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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18281 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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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