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Throwing Out the Baby with the Culture Medium
Over in the Member Feed, Pseudodionysius started an *ahem* spirited conversation regarding eugenics and the dangers of biotechnology. If you’re interested in the subject — and you should be — get yourself caught-up and add your own thoughts (you’ll need to be a member, though; that’s how things work here).
I’m generally a techno-optimist: Despite all the death, horror, and evil technology has enabled, it’s one of the primary means by which we empower our better angels. The same knowledge that gives us bioweapons gives us vaccines; the same understanding that lets us build weapons of unimaginable destructiveness lets us harness energy at the atomic level; the same Internet that makes it easier to distribute child pornography helps us provide micro-loans. The Tree of Knowledge almost always contains the potential for both good and evil.
But the fact of the matter is that humanity cannot provide for the wellbeing — material and otherwise — of the billions likely to come without new tools: we need better forms of energy, more efficient farming, and more powerful medicine. This isn’t just about #FirstWorldProblems and the latest electronic gadgets but whether hundreds of millions of people will be able to live and thrive at all.
Coming back to Pseud’s thread, the medical and biological stuff is rightly scary, especially when wielded by the powerful, the wicked, and the unscrupulous. And it is, indeed, unsettling that you don’t have to look too hard to find cultish and (likely) reckless enthusiasm for the fastest advances, pushed as far as they can go, especially when most moral curbs are waived away as appeals to antiquated and patriarchal Sky Pixies.
Techno-Utopianism and bio-Utopianism are dangerous ideologies for all the reasons that all Utopianisms are dangerous: they promise worldly paradise in a fundamentally broken world. (They’d also be, unsurprisingly, more technically difficult to achieve than their proponents often allege; for all its flaws and lack of intent, Nature does have a head start on us). A better tomorrow — or even a sustained one — will require us to use many of the tools that will soon become available to us while finding ways to forestall their abuse and reduce their danger.
Utopia is almost certainly not around the next corner — nor the one after that — and there’s no shortage of horrors to be found in the future’s labyrinth. But for every Joseph Mengele or Shirō Ishii we might encounter while stumbling through the darkness, there is almost certainly a Jonas Salk or Norman Borlaug.
We should tread lightly and carry a torch, but we shouldn’t let our well-founded fears scare us from much-needed rewards.
Published in General
“Proceed with caution.” That seems like a fair injunction whenever people are considering the ramifications of new technology.
I’m just “raising awareness”.
In large agreement here although I don’t think you are strong enough in your support for technological advancement. Technology has been an unambiguous good for humanity not despite the potential for horror and death but regardless of it. It is not the technology or science that rains destruction upon man but our fellow men. That argument is akin to saying that guns kill people. People kill people, and to blame technology for it is foolish.
“If they only had fire,” said Prometheus to himself, “they could at least warm themselves and cook their food; and after a while they could learn to make tools and build themselves houses. Without fire, they are worse off than the beasts.”
Ricochet attracts more Epimetheus’ than Prometheus. Or just prosektikós-prometheus.
Were it not for a great deal of potentially-dangerous technology, we wouldn’t be able to sustain 7 billion people on a planet that doesn’t particularly care for our welfare.
If you think it’s good for the world to have hundreds of millions of people who aren’t starving to death or dying, then we need powerful tech. We can do so without becoming monsters: we must.
Thoughtful post, Tom. It just shows that in almost every area where we have downplayed or discarded ethics, we need to resurrect its practice, and with a commitment to its role and importance. We need people who will ask the difficult questions, hopefully from a fairly objective and ethical standpoint, and care less about “progress.” If one approach is unethical, we are creative enough to find solutions to problems without betraying those truths we hold dear.
Personally I think technology will solve both the abortion issue and out of wedlock births once we can only get pregnant when we want to.
It’s unusual for anybody to disagree with “Proceed with caution”, but the problem arises when trying to decide whether the emphasis should be on the former or latter, and if the latter, precisely how much caution is prudent. I’d prefer to let the market work those things out and rely on government regulation only when necessary, but I’m not sure that’s a popular approach even with conservatives when it comes to “scary” new technologies..
I was going to write, people NEVER turn their backs on technology–but then I remembered the deaf culture advocates who excoriate parents who seek to restore their deaf children’s hearing on the ground that it destroys the child’s culture. (Funny how lotsa people seem to feel if you’re born with what used to be called a disability, you should NOT seek to alter it–but it’s everybody’s “right” to have a surgeon chop off their genitals…)
So here’s what I’m getting at: conditions that used to be generally agreed to be diseases or defects are now “rights-ized”, and convictions and practices which were generally considered a matter of cultural or personal preference are now regarded as diseases.
if we got to the point where we could guarantee all babies would be born with no heart defects, no cerebral palsy, and all 5 senses, wouldn’t EVERYBODY agree that was a good thing?
No! I can guarantee you, they wouldn’t.
Any more than I would applaud a guarantee that all babies henceforward would be born with a predisposition to progressivism.
The goalposts of Utopia are always moving on us:
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast–
Man never IS, but always TO BE, blessed.” –(Pope, “Essay on Man”)
You’re on the right track, but if you read between the lines it’s clear that these advocates are not concerned about the culture of the child whose hearing will be restored. They’re concerned about the culture of other deaf people. Once deaf you must remain so, so that others with that disability can feel better about themselves.
Misery loves company.
The problem is that we need to have conversations about ethics and in order to do that we need an ethical foundation from which to argue. We no longer have such a foundation, nor do we have any kind of consensus about ethical treatment of human, even, or perhaps especially of the weakest among us, children. We used to, but no longer. Religion generally supplies this, but the attack on religion and religious freedom weakens the voices of those who could bring some ethical enlightenment into the conversation. I have zero faith in the ability of our nation to enact ethical restraints on genetic science.
Tom, your optimism is nice, but I’d like to hear about your ethical basis for determining what sorts of genetic experimentation should be considered ethical and what shouldn’t.
Morning Tom,
Morning Tom,
Your optimism is similar to the optimism of the central economic planner who intends to improve the efficiency of the economy, of course for the benefit of all.
From “Tales of Ex-Apes” by Marks; “By the 1960’s, human diabetes was found to be treatable by injections of insulin derived from a cow or pig pancreas, despite the fact that there are some structural differences among the hormone molecules….bovine insulin molecule works well in humans, which in turn seems to imply a great deal of slop in the genetic system. Discoveries such as these suggested empirically that the genetic system ought to be best understood without the assumption that it has been precisely engineered by natural selection, that is to say, as “non-Darwinian evolution. Thus, at least from the standpoint of genetics, we should see evolution metaphorically not as an engineer, but as a bricoleur, or tinkerer.”
If we think how this relates to epigenetics, then this optimism is more like the optimism which surrounded the push for fetal stem cell as a quick solution for spinal injuries and other diseases. The dashed hype of fetal stem cell research should blunt this optimism, but it hasn’t
It matters how you define ‘all babies would be born with no defects’.
If you mean by that any baby with a defect would not ever make it to delivery, I have a problem with that. If instead, you mean that any baby that would otherwise have had that defect is able to be born without it, then I’m receptive.
Killing all the babies with heart defects, cerebral palsy, or a non functional ‘senses’, whether before or after birth, is not a cure, it is murder…
Its very easy to pretend science offers us a utopian world where nobody is born imperfect, but in practice, it so far always ends up in a purge of the weak and handicapped .
So, after much thought and an enlightening discussion with Mr. Meyer last night, I have come to agree that if it is possible to use gene therapy to avoid genetic handicaps, without the destruction of embryos or fetuses (IE people) then, with some reservations, I support it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see it as a dangerous path to start down.
Not caution merely for caution’s sake, but because of the entirely justifiable concern about unintended consequences. That doesn’t mean “Stop everything!” but it does mean proceed with sufficient caution such that you can begin to tell what the second and possibly even third order consequences of your actions will be and weigh whether or not the costs of those consequences outweigh the potential benefits.
Ethics does not require religion. Also given the vast number of religious traditions that are a part of our culture it seems odd to claim that we can attain any sort of common ethical framework from a fractured religious tradition.
I’m not sure I follow. Darwinian evolution is more tinkering than engineer. We’ve seen the fruits — literally — of this in GMO foods.
What makes genetic manipulation so promising is that we can make a relative few intentional edits on a tinkered system to great effect.
The absurdly short version would be that utilitarian arguments should be tempered by the same concerns we apply — or wish the law applied — to children. That is, you can’t treat people solely as a means toward an end. That likely means not doing some experiments on children or fetuses, and demanding informed consent from adults.
At the same time, we should apply the precautionary principle so far that any risk or lack of understanding demands a halt to things.
Regarding whether a fetus should count as a person — or, even if doesn’t, whether we regardless have duties to it — that’s just an extension of the abortion debate, which is a very worthy an important matter.
Afternoon Tom,
What I am suggesting is that the reason the “invisible hand” is so much more efficient than planned economies is that the planners do not know what they do not know. That is they are blind to the amount of information in economic systems. I am suggesting that your optimism represents a similar blindness. When experts and doctors suggested that fetal stem cell research would open a new world of health improvements, how could they have been so wrong? In the first experimental demonstration of epigenetics Waddington exposed fruit flies to ether, most died, but some had an unknown genetic capacity to develop a second abdomen. No one had ever predicted that. We do not know what aspects of genetic material has latent benefit. It is now thought that our bipedal movement was another non Darwinian, epigenetic capacity. Also the optimists do not account for the advantages of genetic difference. The optimists are like the fetal stem cell advocates sure that just around the corner great health benefits would be found if only we would just push on. This suggest to me, that the optimists have forgotten recent history.
I’m not contesting that and you’ll find few stronger boosters of the catalaxy than I. We do not possess the knowledge to design these things from the ground up and there’s no reason to think that we will on any foreseeable timescale.
Regardless, we have seen how applying a little intent to un-directed order can do marvels. Again, look at GMOs.
Afternoon again Tom,
At IU med school the transplant researchers developed a line of Ossabaw pigs which were designed to match human DNA. The pigs had livers which were similar in size to human livers and would be used to bridge patients over until a human match could be found. It was also thought that these pig livers could become a scaffold for the patient’s own liver cells to regrow the liver. Well the pigs were bred as hoped but we could never get tissue compatibility, no one predicted this, it was an unexpected disappointment. How is it that pig insulin is not a problem but even when we engineer the pig DNA to be compatible to humans we can not solve the tissue rejection? I have presented the failures in human heath care improvement in both fetal stem cell research and IU difficulties in developing a cross specie organ donor to show how complex this area is. One can surmise that if genetic engineering were as easy as the optimists suggest, we already would breed animals to be replacements parts for humans. That we can’t, shows that even when moral considerations are not even in the mix we can not make GMO body parts. This is because it is more complex then we may be imagining. In the past a light hearted complaint to docs was “if we can fly to the moon why can’t we solve the common cold?” Well engineering is easier than biology.
I think what Jim Beck may be trying to suggest is that deliberately modifying systems jury-rigged by evolution risks leading to unpleasant surprises, since we don’t have enough information to know exactly how or why the systems are jury-rigged the way they are. But I doubt you’d deny this, Tom, which is why you and Maj say, “Proceed with caution.”
Anyone who’s ever lived in a house with jury-rigged wiring or plumbing probably understands this, come to think of it. Had the wiring or pipes been laid sensibly, it would be fairly easy to fix one problem without breaking everything else, but since they weren’t, extra caution is called for if you intend to fix even a minor problem without causing floods or explosions :-)
I get that, but Jim — as I’m reading him — is proceeding a little past “this is difficult” and “we can’t currently do this” to “this is impossible.”
I realize I’m repeating myself, but we have had success with these things and are likely to have more as we gain knowledge and experience. That doesn’t mean we’ll have infinite power or that we won’t hit problems that contain inherent trade-offs.
But it sure helps. And religious people are far more likely to see, care about and fight for an ethical approach. For example, religious people led the fights for abolition, civil rights and against abortion.
Afternoon Tom,
I am not saying it is impossible, I am saying worse. Why do we have different blood types? We don’t know, yet we might want to select our children with the more common types, and what would that do to our specie over time? We don’t know. We do know that genetic diversity has been essential to our existence in disease survival even lactose tolerance. What happens as we shape the range of our genetic diversity, we don’t know and as I see your responses it appears as if you have not considered the implications.
Fetal stem cell research is dwindling, due to a failed hypothesis: That cells early in the developmental cycle are sufficiently plastic to be able to match recipients of derived tissues. Turns out to be false, and we’ve meanwhile developed technology to extract adult stem cells and even roll back their ‘genetic clock’ telomeres. So that’s an example of the scientific method correcting itself.
The ‘architecture’ of the genome is another matter. Human engineers are aware of their bounded rationality and have principles such as modularity and ‘separation of concerns’ to control complexity. Evolution doesn’t care – bits of ‘code’ are copied, tweaked, used for multiple purposes with no principle other than improved survival of the offspring. The genome is a true rats’ nest – tinkered is likely too kind an epithet.
That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t places to start. There are plenty of single point mutations, deletions, duplications etc. that have negative outcomes, are approachable with current understanding, and could be removed from the collective genome. Complex outcomes like intelligence are going to take a long time to understand and (guessing here) it may be easier to figure out markers for negative results than to design for improvement.
Lots of things help. Good parents help. A through understanding of he science helps. The rest of your comment is just moral preening. I could point to all the ostensible religious people who act unethically but what’s the point. Likewise I can point to atheists who care deeply about ethics – there are three of them on this very thread – but I don’t think that would convince you as your mind is rather made up on this topic.
I found Jim’s response:
interesting. I doubt Jim’s perception that you’ve considered none of the implications is correct, though Jim is right that minor and seemingly beneficial changes made now do risk having unfortunate outcomes later.
For example, the hygiene hypothesis may be correct – and who would have suspected that good sanitation in early childhood, something that has saved so many lives, might saddle some (including possibly me) with unfortunate lifelong consequences?
On the other hand, helminthic therapy shows some promise in ameliorating the damage that the hygiene hypothesis purports to describe…
anonymous once quoted Scott as saying,
It is a good thing, I think, to live in a society where people volunteer to take such risks, in the full knowledge that things might come out against them. The tricky part, ethically, is not so much what happens to you if you volunteer to take such risks, but what might happen to others who depend on you if things come out against you, or what might happen to those whose acceptance of the risk is less than voluntary…
For my part, I believe the hygiene hypothesis strongly enough that I plan to let our kids get dirtier than I got as a child. We all know the risks to children of too much dirt – heck, all of modern sanitation is designed to prevent them! So… is it right to bet my children, who cannot be wholly voluntary participants, on this? Well, obviously, I hope so – just as I hope without certainty that things do not come out against them because of my bets!
Afternoon Locke On,
Where to start is not the problem, where to stop is. IU med center is one of the top five transplant centers in the country, would it be a public heath benefit if we edited our children so as to increase the ability of individuals to donate organs successfully to others? What are the implications to these choices? I am suggesting that these type of questions are among the more difficult, and that we appear not prepared to even think about the implications. These are not ethics questions which I think always point to eugenics. Indiana was the first state in 1907 to have forced sterilization of genetic misfits.