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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28218 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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Well it looks like embryo selection for IQ is here.

A US startup, using data from the UK Biobank, is offering embryo selection for “IQ and the other naughty traits that everybody wants”, including sex, height, risk of obesity and risk of mental illness.

What surprises me most about this is that they were able to use the Biobank data, and that the head of the Biobank is defending its use. The Biobank is, as I understand, the world's best source of genetic data and I had always hoped that it would be used for this kind of liberal eugenics. However I'd assumed that doing so would be hampered by 'bioethicists' or at least the default political caution of these kind of institutions. However, the head of the Biobank seems to...think this is good?

UK Biobank … has confirmed that its analyses of our data have been used solely for their approved purpose to generate genetic risk scores for particular conditions, and are exploring the use of their findings for preimplantation screening in accordance with relevant regulation in the US where Heliospect is based. This is entirely consistent with our access conditions. By making data available, UK Biobank is allowing discoveries to emerge that would not otherwise have been possible, saving lives and preventing disability and misery.

Well that's a pleasant surprise. I guess I shouldn't be too shocked that the head of a massive genetics project actually understands the implications of his scientific field, but it's great to have my default cynicism proven wrong.

The quotes from the 'bioethicists' are maddening, of course:

Dagan Wells, a professor of reproductive genetics at University of Oxford, asked: “Is this a test too far, do we really want it? It feels to me that this is a debate that the public has not really had an opportunity to fully engage in at this point.”

Not an argument, he's just vaguely gesturing at the implication that it might be bad. It's also unclear why, in a context where IVF is already legal and accepted by almost everyone, this needs to be subject to a public debate. This is just IVF with more informed choices over which embryo to implant.

Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society, in California, said: “One of the biggest problems is that it normalises this idea of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ genetics.” The rollout of such technologies, she said, “reinforces the belief that inequality comes from biology rather than social causes”.

Translation: This scientific advance is bad because it reminds people of facts which I am politically uncomfortable with.

If being slim, happy, kind, law-abiding, rich or intelligent is better than being fat, depressed, cruel, criminal, poor or stupid, and if these things are affected by genetics (which they are) then there is such a thing as superior or inferior genetics.

Either Ms Hasson believes that genes don't influence anything (in which case she should not be working at a centre for genetics) or she believes that all human characteristics are equally good (in which case she should not use the term 'ethicist' in her title). Or perhaps she is a bioethicist who believes in neither biology nor ethics.

By late 2023, the founders of Heliospect claimed to have already analysed and helped select embryos for five couples, which had subsequently been implanted through IVF. “There are babies on the way,”

This is probably the most important part in my mind. It will be extremely hard to argue against embryo selection when there are happy, healthy, intelligent children running around. In the same way that skepticism around IVF vanished as the first IVF babies grew up, there will one day be embryo-selected adults giving interviews on TV, eloquently defending it.

Tiger mothers of the world, rejoice. You can now give your kids a heads-up that actually works, and doesn't require you driving them to extra-curriculars all the time.

IQ selection is one of the less-dangerous possibilities in this field, except insofar as it potentiates any mistakes made WRT personality. Selecting for Dark Triad (intentionally or not) and/or selecting against Asperger's seem like the most obvious traps; they've mentioned they won't let people directly do the former (which, well, good) but the article's unclear on the latter.

Personally, I think selecting for intelligence is a non-brainer and should not be controversial. Being smarter is good for the kid in the same way that not being blind or not being psychotic is.

The slippery slope would be parents (or states) selecting on criteria which are not in the interests of the kid to have.

Selecting superficial criteria like eye color is already a bit icky. Green eyes work just as well as blue eyes, so it is not directly against the interests of the kid if it is picked by eye color, especially if it's parents really have a strong preference for an eye color. In a world in which not everything can be optimized simultaneously, one could however argue that that kid would have benefited more from being selected for an additional IQ point.

And then you have myriad selection criteria where the interests of the kid and the parents diverge. For now, these seem to be far beyond what current genetics can predict. If kids will keep near their place of birth, will keep following their religion and will end up with a sexual orientation and life style their parent approve is not very predictable from genetics, even though these certainly have a genetic component.

Optimizing for professional sports likewise could likewise easily be detrimental to a kid. Most things which influence sport performance come with trade-offs. Being the tallest person on earth will really help in basketball, but also comes with severe health drawbacks. Likewise for high testosterone. Anyone selecting an XY fetus with androgen insensitivity syndrome in the hope that her kid can perform at an Olympic level is likely not doing their kid any favors.

Sex selection (which only requires an ultrasound, no fancy genetics) is another thing which can often be detrimental to the kid. I mean, if a couple uses it for their second kid to balance their family gender ratio, I have no issue with it -- the prevalence of families with unbalanced gender ratios does not seem especially important to preserve. On the other hand, some societies will have a general preference, which will lead to skewed ratios, which is likely not in the kids best interests.

A related scissor statement would be "parents should prefer socially favored phenotype embryos in bigot societies". For example, if I had to chose between being born as a boy missing a foot or a healthy girl in Afghanistan, I would much rather be the cripple. It is uncontroversial that the quality of life impact on a disability depends on society (like the presence or absence of wheelchair ramps), but likewise one could postulate 'pseudo-disabilities' which are entirely caused by societies reaction to a phenotype. One might argue that if QALY's and the like are supposed to track utility, one should indeed treat 'living under the Taliban as a women' as a disability.

Of course, for the Afghan example, this point is largely moot, most couples living in Afghanistan do not have access to sex-selective abortion.

It's a very minor gain, and IVF vs in-vitro probably offsets its already. When they can do at-home sperm selection, then I can expect this to take off. But as far as I understand, the test is a destructive process: you gather several eggs, then conception happens, the embryos grow a bit till the can survive some of their cells being removed, these cells are grown into a culture and tested, then the best embryo is implanted and the rest destroyed. You can't just ejaculate through a magic device that filters out inferior gametes.

If you do this test on a regular embryo, it starts looking too much like an abortion (which it technically is already).

the best embryo is implanted and the rest destroyed

Not true. The rest are frozen and saved for later. And "later" is often pretty soon, because each embryo transfer has a pretty high chance of failure.

Possibly they are destroyed at some point if they are no longer wanted. But in general, the challenge with IVF is having too few embryos, not too many.

As @aardvark2 points out, artificial sperm creation could fix the destructiveness. If you create a pair of haploid cells through meiosis, you will have a pretty good idea what is in cell A from the PCR of cell B and diploid cells.

Of course, another point is costs. The company in the article seems to bill 50k$ for analyzing 100 embryos, which would come to 500$ per analysis. While doing the analysis on (artificially created) sperm cells would definitely get you more dakka, it would also greatly increase costs.

how far are we from creating sperm lines in vitro?

I think people are kidding themselves about how well we understand genetics and the mind. I hereby bet that in twenty years they realise the lower-IQ kids they were screening out actually may have had superior brains and intelligence traits in other respects.

A bet that a counterfactual would be superior is never going to resolve.

"The selected children will be worse than average" seems like a simple resolution criteria? Sure, "worse" is pretty hard to define, but that cuts both ways.

Worse than which average? Not being able to choose a reference class doesn't "cut both ways", it makes the question unresolvable.

Which reference class is the company purporting to be better than?

Aren’t IVF kids already crappier than average because the sperm which conceives them isn’t selected for strength?

Could you elaborate on this ?

No, I don’t really understand this claim I’ve just heard it as an explanation for why most IVF embryos are destroyed. To put it another way, my question was actually a question.

Sure. Selecting the correct reference class is also pretty hard, but that cuts both ways too.

We've had IQ tests for about a century now. Don't you think we would have noticed if there was actually some advantage to being stupid in that time? Why would another 20 years make a difference?

What kind of positive traits would you expect to find?

These traits are notoriously polygenic, and virtually every gene is pleiotropic. It's not hard to imagine that optimizing for IQ specifically can have unforeseen deleterious downstream effects. Genetics as a field is rife with unknown unknowns.

Like @Rosencrantz2, I think people here are kidding themselves about how well we understand genetics or the mind.

Psychology is one of the "softest" and least rigorous of all the sciences, and to the degree that IQ tests are measuring a real phenomenon it seems to me that whatever it is produces diminishing returns and starts to come with significant downsides in terms of mental (and to a lesser extent physical) health as you approach the tail end of the bell curve.

We are talking about a 6 point IQ difference here. East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are already more than that compared to Whites. And there isn't any evidence for significant downsides in terms of mental or physical health, just the opposite.

IQ appears to be as close to an unalloyed good as it gets. To the best of my knowledge, the markers for most things we consider indicators of a good or successful life positively correlate with IQ, such as overall health, mental wellbeing, income and so on.

Is it theoretically possible that after a certain point, further IQ gains will require horrible tradeoffs (such as an example Scott once brought up of a family that seems to get +20 IQ points at the cost of going blind)? Yes.

But for very large and very meaningful gains, well past the 160s, we have existence proofs that people with high IQs do just fine. Better than you or me for the matter. I'll take plenty more gains along those lines.

IQ appears to be as close to an unalloyed good as it gets

This depends entirely or at least heavily on what you consider good. I disagree strongly that IQ is close to an unalloyed good, although I admit that it's correlated with many good traits.

I'm seeing a few comments like this but they're all frustratingly vague. What specific negative traits do you mean?

It is often linked to, at least in the modern world, a lack of ability to connect to emotions, and to connect deeply with other people in a somatic or non-rational way.

If it helps, you can think of IQ as more 'left-brained' whereas the capacity I'm talking about is more "right-brained."

high IQ people are more likely to be married (except at very young age) and less likely to be divorced...

That stereotype is, as far as we know, incorrect. Intelligence is positively correlated with empathy, prosociality and morality. Academic success also seems to correlate with empathy.

Which makes sense, if you look outside of carefully curated bubbles. Who do you think is more empathetic, university graduates or unemployed members of the underclass?

More comments

I do think that there are advantages to not having too high an IQ. I studied maths at Cambridge and met my classmates.

Notice how the investigation was carried by Hope not Hate, one of the most (public) well-funded radical left wing NGO in the UK.

I noticed that too. Also that the story came out in the Guardian, Britain's main left wing newspaper.

What I really want to know is, what does the median Guardian reader actually think about this? I'm sure that most would reflexively condemn it, but a significant portion of those gladly send their children to private schools to give them an advantage or will have used IVF themselves. I wish the comments section was left open.

Time to rewatch Gattaca everyone, it's on the way.

It's not. Choosing the best embryo out of a small handful won't move the needle, especially when only 2.5% of people in the US do IVF, and only a small percentage of those will do advanced genetic testing. And some hospitals are already refusing to work with similar services like Orchid.

I calculated below that this service, if widely implemented, will lead to a 0.005 rise in IQ per generation. So maybe IQs, instead of falling by 1 point per generation, will only fall 0.995 points.

Idiocracy, not Gattaca, is our current trajectory. On a population level, this does essentially nothing.

A lot more people will do IVF when it allows for genetic selection. The only reason to do IVF now, which is very expensive, is to deal with fertility problems. If you can make your children smarter, it pays for itself.

You can already do genetic selection with Orchid, and almost no one is doing it. And the things they are testing for are much higher stakes than a couple of IQ points here or there.

Why is no one using it?

  1. Public awareness is low

  2. People think it's "wrong" to want to have genetically normal children. Imagine how wrong they will think it is to boost IQ

  3. IVF is hard, slow, expensive, and frustrating.

  4. Genetic screening makes it harder, slower, and more expensive.

  5. Many hospitals won't even work with Orchid. Imagine trying to convince Woke State University to partner with your IQ testing service. So you will need to go out of state to specialty IVF clinics. Harder, slower, more expensive, more frustrating.

I'll eat my hat if more than 10,000 couples per year are using this in 5 years. Until we get gene editing the best way to get high IQ babies will be to choose an intelligent partner and to have children before the mother is 30 years old. This barely moves the needle.

Orchid is still extremely expensive and only offers very marginal benefits. The costs will go down and the benefits will increase.

Part of it is just people thinking it's weird. I know a couple doing IVF and I suggested they use a service like Orchid and they just kind of looked at me like I was crazy. They didn't give me any reason why they wouldn't do it. But people will gradually overcome that.

By the way, I didn't know having children when the mother was young affected the child's IQ. How big is that effect?

By the way, I didn't know having children when the mother was young affected the child's IQ. How big is that effect?

I am making an assumption. Mutational load is higher with advanced maternal age.

We'd assume that this would negatively impact IQ unless we could prove otherwise.

Yeah the breakthrough would be ease of use. Even for the rich IVF is a pain in the ass and typically only done if some major issue is expected.

Assuming the technology works, it won't be a big deal. For one, the differences in IQ between siblings tends to be small.

More practically most people who use IVF only have a few embryos. Older mothers especially will have fewer. And many or most embryos either won't be viable or will have other defects that dominate a small IQ effect.

So even though this will be sold as some sort of Gattaca situation, in practice it might end up with a mother choosing an embryo with an IQ of 110 +/- 15 over one with an IQ of 108 +/- 15. And the cost of $50k for such a small benefit will dissuade all but the richest people.

I do agree that I don't expect this to change the world drastically. Most babies will continue to be born the old-fashioned way.

But you're assuming that this technology doesn't change the kind, or number of parents that get IVF. Think about tiger parents who send their three year old children to pre-MBA programmes. Do you think they wouldn't be willing to do something that actually makes a difference to their future children's outcomes? Even if it is only 2 IQ points, that's worth more than violin lessons or debate club.

Plus, we can reasonably expect the price to come down as more companies enter the space (there are already two that I know of). Soon enough, I expect the current 'doctor eyeballs the embryos to decide which one to implant' to be replaced with genetic testing in most IVF clinics. If you're already paying for the IVF, why not pay a little extra to give your future child a better chance in life?

Yeah, it pushes things forward very, very slightly.

Note that Orchid has already been offering genetic testing for other things for awhile now, and it has a very small number of users. (But among them, Elon Musk!)

But Gattaca this ain't. The number of IVF babies is ridiculously low. Only about 2.5% of babies in the US are conceived via IVF, almost all of whom are born to older mothers. If you want to have a high IQ baby, then conceiving naturally at 25 will give you far better odds than using this technology at age 38.

But in any case, let's say 10% of IVF babies use this service and the average IQ bump is 2 points.

This will result in 2.5% * 10% * 2 points = 0.005 points higher IQ among all babies. This doesn't even come close to offsetting the natural dysgenic trends from older mothers and low IQ people having more kids.

The reason for the low number of babies via IVF is because of the expense.

You'd have to decrease the cost of IVF to a large degree in order to see any real changes on a measurable scale.

You're typical minding. I predict that with cheap IVF there won't be a huge increase in IVF births because the people who will do this are strivers with .7 TFR that by its nature won't move the needle much.

That and, well, there's more kinds of expense than just the purely monetary -- IVF is inherently a somewhat invasive medical procedure (apparently involving a good amount of being poked with Big Honking Needles while the doctor watches on ultrasound to make sure that the right bit is being poked, as well as dosing with hormone treatments with occasional interesting side effects) and even without the current multi-thousand-dollar medical bills this is a "cost" that people may reasonably decide they don't want to pay.

But you're assuming that this technology doesn't change the kind, or number of parents that get IVF.

Are there even many anecdotes of people choosing IVF as their first choice method of conception? Maybe there are some worried about serious recessive genetic disorders, although most examples I can think of there seem more focused on pre-screening before marriage. The folks I've known who have done IVF largely tried most other options first, and are out of time to have a TFR that seems likely to cause massive changes in the future. I don't know the specifics, but I hear it's not exactly as fun as the more, er, traditional method, and pretty expensive.

I guess I could see that changing long-term, but it seems like it'd be a hard sell to a couple getting married young-ish and wanting a large family.

This will of course be more than compensated for by the TFR declines in groups that adopt it widely. Even if the cost declines it’s still a big, expensive deal compared to not taking some pills because your trailer needs the pitter-patter of little feet, and so I would expect it to if anything be bad for elite human capital over the long run.

I wouldn't celebrate too quickly. While I don't have any hard evidence, this thing trips my "scam" intuition big time.

I wouldn't be so skeptical. As the article says, the first embryos have already been implanted. Plus, Heliospect is not the only company offering this service. Steven Hsu's company Genomic Prediction did the same thing for eccentric pronatalists Simone and Malcolm Collins. The first embryo selected child (that is publicly known) is toddling around a house in Pennsylvania.

While I don't have any hard evidence, this thing trips my "scam" intuition big time.

The only "scam" that seems likely here would be overstating the potential. It doesn't look like they're doing anything that isn't already routinely done with IVF, they're just getting more specific and detailed about it, connecting it to current best-understanding data on genetics. IVF clients are already routinely informed of the sex and "strength" of the embryos created, along with obvious stuff like "this embryo has trisomy 21" or whatever. Since there isn't a "big IQ" gene, the best they could do with this particular measure would be "given our current best understanding, embryo A is X% more likely to have increased IQ than embryo B."

That is still a long, long way from doing things like bioengineering superhumans. As the Gattaca line goes--"Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply--the best of you."

EDIT: On reflection I guess my biggest worry about this is that it could exacerbate a certain poorly-understood trend.

I think my bigger fear is not that the technology can't work in principle--it can, although overstating the expected improvement is a real risk. It's that this particular company could well be a scam, and fraudulent companies could expect to survive well into the future with very limited negative feedback signal. There's little ability for consumers to accurately evaluate its efficacy, and you'll always be able to point out stories of screened embryos doing well.

Parents who go for this are going to be solidly above the average anyway, further skewing the results toward good outcomes even absent any real effects.

Another angle is that this is likely to get political very fast. There will be a lot of bad faith actors lodging criticisms at it, and that naturally creates an us-vs-them, circle the wagons mentality. That's something to be avoided at all costs.

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