Without reading the article fully (sorry, it’s long and I already have an opinion about the topic that is mostly in line with it): What’s up with its huge focus on the Rutherford person?
Is the book he wrote so dominant in discourse? Are people angry that he is personally insulting the Collins for using US-wide available embryo selection technology?
It just reads weird that the article spends 2/3 of its length arguing at someone I never heard about (which might just be on me) and whom the authors seem to hold in such low esteem. Yeah, these twitter screenshots seem to show someone who is angry and not arguing in good faith … so why let them live rent-free in such a large part of your article?
(though I wouldn’t call IVF exactly „new“ at this point anymore … but then there is the relatively high rate of heart defects for kids conceived that way, which AFAIK isn’t well understood. So the point stands that IVF might have under-appreciated risks.)
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
1yr ago
Eggs are retrieved and then mixed with sperm outside of her body (they are fertilized in vitro). The resulting embryo(s) grow in an incubator for a few days. Embryos are then typically tested, and (usually) one is chosen to be implanted while the rest of the embryos remain frozen for later use.
Not sure I buy “For later use”, This sounds like systematic murder of the unborn, if you hold that life begins at conception.
As someone who believes all human life is sacred (and who recognizes that, scientifically, a zygote is the first stage of human development and thus counts as a human life), I am opposed to IVF.
However, given that IVF is happening, I am in favor of the embryo with the highest chance of survival getting to try to be born first.
Zygotes have fairly low success rates even naturally. If you seriously believed that life began at fertilization, you should stop having procreative sex entirely, because the risk of creating a zygote that fails to implant is too great.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
Mewis 1yr ago
Quite the knotty moral tangle you've presented here. Let's pick it apart.
(But first, a pedantic terminology point: Life as a separate, unique biological human begins at fertilization, according to science. A new human life begins when two germ cells provide the recombinant DNA and cellular machinery to generate a multicellular framework of tissues and organs which can support a sapient nervous system. The science on that is settled. The moral issues are about personhood, for which mere biological life is a prerequisite and thus (in most other circumstances) a proxy. Thus, your moral tangle can be restated more directly, "If you seriously believed that personhood began at fertilization, you should stop having procreative sex entirely, because the risk of creating a zygote who fails to implant is too great.")
Restated as a syllogism, with expansion of a few built-in assumptions:
Major premise: Those who believe a fertilized egg is a person probably consequently believe his death before birth to be a tragic miscarriage.
Minor premise: The risk of creating a fertilized egg which fails to implant, and thus dies before birth, is high.
Conclusion: Therefore, to avoid tragic miscarriages, those who believe a fertilized egg is a person should not perform the acts which create a fertilized egg.
This is a valid syllogism. Assuming both premises are true, the conclusion must also be true.
I contend the minor premise, "The risk of creating a fertilized egg which fails to implant, and thus dies before birth, is high." Current science says that the greatest risk to the extremely young human is within the first two weeks from fertilization through implantation. A commonly cited number is that 70% of naturally fertilized eggs don't get through this filter. Yet, this article on use of a 25% survival statistic in a court case hints that you've retransmitted a meme which is fairly standard among abortion advocates:
Natural human embryo mortality has often been linked to the ethical status of human embryos. For example, in their brief article, Roberts & Lowe state that “If Nature resorts to abortion … by discarding as many as 3 in every 4 conceptions, it will be difficult for anti-abortionists to oppose abortion on moral and ethical grounds.” Ronald Green, Professor Emeritus of Religion at Dartmouth College, points out, incorrectly, that “between two-thirds and three-quarters of all fertilized eggs do not go on to implant in the womb” and asks: “In view of this high rate of embryonic loss, do we truly want to bestow much moral significance on an entity with which nature is so wasteful?” A report of the Ethics Committee of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1983 states: “Knowing as we do that in the natural process large numbers of fertilised ova are lost before implantation, it is morally unconvincing to claim absolute inviolability for an organism with which nature itself is so prodigal”. This link has been considered by many others. Thus, McLean’s assertion, in evidence, that early embryo loss is not only of biological interest but also of political and legislative significance, was clearly correct. How specific estimates of embryo mortality inform an ethical calculus is, perhaps, not so clear. Nevertheless, for those who consider it germane, McLean’s exhortation that “It is therefore important to obtain as accurate an estimate as is possible for the occurrence of early human embryo loss”, must surely be correct too.
Based on this analysis, a plausible range for total embryo loss from fertilisation to birth is 40–60%. This is consistent with estimates from both older and more recent text books. Even with the wide range of mathematically possible outcomes, it is likely that estimates of 90%, 83%, 80–85%, 78%, 76% and 70% total human embryonic loss are excessive.
"Even so," one might ask, "isn't a death rate of one out of two children worth avoiding the one death?" That's morally equivalent to anti-natalism as a prevention for cancers and other causes of suffering and death. Since there's no other way to get new children, and since everyone dies anyway, preventative anti-natalism is equivalent to species extinction, whether for pre-birth or post-birth deaths.
The opposite question becomes, "isn't a life rate of one out of two children worth seeking life?" Even if the life rate were the dismal 20-30% cited by memes, the majority of humanists and Christians have long agreed that children, new people, are worth the attempt.
I would agree that a life rate of 50%, or even 20% or 10% would still be worth it, but I don't place any moral value on a fertilized egg. In addition, I agree that having fertilized eggs die incidentally is not really systematic murder, or even callous. Most Christians, I think, would agree that it's still moral to bring a child to term even if that child had only a chance of survival - if God wants to take those fertilized eggs or embryos back, let the blood be on his hands, not ours.
But the same arguments would apply for IVF. We have accepted that to get a baby, we have to accept a high failure rate for embryos - so now we're just haggling. To that end, embryo screening is a boon, not a burden. By screening out obviously unviable embryos, we are improving the chances of success, not lowering it.
Since currently IVF is done mostly by people with fertility issues, it's more common for the problem to be "not enough embryos" than "too many embryos".
Oh absolutely. IVF results in the creation and destruction (or death by negligence) of many ooctocytes and blastocysts per cycle and it requires many cycles to get a successful implantation. On a per person basis a woman doing IVF is responsible for the death of many more fertilized eggs than a woman seeking an abortion. It's remarkable that the pro-life movement invests so few resources in convincing women paying thousands of dollars and undergoing unpleasant hormonal therapy to adopt instead.
The 'life at fertilization' position casts a funny light on the reality of human biology where 40-60% of embryos die before being born. If blastocysts are human beings than the leading cause of death is failure to be born, improving access to health care that makes fertilized eggs more likely to be born could become a leading pro-life effective altruist cause. However, older couples may be engaging in reckless oocyte endangerment whenever they have unprotected sex since they are placing a human in an environment where it will almost certainly die.
It's remarkable that the pro-life movement invests so few resources in convincing women paying thousands of dollars and undergoing unpleasant hormonal therapy to adopt instead
Did you mean "convince women to carry to term and surrender it for adoption rather than aborting"? Pro-life organizations spend a lot of their time and money doing this exact thing (as in, offer resources to help mothers carry to term even if abortion would be prudent from a socio-financial standpoint, even if they'd ultimately end up adopting it out- they'd find a prospective parent instantly given the below).
If you don't, I think they've correctly assessed that the demand for healthy babies to adopt massively exceeds the domestic supply in Western nations, so women/families looking to adopt have to make very large sacrifices. (And note that it's specifically adopting babies; children (3-8) are a much harder sell, and adults [13+, try as we might to pretend otherwise] are obviously not children thus they basically never get adopted.)
One of these sacrifices is to get a domestic model with a salvage title (usually fetal alcohol syndrome), which require way more maintenance and never perform quite right. Hence, it can be a rational choice to spend that maintenance fee on extra pulls of the IVF slot machine.
The other one of these sacrifices is to get an import model from a country that has a lot of orphans; Haiti is a popular choice for the NA market as it offers a convenient way to inspect the goods on offer before purchase (SEA/African models are trickier to inspect in this way). And while it's true that the TCO on a normal import model will likely be less than a marginal domestic one, there are a few other complications that come with it (namely, that these models have certain immutable traits that render the fact the kid isn't yours permanently and blatantly obvious). Revealed preferences of the population reveal this matters so much that people who want to adopt but can't afford IVF only seldom choose these models, and I don't think it's really a failure of pro-life organizations to not be trying that hard to change this.
Does anyone actually think like this? You know I can think of one Rat catholic that might take ideas seriously enough to follow through to that conclusion. But as far as I'm aware, most profilers who believe life begins at conception aren't utilitarians, they're into natural law. They're still going to hate IVF- but they won't really get started on it as a result of the number of zygotes being high, it will be a response to normalization of a practice outside of natural law. Its not a response to the number of zygotes being killed, its a response to the number of people killing the zygotes.
Lest I get modded for low effort: most people don't "hold that life begins at conception". This already happens with IVF where some embryos are created and never used, and those who hold that life begins at conception already oppose IVF for that reason. But even among opponents of abortion, not all believe that life begins at conception.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
Tarnstellung 1yr ago
To be fair, this is IIRC the Catholic Church's official dogma, so it's hardly unknown. Love the "Aika", though.
(Personally I think the passages from the NT make at least as much sense interpreted as implantation rather than fertilisation, but the Catholic Church is notoriously unfond of laymen interpreting scripture.)
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
Advocating for this technology is ultimately an admission that genes matter, of course it's a eugenics technology. The essence of the eugenics movement is social concern over the gene pool, and that is exactly embodied with this technology.
But embryo selection is indeed highly limited, and if proponents of this technology are going to hide behind "we just want healthier babies", then indeed why stop there? If we want healthier babies, way before we care about embryo screening shouldn't we foremost care about a eugenic mate selection which is always going to be more impactful than embryonic screening?
I can say that I honestly want healthier babies in terms of physical strength, IQ, beauty, but I am keenly aware that even most proponents of this technology would consider that evil beyond their opportunity to improve their own offspring.
I've said before that if "longtermists" were worthy of the name they would foremost care about the gene pool and its direction. Their new advocacy for this technology shows that they want it for themselves without generalizing the issue as a social question, which it always has been and always will be.
They should embrace the label and recognize that the arguments against eugenics have always been bad from the very beginning. You can argue against something like forced sterilization, but the arguments against eugenics have never been good, so it's annoying seeing advocates for embryo screening try to distance themselves from eugenics rather than be brave and acknowledge that fact.
The other LW article I've seen takes the same approach of trying to distance the embryonic selection from eugenics:
In my view, the term “eugenics” should not be used to describe embryo screening. In most people’s minds “eugenics” conjures images of government-sponsored sterilization efforts, genocide, and racist pseudoscience. I understand the technical definition is just “good for genes”, but this is not what comes to mind for most people when they hear this word.
Even worse, most of the horrible things done in the name of “eugenics” in the past were in fact not eugenic at all! The entire Nazi theory of genes was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how genes worked. They believed that non-aryan peoples were “contaminating” the “pure aryan bloodline”, and that only by purging those who were unpure could they make a perfect master race. Which is of course not just a morally repugnant theory, but also wrong.
If you want to have a productive conversation, I would suggest using the term “epilogenics” to describe non-coercive means of improving genes that are in line with what we expect those affected would want. There are of course still some concerns with epilogenics (increasing inequality for example), but they are decidedly NOT the same concerns that people have about eugenics.
From what I've seen, they want to use the technology to selfishly give their own offspring a leg-up over the rest of society, they don't actually want to approach social issues with eugenic-minded thinking- they still denounce that. Supporting embryonic selection won't even make a dent in dysgenic spiral, and good luck being saved by gene editing when even they are too afraid to openly associate with eugenics and don't seem interested in challenging the bad arguments against it.
It looks to me like they are just applying the euphemism treadmill to change the word to something the public won't throw a fit over and then supporting eugenics.
"Eugenics" in the popular imagination means Nazis executing people with disabilities. Embryo selection is "eugenics" in a strict dictionary definition sense, but not "eugenics" as most people understand it.
Still not believing it this time, and before we start on the "It's only because of the Nazis that eugenics has a bad name" route, read Francis Galton 'the Father of Eugenics' and others of the various Eugenics Societies which sprang up in the early 20th century. While Galton was concerned most of all with getting the 'best' specimens to marry and have kids, others were much more enthused about all the ways they would stop the 'inferiors' from breeding.
It wasn't the Nazi Party brought out posters like this - an uncomfortable reality which the Germans pointed out as support for their efforts.
And it always, always begins with "we just want to make sure that healthy babies are born, who could possibly object to doing away with hereditary diseases?"
Apart from that, this is just the usual "there is no such thing as the slippery slope" contention.
Then five years later it's "But how were we to know?"
The general path of this sort of thing is:
(1) We promise, cross our hearts and hope to die, that polygenic screening will not be used except to prevent hereditary diseases
(2) Okay, 'hereditary disease' has been defined in too limited a sense, let's expand it to cover these heart-string tugging cases
(3) Wouldn't you want to give your children the gift of a better life? If they were polygenically selected to be smarter/taller/prettier/extrovert/athletic, they would have such a better life, studies have shown it, it's Science and you can't argue with Science
(4) There are still people out there who are hold-outs about their dysgenic heritage. They will be encouraged by the state to consider polygenic selection of any offspring they intend to have
(5) If none of your embryos reaches the standards required for continuation of the process of pregnancy, you will be sterilised for the good of society
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
FarNearEverywhere 1yr ago
Honestly, that's like the third-worst scenario. The worse ones are inescapable dystopia and selection for negative-sum traits like height/exploitativity causing catabolic collapse (the latter is what you'd get accidentally from naïve selection on income, to be clear, and procreative beneficence also endorses deliberately doing it).
Your #3 is claiming a bailey; fines may not dissuade the rich, but imprisonment does, and citizen jurisdiction (i.e. anyone a citizen of country X is subject to X's laws even while not in X) blocks reproductive tourism if they ever plan on coming back.
#1 has the potential to select for exploitativity, either indirectly via correlative PGT-P on things like income, or directly via Prisoner's Dilemma issues. That's a negative-sum game that if played at sufficient scale leads to societal collapse - with a time delay big enough that the problems are unstoppable once they start to show, assuming a decent uptake rate - and all positive effects of the eugenics only make the problem worse by making the exploitation easier. Note that the principle of procreative beneficence directly endorses doing this.
I'm not firmly in favour of #3, but I think Parrhesia's not taking the problems seriously enough and thus his going soldier on this is plausibly -EV.
I do think you have to coordinate action somehow to avoid prisoner's dilemma issues.
But we probably can.
Consider affirmative action. If you forcibly reduce competition, you reduce the selection pressure, which can help to remove the perverse incentives from the prisoner's dilemma table.
Indirect issues are a larger concern, such as biodiversity, second order effects of first order selections (as in your exploitation case), genetic fads, over-optimization for values initially perceived as important, and so on. I do think we should take things somewhat slow and keep hold of the sequenced genomes of older generations in case we need to backtrack. Your focus on full societal collapse is interesting. If a silent value shift occurs you might not be able to backtrack. But... I think we have to deal with that either way. As long as things keep changing we have to deal with alignment problems and stability. As long as there is any risk of societal collapse we should be diversifying our assets and making sure we can rebuild from as small a piece as possible. I think having smarter children is going to be a net positive regarding these issues. And though you worry about exploitation- cooperation is a very useful trait as well that is likely to be selected for, both explicitly and implicitly.
Your #3 is claiming a bailey; fines may not dissuade the rich, but imprisonment does, and citizen jurisdiction (i.e. anyone a citizen of country X is subject to X's laws even while not in X) blocks reproductive tourism if they ever plan on coming back.
I don't think it's quite that easy. Embryo selection doesn't result in having children you could not in principle have. It's like cheating at a speedrun by raising an item drop rate. Say we sequence the genes of all children (who's sequencing them? Are we letting the government mandate this?). The smart thing to do is cheat just enough that you have an unlikely child, but not an impossible one. If every rich family has a 1 in 10 child and two average children, you can run the statistics and figure out what percentage of them are cheating, but it's very hard to tell who's cheating.
And that's assuming they're raising their own children.
You can mail sperm. You can transfer gene sequences over the internet. You can get a surrogate (or a secret lover who wants your babies) in another country.
Also- yes imprisonment may dissuade the rich, or at least slow them down and force them to use secret tactics. But right now the rich just don't end up getting imprisoned for the same things the poor do. And I think getting the system to actually prosecute them on an issue with plausible deniability is going to be really difficult.
There are definitely some options beyond 1,2, and 3 in concept, for instance- Eugenics getting banned in all countries would help. A full time panopticon monitoring the wealthy would help. Everyone being socially aligned such that everyone coordinates their actions and just decides not to do eugenics would solve it (and you'd get world peace as a bonus!).
But I put those in the same category of 'solutions' that are not realistic enough to be viable.
There might be a 4), but I don't think your variant on 3) works well enough, and the other ideas I just shared are even less likely to happen. If you find a better 4, we can talk about it. Though, I myself am still pro gene-editing right now. Even if we can stop it, I'm likely still going to be arguing for why we shouldn't.
Your focus on full societal collapse is interesting.
The way I see it, if you graph out the distribution of psychological makeup in N-dimensional space, there's a certain window where society doesn't explode. We don't know where the boundaries are, but we know that we're inside it and that natural selection isn't going to move us out of it very fast. But widespread eugenics can.
If every rich family has a 1 in 10 child and two average children, you can run the statistics and figure out what percentage of them are cheating, but it's very hard to tell who's cheating.
Check whether the babies implanted overseas. Check whether they transferred money to/were present at foreign IVF clinics (which will be known, because unlicensed medical practice is illegal everywhere so you might as well not go abroad at all). The existence of the baby actually makes this significantly easier than prosecuting e.g. child-brothel tourism.
I'm hoping embryo selection, especially for intelligence, becomes commercially viable and affordable before I have kids in say 3-5 years.
My girlfriend is reflexively against it and I'm not sure how to change her mind. I think it's a terrible thing to miss out on, and I'd do it for my kids because I wished my parents would have done the same for me.
Insert the mental gymnastics meme, as far as I'm concerned:
Health is good. Embryo selection improves health and other outcomes we care about. Ergo embryo selection is good.
Miss me with the luddite bullshit, I've seen it all before when IVF became a thing.
At the current state of technology, it appears that embryo selection won't publicly offer selection on intelligence anytime soon, and the projected gains (of 2.5 IQ above mean) are pretty low for so much effort. However, Gwern's calculation of 9 IQ points above mean would be much more worth it, but that supposes much better IQ GWASs than are currently known to exist.
I wouldn't wait for 3-5 years - I think at least 10 years would be required for a better IQ PGS and for it to become even minimally widely available. A lot depends on how young your girlfriend is - geriatric pregnancy (age >=35) isn't fun, probably involves ova of lower genetic quality, and is not guaranteed to succeed, even using IVF, so if she's in late 20s and up, it doesn't seem worth it to wait. If she's mid-20s and below and you're willing to wait 10 years, it might be okay.
My philosophy is, have kids now (assuming you're ready), and then if embryo selection matures, you can select a superbaby at that point. Kids are not really that ruinous as long as they don't get into real trouble, especially if you don't have to pay for their university.
That being said, I this is currently a lot of hassle (read the lesswrong article … quite some steps needed), needs a lot of money and is definitely not available in most jurisdictions. I am also not sure how well it would work.
So waiting 2-5 years would probably make things easier (or harder because it’s been outlawed).
Generally, a nation that wanted to go all-in on “IVF eugenics” could probably make a lot of progress just by sequencing and cognitive-ability-testing + disease cataloguing a large part of their population. AFAIK one thing holding the technology back is that there is no good large scale database of DNA sequences with cognitive ability scores (instead,“educational attainment” is often recorded, which might not be exactly what you care about).
GWAS underestimates effect. If we can fully sequences embryo's genome, we can also factor number of less rare mutations in selection, even without any GWAS; this will raise IQ, as rare mutations are much more likely to be harmful, that is why they are rare, though they are very difficult to discover (as human genome is approx same magnitude as number of humans)
"For example, in 2022, 11.5% of babies in Denmark were born with the assistance of reproductive technology (ART) including IVF."
Some cultures really are reproducing like pandas.
Makes me, think of the misunderstandings in the pre-birth genetic testing accuracy, which with embryos would be different, but I'd assume would have the same issues?
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Notes -
Without reading the article fully (sorry, it’s long and I already have an opinion about the topic that is mostly in line with it): What’s up with its huge focus on the Rutherford person?
Is the book he wrote so dominant in discourse? Are people angry that he is personally insulting the Collins for using US-wide available embryo selection technology?
It just reads weird that the article spends 2/3 of its length arguing at someone I never heard about (which might just be on me) and whom the authors seem to hold in such low esteem. Yeah, these twitter screenshots seem to show someone who is angry and not arguing in good faith … so why let them live rent-free in such a large part of your article?
There is a (better argued and worded) comment on the article itself that also captures this feeling:
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/embryo-selection-healthy-babies-vs/comment/17761959?r=9lzgr
(though I wouldn’t call IVF exactly „new“ at this point anymore … but then there is the relatively high rate of heart defects for kids conceived that way, which AFAIK isn’t well understood. So the point stands that IVF might have under-appreciated risks.)
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Not sure I buy “For later use”, This sounds like systematic murder of the unborn, if you hold that life begins at conception.
As someone who believes all human life is sacred (and who recognizes that, scientifically, a zygote is the first stage of human development and thus counts as a human life), I am opposed to IVF.
However, given that IVF is happening, I am in favor of the embryo with the highest chance of survival getting to try to be born first.
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Zygotes have fairly low success rates even naturally. If you seriously believed that life began at fertilization, you should stop having procreative sex entirely, because the risk of creating a zygote that fails to implant is too great.
Quite the knotty moral tangle you've presented here. Let's pick it apart.
(But first, a pedantic terminology point: Life as a separate, unique biological human begins at fertilization, according to science. A new human life begins when two germ cells provide the recombinant DNA and cellular machinery to generate a multicellular framework of tissues and organs which can support a sapient nervous system. The science on that is settled. The moral issues are about personhood, for which mere biological life is a prerequisite and thus (in most other circumstances) a proxy. Thus, your moral tangle can be restated more directly, "If you seriously believed that personhood began at fertilization, you should stop having procreative sex entirely, because the risk of creating a zygote who fails to implant is too great.")
Restated as a syllogism, with expansion of a few built-in assumptions:
Major premise: Those who believe a fertilized egg is a person probably consequently believe his death before birth to be a tragic miscarriage.
Minor premise: The risk of creating a fertilized egg which fails to implant, and thus dies before birth, is high.
Conclusion: Therefore, to avoid tragic miscarriages, those who believe a fertilized egg is a person should not perform the acts which create a fertilized egg.
This is a valid syllogism. Assuming both premises are true, the conclusion must also be true.
I contend the minor premise, "The risk of creating a fertilized egg which fails to implant, and thus dies before birth, is high." Current science says that the greatest risk to the extremely young human is within the first two weeks from fertilization through implantation. A commonly cited number is that 70% of naturally fertilized eggs don't get through this filter. Yet, this article on use of a 25% survival statistic in a court case hints that you've retransmitted a meme which is fairly standard among abortion advocates:
So, what is that accurate estimate? A second article, also originally published on F1000, puts the percentage at a coin flip with a caveat: 40-60% for normally healthy and fertile women. Opinions differ on whether F1000 is a legitimate peer-reviewed journal or merely a pay-to-publish platform, but these authors cite about 40 papers in going against popular wisdom, and reach this conclusion:
"Even so," one might ask, "isn't a death rate of one out of two children worth avoiding the one death?" That's morally equivalent to anti-natalism as a prevention for cancers and other causes of suffering and death. Since there's no other way to get new children, and since everyone dies anyway, preventative anti-natalism is equivalent to species extinction, whether for pre-birth or post-birth deaths.
The opposite question becomes, "isn't a life rate of one out of two children worth seeking life?" Even if the life rate were the dismal 20-30% cited by memes, the majority of humanists and Christians have long agreed that children, new people, are worth the attempt.
I would agree that a life rate of 50%, or even 20% or 10% would still be worth it, but I don't place any moral value on a fertilized egg. In addition, I agree that having fertilized eggs die incidentally is not really systematic murder, or even callous. Most Christians, I think, would agree that it's still moral to bring a child to term even if that child had only a chance of survival - if God wants to take those fertilized eggs or embryos back, let the blood be on his hands, not ours.
But the same arguments would apply for IVF. We have accepted that to get a baby, we have to accept a high failure rate for embryos - so now we're just haggling. To that end, embryo screening is a boon, not a burden. By screening out obviously unviable embryos, we are improving the chances of success, not lowering it.
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Since currently IVF is done mostly by people with fertility issues, it's more common for the problem to be "not enough embryos" than "too many embryos".
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Oh absolutely. IVF results in the creation and destruction (or death by negligence) of many ooctocytes and blastocysts per cycle and it requires many cycles to get a successful implantation. On a per person basis a woman doing IVF is responsible for the death of many more fertilized eggs than a woman seeking an abortion. It's remarkable that the pro-life movement invests so few resources in convincing women paying thousands of dollars and undergoing unpleasant hormonal therapy to adopt instead.
The 'life at fertilization' position casts a funny light on the reality of human biology where 40-60% of embryos die before being born. If blastocysts are human beings than the leading cause of death is failure to be born, improving access to health care that makes fertilized eggs more likely to be born could become a leading pro-life effective altruist cause. However, older couples may be engaging in reckless oocyte endangerment whenever they have unprotected sex since they are placing a human in an environment where it will almost certainly die.
Did you mean "convince women to carry to term and surrender it for adoption rather than aborting"? Pro-life organizations spend a lot of their time and money doing this exact thing (as in, offer resources to help mothers carry to term even if abortion would be prudent from a socio-financial standpoint, even if they'd ultimately end up adopting it out- they'd find a prospective parent instantly given the below).
If you don't, I think they've correctly assessed that the demand for healthy babies to adopt massively exceeds the domestic supply in Western nations, so women/families looking to adopt have to make very large sacrifices. (And note that it's specifically adopting babies; children (3-8) are a much harder sell, and adults [13+, try as we might to pretend otherwise] are obviously not children thus they basically never get adopted.)
One of these sacrifices is to get a domestic model with a salvage title (usually fetal alcohol syndrome), which require way more maintenance and never perform quite right. Hence, it can be a rational choice to spend that maintenance fee on extra pulls of the IVF slot machine.
The other one of these sacrifices is to get an import model from a country that has a lot of orphans; Haiti is a popular choice for the NA market as it offers a convenient way to inspect the goods on offer before purchase (SEA/African models are trickier to inspect in this way). And while it's true that the TCO on a normal import model will likely be less than a marginal domestic one, there are a few other complications that come with it (namely, that these models have certain immutable traits that render the fact the kid isn't yours permanently and blatantly obvious). Revealed preferences of the population reveal this matters so much that people who want to adopt but can't afford IVF only seldom choose these models, and I don't think it's really a failure of pro-life organizations to not be trying that hard to change this.
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Does anyone actually think like this? You know I can think of one Rat catholic that might take ideas seriously enough to follow through to that conclusion. But as far as I'm aware, most profilers who believe life begins at conception aren't utilitarians, they're into natural law. They're still going to hate IVF- but they won't really get started on it as a result of the number of zygotes being high, it will be a response to normalization of a practice outside of natural law. Its not a response to the number of zygotes being killed, its a response to the number of people killing the zygotes.
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If.
Lest I get modded for low effort: most people don't "hold that life begins at conception". This already happens with IVF where some embryos are created and never used, and those who hold that life begins at conception already oppose IVF for that reason. But even among opponents of abortion, not all believe that life begins at conception.
To be fair, this is IIRC the Catholic Church's official dogma, so it's hardly unknown. Love the "Aika", though.
(Personally I think the passages from the NT make at least as much sense interpreted as implantation rather than fertilisation, but the Catholic Church is notoriously unfond of laymen interpreting scripture.)
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Advocating for this technology is ultimately an admission that genes matter, of course it's a eugenics technology. The essence of the eugenics movement is social concern over the gene pool, and that is exactly embodied with this technology.
But embryo selection is indeed highly limited, and if proponents of this technology are going to hide behind "we just want healthier babies", then indeed why stop there? If we want healthier babies, way before we care about embryo screening shouldn't we foremost care about a eugenic mate selection which is always going to be more impactful than embryonic screening?
I can say that I honestly want healthier babies in terms of physical strength, IQ, beauty, but I am keenly aware that even most proponents of this technology would consider that evil beyond their opportunity to improve their own offspring.
I've said before that if "longtermists" were worthy of the name they would foremost care about the gene pool and its direction. Their new advocacy for this technology shows that they want it for themselves without generalizing the issue as a social question, which it always has been and always will be.
They should embrace the label and recognize that the arguments against eugenics have always been bad from the very beginning. You can argue against something like forced sterilization, but the arguments against eugenics have never been good, so it's annoying seeing advocates for embryo screening try to distance themselves from eugenics rather than be brave and acknowledge that fact.
Who are you talking about? All of the longtermists I know want gene editing. Have always supported gene editing. Are not against gene editing.
The other LW article I've seen takes the same approach of trying to distance the embryonic selection from eugenics:
From what I've seen, they want to use the technology to selfishly give their own offspring a leg-up over the rest of society, they don't actually want to approach social issues with eugenic-minded thinking- they still denounce that. Supporting embryonic selection won't even make a dent in dysgenic spiral, and good luck being saved by gene editing when even they are too afraid to openly associate with eugenics and don't seem interested in challenging the bad arguments against it.
It looks to me like they are just applying the euphemism treadmill to change the word to something the public won't throw a fit over and then supporting eugenics.
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"This is not at all the same thing as eugenics! Only cranks could possibly oppose it!"
Then proceeds to give list of "and this is now accepted as normal and only cranks oppose it" eugenics examples.
Yeah, sure I believe you that this time is gonna be different.
"Eugenics" in the popular imagination means Nazis executing people with disabilities. Embryo selection is "eugenics" in a strict dictionary definition sense, but not "eugenics" as most people understand it.
"Our eugenics are different!"
Still not believing it this time, and before we start on the "It's only because of the Nazis that eugenics has a bad name" route, read Francis Galton 'the Father of Eugenics' and others of the various Eugenics Societies which sprang up in the early 20th century. While Galton was concerned most of all with getting the 'best' specimens to marry and have kids, others were much more enthused about all the ways they would stop the 'inferiors' from breeding.
It wasn't the Nazi Party brought out posters like this - an uncomfortable reality which the Germans pointed out as support for their efforts.
And it always, always begins with "we just want to make sure that healthy babies are born, who could possibly object to doing away with hereditary diseases?"
Snidely implying that Ambiguous Bad Thing Definitely Has to Happen Again for no reason is not a good argument.
I take exception to the term "snidely".
Apart from that, this is just the usual "there is no such thing as the slippery slope" contention.
Then five years later it's "But how were we to know?"
The general path of this sort of thing is:
(1) We promise, cross our hearts and hope to die, that polygenic screening will not be used except to prevent hereditary diseases
(2) Okay, 'hereditary disease' has been defined in too limited a sense, let's expand it to cover these heart-string tugging cases
(3) Wouldn't you want to give your children the gift of a better life? If they were polygenically selected to be smarter/taller/prettier/extrovert/athletic, they would have such a better life, studies have shown it, it's Science and you can't argue with Science
(4) There are still people out there who are hold-outs about their dysgenic heritage. They will be encouraged by the state to consider polygenic selection of any offspring they intend to have
(5) If none of your embryos reaches the standards required for continuation of the process of pregnancy, you will be sterilised for the good of society
Honestly, that's like the third-worst scenario. The worse ones are inescapable dystopia and selection for negative-sum traits like height/exploitativity causing catabolic collapse (the latter is what you'd get accidentally from naïve selection on income, to be clear, and procreative beneficence also endorses deliberately doing it).
Beware of mean chickens.
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I'm not sure what you're proposing. To me its clear that once this technology exists your choices are as follows:
Let anyone use it to select their offspring
Let the government choose which offspring we have
Ban it (only let rich people select their offspring and leave the poor to rot.)
I'm a fan of option 1 given these choices.
Your #3 is claiming a bailey; fines may not dissuade the rich, but imprisonment does, and citizen jurisdiction (i.e. anyone a citizen of country X is subject to X's laws even while not in X) blocks reproductive tourism if they ever plan on coming back.
#1 has the potential to select for exploitativity, either indirectly via correlative PGT-P on things like income, or directly via Prisoner's Dilemma issues. That's a negative-sum game that if played at sufficient scale leads to societal collapse - with a time delay big enough that the problems are unstoppable once they start to show, assuming a decent uptake rate - and all positive effects of the eugenics only make the problem worse by making the exploitation easier. Note that the principle of procreative beneficence directly endorses doing this.
I'm not firmly in favour of #3, but I think Parrhesia's not taking the problems seriously enough and thus his going soldier on this is plausibly -EV.
I do think you have to coordinate action somehow to avoid prisoner's dilemma issues.
But we probably can.
Consider affirmative action. If you forcibly reduce competition, you reduce the selection pressure, which can help to remove the perverse incentives from the prisoner's dilemma table.
Indirect issues are a larger concern, such as biodiversity, second order effects of first order selections (as in your exploitation case), genetic fads, over-optimization for values initially perceived as important, and so on. I do think we should take things somewhat slow and keep hold of the sequenced genomes of older generations in case we need to backtrack. Your focus on full societal collapse is interesting. If a silent value shift occurs you might not be able to backtrack. But... I think we have to deal with that either way. As long as things keep changing we have to deal with alignment problems and stability. As long as there is any risk of societal collapse we should be diversifying our assets and making sure we can rebuild from as small a piece as possible. I think having smarter children is going to be a net positive regarding these issues. And though you worry about exploitation- cooperation is a very useful trait as well that is likely to be selected for, both explicitly and implicitly.
I don't think it's quite that easy. Embryo selection doesn't result in having children you could not in principle have. It's like cheating at a speedrun by raising an item drop rate. Say we sequence the genes of all children (who's sequencing them? Are we letting the government mandate this?). The smart thing to do is cheat just enough that you have an unlikely child, but not an impossible one. If every rich family has a 1 in 10 child and two average children, you can run the statistics and figure out what percentage of them are cheating, but it's very hard to tell who's cheating.
And that's assuming they're raising their own children.
You can mail sperm. You can transfer gene sequences over the internet. You can get a surrogate (or a secret lover who wants your babies) in another country.
Also- yes imprisonment may dissuade the rich, or at least slow them down and force them to use secret tactics. But right now the rich just don't end up getting imprisoned for the same things the poor do. And I think getting the system to actually prosecute them on an issue with plausible deniability is going to be really difficult.
There are definitely some options beyond 1,2, and 3 in concept, for instance- Eugenics getting banned in all countries would help. A full time panopticon monitoring the wealthy would help. Everyone being socially aligned such that everyone coordinates their actions and just decides not to do eugenics would solve it (and you'd get world peace as a bonus!).
But I put those in the same category of 'solutions' that are not realistic enough to be viable.
There might be a 4), but I don't think your variant on 3) works well enough, and the other ideas I just shared are even less likely to happen. If you find a better 4, we can talk about it. Though, I myself am still pro gene-editing right now. Even if we can stop it, I'm likely still going to be arguing for why we shouldn't.
The way I see it, if you graph out the distribution of psychological makeup in N-dimensional space, there's a certain window where society doesn't explode. We don't know where the boundaries are, but we know that we're inside it and that natural selection isn't going to move us out of it very fast. But widespread eugenics can.
Check whether the babies implanted overseas. Check whether they transferred money to/were present at foreign IVF clinics (which will be known, because unlicensed medical practice is illegal everywhere so you might as well not go abroad at all). The existence of the baby actually makes this significantly easier than prosecuting e.g. child-brothel tourism.
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I'm hoping embryo selection, especially for intelligence, becomes commercially viable and affordable before I have kids in say 3-5 years.
My girlfriend is reflexively against it and I'm not sure how to change her mind. I think it's a terrible thing to miss out on, and I'd do it for my kids because I wished my parents would have done the same for me.
Insert the mental gymnastics meme, as far as I'm concerned:
Health is good. Embryo selection improves health and other outcomes we care about. Ergo embryo selection is good.
Miss me with the luddite bullshit, I've seen it all before when IVF became a thing.
At the current state of technology, it appears that embryo selection won't publicly offer selection on intelligence anytime soon, and the projected gains (of 2.5 IQ above mean) are pretty low for so much effort. However, Gwern's calculation of 9 IQ points above mean would be much more worth it, but that supposes much better IQ GWASs than are currently known to exist.
I wouldn't wait for 3-5 years - I think at least 10 years would be required for a better IQ PGS and for it to become even minimally widely available. A lot depends on how young your girlfriend is - geriatric pregnancy (age >=35) isn't fun, probably involves ova of lower genetic quality, and is not guaranteed to succeed, even using IVF, so if she's in late 20s and up, it doesn't seem worth it to wait. If she's mid-20s and below and you're willing to wait 10 years, it might be okay.
My philosophy is, have kids now (assuming you're ready), and then if embryo selection matures, you can select a superbaby at that point. Kids are not really that ruinous as long as they don't get into real trouble, especially if you don't have to pay for their university.
According to the LessWrong writeup (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yT22RcWrxZcXyGjsA/how-to-have-polygenically-screened-children), one of the authors of OP article can fix you up with a startup that offers intelligence scores for embryo selection (Jonathan Anomaly…not sure how trustworthy someone with that last name is!).
That being said, I this is currently a lot of hassle (read the lesswrong article … quite some steps needed), needs a lot of money and is definitely not available in most jurisdictions. I am also not sure how well it would work.
So waiting 2-5 years would probably make things easier (or harder because it’s been outlawed).
Generally, a nation that wanted to go all-in on “IVF eugenics” could probably make a lot of progress just by sequencing and cognitive-ability-testing + disease cataloguing a large part of their population. AFAIK one thing holding the technology back is that there is no good large scale database of DNA sequences with cognitive ability scores (instead,“educational attainment” is often recorded, which might not be exactly what you care about).
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GWAS underestimates effect. If we can fully sequences embryo's genome, we can also factor number of less rare mutations in selection, even without any GWAS; this will raise IQ, as rare mutations are much more likely to be harmful, that is why they are rare, though they are very difficult to discover (as human genome is approx same magnitude as number of humans)
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"For example, in 2022, 11.5% of babies in Denmark were born with the assistance of reproductive technology (ART) including IVF."
Some cultures really are reproducing like pandas.
Makes me, think of the misunderstandings in the pre-birth genetic testing accuracy, which with embryos would be different, but I'd assume would have the same issues?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/01/upshot/pregnancy-birth-genetic-testing.html
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