Modern Wisdom - #598 - Dr Jonathan Anomaly - The Wild Ethics Of Human Genetic Enhancement

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Dr Jonathan Anomaly is a philosopher who writes about the social implications of emerging biotechnologies, teaches classes in ethics and game theory, and helped design the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at Duke University. The ability to select from potential embryos is already here. Soon, we will be able to select for height, intelligence, personality types, moral disposition, athletic ability and maybe even enhance traits which aren't present. This creates a vortex of complex ethics around one of the most contentious topics on the internet - genetics. So I decided to dive in. Expect to learn just what the current technology of embryo selection can achieve right now, whether opting to not genetically enhance your child is an unethical practise, the dangers of creating massive societal inequality, why you are already a eugenicist, whether genetic interventions are morally different from environmental ones and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Dr Anomaly's website - https://jonathan-anomaly.com/ Read Dr Anomaly's papers - https://philpapers.org/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr Jonathan Anomaly. He's a philosopher who writes about the social implications of emerging biotechnologies, teaches classes in ethics and game theory, and helps design the philosophy, politics, and economics program at Duke University. The ability to select from potential embryos is already here. Soon, we will be able to select for height, intelligence, personality types, moral disposition, personality types,

moral disposition, athletic ability, and maybe even enhance traits which aren't present. This creates a vortex of complex ethics around one of the most contentious topics on the internet, genetics. So as is tradition, I decided to dive in. Expect to learn just what the current technology of embryo selection can achieve right now, whether opting to not genetically enhance your child is an unethical practice, the dangers of creating massive social inequality, why you are already a eugenicist, whether genetic interventions are morally different from environmental ones, and much more. This conversation touches on a number of topics that are incredibly unpopular on the internet

from heritability to behavioral genetics, we discuss the history of eugenics and embryos selection and genetic enhancement. And I praise Johnny for deciding to be close to the forefront of one of the spiciest discussions that you can have online. I really think that you're going to love this one. It's absolutely fascinating. This technology is here. It's not slowing down.

More people are going to use it. And it is crucial that everybody understands what it's going to do. Also, don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed. And if you want to support the show and make me very happy and ensure that you don't miss episodes when they go live, just press the subscribe button.

That is the only thing that I would ask of you. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr Jonathan Anomaly. What do people misunderstand about what eugenics is and means? The question, so I would say eugenics in the broadest sense is any attempt to harness the knowledge that we have about heredity to influence the traits of our kids. And in that sense, eugenics is as old as people and actually much older, you know, any mammal that uses sexual selection ends up in such a situation where females choose males on

the basis of traits that will partly influence their own welfare, but will also influence the welfare of their kids. And so, in a way, Eugenics is as old as you can think, as old as humanity, but the term dates back to 1883 and Francis Galton, who coined the term. And I would say the reason that that term was invented and the concepts of Eugenics in a really explicit way made a comeback is that we had a few things happening in the 1800s. First we get Mendel's experiments on pea plants so we started getting to know a little bit more about how heredity works. A little bit more about what eventually became called genes gene the term gene wasn't actually coined until 1905, but we understood there must be some unit of heredity that somehow blends and recombines to shape traits.

So first it starts with Mendel, then of course Darwin comes up with this theory of evolution by natural selection, applied to all animals, not just plants, including people, and his cousin, Francis Galton, who studied the heredity of specific traits that we care about in humans. Intelligence, so we wrote a book called hereditary genius, but also just binoculates like height and skin color and hair texture and stuff like that. And in fact, in fact, Francis Galton was the first to invent twin studies. So this is the idea that we now use in cave world genetics where he thought, hey, here's a thought experiment. What would happen if we took identical twins and fraternal twins and raised them apart and just saw how they ended up? Like, would they be really

similar, really different? And as you know, fraternal twins share half of their DNA, identical twins share all of their DNA. And so he thought of this really cool natural experiment to tease out what part of our personality or physicality is due to nature and nurtured, etc. So in short, what you get is this kind of golden age in the 1800s where we're starting to discover how evolution works, how heredity works. And then this thought that, well, maybe we can control it to some extent. In the same way we do for animals, in the same way we do for plants, and you look at what corn you still look like, 3,000 years ago, this is a pathetic little weed that yields

a few calories. And through selective breeding, obviously, we make it more nutritious, more delicious. You know, you take those honey crisp apples, like they didn't start that way. They were these sort of bitter fruits, and now they taste like just pure sugar. You know you can amp up the vitamin C. You can do these kinds of things. And of course it gets dangerous when you talk about selective reading for for people and we'll get into that. But it's pretty clear once you understand heredity one of your first thoughts is going to be like, okay, how does this influence like my choice of mates?

What kind of children I'm going to end up with okay, how does this influence like my choice of mates, what kind of children I'm going to end up with, and how do those children end up influencing the traits of people around us and the overall social welfare of people? What do you think people are concerned about when the word eugenics comes up? Obviously, Nazism. And I think this is partly an innocent explanation. The Nazis did engage in the worst forms of eugenics you can imagine, which is involuntarily sterilizing their own citizens. Germans in this case, they actually sterilized about 300,000 of their own disabled citizens,

of course mass murder that Germans engaged in. And so to that extent, we rightly associate it with some of the evils in the past, also American sterilizations. But there's also a less innocent, and I think more sinister explanation for why we associate with Nazi Germany, and that is the kind of woop left. So they like to take terms and hijack them such that you can't have

certain kinds of thoughts. Right? So for example, we all have thoughts like I really care about the traits of my children and to the extent that I'm engaged in a long term relationship. I mean, of course, what I really care about is the personality of the other person. I'm not just thinking, oh, her genes are going gonna end up in my kids. But the thought does occur to you that your kids are gonna be something like, you know, a combination of the parents. And, you know, sort of that extent, like thinking about heredity and thinking about

how her choice's influence outcomes for her kids is completely natural. And a lot on the radical left want to make this thought almost impossible to have. And so they call almost anything that involves genetic explanations eugenics. And so I think that's the darker reasons that we associated with not to Germany. Not the good reason, which is, yeah, we have to be careful and learn from those episodes in history, but it's also just the manipulation of thought.

So yeah, it seems like an odd paradox that occurs especially with people from the super progressive left, because on one hand they want to have this sort of blank slate approach to things which allows for pure meritocracy to come through, but also seem to be quite against meritocratic systems as well, because implied in that is that the people that don't succeed were somehow responsible for their own failure. But the solution to that is, well, let's fold in the heritability question, let's fold in behavioral genetics into this, which doesn't give everybody the same starting point, like by design, but that is so off the table that

it ends up being this pretzel-shaped loop-to-loop and a desperate attempt to kind of zero out or square the circle of this conversation. That is exactly right. And it's fascinating because the early eugenicists after a Galton, and I mean especially in England and the United States, were progressives. Because why? Because they thought science could help us advance our species, obviously it can, right? Vaccines, contraception, there are of course downsides to that that you've discussed on your show,

but contraception at least in principle, you know, women could now control the reproductive choices and decide when and whether to go to work and that sort of thing. And similarly, well, the left thought we can control the traits of our children. So this does show you because the early eugenicist were progressive. There's no doubt about that. It does show you there's nothing inherent to the left that attaches them to the blank slate. But there is this tradition going back to Marx and the French Revolution and Rousseau, and especially now with the woke left, whereby they've put all their cards on the blank slate, this doctrine that any disparities we see before us are the product of oppression, unjust discrimination, deprivation in the household or bad schools or something. And by doing that, they're actually hamstringing themselves because as this technology, and

we can talk about the technology now, but as the technology that's going to allow us to shape the traits of our children, is more and more developed and available, especially using in vitro fertilization and embryos selection and so on, they're going to face an increasing cognitive dissonance whereby on the one hand, they're going to have every incentive to use this. I mean, everyone recognizes heredity powerfully shapes the traits of our kids, but on the other hand, their official public position is going to be didn't announce it because it's going to blow up their entire worldview. Once you have a price on the false belief in the blank slate, once you have to pay a price, for example, for going the use of technologies

that might improve the welfare of your children, what you publicly say and privately believe I think will become more and more different until the blank slate is blown up and far leftist are going to have to just publicly endorse eventually the reality of heredity. That's fascinating. What's the difference then between eugenics and genetic enhancement and embryos selection? Yeah, good question. I think there is no difference. I think it's pretty clear that genetic enhancement is a useful euphemism for eugenics. And some euphemisms are useful. I mean, the truth is, you know, it can disarm people when you say you're defending eugenics. I've certainly done that to people. Your, our mutual friend Diana Flaschman likes to get under people's

skin by using the word eugenics. So yeah, some biopassists and others have used the term genetic enhancement instead. And, you know, you might say on the one hand that's kind of nice because it doesn't have these emotional associations with it. On the other hand, it's the same thing. And so the idea is, look, when we're talking about eugenics or genetic enhancement, we're talking about paying attention to the genetic traits where it gets. Whether we're intentionally altering them or actually intentionally refraining from

altering them. For example, CRISPR-Cas9 can technically be used now to edit the genes of an embryo, but there's so many off-target mutations that would be incredibly dangerous for you to try to do that right now. And I would say that the decision to refrain from doing that is itself a form of either eugenics or genetic enhancement. You're using your knowledge of heredity and how the technology works to shape the genetic and dominant of your kids. So in principle, genetic enhancement is a euphemism. It's supposed to disarm your opponent so that you don't think about some of the downsides of eugenics. But the reality is, we've always made these distinctions in philosophy and in other adjacent

disciplines between voluntary eugenics and course of eugenics between eugenics or genetic enhancement. If you want to call it that, that is aimed at improving the welfare of your child or improving the welfare of your child or improving the welfare of all children, right? So again, I'm not big on definitions. It's clear why we've chosen this other definition and we tend to use genetic enhancement. But as you've probably seen from reactions to the work I've written and Diana Flaschman

as well, what they're going to do if you use genetic enhancement is just call you eugenicist anyway. So at that point, why not just say, okay, call me what you want. What's really important is like, what are the policy implications of this? What are the responsibilities that scientists and parents have to use this technology for the benefit of their kids and for humankind rather than misuse it in the form of masterlizations and murder, which happened in Nazi Germany. I mean, at any time that I've ever had a conversation about behavioral genetics, the people that

didn't watch the entire episode have a problem and call it eugenics. I'm like, you're pointing your finger at Robert Plowman. Like, what is he? The fourth or the ninth most cited psychologist of the 1900s, the entire century. And he's in the top 10 most cited psychologists, like the most stellar research career, you know, tens of thousands of twin pairs that he's done with his research in the UK. And then, uh, all over the world in Sweden and Japan. I mean, yeah, we have overwhelming evidence. Yeah, and then Stuart Richie comes on to have

another discussion about behavioral genetics. And it's like there is, understandably, I suppose, sensitivity around anything that could slipery slope's way down to forced sterilization of particular groups of people. And it is a little bit of a shame looking back that the first widespread adoption of Eugenics on Mass was done by a group that used it for such malign purposes that there is now this quite arduous game that you need to play in an attempt to talk about, okay, well, how can we maybe limit some really bad genetic traits that occur within people? Like everybody's already doing it through the way that they choose their mates in any case,

visually, like what the fuck do you think you're actually attracted to when you choose the partner? But so, why should anybody be in support of genetic enhancement? Good. Yeah. And actually, let me back up and answer the final part of your previous question first and then give arguments for enhancement. You you mentioned the distinctly eugenics genetic enhancement, which I said are just kind of euphemisms and an embryo selection. So let me say something really quickly about what's on the table right now. So of course we've always had mate selection and even going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, they thought explicitly about the biological basis of society. They actually thought the main

virtue of a political society is to create a kind of biomass that in turn produces a certain kind of culture. In Sparta, it was a fighting culture. In Athens, it was a bit wiser for some period of time. But even they understood that biology shapes culture and vice versa. It made a comeback again and got its official name eugenics because of Darwin and Galton, all of this. And then fast forward to centering a half. And why are we talking about it all of a sudden now?

Partly, it's because of behavioral genetics. We now really understand how heritable certain traits are. It's partly because of computational genetics. We're now seeing like how the actual genes work to produce those traits. But it's also because of technology like in vitro fertilization, the science of genome-wide association studies

and what's called polygenic risk scores. So let me kind of develop each of those. So since the 70s in the US and England and now the whole world, we've had this process of in vitro fertilization. At first it was just for infertile or gay couples where you could artificially stimulate the production of eggs for women and then you know, you artificially inseminate those eggs and then you you have a choice like which embryo am I going to implant? And it's fairly obvious if you're only going to implant one, or if that one fails maybe a second one, out of let's say 10 or 20, you're not going to do it at random.

I mean, you could do it at random, but that seems insane, in the same way it's insane to choose a mate at random, right? Let's just throw the dice and whoever it lands on, the nearest girl to me, I'm going to pick her to marry me. Nobody does that. And so what you have in the 70s is you can test for an employee, you can test for a down syndrome, these sorts of things, tastes, acts, these really simple disorders that are caused by a single gene

or a set of small, small set of genes. And obviously you're going to not select that one, and then you'll select one of the other ones. But what's happened in the last, say, 20, 30 years is, well, 10 years really, we have these genome-wide association studies from the UK, bio bank, from the Japan bio bank. There are about 10 or 12 of these around the world, where you take millions of people,

and you genetically sequence them. And then what you can do is see which ones develop, let's say, type one diabetes, breast cancer, which ones tend to have more educational attainment or even just score higher on IQ tests, which ones are taller. And after enough samples, what you can do is just associate these hundreds or thousands of tiny genetic variants with traits. And then with some probability, what you can do is, for example, now with IVF, sequence each of the embryos, and it's really not dangerous at all.

You just take a tiny clip of that embryo and run it through a kind of, well, through a sequencer, through an algorithm, and you develop what's called a polygenic risk score. And the idea is most of the traits we care about, intelligence, most forms of cancer, it's not caused by a single gene disorder, it's caused by hundreds or thousands of variants, and what you can do then, or now, is assign scores to different embryos, and now what people can do is say, not only do I not want the embryo with tastesacks, I also don't want the embryo that's at extreme risk of heart disease or schizophrenia, or, and this is now possible, I know people are capable of doing it, intelligence.

So, what you can now do is assign a study polygenic riskor to those embryos and select the one in accordance with whatever it is that you want. So couples are going to select probably some more for health. Then intelligence, some may be care more about intelligence. Eventually it's going to be personality and even political orientation, which are to some degree heritable. And that's really why all of this is making a comeback now. So tying together eugenics, genetic enhancement, and embryo selection, it's really the

viability of doing embryo selection in a more fine-grained way than ever before that's kind of bringing back the debate on eugenics and genetic enhancement. With this technology on the table, does it make it immoral as a parent who is aware of it to not use it on your child? I think so, but that's a pretty controversial view. Actually, let me qualify that. In large parts of the world, most people won't have enough money to go through IVF, for example. So, is it immoral to do what you can't do? No. In philosophy, we have this famous saying, autumn plies can, and if you can't do it, then there's no obligation for you to do what you can't do. No. In philosophy, we have this famous saying, Autumn applies can. And if you can't do it, then there's no obligation for you to do it.

But I would say that the more you understand the technology and can afford it, the stronger your obligation is, potentially to use it. And that's kind of hedging, hedging my claim, but I think that's, that's right. It should be hedged. I still think, for example, that the best thing that you can do for your kids is choose the right mate. Partly, just because of the environmental conditions you're going to raise them in, but also because let's face it, if IQ is heritable by about 80% by adulthood, if lots of personality traits are 50% heritable, you know, I'm not an IQ maximizer, but I want my kid to be conscientious.

I want him to have friends and to be able to interact in socially productive ways and frankly just like make the world a better place. You know, and if you want those kinds of traits, the best thing you can do is select a mate. And then after that, you know, the cheaper the technology, the more powerful powerful it is if you can subtly influence Those traits so that they're a little bit nicer little smarter little a little more likely to succeed in life I think you should do it. I think that's fairly obvious But I will say this I think the reason that people are hesitant to make claims like that is First of all there are infertile people and you you don't wanna make them feel bad, right? So it's sort of like, there's this implicit message

that if you say, oh, you know, you should have like a lot of kids, you know, and you should really care about the traits they have, and some people can't, or some people would say, or at the, well, let's just put it mildly on the left side of the bell curve of IQ or health or whatever, saying you should have genius kids when it's like not really possible is is a bit of a slap in the face to them. So I do think there are

strong obligations here, but I understand why people are hesitant to acknowledge it. Is there something particularly different about selecting from an existing combination of your genetic material and your partner's genetic material, and somehow editing or creating genes themselves within the existing path. So with one of these situations, you're selecting from raw materials that you provide. And in the other one, when the technology perhaps advances further,

you may be able to go in and edit and change genes already. Is there something morally different about those two, do you think? I think the moral difference would only stem from the empirical realities. So for example, like right now, CRISPR has this problem. I should say CRISPR is the gene editing system that we learned from bacteria. Bacteria have been fighting phage viruses that invade them for billions of years,

so they've co-evolved, right? What CRISPR evolved as in bacteria is a way of sequencing and disabling various genes and viruses that attack them. So CRISPR actually works quite well. We learn to use this from bacteria. The problem is if you were to CRISPR and embryo right now and you wanted to change hundreds or thousands of variants because that's what actually produces complex traits, there would

be a lot of mutations that you would inadvertently produce. But now let's say that you take that away, right? Well that changes the moral calculus because like if you knew for sure, for certain, right? And this is purely hypothetical, you knew there would be zero downstream mutations. And the only thing there would be is like decreased risk of heart disease. Well, of course, you know, you should use it use it, and you'd have a strong obligation to use it. Even if you and your partner didn't have the raw genetic material to create

the reduced risk of heart disease. That's right, that's right. And look, we already say this, like, at the extremes, governments take children away from their parents when they refuse to feed them enough, when they basically create an environment that ensures that they're not going to develop properly. And so we do make moral claims about what parents owe to their children, like adequate nutrition and exercise and like put them in school,

don't just like keep them home and don't teach them anything. And the same thing is going to happen for genetics to the extent that our knowledge improves. The problem right now is like, yeah, you wouldn't use CRISPR, but it's really more for, you know, scientific reasons that lead you to that moral conclusion. So yeah, I actually don't think that there are intrinsic moral reasons not to use it.

Here's another point though that's worth making. There's actually a really good scientific objection to using CRISPR right now on complex traits. And that is the pleiotropy objection. Pleiotropy occurs when one genetic variant or a set of variants produces multiple phenotypic consequences. So there's like one simple example that's often used, and that is there's a genetic variant in East Asians that causes both dry earwax and low body odor, right?

And it's like, why? You can give God knows what evolutionary reasons or explanations for that, but it's true. So one of them is either neutral or maybe they're both positive, but it's kind of trivial. There's probably lots and lots of polyotropy throughout nature, and until you actually understand what genes do, and we actually are a fair away from understanding the total effects of all genes, one problem is by tinkering with one gene, you could inadvertently select in favor of a healthy trait and against another trait where that trait is actually even more healthy, right?

So you end up with like a net cost by fucking around with the genome before you actually know what every gene does. Now there's a reply to that and one of the interesting replies is that even before we know what every variant does, it turns out there's something called positive pleiotropy, and genomic prediction, a company that already does this, what they do is they've created an overall health index, such that it turns out when you select against a set of variants that cause one disease, it's also more likely to reduce a whole suite of other diseases.

And that's partly because, again, there are genes or sets of genes that basically are just bad for you, especially some of the more recent day-novo mutations. Everyone throughout their lifetime acquires new mutations. Like think of the freckles on your skin, you know, and other kinds of defects that we get that's visible. And we pass along those defects. That was one reason that Francis Galton and Charles Darwin worried about developed societies like England, he said, basically it's inevitable that we're going to accumulate more and more deleterious mutations because our medical system and our welfare programs basically ensure that everyone survives and can reproduce.

Whereas when you have more ancestral environments, you get purifying selection. When there's a set of daynovo mutations that produce health risks, etc., they're likely to be selected out. They're likely to be selected. The technology and the social safety net that you're given has raised the minimum level of health that somebody can, sorry, yeah, lowered the minimum level of health that somebody can survive at. A person that previously would have existed for five years or ten years now lives until their 70 or 80 because all of the support that they're given, which the

side effect of that would be a weakening of your immune system. And if you have those sorts of genes being reproduced back into the gene pool, that then makes downstream from that a quote unquote weaker society. Yeah, although I wouldn't quite put it that way because what what what the key is is that you're more likely to live through your reproductive age. So it's not that you live longer. It's that you don't die when you're 20, when you do something stupid. Or you can famously, you can just get by-focals

if you can't see very well, right? Which is good. And Darwin and Galton were quite happy. I mean, they said, look, we're ambivalent about this. And we support a lot of the social safety nets. There are. We certainly don't think like we should abandon modern metacism or antibiotics or something, but the net effect of that has to be, just the logic of it has to be, that we're accumulating deleterious mutations, such that,

essentially, since we don't have purifying selection anymore, we're going to build these up. Now, John Tubi, the evolutionary psychologist, wrote a really cool essay some years ago. It's only two pages long, so all of your viewers can read it quickly. And it's called The Race Between Jermline Gene Editing and Genetic Meltdown. And it plays on exactly this logic.

Like, we are in this weird race whereby the richer we are, the more inevitably, deleterious mutations will get, and that will lead to a kind of slow genetic meltdown. Unless we have ways of editing those out or using embryos selection to select them out. So this is just part of being human. We get these massive boosts, and it's kind of like on the cultural level, poor societies can't afford to go woke. They can't afford insane beliefs like men and women have the same capacities.

This is why you show these videos of like Leah Thomas or whatever the transgender swimmer at Penn where I used to teach to an African tribe and they're just confused. It's just really confusing to them. And in the same way that when it's only when you get really rich, wealthy as a culture that you can afford to believe things that are actually at odds with reality itself. So too, when you get rich, you can actually sort of impoverished at the genetic level, the individual and the group, unless there's some way of altering those genes. So, yeah. Going into a conversation I had a little while ago with David Goggins about the equivalent of the overt and window, but for discomfort. So you could imagine that in the maximum amount of human experience you could have

would be from zero to 100 from pain to pleasure. And what we have managed to do in the modern world is constrain the guardrails. I would actually say on both sides, I think there's less dread, but there's also less awe as well. And what that means is that people are hyper sensitized as soon as they step outside of that.

And this is kind of the same, but with regards to genetics. But what we've seen is a degree of security and comfort that has come around through advanced health care, through more social security and social support and so on and so forth. And yet we see this within our own lives. You know, the person, everybody has an inclination, even the most, you know, progressive walkie-person has the inclination of the silver spoon coddled aristocratic family wanker. And they also understand that when they are faced with adversity, they are probably going to struggle.

I think that one of the concerns would be from this, again, the slippery slope down into the bad coercive form of eugenics is, well, what about the freckled community? Are you saying that we need to get rid of the freckled community? What about them? Are you denying their personhood and their identity? How can you? How can you, what about deafness?

What about the deaf community? That's a non-insignificant portion of people. You're saying that there's somehow less suboptimal in a way that means that we ought to get rid of them and all of their future progeny. What if we need to select out from them and they can't have children? Yep. Yeah, it's great.

And that's a common objection. And, you know, I used to not take it as seriously as I do now, but there is one way to take it seriously and give a pretty good answer to. On the one hand, I think it's clear that if you're having children and you can select, let's say an embryo, it's more direct form selection, it's clear you should select a kid that can hear, right? And if they want to make themselves deaf later, they can do that. It's a lot harder to reverse it in the opposite direction. It is true that in principle, we could imagine a world where people get more callous toward minorities that have various kinds of disabilities. I mean, that did happen in the 1930s.

Hitler actually deemed the old, quote, useless eaters, right? They're consuming more resources than they're producing, and so they're on the chopping block, right? I mean, it's happened before. And in fact, in human history, it's pretty common when resources are scarce especially, take Eskimos famously, if you get too old or too sick, they kind of push you out of the igloo and onto the ice and it's your time. I mean, it's not uncommon in human history.

Might it make a comeback? I think in principle, yes, but it also shows that genes aren't everything. The power of culture is real. And when you look at the last 40 years in, let's say, the US or UK, despite all the social pathologies which we can talk about, there's actually been a really remarkable move toward moral inclusion, and so when you think about disability rights, those have actually increased in recent years, not decreased. So it's perfectly compatible, I think, to have a world in which you say, look, if you're born unable to hear or you have various disabilities, we should have all kinds of laws and norms that protect you. But that's not inconsistent with saying, nevertheless, like, it's something to be

avoided. Like one of my best students, just to give an anecdote from Duke University, um, broke his neck. He was about to enter Duke 10 years ago on a diving scholarship and an academic scholarship He actually did enter on an academic scholarship and he got into a diving accident the summer before he entered broke his Neck he was in a wheelchair the whole time remarkable kid. He ended up one of the best students I've ever had got a road scholarship and went out did his at Oxford, and now he's working in politics here in the US. But I asked him, actually, when I was in a controversy over this eugenic stuff, we spent the summer together in Oxford. I was writing a book at the time, and I was like, you know, surely, you know, you would

want to cure for your current condition. He's like, of course, like, you know, like on the one hand, he's going around arguing for disability rights, and on the other hand, he doesn't want to be disabled. Why would you want to be, right? So I think a lot of these scholars, on the one hand, they have a genuine moral concern. Like we really should protect both socially and legally, the disabled, and have, if anything, even more empathy for them. But that's not inconsistent with selecting against disability. And I think a lot of a lot of noise to the contrary is pure virtue signaling, right?

People want to appear morally better than other people. And so they pretend like people who care about health are somehow against the disabled, which is just bullshit. I don't think we should listen to them. I don't think we should take some of their objections at face value because they themselves don't believe it. Just to round out the discussion about genetic interventions, is it your view that they're not morally different

from environmental interventions, from stepping in to take the children away from the parents, the ump feeding them, et cetera. Well, they're different in a qualitative sense. I mean, of course, there's a different mechanism, right? But they're not necessarily different in their consequences. Like if you drink alcohol as a pregnant woman or you consume a lot of sushi,

which has fish like tuna that has high levels of mercury in it, right? You actually have a serious risk of impairing the brain development of your kid or back in the 70s like when we had lead in gasoline and in paint. A lot of kids were born with like a 20, 30 point IQ deficit because at that crucial age when your head is developing in the womb in the first few years, you're likely to get this irreversible brain damage. Is that different than selecting in favor of a low IQ kid at the genetic level? And my answer is no to the extent that they're both bad for the kid and they're both in some ways irreversible. So environmental deprivation or enhancement can be just as some ways irreversible. So environmental deprivation or enhancement

can be just as reversible or irreversible as genetic ones can be. Although genetics tend to be a little more permanent. You might say, OK, one of the things though about toying with or tinkering with embryos is that once you've decided to genetically edit, some environmental enhancements or alterations can be undone. Not always like what the examples I gave,

but genetics can't be undone. But that's not true, right? If we have the power to edit a gene in one generation, it's likely we're going to have even more power in the next generation to unedit if you think that there's a better addition or subtraction or whatever. So I actually don't think in principle it's any different than a lot of environmental interventions or sorry interventions.

But people have a tendency to think it is because genes are essential and environment is somehow more flexible. It's not always true. Is it a case of a naturalistic fallacy as well? That just, this is the way that it's always been. There's something that feels the same way as the person who would be maybe fine with taking antibiotics to get rid of some infection that they have

wouldn't be okay with taking a vaccine. Yeah, I think that's true, but also when you look back at history, there was resistance to not so much antibiotics, but certainly vaccines, life extension, like artificial respirators. There were church leaders that were against these things, right? Because if it's your time, God is taking you for a reason. And so the idea that you would use a respirator to artificially extend life is clearly immoral.

Now it's immoral according to them. If you take it away, so a lot of this is naturalistic fallacy, because we've always done it this way, it must be good as opposed to this new technology. Some of it is legitimate skepticism toward new technologies. I mean, look at the way the COVID vaccine was pushed by elites. Like, my view is always pretty moderate on this. Like, it looks like probably old people are better off taking it. Young people probably don't need it. But the reality, as you saw, right, is that there was just this push.

Like, everyone should have five boosters, you know, fetuses should be given the COVID shot. I mean, just total insanity, the politicization of science, and the reality is, this is how, this is how it works with almost all new interventions. But let me mention actually briefly, last week, there was a really interesting study that was published in the journal science, and it was a comprehensive survey of American adults and there were thousands involved and they asked them about their attitudes toward embryos selection and specifically for cognitive ability. So they asked them like, how comfortable are you giving your kid like SAT prep lessons right to give them an advantage and almost everyone said, yes, amazing, like 10% said that's immoral. I don't know why, but whatever.

Most people say, yeah, of course, classes, environmental interventions are okay. Okay, what about like genetic interventions, like using embryos selection with polygenic scores to select for cognitive ability. And it turned out the majority of Americans were actually in favor of it. And the numbers go up as you go younger,

which is reproductive age. And not only that, but people are asked separately, like if a lot of people you know and respect, because people tend to follow leaders, right? That's why they look to Hollywood or professors or journalists or politicians. If those people are using it, would you be more or less likely to use it? And of course, almost everyone said more. And so I think what's going to happen here is like a lot of other technological innovation. There's going to be skepticism at first. Some of it's sincere, just like, and legitimate, right? I don't know what this

is. This seems a little dangerous to, okay, this looks a little less dangerous to, well, we have a moral obligation to do it, right? And now let's like subsidize it for everyone. That's my view on what's going to happen. And I think that article in science pretty clearly shows that's the kind of pattern. What are the genetic enhancement capabilities that we've got at the moment? Good. We can minimize a variety of the likelihood that a variety of mental and physical diseases manifest themselves. So for example, you can select against schizophrenia, coronary artery disease, type one diabetes.

There's a lot of physical traits. You could, if you wanted to, select in favor of height and cognitive ability, although the predictors, you can do that now. You can do that now. Yeah, yeah. I know people who are definitely capable of doing it now,

and I think within a few years, it'll probably widely done. I think it's going to be China leading the way. They now have universally subsidized IVF, and once you have subsidized IVF in vitro fertilization, it's just a really quick and easy step to sequence those embryos and test them for cognitive ability. So I think it's going to happen there more than anywhere else first, but yeah, just to give a hypothetical example, if you have 10, 12 embryos,

what you're going to get in terms of IQ gains between the lowest and the highest scoring embryo is roughly 9, 9 and a half points. It's a pretty- Maybe it's not the deviation. Yeah, yeah, close to a standard deviation. That number is going to increase once we get more knowledge of genetics, but there's there are upper limits to this, right? Because first of all, there's only so much genetic diversity that you produce between two people. But there is something coming on the horizon, those of your your viewers who are not happy with this technology are going to be even less happy with what I say now. And that is that there's a new technique called in vitro gometogenesis,

IVG, which will allow you to take an adult cell, let's say a skin cell, hair cell, it could be blood or bone, turn it into an induced pluripotent stem cell. And that's the kind of cell that embryos have, right? They're pluripotent stem cell. That's why the stem cell debate was so important, right? If you have a stem cell, and it's undifferentiated, you can turn it into any kind of cell, right? That's why you could potentially grow a liver and a petri dish or a skin, a batch of skin so that if you're a burn victim, you could actually use one of your skin cells

and produce a whole patch of skin, right? But similarly, if you can do that, you can produce an egg cell. And when you think about the implications of that, I could take potentially a skin cell from a 60 year old woman and turn it into a pluripotent stem cell, turn that into an egg cell. And if she had someone who could carry the child for her

and a sperm donor, well, your grandmother could be having children and her own children, past menopause. But a bigger implication is that even if a gene in an embryo were never edited using CRISPR or anything else, using this technique, we could have not 10 embryos to select from, but potentially 500,000. Why not? Once it scales and gets cheaper, now couples

are going to have tremendous genetic variation from which to select. And my vision of the future is, I'm not saying I even endorse this. I think this is what shall happen, like it or not. Is that in 50 years and 70 years, I don't know what the time frame is exactly. We're already using IVF to select for polygenic traits, but there's probably going to be some combination of IVF using polygenic risk scores,

plus IVG increasing the number of embryos from which you choose, plus some light touching up with CRISPR. Once you make it more accurate, and it produces fewer downstream mutations, probably what you'll wanna do is, yeah, again, select from a large number of embryos, and then whatever residual mutations are producing some elevated risk of cancer, disease, maybe aging, you'll wanna, you know, CRISPR those out a little bit, and I think aging, you'll want to, you know,

crisper those out a little bit. And I think you're going to be able to produce through that process, people who live longer, who are smarter, who are healthier and happier. Dude, that's wild. That's absolutely. I, I finished off a conversation. Are you familiar with Richard Rangham's work, goodness, paradox? Oh, yeah, someone just gave me his book, actually.

Yeah, but I'm really good. Tell me about it. So we had this really fascinating conversation. He is a primatologist, anthropologist, looked at the development, the co-evolution of human aggression over time. And his hypothesis is that we have gone through self-domestication. Humans have self-domesticated ourselves. And if you look at previous iterations of Homo,

you will find that they had longer faces, that they had heavier brow ridges, that they were less popified. And his argument is that any individual, typically a male who was overly dominant and tyrannical, would have been killed by the alpha alliance, as he calls, this was facilitated by a combination of a co-eitional warfare or hunting that was whatever,

two million years old, and then about 300, 400,000 years ago when we got the ability to coordinate through language, you could have a very cleverly put together plan with you and your alpha alliance buddies. You take down this tyrant at the top. And what that means is that any man who crossed a threshold of sufficient aggression would be selected out of the gene pool. Now, some of them would have reproduced and on average, they're going to reproduce less. And what that means is that over time, you are deselecting for it. So we, we self

bread the same way as we domesticated dogs and cows, we did that to ourselves. Now, we get all the way through this fantastic conversation, which is really, really interesting. And then he gets to the end of the very, very end. And he says, as I said, what do you think the future has in store? You know, we're in this sort of novel evolutionary environment, this selection pressures previously that would have caused particular tyrannical individuals to have been stopped, you know, maybe they're now in jail, maybe they're now doing something else, but they're not being killed. And he says, well, I think actually rolling forward, if you look at what's going to be available genetically, we're just going to get rid of the Y chromosome overall

that we're just going to be able to have women who can self-reproduce Who don't need that and that males will be completely taken out of the species and he made a case that that would be the moral thing to do That almost all war almost all aggression comes from the Y chromosome. He said it would be a socially civilizational immoral thing to not do, to not get rid of men. And this was the final thing that he said. And I was like, we've been going for an hour and 25 minutes. And I'm like, Richard, I need to, we'll run this back. And I'll, we'll start from now, and then we'll go again in future. But that was the sort of the lasting echo that I was left with. What do But that was the sort of the lasting echo

that I was left with. What do you think about getting rid of the Y chromosome from the future of human civilization? Host. Yeah. Yeah, I think you and I can agree on this. Yeah, I mean, you can get into some territory that makes you really controversial,

but I mean, you already do this on your show, I guess. I think they're masculine virtues that are important and civilization building and civilization preserving. I mean, also, I mean, okay, it's true that women have higher levels of affective empathy, they start wars less and so on, they do engage in massive psychological warfare, as you know. There's a lot of intersex warfare.

It's just of a different kind than ours. But yeah, I think the masculine virtues are real and important and civilization affirming. So I don't like the vision. I think he's right. I know he's right, and he's more of an expert than I am, but I've read a lot on gene culture co-evolution. I think this is one of the most interesting areas of last 30 years of research, Joseph Henrich at Harvard, and Jonathan Hyte, the political psychologist. We've all started to think in these terms, Peter Turchin. Actually, the opposite side of the argument you just

gave, he has a book called Ultra Society, how 10,000 years of war made us the greatest cooperators on earth. One of the great things about war and mass conflict is that it incentivizes coordination among existing groups and cooperation. So it produces a kind of local altruism, or you might call it parochial altruism, whereby it is true. We don't have universal love for all humans, and men especially don't have this. Women tend to have a little bit more of that universal altruism. On the other hand, this is a good thing, because it allows us to bond together with a tribe.

This is what sports is, obviously, right? This is why men like sports more than women do. It allows us to identify a tribe, to set goals, to achieve those goals in meaningful ways. It gives us a reason to live in the morning, to get up in the morning, right? So I actually think that he's right, jeans and cultures co-evolve, we've self-domesticated, although that was a kind of emergent order. It was a kind of emergent order, it was a kind of smithian or Darwinian invisible hand process. Nobody planned that, obviously, right?

If anything, it was the opposite. People going to war or doing things like killing the alpha male and violently killing them and enjoying the process of just destroying them, right? That actually made us more cooperative or more docile in some ways. But do we want to get still more docile? I don't know about that. I don't want to. No, and think about it this way, in retrospect, if you were to say, is it moral or was it moral to kill the most violent members of your tribe? That's eugenics. That's coercive eugenics. Absolutely. It's just straight up murder. Yes.

And yet downstream from that, you can say, okay, we were able to create a genetic social cultural landscape, which is more optimal, more peaceful, more co-illitional, more coordinated, more altruistic, than it would have been, had we have allowed all of these tyrannical males to continue to exist. And you got, okay, so it was bad at the time, but it was good after the fact. This to me, just, it's not motivated reasoning, but it's kind of like availability wise. It's like, look, so you're living in the world that you're in now, so in retrospect, the thing that we did was the thing that was good. And it's just a very sort of difficult, messy scenario to get into. Another element here to just

pop the back of what you're saying to do with the masculine virtues that we have, at the moment, I think that, especially in a post-MeToo world, what a lot of cultural, popular culture tried to do was to sanitize some of the more toxic elements of aggressive male behavior, both sexually, socially, interpersonally, etc. But what ended up happening was it sterilized all male behavior. And I think the only reason that we are able to see that as anything approximating not totally terrible is because we're in a time of severe piece. You know, there are there is no alien civilization which is coming over the edge of the solar system toward us.

But if that was to happen, one of the first things that I would suggest is, okay, all porn immediately gets switched off, all video games immediately gets switched off, all social media, except for a necessary communication gets switched off. Because what you're going to do is you'll be familiar with Diana Fleischman's uncanny vulver theory that you get this titrated dose of porn that kind of satisfies men's reproductive values, which is why we haven't seen young male syndrome and all of these guys causing havoc and stuff. This is my male sedation hypothesis

that if we take away the sedatives, the porn, the video games, the social media, you're going to amp up that amount of aggression. Now, yeah, absolutely. If there isn't anything for those men to direct it out, if it's not 18th century Portugal and you're putting them all on galleonships to go explore the new world because only the eldest son is the person that gets into a marriage, then yeah, they're going to turn that inward. They're going to push over granny graffiti walls and start pillaging. But if you have an enemy that you can point them to, then it's really useful.

So what you're saying now is that the like sociopolitical landscape that we are in has created a world in which useless men are perhaps slightly more optimal than dangerous men. But that's not necessarily always going to be the case. Yes, and this was also, this was Nietzsche's worry in, well, thus spokes their athustra worry, coins the term Superman and last man, right? Who is the last man?

Well, the last man, he says, first of all, values equality above all else, and he values momentary pleasures above danger. He basically is the man that has been emasculated, and he says, behold, the last man, this is what we're becoming in peaceful Europe. Now Europe wasn't that peaceful in the 20th century all the time, but actually it's one of the most peaceful centuries in human history, despite the two world wars. And Nietzsche was really worried that when we remove all of these threats and all of these cues that activate precisely what you

said, we're just going to become pathetic men. We're going to become last men. And he of course advocated the Superman, which was some alternative vision, the Uber Munch. There's another interesting aspect of this, which is we not only don't have these kinds of social cues, but we now have relaxed sexual selection by women. So women have always been the choosers of men, right? Most women historically leave surviving offspring. And large numbers of men either leave none,

or leave very few compared to the kind of dominant men, the smartest man, the most whatever, athletic men, whatever the case is. And what we have is a scenario now where we not only value monogamy above all else, but in Western societies, we have these government social welfare programs But in Western societies we have these government social welfare programs such that you know Traditionally a woman would need to to select for moral virtues like how likely is this guy to stick around help me raise my family my children Help actually defend my tribe and my family as a whole and defend me. That's a kind of moral virtue Is he smart? Is he gonna be able to solve the kind of novel problems that inevitably arise over time, where there's novel threats,

maybe we go to war at some point, is he physically capable of defending me? So they would select on all these traits. And now, the government is essentially the father, and they can basically just get pregnant by whoever, some, you know, mussely dude with no brains. And the government is going to take care of that person. The government is essentially going to subsidize child care and so on. Now, I understand there are arguments for this, but this has to have massive

civilizational and genetic consequences. Women don't have incentives to select for the best man in the sense of the most virtuous, the smartest, the most creative because the government is essentially solving the problems that a male would have been tasked with solving originally. So that's just to add to this idea that, cultures shape genetics. They always have whether it is

adverten or inadvertent. And right now it's not like we can sort of say like, okay, cool, like history produced what we are now, let's just stay with what we've got now. Well, we're not staying anywhere, right? Culture is already producing massive genetic changes and the ability to either change our culture or more deliberately change our children through these genetic technologies, these are going

to be available, their options on the table, and you can't just sort of plug your ears and go, no, no, no, I'm just going to sort of stay away from all of it. Like the decision to do nothing is a decision to shape future humans in very specific ways, whether you like it or not. So what are the main characteristics that you think people are going to want to enhance when the technology is fully available, there's no downstream risks? Yeah.

Well, a clue is just what you can do surveys now, but as economists like to say, actions reveal preferences, whatever you ask people, look at what they do, not at what they say. So sometimes they'll tell the truth, but your average New York Times columnist is a blank slatist, right? So they're gonna say,

intelligence, I don't even know what that means. IQ tests just measure the ability to take IQ tests. They're just nonsense. But in their private lives, they're obsessed with intelligence, right? The way they select their grad students, their mate, the way they brag about their kid being at Princeton, not that state school,

Rutgers or whatever, right? So these people are obsessed with it. So one thing is you could ask people, but they like to lie for political reasons. But watch what people do, how they select their mates, and more specifically, watch how they act at the sperm or egg bank when, for example, they're a gay couple or an infertile couple, or they just electively are choosing sperm regs because

they didn't find a mate that they like. And here's what they choose. So here's what women choose in sperm clinics. Intelligence or signs of intelligence. So they ask about educational attainment. Where'd you go to school? Would you study? Athletic ability, health, they like it when people were a member of a team, a sports team, that shows that they're not only healthy, but cooperative, etc. And then they ask for things like kindness, which may be surprising to people, but it's true. When women can select in the IVF market, or in the sperm market, as opposed to in the mating market,

they more directly select exactly what traits they want. So, you know, women may famously like date the asshole as they call them, right? Like, I know he treats me like shit, but God, I'm just so attracted to him. Nobody acts like that in the sperm clinic when they're actually deliberately selecting children. Instead of much more transactional in that kind of a way, or much more direct, perhaps. They are, and women are, even though extroverted guys do better on the dating market, women

are pretty clear that, well, they're equally likely to choose introverts as extroverts when they're selecting, let's say the father of their children when it's like a sperm donor. But I think that sums up to like, how are people gonna choose? We'll take a look at what they're already doing in those markets, and I think that probably is,

not only good evidence that they'll do this when it comes to like gene editing and embryos selection, but it turns out it's like really optimistic. Like some people are, they're afraid, well, what you're going to choose is male psychopaths, right? Why? Because, well, they're more socially dominant and they're going to make more money. Well, first of all, that's not true.

Psychopaths mostly end up in prison. And despite what people say, it's not true that most CEOs are psychopaths. They may be more disproportionately represented there than in other occupations, like family medicine or something. But for the most part, psychopaths don't live good lives and people know that and they don't wanna choose psychopaths. They actually wanna choose people who are reasonably nice,

but nevertheless retaliatory, because they don't want them to be taken advantage of in a world where not everybody else is nice. So I think that's how they're going to choose. I think it's pretty clear. Are there any theoretical limits to increasing IQ? I don't know of any, but I do know that there may be some really small risks on the really high end of IQ.

So there have been some claims that above a certain threshold that some mental disorders are more likely to be found, but those papers don't replicate well at all, and there aren't very many of them. So I don't think there's really much evidence at all that there are downsides to a high IQ. There's like a really, really small correlation, maybe point one or point two,

between extremely high Q and Asperger's. But what that is is the really high form, high functioning form of autism, it's not low functioning autism, where the kid is totally dependent on the parents for the rest of their lives. It's more like, you know, the nerdy professor who is always like classifying everything, you know, they live perfectly good lives, maybe they're just geeks or whatever, right? So there is some risk of that at the high end of IQ, but it's not well studied and the upside is

Extremely high. I mean the probability that you'll earn a PhD or earn more than $200,000 a year or be successful in the mating market these things actually go up and up and up with IQ or be successful in the mating market. These things actually go up and up and up with IQ. And moreover. What's up? The man IQ and female mating success isn't fantastically well correlated. Oh, I see, I see.

In other words, like there may be thresholds to how well you do. Well, I know the probability of divorce goes down. So I don't know about actually finding a mate, but keeping your mate is more likely to be true after a certain level. Yeah, I agree. But there may be different explanations for that.

So lower IQ people tend to get divorced more, for example. Is that a good thing? And also, you may have higher IQ women may also correlate with more disagreeability, perhaps, which would perhaps make it more difficult for them to get into a relationship with a man who's looking for a slightly more agreeable woman. That's interesting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know the evidence there, but it sounds plausible. And yeah, so there may be some downside risk. And since women are cheesier than men, as you know, and hire IQ women earn more money than men, it may be that there's the risk that there's like no one left in the dating pool to find if you're like, you know, a knockout with 150 IQ, making a quarter of a million a year, like there's just no eligible bachelors. I suppose that is more of a risk for women than men. Yeah, correct.

That's what I've deemed a tall girl problem. So if you sit on top of your own dominance or competence hierarchy and you're looking to date up and across, you're, you're stood on Everest trying to find something higher to get up to. Okay, so cognitive and intelligence enhancement, personality, for instance, what are the sort of things that people want to do there? Conchentiousness, presumably, industriousness. Yeah, clearly. And I think when we get into personality traits, that's where it is. Just trade off all the way down, right? So conscientiousness tends to be a good thing. There's no doubt about that where you think about, you create plans and you follow them,

right? And that's more likely to get you things like health, wealth, friends, because you remember their birthdays, you remember what they, what they really like and you give them the gift that, oh, wow, I can't believe you remembered that, right? On Valentine's Day or on my birthday or whatever. So conscientious is really good. Other traits are mixed bags, but even conscientiousness. If you selected for the most conscientious person you could possibly select for, it may be that on both sides of the bell curve at the extremes, they end up producing psychopathologies like obsessive-compulsive disorder, something like that

on the extreme of conscientiousness. And the downsides, if you're selecting against it, those are fairly obvious, right? You might be really good at exploiting other people in the moment, but you don't really think enough about the future or thinking about the needs of others and responding appropriately. But then you take stuff like openness, right?

So take ocean, right? Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and eroticism. I think again, there's trade-offs. So like when you go high on openness, that actually inadvertently selects in favor of political liberalism. Is that good or bad?

I don't know. Depends on the distribution of traits in the society that we have and what you want. So liberalism, and that's a poorly defined term because we now tend to connect liberals, which would have included like Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, with also like the most extreme progressives, which I mean there's really no overlap between them, but in America, for whatever reason we just call anyone on the left a liberal. What I really mean is high openness is going to correspond with something like classical liberalism, like thinking about people as individuals, being maximally open to new experiences.

But again, if you're really open, you're not only more likely to be liberal in that sense, the classical liberal sense, you're probably gonna be more subject to exploitation by people who are not so open and who are more tribal than you are. And so you can think about the downsides of even openness, which is a pretty good trait, right? You're willing to learn from others,

you're open to new experiences, oh shit, somebody just took advantage of your openness and you're trusting this. So I think when it comes to these things, it's going to be trade-offs all the way down. It's going to be really interesting because, I don't know, maybe introverts will prefer introverts or if they're extremely introverted and they actually see that they're really shy for example, they'll probably want to select the opposite. I don't know, what do you think? What do you think people will select for? What would you select for? If it was me, certainly conscientiousness, but you don't want anything to probably be above 80% or below 20%. If you take yourself into the 90th percentile of anything, there's probably going to be some weird externalities that come from that. Do you want introversion or extraversion? You go, well, it's so, everything's

so idiosyncratic and the openness thing, oh well, I've got conscientiousness plus openness. Okay, well, this might mean that they're an incredibly great, hardworking artist that is able to both see their craft and be able to be sufficiently disciplined to move it forward. But what if they fall in love with trying to be an accountant and they can't focus on a spreadsheet? Because they're constantly trying to think about new ideas and new ways to do it. So it's very, very difficult to do. I think that there's definitely some, you know, base pairs or whatever that you want to try and get together. One of the things I'm most fascinated by is attractiveness.

Whether or not people would be able to select for attractiveness. You can think about fish area and runaway where big eyes or big boobs or a big bum or wide shoulders or low muscle fat or body fat or whatever. Things that assortatively or in terms of mate selection people are already looking for. But when it comes to selecting your kids, I guess one slightly uncontroversial thing that most people would look to select for would be symmetry in the face. That's right, and some of the other body proportions, maybe, yeah, we all have our own tastes

there, but they're kind of within a window, right? I mean, you know, when you think of waste-to-hips ratios, there's kind of a golden ratio of, I guess it's .7. Again, our mutual friends, Dana Fleischman, Jeffrey Miller, people like this can tell you more about it, but still within that range, like you said, different kinds of curves or height and man or shoulder width, some of which are totally unnecessary, and maybe counterproductive from the standpoint of like, I don't know, being able to walk or live in the world

in a way that feels good to you, right? That those are more ways of attracting mates and so on. You're gonna be able to see that as well, right? What's up, people that are over, I think is it people that are over 64, tend to live less long than people that are under 64? Yeah, and have more, you know, back problems and things like that. So I mean, and this is an interesting point too.

When you think about height, yeah, it's clear that people want to select on height more for men than women, if they have boys rather than girls, they want the boys to be tall. Those are sexually selected traits and they understand like that correlates with even financial success. Perceived authority if you're in politics or business, right? We've all seen the famous debates with politicians and Trump even makes the tiny hands argument for Marco Rubio. People really do amazingly have these associations. If you have small thin hands as a man, you're probably not going to win a war or something right or you're short That may or may not be true, but people have these associations

So yeah with with runaway selection I guess the issue is you might be afraid that some of these traits people select on like height or body shape We'll go to these extremes that will actually give you disabilities But one obvious reply to that is the one you just gave which which is there's a kind of self-equal aberration such that if there's a movement toward those extremes and they actually have those really bad side effects, you're gonna select in the opposite direction I think. So in some cases, you're actually gonna deliberately select against those because you don't want the side effects. In other cases, like facial symmetry, everybody wants it and for good reason. Why? Because it's an indication of something

like either genetic fitness. So you have a low genetic mutation load, low oxidative stress, or low parasite load. And parasite load is at least partly, partly a function in the environment, but partly a function of your immune system, which is mostly genetic, right, and adopted the immune system. So when you select, interestingly, in favor of facial symmetry, and even to a lesser extent, male height, because taller than average men actually are healthier, I say this is an exactly

average size man at 5'9. There's some evidence for that. When you select for some of those aesthetic traits, you're inadvertently selecting in favor of health. People may not know that. That's why you find that attractive in the opposite sex. That's the positive polygenic risk thing again. A positive platotropy. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. And it's an unconscious force that's been sculpted through sexual selection. What do you find attractive? Nobody finds attractive, massive asymmetry, quite the opposite. Like if your eyes are even the slightest bit asymmetrical,

people immediately see it and they're like, that's weird, right? I mean, you're not supposed to say that out loud, but that's the reaction they have. And that's for good reason we've been honed through sexual and natural selection forever. I mean, that's the, that's what we sort of mentioned toward the start. And I really want to try and hammer it home. That every single person that has ever had sex or chosen a partner is already genetically selecting

your kids, even if they wore a condom and you were on the pill, you are already doing this. There are genetic markers that you can see in your partner. I remember once, I think Jeffrey told me that he rolled over in bed and looked at Diana and said, you're such a lovely bundle of fitness signals. Beautiful. Yeah, which is the, I imagine one of the most romantic babies. Yeah, exactly. So tell me more about my polygenic risk scores. Yeah, but the point being that why is it that

men want waste a hip ratio? Why is it that women want high shoulder to waste ratio for men? What is it with facial symmetry? What is it with good skin, not skin that's covered in legions? What is it with the full head of healthy looking hair? What is it with good straight teeth. What is it with a full head of healthy looking hair? What is it with good straight teeth? What is it with not bad breath, not bad body odor? Pick whatever it is that you find attractive unless it's a very particular kind of quirk.

Almost all of the things that you pick are already these kinds of genetic markers. Like humor in men, well, humor is not that far away from intelligence, right? The ability to be funny is quite tightly tied to social intelligence as well as straight up IQ because in order to be funny and need to be quick. So, okay, like, what is it that makes being humorous attractive? Well, it's because that person has genes that if you had a child with them

would make funny children. So the sexy sonor, sexy daughter hypothesis, you know, works again. So I think it can get all a little sterile sometimes when talking about the individual traits and we're selecting them and you know, it can sound a little detached from the humanity of it all. But we're doing this in a rough human way in any case. We're doing this in an analog, and already it's just that we're now moving into a slightly more digital, slightly more targeted world. That's a really good way to put it. And in fact, one book about the future of this is by Craig Ventor, who was the first to sequence the human genome in the year 2000. And he does a lot of what's called synthetic biology now, but his book is called life at the speed of light

And what he meant with the light metaphor is not just that we're moving faster and faster through cultural evolution scientific advancement, but we're now into the age of digital biology And he means that both metaphorically and literally before we understood in an analog way like Mendel understood There have to be little units of inheritance somehow like traits are being transmitted. And now what we can do is just tell you exactly which variants are producing which traits. We were already doing it before. It's just a more precise way of doing it. I want to say something though about what you just said.

I love it. I mean, with the, with the humor point, you know, I've always thought about this as a way of creatively solving problems. Like you said, it's the form of social intelligence. It's a form of inference. It's playing on other people's expectations and then leading them down like a left curve. And so what you're doing is you're showing through this really interesting display that you understand how other people think and can manipulate it, not in a bad way, but you can relate to them so well that you know exactly what they're going to anticipate and then the conclusion of the joke almost always ends up being something very different than they were thinking. It's a kind of trustworthy empathy in a way. Yes, exactly. It's cognitive empathy.

It's exactly what, well, psychopaths have it to some degree. They have this macchi of alien empathy, but autistic, severely autistic kids don't. They don't have a good theory of mind. And so what you're doing with jokes is showing intelligence, showing a kind of social intelligence and then cognitive empathy. But I wanted to say one other thing that you picked up on that was fascinating that I've never thought of before. You said, for a lot of traits,

you would want to like choose between, I don't know, the 20th and 80th percentile. You wouldn't want to go too far out. And then you said 90th for something else, maybe conscientiousness. And one thing that I've seen on this evidence of the way that women choose sperm donors is they actually do choose intelligence up to about the 90th or 95th degree or percentile.

And then their desire for it actually goes down a little bit. It flattens off and goes down. And I always wonder whether these heuristics we have like are some Darwinian wisdom, like there really is something to this. It gets dangerous above a certain level, or whether it's just a heuristic we've developed that is a kind of stereotype that's bullshit, that's false. I don't know, but it's really interesting that you have this intuitive sense, and the data shows that women completely agree with that. They actually start getting scared on the extremes. I just think of it. Anything where you tune it up toward absolute is going to end up having

some pretty strange downstream consequences. I mean, Cal Newport talks about this with the fact that email shouldn't be free. Email should cost five cents to send because it would change the entire landscape. But when you drive the price or the cost of anything down to zero, you end up with very odd externalities. It's the same way as if you tried to eradicate absolutely all in-group or out-group biases from the world. If you wanted to get rid of all of them, you end up with some super bizarre externalities. If you want to drive them down to, let's say, 10%, then you probably end up with way fewer. That's a great analogy. And of course, on a, maybe this is controversial, maybe not, but on a social level, we can see this.

So take like Sweden over the last 30 years. They've gone through these waves where they accept refugees and whatever you're opinion on that doesn't matter much. But some of the refugees they were taking were committing a disproportionate amount of the crime and so on. And their response was, OK, then we'll just stop collecting crime statistics so we don't know who's committing the crime. And here's what I was getting out with with this point.

There's a kind of pathological altruism where you actually not only don't have extreme in-group preference, right, like racism and so on, but you actively have no in-group preference to the point where you actually allow yourself to just be subjugated by outside forces. So there was a judge in Sweden some years ago who, upon hearing that one of these refugees had raped a bunch of women, he was a refugee claimant. And initially, there was a ruling like he should be sent back to Somalia, I think it was. And the judge said, well, no, if we send him back to Somalia, that's an even more dangerous

place than Sweden. And so we're going to keep him here in Sweden because we really want to protect this guy, you know, it's not as fault that he's a rapist and like break all of your rapists here. Exactly. Talk about pathological altruism. I mean, that's it. That's a case where it's like, look, we all understand in group preference can be bad, right? There's no doubt about that. A lot of historic wars were a kind of pathological form of in-group preference. But is the opposite really so great? And you talked about this previous guest and that sounds like a fantastic conversation. But I think you and I have the same sense of resistance toward that final pointy made. If we could only all become women, it would be great. It's like, no, like how much of life, how much of the greatness of life is driven

by competition and in-group preference. Actually, a lot of it is team sports would disappear without that, that high that you get. When you're, you know, I like to go to the boxing gym, I like to do pickup sports, surfing, we don't really get this because it's more individualistic, but I love team sports, even though I'm better at the individual ones like surfing, I'm not that good at basketball, but I love it because of that high you get where you bond with your team, and you have that almost, it's not hatred, but yeah, kind of disrespect for the outgroup, and it's fun. It leads you to achieve great things, and that's true throughout life, right?

Your team is like motivated to distinguish themselves. And what would happen if we got rid of that? I think we'd be terrible. What can you foresee as some of the potentially negative societal impacts of this technology? Let's say that it is, well, actually, first off, what is the kind of timeline that we're looking at to be able to get us to an appreciable amount of enhancement slash selection capacity for the traits that we've spoken about and other ones like morality and religiosity and dominance and blah, blah. And then downstream from that, what are the societal concerns and impacts? Really good question. So predictions are always, you know,

things that we regret in retrospect. Most people, even when you get them right, it's probably because we were partly lucky. Like, I was like, you know, my friends who, you know, predicted Trump was going to win. It was like, okay, it's not that hard. Yeah, it's not like, you know, it was just completely impossible to win. Like even even the pundits thought it was like a 20% chance. I mean, so some predictions come out right by chance. Let me give you like a rough, a rough prediction on where we're going. Polygenic risk scores for embryo selection are already here.

They're getting more powerful every year. We can already do it for intelligence. Um, I think we'll hit the limits of those, though, again, until we get more genetic diversity through things like in vitro commetogenicity or if people wanted to opt for sperm and egg donation rather than husbands and wives. I don't think that's necessarily the best society, but some people will do that. I know a lot of people from college, women who hit their forties and they just didn't find the right guy and they're doing that.

They're just selecting a sperm and then they're going to on top of it select embryos. So that's already happening. It's going to get more and more powerful for like the next 10 years in vitro-gamingo genesis, like powers that up even more. My view is, you know, I'm not an expert on gene editing, but I've talked to some experts in particular, I'm thinking of one guy, I guess I won't name him at the Broad Institute. I guess this can be controversial,

so I won't name him, but he's actually pretty skeptical that gene editing will happen for even 50 years, like on a mass scale, if ever. So for reasons I don't fully understand, he thinks this problem of downstream mutations is a big one, and there may be no way to fully crack that. Even if that's true, I still think we're going to manipulate individual genes

because the risks are lower if it's just like this one gene, the one that causes tastesacks, for example. But if it turns out there's always some probability of these downstream errors, when you're manipulating highly polygenic traits, it may be that, I don't know, gene editing is 20 or 30 years away or even 100 or... it's really hard to know. So I think that the main game in town for now is embryosiluction and again going back mate selection.

But I will say something about the inequality issue. I think that's an important one. I do think inequalities just like inequalities of wealth above a certain level can lead to a lack of social cohesion for obvious reasons, right? It's kind of like a winner-take-all system. I don't think polygamy is such a bad thing in terms of the genetic effects of it, if the smartest or strongest or whatever the traits are that you want are having a disproportionate share of the children, that's actually good for future generations. On the other hand, it leads to massive social instability. This is one reason monogamy evolved is to kind of control

the alpha males and to lead to more stability. But yeah, we can get these like genetic inequalities either through, again, hypergamy or polygamy, but you can also get them through a sort of mating and we're already doing it. Even before you have gene editing or embryo selection, which is just come online, what we've had is increased genetic inequality in the last century. Why would we have that? Well, women's education. So for the first time, women are getting actually more education than men, and because of their choosingness and their preferences, what's happening is a female doctor will just marry a male surgeon or a really successful male lawyer and a janitor will marry well another janitor or someone who works at Walmart or whatever and that's not casting

shade on someone who works at Walmart. I mean that's a job and those people deserve to be treated with respect and dignity and everything else. I mean I'm not sort of making judgments about it but if you do the genetic math here, these traits are heritable, and the more assortative mating we have, and intelligence is the number one trait along which people assortatively mate, along with height and some other aesthetic traits, we're already getting increasing genetic inequalities in the West without any of this technology. What will the technology do?

It will accelerate those inequalities. Except we have the ability to actually enable people who are poor through subsidies for IVF, subsidies for genetic counseling, and so on to gap those genetic inequalities. I think there's going to be a time where these new procedures, especially embryos selection, for some of these complex traits, they're going to be really expensive, but like cell phones, like cars, like plane trips, right? It used to be a luxury for the rich. What the rich are going to do is drive the price down and the quality up. And so there's going to be this temporary period, maybe 20 years, where we get even more genetic

inequalities through assortative mating and the use of these technologies, but then we quickly get pressure to ramp up the ability to use these in an even more efficient way by the so-called genetic poor. And I don't mean that again, as like an insult, I just mean not everyone has like these natural abilities. I don't have the natural height that you have or whatever. So I'm genetically poor with respect to height. Will my grandchildren have the ability to select for height? Yes, like way more than I can. And so I think that the grandchildren will bridge these genetic gaps. That was something that I'd never really learned about before I was listening to you.

And it's this, the rich pay over the odds for new technologies. When they first come online, that creates a market. Companies then move into the market, market pressures then occur. Then it's slightly less rich people, the slightly less rich people, the slightly less rich people, and downstream from that you have what in the beginning created potentially massive advantage or inequality toward the people at the top, actually then trickling down to create the opportunity for everybody to benefit from these. Is that a common dynamic?

It was the first time that I'd ever heard of it when you started speaking about it when I was listening to you. Basically, all of technological innovation is like that. Think of the people who are using boxy cellular phones in their porcias in the 1990s. The phone did nothing other than give you the ability to have barely have a conversation with other rich people in your porcias.

It wasn't, now we've got like these incredibly powerful computers in, in our pockets and poor African farmers are using these for like, you know, they've got Bitcoin wallets or whatever, right? So when the government tries to seize their property, they actually have virtual property and it's on, you know, this electronic medium, which like even you and I wouldn't have been able to afford 20 years ago, or wouldn't have been able to do much. The same goes for the use of, yeah, again,

think of who's flying now. Well, it's one reason flights are so miserable now, right? They're packing everyone under these cheap flights, but for the poor, that's a really big benefit. The idea that they could fly to another continent, they couldn't afford a fucking boat to another continent, you know, that would take six weeks, just a hundred years ago. The average person, a hundred years ago,

would have never heard music in their lives. Can't afford a piano. You can't afford a ticket to like the palace where the symphony is, and now you can afford like a five dollar shitty radio that you just turn on and you get like symphonies from around the world in different musical styles. Why? Because rich people subsidize the the creation and the dispersion of that technology. I'll take this even farther. You know, one of the things that bothers me about climate reparations, this idea that

you know, Britain and the US owe the world huge amounts of money because they polluted the environment. Well, first of all, they're not the main polluters anymore, right? It's obviously China, India, and eventually Africa. But secondly, that pollution came as a byproduct of inventing everything that matters. The airplane, antibiotics, all of modern medicine, vaccines, the internal combustion engine, nuclear power, everything that makes your life go well. The kind of walls that I have, I don't even know what they're made of because we have this division of labor that makes them so much better and so much cheaper than the mud

huts that we would otherwise be living in. Like if anything, climate reparations should be going toward Britons and toward Swedes and Japanese who invented practically everything in the world that matters. But instead, we're flogging ourselves going, oh, but there was some pollution produced as a byproduct. Yeah, no shit. Everything has some cost, but the entire world,

a hundred years from now, is going to be fantastically wealthy because of these products we innovated over the last 200 years, especially since the British essentially created the Industrial Revolution and made the world rich. I think we can pay for a little bit of pollution, you know, as a side effect of that.

So anyway, to tie that together, all new technology is a toy for the rich until it's not. And the technology gets better and cheaper precisely because of the rich, take the risks to subsidize it for everyone else. Yeah, they're not doing it altruistically. But the total effect, and this is a Smithian point, right? This is what Adam Smith met by the invisible hand. He said, look, in a market society, and he's looking around London at the time, we get this division of labor so the butcher, the brewer, and the baker, they're just trying to get a good deal. Like, I'm not making

bread for you because I like you. I might like you, but like, I'm just trying to sell a bunch of bread. You're trying to sell beer and somebody else's a butcher, but the cumulative effect of this process of trade. And that's really what we're talking about, right? The development of technology in these industrialized societies is that it's as if an invisible hand, as if the hand of God was redistributing resources by pulling them out of the ground, turning them into cool shit, and giving them way to everyone. It's as if there's this benevolent, invisible hand, creating all of this for everyone.

And it's really these climate reparations people, and these people who think, oh, the rich, they owe so much to the poor because look at them. They have all these fancy cars or like genetic technology. Okay, maybe there's an argument to tax them to redistribute a bit, but the reality is, they're actually subsidizing almost everything that matters for everybody else.

Is there something particularly unique about genetic enhancement, given that the assortative advantages between couples who have both wealth and the existing genetic material will then have kids who are X times percent smarter, better prepared, plus they'll have the resources, plus their preparedness will give them the opportunity to accumulate more resources, which will allow them to accrue more and more. Is there a concern that you end up with a forking in society, if the haves and the have-nots, and that even though this may cause a trickle-down of cheaper IVF with selection to be available for poor people, that a problem

will be there is a runaway effect which has meant that the it's impossible to catch up to the first move is within this particular domain. Good. Yeah, I mean, that's that's of course a theoretical possibility. And you know, I think it's an interesting question. We'll go through the ramifications, but the obvious response over fears like that are to ban the technology and one thing I've written about You know because I sort of I think like an economist I studied both philosophy and economics in the book that I wrote on this topic I took very seriously the problem of black markets because the idea is look when there is something For which demand is any elastic is really strong even when price is high What you get by outlawing it is not to prevent

any inequalities but to exacerbate them. Because it's only the richest and the most well-connected who can afford to use the technology anyway. They travel to another country to do it. Maybe Mexico, maybe Singapore, whatever it is. And so I think the more obvious response to it is not to ban it. I mean, yeah, certain versions of the technology might be ban sure or regulated, but rather

to subsidize access for everybody so that you close the potential genetic gaps between people. But also to recognize that equality isn't everything. You know, I'm a Nietzschean. I mentioned Nietzsche earlier in the conversation and he saw equality as a kind of disease of the West, an unfortunate side effect of Christianity. Christianity did a lot of great things for the West, but it also gave us this bizarre idea that all hierarchy is bad, that everyone is like sort of morally equal.

I think to some extent that's a healthy thought, you know, we should we should be protected equally under the law, we should regard each other with equal respect. But at the end of the day, like, you know, we shouldn't think like if some people are smarter than others or more athletic, like, that's an evil and it needs to be eradicated. You've probably heard of this this Kurt Vonnegut story, Harrison Bergeron. And in Harrison Bergeron, he envisions a world it's 2050. And he says, finally everybody is equal, but we start noticing, wait a minute, some people can concentrate better than others. Some are a little bit better looking than others. So they invent the Ministry of Handicaps

and what the the minister who runs the Ministry of Handicaps. And what the Minister who runs the Ministry of Handicaps does is, you know, for the really bright people, he attaches a kind of laser that like zaps them every 20 seconds so they lose their train of thought. He breaks the noses of really attractive people and he hacks off the legs, right, of people who are especially athletic. And this is supposed to be a parable of equality run a month. And I think what this teaches us is, look, there's a virtue in trying to equalize access

to technologies that enable everyone to flourish. But there's also a vice of being obsessed with equality. And when you think about it, one way this vice could manifest itself is as the very kind of eugenics that we started off talking about, the kind of Nazi eugenics. If you want to force everyone to be equal, I guess you can, but it will require like massive government coercion. And I don't endorse that. So I think like we should enable the poor to use this. We can't stop the rich from doing it because they'll go somewhere else to do it if we try to stop them. And we should enable the poor to use this. We can't stop the rich from doing it because it'll go somewhere else to do it

if we try to stop them. And we should learn to live with inequality. And if we get inequalities that are so big that we can't cooperate anymore, this is not like my hope or my dream, this is just my prediction. At that point, we essentially associate in the same way that chimpanzees are now different

than bonobos. They're very closely related, but they actually behave pretty differently. essentially speciate in the same way that chimpanzees are now different than bonobos. They're very closely related, but they actually behave pretty differently. Bonobos are more peaceful than chimpanzees, and they basically don't live together in common societies. They differentiate. Is that the future of humanity? Probably. Is that a bad thing? Like, I don't know, not necessarily, unless you think like, exact equality of outcome outcome, equity as we call it now, is somehow an overriding virtue. So you have a prediction that a potential downstream future

might be the runaway benefits of this kind of technology coupled with the variability that you have in terms of the raw materials that you're playing with, could end up with different strands, different species of humans in future, which would then be unable to mate with each other if they chose to. Yeah, with one caveat, I think they'd be able to mate unless, I mean, this is interesting, right? Because you can be very different You can be a chihuahua and a great day and you may not want a picture what that mating looks like

But it's how it's possible right they can produce fertile offspring But they're very different in terms of nature, physicality, and so on right so we have all these dog breeds There's no reason that humans I mean we already have been like this right If you take a pygmy and the African forests and compare them with the sweet, I mean pygmies are like four feet tall and Swedes are a six feet tall and we're pretty different actually, right? And we've got past ancestors, right? I mean we interbred with Neanderthals, Europeans, we Europeans have what? 4% on average Neanderthal DNA in us, right? Neanderthals actually had big brains. They were probably more creative than homo sapiens in many ways, but there were other differences

that we don't fully understand. So I see it like that. I think we will diverge, but probably we'll be able to reproduce. But you just, you just sort of tempted me with an idea, which is, it's possible that if some groups diverge phenotypically quite a bit, and they're a lot like, I don't know, either smarter or more creative or more athletic than others, they might want to genetically enhance their children such that they're now genetically incapable of reproducing with other humans.

And then you really get runaway selection, right? Wow, yeah, you would have an almost like a tribal lock-in that you can have. Yeah, exactly. Going forward. Well, this conversation kind of reminds me a little bit of Catherine Page, Harden's book, The Genetic Lottery. So, behavioral geneticist, but somebody who's from very strongly from the left, and I was fascinated by this because it's those two things don't tend to go together, tremendously well, because they clash up against each other. And obviously, if you go down the behavioral genetics rabbit hole for long enough, and you say, okay, well, in a world in which we managed to flatten all

equality of access problems in terms of the environment, what you end up with is an even more brutal world in which the only difference differences that anybody has are exclusively due to their genetics. And that feels like even more, that feels even less meritocratic. And you go, okay, but if you do the reverse and you flatten everything genetically, you end up with environment playing such an unbelievably huge impact in terms of any divergences that people have, that that doesn't seem good either. So I mean, I don't know, I don't know what the answer is there. That being said, we mentioned this again seem good either. So I mean, I don't know what the answer is there. That being said, we mentioned this again at the beginning.

Some people don't believe in behavioral genetics, or even if it's only explicitly, rather than implicitly, they don't like the idea of heritability playing a massive role. How hard do you think these people are going to be hit by the world of genetic enhancement when it becomes widespread? Very. And I think what's going to happen is, you know, right now these facts are basically known. And we can do surveys too. I mean, if you pull parents with two or more children, even the uneducated,

I mean, people who didn't go to university, that's not necessarily uneducated, I mean people who didn't go to university that's not necessarily uneducated in a real sense, but not formally educated. Their beliefs are far more accurate about heritability than the average sociology professor at an Ivy League university, right, who believe like men are only more aggressive than women because they're taught to be, you know, toxically masculine or whatever, right? So a lot of the elites actually have patently absurd beliefs. And right now there's not a cost

to expressing those beliefs, there's an actual benefit, right? You promote equity, right? By spouting bullshit. On the other hand, when these technologies are available, I think they're gonna use them. I mean, at some point they are, right? They might be more skeptical at first. They might denounce them.

And again, there's going to be more and more cognitive dissonance created. And the question is, can they just continually increase the amount of cognitive dissonance and publicly do one thing and privately do another? Or is it going to put so much pressure on their worldview that we're going to get a kind of sea change of public opinion on this? And the answer is I don't know. I'm not a prophet. But I think what happens is like a lot of social norms and beliefs are one kind of social norm, right? It's not the belief that the sky is blue. Everyone believes that because, you know, you have to navigate reality to get around to leave your house.

But some of these higher level beliefs about like heritability, which really are rooted in political ideology, those you can afford to get wrong, especially when you're publicly pronouncing things, but you can't afford to get them wrong in your private decisions or else you're going to lose in the arms race that we just talked about. And so again, I think at some point there's going to be pressure to change these beliefs and once some of the elites change these beliefs and do it publicly, I think there's going to be a cascade where everyone just goes, well, of course, I believe that all along, right? Of course, heredity matters, of course, mate selection matters, and of course these things are highly heritable and we should take these account we reproduce.

But in the meantime in the interim, I think there's just going to be this flurry of like, A, the science doesn't work, B, it's immoral and they're just going to cast a bunch of different arguments and see which sticks. And the reality is we can actually quantify the extent to which this does work, what we know and don't know.

We've given perfectly good arguments for and against this, and those are interesting arguments to have, but I think it's going to take a while for the elites to have these and to come to grips with reality. So I don't know, let's give it a 10 year, 20 year time horizon. I don't know. Do you think that this changes the moral impetus for people to have children? It's a good question. I think IVG will, because if it becomes possible for you to have a kid in your 40s, I think it's more likely that some women who regret not having children will. So there's going to be more control over the quality and quantity of kids you have.

That's not always good though. I think that what we need in the West, I think we're in deep shit because of the demographic trends we're facing. Elon Musk is clearly right about this. And East Asia, it's actually even worse there. I think Korea, the total fertility rate, hit 0.8 per couple this year. So that means their population is going to let less than half in one generation, right? They would go from like five million, that's not the actual population, but hypothetically, let's say five million to like 2.3 million in a generation. That's insane, right? Play that out for like three generations and Korea disappears. So what we really need is like massive cultural change. I don't think this technology is necessarily going to facilitate that one direction or another. But it is going to influence the direction it takes. I really don't know.

Especially one of the things that may be selected for most likely to be selected for would be intelligence. Yeah. But intelligence is negatively correlated with fertility or at least with with birth, birth rights. Yeah. Yes, and that could be a problem. So, right, as intelligence goes up, income goes up, and that's because opportunity cost goes up, there's lots of fun shit you can do with your time, rather than changing diapers, whatever, and so that's a bit of a parody of the argument,

but that's kind of the economic analysis. So the richer you are, the less kids you have, and that's been mostly true, but it's not true in Israel. economic analysis. So the richer you are, the less kids you have. And that's been mostly true. But it's not true in Israel. It shows you, Israel shows you even among the secular, wealthy Israelis, they're above replacement, barely, but they are above replacement. And what that shows you is like nationalism, religiosity, things that provide meaning in life can lead fertility to go up even when education and IQ is high. And so I think what we need is pretty massive cultural change. I don't have any like magic formula for how to get there,

but I think this is the biggest crisis facing the West right now. Is like how do we, how do we sort of move away from this sense that the best thing you can do with your life is pursue pleasure make as much money as possible. It's not that pleasure and money aren't good But rather how do you transcend those things and use them in the service of living a meaningful life and part of a meaningful life is like getting married and having children and having friendships that last across your lifetime Like not just buying the latest iPhone and having children and having friendships that last across your lifetime,

like not just buying the latest iPhone. I think more and more of us are realizing this is an extremely important question. It turns out Plato and Aristotle thought these things through better than we did a long time ago, but they were also anti-liberal and anti-democratic. So I don't know if we can save the liberal democracy that we've had for

the last hundred years and also boost fertility, meaning, and life, et cetera. Because liberalism is premised on the idea that the government's sole function is to protect individual rights and to make no judgments whatsoever on what a good life is, on whether we should have an overall social goal, social vision, etc. So I think one of the biggest questions, and I just published a paper on this called Can Liberalism Last, Demographic Demise and the Future of Liberalism, and maybe controversially, I came to the conclusion that liberalism is evolutionarily unstable, that liberalism is evolutionarily unstable, and that some form of nationalism or religiosity

might end up in the long run replacing it because of this fertility problem. That's outside of the scope of genetic enhancement, but it may be that religious people or nationalists who both embrace high birth rates and embrace some of this technology are going to be the ones that succeed over the next two to three hundred years. A society of Mormons and Israelites perhaps.

I don't know. Tech-friendly Mormons. Yeah, Israeli. And Israelis, yeah. What's that paper called? Because I want to read it. Yeah, that's Cam Liberalism last. Is that on whatever it's filled papers?

Yeah, yeah, it's there. And I'll say anything like, it's not a fish. I mean, I wrote it like two years ago, but you know, academia works. It's gonna take another nine months before it's like, in print, but yeah, it's done ready to go. So yeah. One documentary that you should check out

is Birth Gap with Steven Shaw. So I had him on the show about three weeks ago. He had just placed him on Peterson's show as well, and he's absolutely smashed it. He is a data scientist who for the last seven years has studied birth rate decline worldwide. And it's the most comprehensive, most accessible, very easy to get into breakdown.

And it's a three-part documentary. The first part is out on YouTube, and you can watch it for free called Birth Gap. And then I had him on the show, and we spoke about this. And I agree, man, I think it's so, so strange that I read Super Intelligence by Nick Boster, and when it first came out, and then I read The Press and Piss by Toby Aud, it's one of my five best books that I've ever read my entire life. No one talks about birth rate decline or like demographic collapse. No one talks about.

As a substantial risk. Yes, I think I genuinely believe that to get into the super nerdy realm of like what an existential risk is, like permanent unrecovable collapse, I don't think that birth rate decline can actually get us to permanent unrecovable collapse because for as long as there's a thousand people, you're probably still sweet and there's

definitely still going to be a thousand Mormons and a thousand, you know, blah, blah, blah, but by way of functionally a very large collapse or one that sets civilization back, especially if you're a long termist, you know, if you're Wilma Cascill, like you, this, this is the sort of thing that should be spoken about. And I, it's, it's just creeping under the fucking radar. And because there's no smoke in the sky or asteroid coming toward us or, you know, Gregu paperclip AI takeover thing that we're going to be faced with, it doesn't galvanize response in the same sort of way. No one cares. No one gives a shit about it because it creeps upon you one generation at a time.

Agree, and what you just said made me think of something I hadn't thought about before, marrying together the sort of pronatalism or worries about collapsing birth rates, plus the technology. When you think about it, wanting to have children is itself its own trait, right? So historically, I mean, partly kids are just a product of sex. it's own trait, right? So like historically, I mean, partly kids

are just a product of sex. I mean, obviously, right? That's why sex is fun. That's the Darwinian explanation of why... The proximate and the ultimate coming together, yeah. Exactly, right. So you make it the most pleasurable activity. And now we have these proxies like drugs

and I mean, video games are a little different, but drugs certainly, these and porn, all these distractions to like get us away from reproducing. But here's an interesting thought that I hadn't really thought of before. And that is that it may be that through this genetic filter as populations start declining, especially in the West they already have.

Who survives? Well, yeah, the religious people, partly because of social technology, God tells you you should have children. It makes a positive virtue of this. But then there's also people who just happen to like kids, right? They just want to have a bunch of freaking kids. And like that has to be partly heritable. It's not just completely arbitrary, right? And those people are likely to disproportionately reproduce. And it may be that in 50 to 100 years, when this technology is really developed

and people understand a lot more about genes and heritability, it may be that some people deliberately program their kids at the genetic level to want to have more children. And what a bizarre outcome that would be, but it may be like, yeah, the fertile shall inherit the earth, but fertility is partly going to be genetically encoded, like the desire to have fertility. A selectively fertile will inherit the earth.

Exactly. Because as resources become more abundant and the cost of reproducing goes down, people who just want to have more kids, unless their laws against it, will just have more kids. So. One thing that I should have asked before, is there an ethical concern around you as a parent choosing the traits of your child? Yeah, but I think that the ethics cuts both ways. So in old argument from Michael Sandell at Harvard against using these technologies is hypothetical

at the time. It's called the case against perfection. It's a good article. I've assigned it to my students. You know, and they get convinced until I give them another article and they get convinced of the opposite view. You know what Sandell says in the case against perfection is look, there is a virtue to accepting what you have

and working with what you have in your becoming the best version of what you can be, but like accepting that you have these limitations and a problem with using the technology, who would say, is it's gonna lead parents to think they could have like ultimate mastery over what their children are and so on. That's true. There is a virtue in like being willing to accept your kids for who they are even if you want to push

them a little bit. But you know, there's also a virtue in not using this technology and just sort of saying like, I don't really care what traits my kids have. Like, they're going to have to just learn to live with that. That's cruel, dude. Like we have really strong evidence that, you know, if you have cognitive empathy, you're going to have more friends, right? And be able to succeed in your job if you have more conscientiousness. If you're smart and athletic, you're going to be better at sports because you can remember

the play calling of your coach And you can anticipate the game theory of like if I do this the other team will do that So my best response to Nash equilibrium is to do this other thing, right? If you're if you're musical like the ability to learn music quickly and to and to play better depends on intelligence. So I Think there are these like general traits at least up to a point. Yeah, I want to agree with you. You don't want to select for the extremes necessarily. General traits like a well-functioning immune system, cognitive empathy, conscientiousness, and general intelligence that are going to be good for any kind of kid you have,

and I would say it's a virtue to actually actively select in favor of those. So sandal is right. We don't want to pretend, you know, we're going to have the perfect kid and be super disappointed with how our kids turn out, but he's also wrong that like we shouldn't try to deliberately sculpt the shapes of our kid. Sorry, sculpt the traits of our kid. We should. And there are some things we know, no matter what, no matter

what you're good at, it's generally better to have a better memory, to be able to creatively solve problems, whatever domain you end up in, that's going to be good for you. And so like we shouldn't just pretend like we have no idea what makes for a good life. That's bullshit. Of course we have an idea. It's not that, you know, having a certain color of skin or whatever, that makes for a good life. Okay, no, that's not true. You know, there's going to be a diversity of preferences. Some people want tan skin or darker skin or lighter skin. Find whatever. But the claim that we don't have responsibilities or we should deliberately select against intelligence, That's insane.

We know that there are some traits that tend to make a life go better. Jonathan anomaly, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the stuff that you do, where should they go? My website. So yeah, they can find that. We'll include it, I guess, in the show notes. What's up for the people that aren't going to write it down in the month. Yeah, Jonathan dash anomaly.com.

So perfect. Yeah, I tried to stay off of social media for my own mental health and because so many of my fellow academics have been literally fired for things like what they've said on Twitter or, you know, sunset in various ways. So I stay off social media, but all of my writings, videos, et cetera, on the website. So, brilliant. I really appreciate you.

This is fascinating stuff. Thanks for coming on. The great opportunity. I love your show. And so this is an honor to be on it. So thanks. Yeah, I'm fed.