. And, um, my great hope is that the pressure put on by Elon Musk, by Bukele in El Salvador, and Malay in Argentina, and maybe Trump or whoever wins the election will basically cause the Venezuelan people to rise up and people in the military, once that first general says, this is bullshit, Maduro did not win this election, we know he didn't, once he defects, everyone else defects and you get this preference cascade. So that's what it is.
So interesting, dude. I think it's going to be a. Just, there's this odd sort of cathartic fantasy I have of all of the people who are claiming to not believe a thing or that the thing doesn't actually happen. And just having to see that discordance sort of come out front, it's gonna be oddly satisfying. And I wish I was less petty. I wish I was less petty, but it's true.
One of the studies that I came across, I already wanted to speak to you about, Remy Fuhrer and colleagues, public attitudes, interests and concerns regarding polygenic embryo screening. You must have seen this. Yep, I sure have concerns regarding polygenic embryo screening. I mean, you must've seen this. Yep. I sure have. I met him last year in Cambridge.
Yeah. Can, can you, uh, how well do you know that study? Could you give a, an overview of what was found? Uh, he's been on at least two relevant ones for our purposes. So he's, he's a bioethicist, really good guy. I think he's either Swiss or French, but works at Harvard in Cambridge. Um, he's part of a team that studies polygenic risk scores. And we talked about that last time,
but a polygenic risk score is just this idea that you can take these highly polygenic traits like risk of diabetes or how tall you are or whatever. These things are influenced by thousands of small genetic variants. And based on the kind of data we have from biobanks, you can assess individuals risks of developing diabetes or being a certain height or whatever, right? So they study polygenic risk scores and public attitudes toward
them. And specifically in this context, I think you have in mind public attitudes toward using polygenic risk scores to select between embryos if they're doing IVF. So one of their studies that he's actually on too, but one of their studies, I believe he was on the first one, just compared, would you use tutoring to improve the prospects of your kids getting into an elite university? The second question, would you use embryo selection for it? And then would you use gene editing, assuming it was safe?
They found almost everyone would use tutoring. Many people, even among Americans, about half would use embryo selection and slightly less would do gene editing. And then if you ask them, what if people around you are doing it or people you respected were doing it, and this is of course the secret of human societies, right?
We, we basically copy the norms of high status people, right? So what if high status people were doing it? Then everyone's like, I would do it. But their second study, this is more recent, found something a little bit different, a little bit of discordance there. They found that like the vast majority,
I think it was like 70 something percent, I'd have to look at the study. I've got the- You've got it, oh yeah, go for it. Yeah, tell us what they found. I've got the charts in front of me. So basically there's sort of two differences here. They looked at health conditions on one side
and sort of traits on the other. Remy Fuhrer and colleagues survey Americans about the risks and benefits of polygenic and embryo screening. They found that a large majority of respondents believed that screening should be allowed. However, the level of approval varies substantially with the target trait.
It is high for diseases, moderate for intelligence and low for skin color. So just having a look here, sort of cascading down from most highly agreed with, so people could strongly disapprove, disapprove, neither approve or strongly approve. Cancer, almost, you know, what's that, 50% of people strongly approve and then 35% of people approve, so almost very, very high. I can't believe, you know, 5% of people. Disapproved. Strongly disapproved and 5% of people strongly
disapproved. Yeah. Cancer maximizers. Yeah. They honestly, it's basically the same for heart disease, nearly the same for Alzheimer's, diabetes a little bit less, schizophrenia a little bit less, bipolar, autism,
all of these are combining approved and strongly approved in the seventies. Blood pressure, interestingly, actually doesn't get quite so much. OCD less, ADHD significantly less. I wonder if that's because a lot of people know that they have it. Or they know that it's overdiagnosed, which I think, you know, but, but, but anyway.
Obesity, uh, seen as a health condition, rather than a trait that could be controversial in and of itself. Yeah. Uh, what's that 55% between the top two, but then we get into traits. Um, intelligence is the most highly approved overall, but it's significantly lower. You're talking about, what's this, 35, 40% of approval, neuroticism the same, BMI. So obesity, they actually track the same thing, like the trait of BMI versus the health condition of obesity.
So that tells you everything you need to know about framing that you gain. Yeah, exactly. What you gain by framing these two things you gain. I don't need to tell you, Chris, you're probably considered obese because you're a pretty buff dude. BMI is not good. Obesity is all right though. Life satisfaction, like selecting for life satisfaction, height, height, the trait of height is not good, obesity is all right though. Life satisfaction, like selecting for life satisfaction.
Height, the trait of height, not good. Educational attainment, also the same. Agreeableness, baldness. The baldness maximizes, 25% of people strongly disapprove with selecting against baldness. Jealousy, those are the people with good hair. Yeah. They want to keep their advantage.
Openness to experience, really interesting. Openness to experience and extraversion, two of the lowest. I mean, how much does the normal person know what extraversion is? They think we're gonna be surrounded by loads of parties, I wonder about sort of the education. And then skin colour, really, really, really, really highly strongly disapproved. But I mean, some of the most, uh, sort of surprising ones in there to me,
extraversion, openness to experience life, satisfaction. Why is life satisfaction? Why would you want to ever select against that? Like that's literally the only thing that we're all here for all of these other things, cancer, heart disease, ADHD, intelligence, neuroticism, skin color, all of these things presumably are in service of some form of life satisfaction. And me, even if that's impossible, even if you can't select for it, which I'm not sure that you can, saying, I don't think that we should go directly to the source and enhance
someone's fucking life satisfaction. Wild, wild. Chris, I'm going to push back on you here. I'm going to agree with the crowd. Maybe the first time in my life, you know, I'm going to be the, I'm going to be the conformist. Let me give you good arguments for this.
I mean, first of all, this is just interesting data and yeah, you got to take it with a grain of salt because how many people even know exactly what the big five are, the personality traits, how heritable they are. Probably you'd want to prompt them first to get good answers, but there seems a lot of
wisdom in these answers to me. So first of all, if people are not very superficial, they really care about the quality of their children's lives, skin color probably should be near the bottom. You shouldn't, you wouldn't want to emphasize it too much. Now I don't think it should be illegal,
you know, et cetera. I think that's stupid. And in fact, I think most people would not select for the whitest possible skin. They'll select for tan skin. My skin looks really orange right now because of this light in front of me, but I've got like Homer Simpson skin right now,
but what I would want is like a little bit tanner than I naturally am so you don't get too many, you know, skin cancer, that sort of thing, right? Sunburn. So I think a lot of people have a sense like it's superficial and probably dumb to like focus too much on skin color, you know, something like that. But health does seem to me, it seems right that you should focus that on that the most. Intelligence, I think people have an excusable ignorance about this, right? So that was somewhere in the middle and it's probably because people, they're often told that, oh, you know, smart people, yeah,
maybe they make more money, but they're actually much more prone to depression and mental health disorders. And that's false. That's just obviously and completely false. We know that from just huge numbers of studies. There have been one or two that allege that and then they get debunked and there's a million studies to the contrary. So, I think some of this is ignorance, some of it is actually correct. And let me give you an argument for why life satisfaction is good. You know, the upside of depression. Here's the argument. I mean, maybe what people are thinking there, some of them is you wouldn't want a kid who's overly satisfied with the existing social order or their place in it.
You want someone who's like an achiever and someone who's too easily satisfied. You know, they break up with this, this great girl that, that they were with for, for a couple years and they're not depressed at all. They're like, let's get back on it, man. I'm on Tinder tomorrow. And it's like, no, actually you should
probably do some self-reflection, you know? Talk, listen to some Chris Williamson episodes and you know, figure out how to fix yourself. So that you can absorb some of my low life satisfaction. Yeah. No, I don't think that that's too bad. I think that certainly wallowing in reflection, moving slowly, that kind of melancholy,
there's lessons from it. So probably what you should do is select, I mean, should, I mean, what I would do anyway, I don't wanna give people advice, but select against like severe depression, that's obvious, right? But overall life satisfaction, do you really wanna be at a 10 all the time?
Maybe, some people do, but I actually think that might be correlated with being all too easily, I don't know, manipulated or just like accepting the status quo for what it is. It's kind of like agreeableness. Do you just want to maximize that? Like, fuck no.
You know, I, I, I want, I want to push back on like some of the popular wisdom, which I think is false. So if there's like, and that requires a little bit of disagreeability. So, yeah, that is interesting too. To consider the sort of, uh, the advantages of melancholy and artistic advantages too. Right. So all of them, you're not going to make, you're not going to make a good rock acoustic guitar rock star.
If you, if you're not, your lyrics are going to suck, you're going to outsource them to some corporations. So fucking happy. Shut up. Shut up. I don't want to hear about that. So just one other interesting sort of consideration. What about political trends, group affiliation, ideology, living setup? You know, we're talking, we've got so far to go and I wonder how quickly
this is going to be adopted. Actually two separate points. First off, how quickly is this going to be adopted? Obviously we're at least rate limited by the rollout of the technology, by the sort of cost, the accessibility. Have I got a fucking facility within a hundred miles of me that I can do it with, blah blah. And then we've got this kind of, I guess, conceptual inertia thing, which is going on. Um, but what's your predicted uptake?
How many kids are we going to see in the Western world born through using embryo selection over the next few decades? Well, I think really by the end of this decade, there's going to be a lot of uptake, but by a lot, I mean, you know, whatever, a couple percent or something. Look, infertility is on the rise. People are having kids later, some of which is good. You know, they build their career, some of which is bad because if you wait too long, you accumulate
mutations. We know that especially on the male line, which is why autism is on the rise. More people are using IVF anyway. I think more people are going to use it who don't need to use it in order to select against family disorders. I actually think that's a good thing. I think once companies start moving from disease traits to non-disease traits, more will do it. There's going to be a kind of network effect
where once governments, especially governments like South Korea, Israel, et cetera, with small populations that have enough money and they worry about declining birth rates, I think they're gonna kind of subsidize it and hasten it. And once that happens, yeah, you're gonna get a much more rapid uptake of it. So, you know, IVG, this thing we talked about last time,
where you can take an adult cell, turn it into a cloripotent stem cell, which turns into an egg. If that becomes feasible in five, 10 years, let's say, and cheap enough and accurate and all that, then you could of course select among hundreds, thousands of embryos, which is pretty wild. I think if that became feasible, it would be taken up really quickly because it obviates the need to even do IVF, right? You just take a vial of blood and do it. So yeah, there's uncertainty about this, but I think the ideological resistance is going to melt away very soon, like in the coming five years. You know, when some of these companies come out into the open with cognitive ability, personality, there's going to be the New York Times, you York Times slingshit at them and calls them Nazis. That's all predictable and boring. But what actual people will be doing is sort of going, huh, is this real? And they'll start
reading up a little bit more about it because it is real. And I think that's going to change the incentives in ways that are hard to predict. That's going to drive costs down quite a bit. And I will say this, I won't mention the technology per se but there will be ways for everyone to use this very, very soon, like within a year or two. People around the world, because there are some innovations where you're not going to necessarily need all of the clinical equipment that is currently needed to do this. Um, I'll just hint at that and not say much more about it. Hmm.
Very sexy. Okay. And then, um, downstream, what, what are we going to see in terms of social setup, political, what's, what's, what's going to change if this sort of technology starts to be rolled out en masse? I think for the most part, things will be quite good because as I mentioned, one in eight people in the world marry their cousin. In the Middle East, in parts of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it's close to half, like 50%.
We're going to see a dramatic reduction in disease burden in those parts of the world. And that's going to lead to more flourishing for those people. Imagine you're some Saudi kid and you're born to a cousin marriage. What are your prospects versus not born to a cousin marriage? So we're going to see a lot more people taking heredity into account when they choose their mates. And then on top of that, because there have been generations of cousin marriage, I think selecting embryos to minimize disease burden. So we're going to see a lot of countries with far fewer diseases, both monogenic and polygenic. And then we're going to see some pretty wild things. We're probably going to see mild gains in cognitive ability, which will counter the kind of sterilizing
dysgenic trends of liberalism. You may have seen this meme online of cities being IQ shredders. What happens in the West now? The smartest people go to Ivy league schools or Cambridge and Oxford. They then take their talents to live in a city and make a bunch of money as bankers in London and New York and so on. And they have, you know, 1.1 kids or whatever at the age
of 40. You know, this is not great from the standpoint of civilization across long tracks of time, even if it's good in the moment. And so I think where you're going to see is people on the one hand, making different kinds of decisions with their lives, but you're also going to see a countervailing force where a lot of people are going to
be gaining slight amounts in IQ, as well as, you know, On the one hand, making different kinds of decisions with their lives, but you're also going to see a countervailing force where a lot of people are going to be gaining slight amounts in IQ as well as decreasing disease burdens. And over a few generations that really makes a difference. But here's a kind of dystopian scenario. Um, I don't think it's going to happen too much, but I think it will a little bit. Um, it's possible that when people realize that religiosity and political orientation are about 0.4 heritable, they're moderately heritable conditions. You don't inherit Christianity per se, but the tendency to be religious and to seek out
that kind of community instead of beliefs, that is heritable. And so is, again, political orientation, the tendency to score really high on openness and some of these other traits underlies that probably. I can imagine a world where religious people find this out and eventually use embryo selection or possibly way down the line using gene editing to select in favor of religiosity or political extremism. It's kind of a wild thought, but I don't know, why wouldn't they if what they wanted to do. I want my daughter to be a part of my church. I want my daughter to come, you know,
if you really care about your politics. Well, we see- If you really think that, exactly. Daniel Cox, he did some really interesting research about this stuff. And, you know, you're seeing huge swaths of Gen Z girls with Republican fathers and mothers pivoting left and going to Democrats. So you know, this, the heritability that there is for religious affiliation has really been, there's something going on that has managed to sort of molest that.
I think that's really interesting. That shows two things. One, culture in the short term, culture swamps the heritability of religiosity or political orientation. No doubt about that, right? That's the short term, but over long tracks of time, you know, evolution is a real thing. And the choices we make and differential choices, differential birth rates, you know, we know we talked about it last time, both within countries and across countries, religious conservatives simply have more kids than atheistic liberals. And Jonathan Haidt and others have talked about this. I know you've had him on the show. He mentions this in his book, The Righteous Mind, that has to have genetic consequences over time. It just may take a long time. But it may also be when you think about, yeah, Gen Z, you've got boys turning more right
wing and girls turning much, much more left wing. That's obviously because the institutions are left wing. I mean, I was a professor in these elite schools and Duke was pretty moderate, but it was still pretty left wing.. Penn was off the charts left-wing and pretty much everywhere else I've been. So they get indoctrinated. Girls are also on average more conformists. And they know if you want to climb in polite society, who are the elites? They're obviously left-wing. And so they swing more left-wing. But when you look at the 1970s in universities, women were more conservative than men. I think that's because at that time, in their culture and given what their parents were
doing, religiosity, conservatism were bigger cultural forces. Yeah, you had the hippies, but they were the outliers. So I think what's going on here is just there's women being more conformist on average than men, the institution's being completely captured on the left for now, maybe that'll change. And you're not seeing like a huge, you know, deep down really felt change. It's just more of them responding to the environment. So, so yeah, I think there are cultural forces in the short term that simply swamp those genetic forces. Very interesting, man. I mean, the next few years are just going to be so fascinating.
And the fact that you get to be commercially or academically close to the front of this must be, must be pretty exciting. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you've got going on. Yeah. Well, maybe we can leave some links in the show notes. I mean, those papers by, by Remy, for example, on the heritability of traits and how people feel about that. That's some pretty cool stuff.
There's actually a group called PEER, P-E-E-R, that it's a collection of scientists and ethicists that are tackling these problems. They're based at Harvard and Cambridge, so the usual biases apply, but they're really good. I mean, the scientists in particular just rock solid. But obviously, yeah, I have a new book on this. It's, here it is, Creating Future People, The Science and Ethics of Genetic Enhancement. And you can buy the paperback. That's always, I like to read physical books, but there's also a free version too, open access. So, I can send that out to you to have the link, but I also have a website. So if you want to read sort of, I have a column for psychology today called sex and civilization, and I kind of go through like what's happening, you know,
first it starts with the birth control pill and all these innovations. We separate more and more sex and reproduction. Some of that's good. Some of it's bad, but what are the big cultural consequences? So yeah, I try to outline some of that stuff and, uh, listening to your show actually is pretty damn good. I mean, you have a lot of great guests. So that's what we need.
I'm just looking at your, uh, psychology today. Techno traditionalism, the label for a view that we can embrace traditional values, whilst also endorsing the use of reproductive technologies. I am going to go and read that. May, I really appreciate you. I'm fired up to see what you do next. And yeah, let's get you on. We need to have a chat about the sort of modern world of cancel culture and
academia from a front lines perspective. I've had an online stalker for years and some of my friends, he's tried to take down at Cambridge and other universities. There's never been a better time to be a psycho on the internet who just shitposts all day and cancels academics and other people. So yeah, maybe one of these days we'll talk about that. Thank you.
Appreciate you, man. Oh, offense Yeah, oh yeah Offense