First off, nice that you got to hold a baby. Also, nice to want to improve the screening for diseases.
Importantly, there is limited evidence supporting almost all the claims, however well intentioned. That PGT-P improves real-world child health outcomes in a way that justifies its routine use is unproven, as is that it reliably predicts or increases intelligence in any practical or meaningful sense (that’s before we even consider IQ as only a reliable measure of a narrow construct—where is the reliable measure of creativity, practical judgment, personality, motivation and all the other social skills?). Where are the citations, sources, independent studies, peer review? Where is the data in the graph from?
And super babies? Ranking embryos? It feels like market-driven eugenic thinking. I thought we’d moved on from that early to mid-20th century aberration.
“Importantly, there is limited evidence supporting almost all the claims, however well intentioned. That PGT-P improves real-world child health outcomes in a way that justifies its routine use is unproven”
I hear this claim repeated often by people in the field, most of whom seem unaware that there are multiple papers validating polygenic scores in a within-family context. Just to list a few:
Maybe you’re still thinking “that doesn’t prove these actually work in a clinical context”. But we already have polygenic predictors deployed in clinical practice, such as Myriad’s breast cancer predictor.
But maybe you’re still not convinced. Maybe you think “we need to wait for a bunch of selected embryos to grow up, then observe whether or not selection worked.” In that case, I’d just point out that this dataset already exists: it’s called “siblings”, and it can show you exactly how well predictors perform on selecting an embryo with a lower risk of breast cancer or a higher predicted IQ.
“where is the reliable measure of creativity, practical judgment, personality, motivation and all the other social skills?”
The biobanks from which these predictors are trained have not yet deemed it worthwhile to examine the genetics of these other traits. So for the time being, we’re limited to diseases, IQ, height, and (maybe soon) personality and possibly facial appearance (the latter is still speculative at this point).
The other things you pointed out are of course important too. Motivation is, I think, particularly important. We’ll likely be able to test for this weakly soon via conscienciousness. But there are just obviously many other important human traits that we don’t have good predictors for at all. I think it’s a shame.
But the only way to solve this is with more data, which is too expensive to collect for the moment.
And super babies? Ranking embryos? It feels like market-driven eugenic thinking. I thought we’d moved on from that early to mid-20th century aberration.
Was anyone signing up to be part of 20th century eugenics? Of course not. It wasn’t a voluntary process at all. It was state sponsored sterilization and murder.
If you don’t see the difference between that and embryo selection, you either haven’t thought deeply about it or you’re catholic.
If it’s the latter, I understand. One day we’ll have a way to do this without any excess embryos. But not yet.
Regarding the last section, I think you’re being quite dismissive, i.e. not addressing their concerns and acting as though they don’t have legitimate concerns (while I think probably not in fact understanding their concerns). For example,
If you don’t see the difference between that and embryo selection
I mean, did they say “there is no difference between embryo selection and state-enforced murder”? I think you’re strawmanning them.
If you don’t want to deal with these sorts of comments, fine, that’s understandable, and there’s a lot of other valuable things that you do such that you don’t need to work on addressing these sorts of comments with more attention. As I’ve said repeatedly, I AM VOLUNTEERING TO GIVE THOUGHTFUL RESPECTFUL REAL ANSWERS TO MORAL/ETHICAL CONCERNS ABOUT REPROGENETICS. Please just tag me instead! I imagine (not confidently, but this is my top guess when I quickly try to empathize with you) that you’re doing a social motion that’s something like demonstrating+performing confidence / power, like “yeah actually I’m right, I know I’m right, I know lots of other people agree with me, and I’m expecting lots of people to back me up on this, now and then even more in the future”. I think that’s fine and in some cases good to do, as a general category. But I think that doing it by strawmanning and dismissing is bad. I think that you think that (or act as though) if someone can’t express their concern very clearly, and so you can give a shallow counterargument that they can’t quickly give a compelling response to, then that’s a win. I think that it’s sometimes a win and sometimes a loss, because if the version you’re doing is strawmanning them, then they have a concern which you haven’t addressed but you’ve put them in a position where their (fumbling) attempts to get their concern (however coherent or not it may be) addressed are met with dismissal or even derision, and no easy recourse for more helpful engagement.
This is a fair critique. I think I’ve partially ended up training myself to respond too dismissively by spending a lot of time engaging with the attention dynamics of Twitter.
I slightly agree that the term and concept “superbabies” has some affinity with eugenical thinking, and is kinda bad (see my other comments on this post).
Ranking embryos?
Note that it is, and very much should be, parents who are ranking the embryos. Clinics provide predictions broken out by each specific condition or trait; parents make choices based on that, however they see fit.
It feels like market-driven eugenic thinking.
I’m not totally sure what you’re saying here, and would be curious for you to unpack it. A guess I’d make is that you’re thinking something like: “Social/economic incentives about traits/types of people will push parents to make genomic choices for their future children that respond to those incentives; in particular, whatever the strongest incentives are, though incentives would induce all parents to make the same genomic choices in response. In effect, this is some single force (the aggregate of the main economic incentives) making a decision about what sort of person should exist that gets applied uniformly across all of society. That’s basically eugenics.” Is that close? How would you correct this?
If that’s roughly what you’re thinking: I almost agree that this is a kind of eugenics, but I don’t quite agree. Eugenics was a highly varied ideology so it’s hard to analyze, but my attempt is here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yH9FtLgPJxbimamKg/genomic-emancipation-contra-eugenics#The_Eugenical_Maxim_as_the_shared_moral_core_of_eugenics_
My hypothesis there is basically that eugenics largely boils down to “There are Good and Bad traits (a single universal concept); they’re important; so we should push for all children to have Good traits.”. So, the uniformity is important, but at least according to me, truly eugenical thinking is about justifying a universal application of one standard of Good traits based on conceiving of a single universal notion of Good traits. Responding to incentives could (if extremely pervasive) be a uniform/universal application of one standard, but it’s not necessarily being justified that way. This matters because the justification is where much of the really bad stuff comes from. If you put a lot of stock in your single universal notion of Good traits, then you can justify imposing that notion on other people, even using force.
That said, a free market could result in that universal notion of Good traits being justified as such—in other words, people could start blaming children for being economically unproductive / burdensome because they weren’t sufficiently genomically optimized. That would start to shade into “soft eugenics”, which is still less bad than coercive eugenics, but is bad, and could then shade into coercive eugenics. For example, people could say “why should we provide you healthcare, when your disease is genetically preventable and your parents refused to prevent it for no good reason”. (In an absolute sense, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t think this is that much of a problem; there’s really a ton of latitude (legal and social) in our society to take a huge variety of approaches toward life and child-rearing, though things seem like they’ve gotten significantly worse in the past decades—but as long as there is this store of liberty, I think the consequences aren’t that bad. I’m also skeptical that how much healthcare our society provides is all that linked to which options specific parents would have had to avert sickness.)
Now, even if you agree with my analysis about eugenics and eugenical thinking, you might still be concerned simply about any sort of pressure that applies some human-judgement standard to the genomes of future children. E.g. you might think that are notions of “intelligence” are so deeply flawed that a kid selected to have a higher IQ in expectation would also tend to have some bad quality in expectation. Or you might be concerned about negative consequences of uniformity, regardless of the attendant social attitudes (eugenical or not). E.g. you might think that selecting for IQ would make kids who all have “the same kind of intelligence”, and that would be bad. Are these your concern?
that’s before we even consider IQ as only a reliable measure of a narrow construct—where is the reliable measure of creativity, practical judgment, personality, motivation and all the other social skills?
Let me know once you find a reliable measure of those constructs with enough DNA data attached to make a predictor :)
Importantly, there is limited evidence supporting almost all the claims, however well intentioned. That PGT-P improves real-world child health outcomes in a way that justifies its routine use is unproven, as is that it reliably predicts or increases intelligence in any practical or meaningful sense
First off, nice that you got to hold a baby. Also, nice to want to improve the screening for diseases.
Importantly, there is limited evidence supporting almost all the claims, however well intentioned. That PGT-P improves real-world child health outcomes in a way that justifies its routine use is unproven, as is that it reliably predicts or increases intelligence in any practical or meaningful sense (that’s before we even consider IQ as only a reliable measure of a narrow construct—where is the reliable measure of creativity, practical judgment, personality, motivation and all the other social skills?). Where are the citations, sources, independent studies, peer review? Where is the data in the graph from?
And super babies? Ranking embryos? It feels like market-driven eugenic thinking. I thought we’d moved on from that early to mid-20th century aberration.
“Importantly, there is limited evidence supporting almost all the claims, however well intentioned. That PGT-P improves real-world child health outcomes in a way that justifies its routine use is unproven”
I hear this claim repeated often by people in the field, most of whom seem unaware that there are multiple papers validating polygenic scores in a within-family context. Just to list a few:
Lello et al Wolfram et al Moore et al Plomin et al Selzam et al
Maybe you’re still thinking “that doesn’t prove these actually work in a clinical context”. But we already have polygenic predictors deployed in clinical practice, such as Myriad’s breast cancer predictor.
But maybe you’re still not convinced. Maybe you think “we need to wait for a bunch of selected embryos to grow up, then observe whether or not selection worked.” In that case, I’d just point out that this dataset already exists: it’s called “siblings”, and it can show you exactly how well predictors perform on selecting an embryo with a lower risk of breast cancer or a higher predicted IQ.
“where is the reliable measure of creativity, practical judgment, personality, motivation and all the other social skills?”
The biobanks from which these predictors are trained have not yet deemed it worthwhile to examine the genetics of these other traits. So for the time being, we’re limited to diseases, IQ, height, and (maybe soon) personality and possibly facial appearance (the latter is still speculative at this point).
The other things you pointed out are of course important too. Motivation is, I think, particularly important. We’ll likely be able to test for this weakly soon via conscienciousness. But there are just obviously many other important human traits that we don’t have good predictors for at all. I think it’s a shame.
But the only way to solve this is with more data, which is too expensive to collect for the moment.
Was anyone signing up to be part of 20th century eugenics? Of course not. It wasn’t a voluntary process at all. It was state sponsored sterilization and murder.
If you don’t see the difference between that and embryo selection, you either haven’t thought deeply about it or you’re catholic.
If it’s the latter, I understand. One day we’ll have a way to do this without any excess embryos. But not yet.
Regarding the last section, I think you’re being quite dismissive, i.e. not addressing their concerns and acting as though they don’t have legitimate concerns (while I think probably not in fact understanding their concerns). For example,
I mean, did they say “there is no difference between embryo selection and state-enforced murder”? I think you’re strawmanning them.
If you don’t want to deal with these sorts of comments, fine, that’s understandable, and there’s a lot of other valuable things that you do such that you don’t need to work on addressing these sorts of comments with more attention. As I’ve said repeatedly, I AM VOLUNTEERING TO GIVE THOUGHTFUL RESPECTFUL REAL ANSWERS TO MORAL/ETHICAL CONCERNS ABOUT REPROGENETICS. Please just tag me instead! I imagine (not confidently, but this is my top guess when I quickly try to empathize with you) that you’re doing a social motion that’s something like demonstrating+performing confidence / power, like “yeah actually I’m right, I know I’m right, I know lots of other people agree with me, and I’m expecting lots of people to back me up on this, now and then even more in the future”. I think that’s fine and in some cases good to do, as a general category. But I think that doing it by strawmanning and dismissing is bad. I think that you think that (or act as though) if someone can’t express their concern very clearly, and so you can give a shallow counterargument that they can’t quickly give a compelling response to, then that’s a win. I think that it’s sometimes a win and sometimes a loss, because if the version you’re doing is strawmanning them, then they have a concern which you haven’t addressed but you’ve put them in a position where their (fumbling) attempts to get their concern (however coherent or not it may be) addressed are met with dismissal or even derision, and no easy recourse for more helpful engagement.
This is a fair critique. I think I’ve partially ended up training myself to respond too dismissively by spending a lot of time engaging with the attention dynamics of Twitter.
I slightly agree that the term and concept “superbabies” has some affinity with eugenical thinking, and is kinda bad (see my other comments on this post).
Note that it is, and very much should be, parents who are ranking the embryos. Clinics provide predictions broken out by each specific condition or trait; parents make choices based on that, however they see fit.
I’m not totally sure what you’re saying here, and would be curious for you to unpack it. A guess I’d make is that you’re thinking something like: “Social/economic incentives about traits/types of people will push parents to make genomic choices for their future children that respond to those incentives; in particular, whatever the strongest incentives are, though incentives would induce all parents to make the same genomic choices in response. In effect, this is some single force (the aggregate of the main economic incentives) making a decision about what sort of person should exist that gets applied uniformly across all of society. That’s basically eugenics.” Is that close? How would you correct this?
If that’s roughly what you’re thinking: I almost agree that this is a kind of eugenics, but I don’t quite agree. Eugenics was a highly varied ideology so it’s hard to analyze, but my attempt is here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yH9FtLgPJxbimamKg/genomic-emancipation-contra-eugenics#The_Eugenical_Maxim_as_the_shared_moral_core_of_eugenics_ My hypothesis there is basically that eugenics largely boils down to “There are Good and Bad traits (a single universal concept); they’re important; so we should push for all children to have Good traits.”. So, the uniformity is important, but at least according to me, truly eugenical thinking is about justifying a universal application of one standard of Good traits based on conceiving of a single universal notion of Good traits. Responding to incentives could (if extremely pervasive) be a uniform/universal application of one standard, but it’s not necessarily being justified that way. This matters because the justification is where much of the really bad stuff comes from. If you put a lot of stock in your single universal notion of Good traits, then you can justify imposing that notion on other people, even using force.
That said, a free market could result in that universal notion of Good traits being justified as such—in other words, people could start blaming children for being economically unproductive / burdensome because they weren’t sufficiently genomically optimized. That would start to shade into “soft eugenics”, which is still less bad than coercive eugenics, but is bad, and could then shade into coercive eugenics. For example, people could say “why should we provide you healthcare, when your disease is genetically preventable and your parents refused to prevent it for no good reason”. (In an absolute sense, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t think this is that much of a problem; there’s really a ton of latitude (legal and social) in our society to take a huge variety of approaches toward life and child-rearing, though things seem like they’ve gotten significantly worse in the past decades—but as long as there is this store of liberty, I think the consequences aren’t that bad. I’m also skeptical that how much healthcare our society provides is all that linked to which options specific parents would have had to avert sickness.)
Now, even if you agree with my analysis about eugenics and eugenical thinking, you might still be concerned simply about any sort of pressure that applies some human-judgement standard to the genomes of future children. E.g. you might think that are notions of “intelligence” are so deeply flawed that a kid selected to have a higher IQ in expectation would also tend to have some bad quality in expectation. Or you might be concerned about negative consequences of uniformity, regardless of the attendant social attitudes (eugenical or not). E.g. you might think that selecting for IQ would make kids who all have “the same kind of intelligence”, and that would be bad. Are these your concern?
Let me know once you find a reliable measure of those constructs with enough DNA data attached to make a predictor :)
What type of evidence would change your mind?