We do not know and can not know what the long term effects “polygenic embryo selection”—or “unnatural selection” will be.
I think you could make the same argument about almost any technology. Was it foreseeable that the transistor would lead to the rise of cell phones and social media? Maybe to a small number of highly prescient people, but it certainly wasn’t obvious to most people.
However in the case of embryo selection I think the near term effects at least are pretty foreseeable because we can look at real siblings, see which ones have better polygenic scores for various things, and then check whether those people experience other serious downsides.
The answer is mostly “no”. Siblings with higher polygenic scores for IQ, for example, tend to have lower rates of mental illness, longer life expectancy, lower divorce rates, higher incomes, and lower rates of cardiovascular disease.
There are SOME exceptions to this; higher IQ correlates at about 0.15 with aspergers, and at about 0.06 with anorexia. But these exceptions are… exceptions. Most “good things” seem to run together at a genetic level.
None of these correlations are that strong, by the way. IQ only correlates with hypertension at about −0.07 or so.
And for diseases in general, you can see they overwhelmingly have positive correlations, meaning if you selected against one disease, chances are good that it will slightly decrease others.
A “better” approach: Accept that “Idiocracy” is a documentary film, ban IVF and let history take its course :-)
This seems like a bad approach to me.
Or if we want to fight “Idiocracy” naturally—make it a degree requirement, for PhD students, to have at least one child :-D
I’m guessing you’re just kind of trolling here, but i’ll answer like a true autist by taking this proposal seriously.
This is the bad kind of eugenics. We tried stuff like this in the 20th century and it overwhelmingly did not go well.
I think you could make the same argument about almost any technology. Was it foreseeable that the transistor would lead to the rise of cell phones and social media? Maybe to a small number of highly prescient people, but it certainly wasn’t obvious to most people.
However in the case of embryo selection I think the near term effects at least are pretty foreseeable because we can look at real siblings, see which ones have better polygenic scores for various things, and then check whether those people experience other serious downsides.
The answer is mostly “no”. Siblings with higher polygenic scores for IQ, for example, tend to have lower rates of mental illness, longer life expectancy, lower divorce rates, higher incomes, and lower rates of cardiovascular disease.
There are SOME exceptions to this; higher IQ correlates at about 0.15 with aspergers, and at about 0.06 with anorexia. But these exceptions are… exceptions. Most “good things” seem to run together at a genetic level.
None of these correlations are that strong, by the way. IQ only correlates with hypertension at about −0.07 or so.
And for diseases in general, you can see they overwhelmingly have positive correlations, meaning if you selected against one disease, chances are good that it will slightly decrease others.
This seems like a bad approach to me.
I’m guessing you’re just kind of trolling here, but i’ll answer like a true autist by taking this proposal seriously.
This is the bad kind of eugenics. We tried stuff like this in the 20th century and it overwhelmingly did not go well.