Great post. Thank you. Fertility doctor here and a supporter of ART (assisted reproductive technologies) in general. A few thoughts (although you touched on a few of these below, worth emphasizing in my opinion):
PGT-P has not been validated yet, which may take decades to do, if ever.
The science in terms of GWAS isn’t quite there yet IMHO—we don’t know all the genes that are important for most traits and we may be inadvertently selecting against some desirable traits, for example.
Comparing clinic success rates using CDC data is imperfect because of different patient characteristics, patient selection, and reporting bias.
IVF pregnancies carry a significantly higher complication rate (hypertensive disorders, preterm birth, placental abnormalities, etc.) compared to spontaneous pregnancies—unclear if this is due to IVF or underlying infertility diagnosis.
The risk-benefit calculus of PGT-P is going to be different for a couple who already needs to do IVF anyway to have a baby (low additional risk/cost) compared to a couple doing IVF just so that they can do PGT-P (higher additional risk/cost).
IVF is notoriously inefficient at present. Depending on female partner age, each cycle may yield only very few embryos making the benefit and utility of PGT-P limited. It may not be practical, safe, or financially feasible to do multiple cycles of IVF to increase the cohort of transferable embryos.
IVF is expensive and often not covered by insurance which creates access disparities. PGT-P would exacerbate these disparities in access. This is not unique to IVF I realize.
Slippery-slope eugenics and discrimination are real ethical concerns that would need to be mitigated.
In-vitro gametogenesis (IVG) would be a game-changer. The utility of PGT-P would be greatly enhanced if suddenly you had thousands of eggs and hundreds of embryos to select from.
I think you are not taking the eugenics and discrimination concerns seriously enough.
I think few people disagree with the idea of selecting the embryo with fewer avoidable diseases that would involve severe suffering; I do not think alzheimers makes humanity better. But there is a slippery slope towards a scenario where people select for sex, skin (and hair and eye) colour, not being queer, not being neurodivergent… and I do find that a dystopian scenario where we would lose something valuable that enriches our world. It makes me worry about and for the people who would opt out of being fixed, or having their children fixed (or rather, discarded early and replaced). I wish I didn’t have the genetic tendency towards disease that I unfortunately have, and that causes me a lot of suffering. But I assure you, if my parents had gotten to pick, they would also have made sure that I am not gay. Or tall. Or enby. Or have ADHD and autism. Things that were challenges, to be sure, but that I do not see as a net negative. I also know that both my parents found it disagreeable that I am highly gifted, and smarter than them; my father explicitly considers it a disease state and unpleasant complication, and would certainly have selected against it. I am very glad that he could not.
We also already have a scenario where it is incredibly difficult for a poor person to have proper upwards social mobility. If their competitors are literally superior from birth, prior to also getting their personal tutoring and private schools and trust funds and brain implants… at some point, no amount of hard work will make you competitive anymore, the different classes will become insurmountably separated and fixed. Not because the rich parents want this—they just want the best for their children, who wouldn’t. But if access to this tech is not fair, and its legitimate usage is not carefully reflected and set, the changes could be dystopian indeed.
This tech is transformative. I see how it could make humanity better, more just, more diverse, happier… but also how we could end up with an untouchable elite pushing for a narrow norm in which people like me, and many of my friends and loved ones, would have been sorted out for traits that we are glad we have.
But there is a slippery slope towards a scenario where people select for sex, skin (and hair and eye) colour, not being queer, not being neurodivergent… and I do find that a dystopian scenario where we would lose something valuable that enriches our world.
Yes, this is actually a fairly common critique of embryo selection. One useful intuition pump I’ve found helps me think about it is the reversal test; should we make people sicker or more mentally distraught to enrich the world? It’s a bit odd to imagine that evolution somehow put us at the perfect equilibrium where any increment or decrement in mental illness rates would result in a worse society. It’s especially odd to think that since evolution doesn’t care at all about either of those things except insofar as they affect inclusive reproductive fitness.
Also, my experience so far just talking to people makes me think parents are going to have different priorities regarding the traits they select for.
But I assure you, if my parents had gotten to pick, they would also have made sure that I am not gay. Or tall. Or enby. Or have ADHD and autism. Things that were challenges, to be sure, but that I do not see as a net negative. I also know that both my parents found it disagreeable that I am highly gifted, and smarter than them; my father explicitly considers it a disease state and unpleasant complication, and would certainly have selected against it. I am very glad that he could not.
I’m sorry about your parents. That sounds like an unpleasant experience.
I don’t think the thought experiment of “erasing” someone like you from existence is really a very good test of the morality of embryo selection. You are a person with decades of memories and ties to the community of people around you. In my view the morality of “erasing” you feels a lot different than making a choice between two embryos. Unless you believe in souls or something, an embryo is almost pure genetic potential. It has no internal organs, let alone a brain. Even the placenta hasn’t formed yet.
We also already have a scenario where it is incredibly difficult for a poor person to have proper upwards social mobility. If their competitors are literally superior from birth, prior to also getting their personal tutoring and private schools and trust funds and brain implants… at some point, no amount of hard work will make you competitive anymore, the different classes will become insurmountably separated and fixed. Not because the rich parents want this—they just want the best for their children, who wouldn’t. But if access to this tech is not fair, and its legitimate usage is not carefully reflected and set, the changes could be dystopian indeed.
I would point out that all the dynamics you described are already true to some degree; there are some people born with such extreme genetic disadvantages (through a combination of parentage and bad luck) that there are some paths in life simply closed to them.
Of course embryo selection will increase variance, so your point is still well taken. I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about this and the obvious solution here is just to work very hard to make this technology cheaper and better. If we make enough progress on that front then we can just have the government subsidize the technology and give free access to anyone that wants it.
Inequality WILL still increase in the meantime, but there are some dynamics that I think help us here:
There is a ceiling on improvements through embryo selection or editing. That limit is determined by the amount of variance in the human gene pool. The ceiling is very high, but its existence makes it plausible that some people will get there first and others will catch up
To push beyond that ceiling you’ll either need to generate new genetic variants and test them out in people. This will require the cooperation of a very large number of people. To make good predictors today, you need literally a million people or more in a database. To a first approximation I would guess you’ll need that many if you want to test out a ton of new genetic variants and have enough statistical power to distinguish true positives from false positives.
The main way rich people can get an advantage in embryo selection is by harvesting more embryos or getting access to better predictors. The predictors are all made from huge databases, most of which are public. So it’s unlikely rich people could maintain a monopoly on the best predictors. Also, it’s hard for them to get a big advantage by selecting from a lot more embryos. You can of course pay to use a better clinic, and you can pay to go through more egg retrievals to harvest more embryos. But there are steeply diminishing returns; you’re still sampling from a normal distribution. The expected maximum value of N samples from a normal distribution is sqrt(ln(N)). That’s an INCREDIBLY slow growing function. If you go from 10 embryos to 1000, the benefit only increases by 70%.
Will rich people still have an advantage? Yes. But genetic enhancement does not have the same runaway “intelligence explosion” dynamics that AI does.
But there is a slippery slope towards a scenario where people select for sex, skin (and hair and eye) colour, not being queer, not being neurodivergent… and I do find that a dystopian scenario where we would lose something valuable that enriches our world.
Not necessarily disagreeing with your main point (“discrimination concerns”), but I want to note that the status quo is currently that an alien god gets to choose those traits. Given the option to wrest (more) control away from natural selection, specific humans, or even humanity collectively, might indeed choose to exercise that control in even worse and more horrifying ways than evolution.
So “even more horrifying” is a way things might go, and it’s worth weighing that in a cost-benefit analysis. But I just want to note that, as a transhumanist, I regard the status quo, of ceding humanity’s collective heritage to an unthinking and unfeeling alien optimization process, to already be pretty horrifying.
Partially, I’m horrified at some of the actual outcomes it produces, but I also have a larger philosophical discomfort with trusting something as important as the process by which humans get created to such an alien process, in a universe that (aside from humans themselves) is so unthinking and uncaring and unfair.
I think I have a different perception of nature, and a much more positive one.
With every single life form I see, myself included… I look, and think, your parents survived until they brought children. And their parents survived until they brought children. And their ancestors. And their ancestors. All the way back, for 3 billion years, a single unbroken chain beginning in the first clump of life that hung on, that survived, that hung on, grew, diversified, learned, evolved, a chain of survivors longer than I can conceive. What lives in me now, what lives in all of us, went through this incredible forge, and survived. It has me mesmerised. I look at every strange, random thing, and think, this chose itself, it proved itself, it brought us here.
I look at my body and think, this is a freaking self-assembled nanomachine. I started with two cells, one in the literal nanorange, the other so small it can barely be seen, and that only because it already carried some building blocks for cannibalising later. And they self-assembled into an entire human being, every single step depending on the next, and enterprise that seems insane, and yet here I stand, and this body works. I breathe, I move; my heart cells began beating in the sixth week of pregnancy, and they have never for a single minute stopped since. I can consume practically any organic substance, and my body will disassemble it, and then reassemble it into more of me (how crazy is that?), while breaking down invaders and poisons in the process. I can be cut, and my body will automatically begin self-repairing. I can be invaded by hostile life forms, and have them eliminated. You can destroy a chunk of my brain, the very substrate of my mind, and it will reroute, rebuild, recover.
I walk into a forest, and I am overwhelmed by the beauty, the complexity, the balance of it. I look at plants and think, fuck, this thing is literally made of air. It stole the energy from the sun, grabbed some micros from the soil, and literally built itself out of thin air.
Every time in nature that I encounter something that seems destructive, I see new beginnings emerge from it, nothing wasted, everything re-entering the cycle. The forest fire that germinates the seeds. The flooded areas that have amphibians lay their eggs. The tree struck by lightning that becomes a home to birds and bats.The elaborate net of complex processes that attenuate each other, resilient to catastrophes, rebuilding. I watch the Chernobyl site recover into a jungle, and am in awe; a place which humans did their best to destroy, and nothing to rebuild, just retreated from… and that rebuilt itself. I see how life arounds me is in a constant process of adapting, shifting, making use of new opportunities, evading new threats.
I adore how even the most brutal and horrific thing has a logical explanation—not a kind one, but a true one. I look at this vast web that plays together like a clockwork more intricate than any we have ever made, but a clockwork that is never done, in which an item can be smashed, but then, the whole begins to shift, to change, and a new balance emerges. I laugh and weep at the beauty of it.*Life can be so cruel, so painful, but it is the reason we have sentience at all, feel anything at all. My very joy right now is the result of evolution, selected for its adaptive advantage.* Out of this dead planet, this broiling chaos, we got life, we got sentience, we got minds that can recognise themselves, and think about all this. Not given by a kindly God, or even an evil or uncaring one, but fought for, torn from death and against the chaos.
There is no God, not even an alien one. Noone wanted us here. Noone picked us. Life picked itself. It held together against entropy. Without breaking a single physical law, without magic, without cheating, we still managed to break the consequences and flaunt the result; I see it in every bird that, instead of falling like a rock, soars to the sky. I see it in humans who escape their gravity well. This overwhelming sense of survival, of defiance.
I’m a transhumanist, too. But for me, that does not feel like a contradiction to and opposition of natural life. It feels like its continuation. Something true to the very character of life, to resist, to become something better than there was, to forever change and adapt, to survive, to diversify, to thrive.
But for me, it is also entangled with the other lessons of life; that we are part of a complex whole that exists not for us, but for itself, our origin, and our home, a vast web of interdependence, carefully synchronised.
There are reasons for why nature is the way it is, and while it is not perfect, we need to think very, very carefully when we want to improve upon it as to why it is currently not. We have seen often that optimising for just one thing is nearly always short-sighted. We optimise for human nutrients and against pathogens, with perfect hygiene, and then find that we have starved our microbiome, and that is where we got our neurotransmitters, and destroyed our immune system. We kill the large predators, and then find the forest grazed to death. We produce substances impervious to biological decay, and rejoice, and then find that we have filled the planet with trash that nothing can eat, choking everything. We isolate and overdose micronutrients to get superhealth, and find that they suddenly make us sick without the whole foods they were in. We seal our roads to be perfectly smooth, and then get flooded as the water cannot drain. We fertilise our trees for perfect growth, and do not realise we killed their fungal partners in the process and destroyed their communication system. We protect the crops with pesticides, and find that the pollinators collapse. We discover and burn fossil fuels for abundant energy, and find we have destroyed the climate.
I do think nature can, and should, be improved upon. Improvement is at the very core of evolution, nature is never done, it is ever shifting, changing, reaching. It is not per se good at any one time, just the best it could do, and this best is created out of nothing but errors, the best errors that were selected. If you will, life is not right, but it is less wrong. So I do think it contains a wealth of knowledge and experience we do not immediately see, but that is crucially important, from all the improvements that already preceded us. There are so many apparent imperfections in nature that aren’t imperfect at all, but held in the pool for the unexpected moment where we will suddenly need them again. The blood disease that makes your blood less good at transporting oxygen… but makes you resistant against a severe epidemic. The stupid appendix that can kill you when infected… but is also the safe harbor for your microbiome that will recolonise and save you if its main home is destroyed. The queer offspring that will never reproduce… but that supports, without any competition, the children of their silblings, and so brings through children at times where the restricting factor isn’t birthing, but raising. The neurodivergent children who seems oddly terrible at so many things… but then startlingly brilliant at others.
Diversity is a massive strength of nature. It is the reason we do not all fall as one, that we can survive so much. The strange can become the utterly necessary in strange times. If you encounter something awful in nature over and over, it is generally tied to something good you have not yet figured out, as a consequence or condition or correlation, or has an unexpected use that is not yet apparent, but will be crucial when it does become apparent. It can be possible to take it out, and perfect nature. I love technology that actually does, that seemlessly and gently integrates into a system and makes it more stable, more diverse, that enables self-healing, that becomes a constructive part of the whole. I love using such things, I admire them, they seem the culmination of life as an engineer of its own world, of life not being created, but the thing that creates itself and transforms the world around it. I love things that seed new opportunities, stabilise what falters, enable something novel, heal. But when we view something at a glance, and notice something that seems silly, and eradicate it… we may also remove something else that was important. I think changes need to be done with knowledge, and great care, and observation, and consequences considered. Or what we create will not be better, but instead narrow, fragile, impoverished.
Great post. Thank you. Fertility doctor here and a supporter of ART (assisted reproductive technologies) in general. A few thoughts (although you touched on a few of these below, worth emphasizing in my opinion):
PGT-P has not been validated yet, which may take decades to do, if ever.
The science in terms of GWAS isn’t quite there yet IMHO—we don’t know all the genes that are important for most traits and we may be inadvertently selecting against some desirable traits, for example.
Comparing clinic success rates using CDC data is imperfect because of different patient characteristics, patient selection, and reporting bias.
IVF pregnancies carry a significantly higher complication rate (hypertensive disorders, preterm birth, placental abnormalities, etc.) compared to spontaneous pregnancies—unclear if this is due to IVF or underlying infertility diagnosis.
The risk-benefit calculus of PGT-P is going to be different for a couple who already needs to do IVF anyway to have a baby (low additional risk/cost) compared to a couple doing IVF just so that they can do PGT-P (higher additional risk/cost).
IVF is notoriously inefficient at present. Depending on female partner age, each cycle may yield only very few embryos making the benefit and utility of PGT-P limited. It may not be practical, safe, or financially feasible to do multiple cycles of IVF to increase the cohort of transferable embryos.
IVF is expensive and often not covered by insurance which creates access disparities. PGT-P would exacerbate these disparities in access. This is not unique to IVF I realize.
Slippery-slope eugenics and discrimination are real ethical concerns that would need to be mitigated.
In-vitro gametogenesis (IVG) would be a game-changer. The utility of PGT-P would be greatly enhanced if suddenly you had thousands of eggs and hundreds of embryos to select from.
I made my reply to your comment into a standalone post
I think you are not taking the eugenics and discrimination concerns seriously enough.
I think few people disagree with the idea of selecting the embryo with fewer avoidable diseases that would involve severe suffering; I do not think alzheimers makes humanity better. But there is a slippery slope towards a scenario where people select for sex, skin (and hair and eye) colour, not being queer, not being neurodivergent… and I do find that a dystopian scenario where we would lose something valuable that enriches our world. It makes me worry about and for the people who would opt out of being fixed, or having their children fixed (or rather, discarded early and replaced). I wish I didn’t have the genetic tendency towards disease that I unfortunately have, and that causes me a lot of suffering. But I assure you, if my parents had gotten to pick, they would also have made sure that I am not gay. Or tall. Or enby. Or have ADHD and autism. Things that were challenges, to be sure, but that I do not see as a net negative. I also know that both my parents found it disagreeable that I am highly gifted, and smarter than them; my father explicitly considers it a disease state and unpleasant complication, and would certainly have selected against it. I am very glad that he could not.
We also already have a scenario where it is incredibly difficult for a poor person to have proper upwards social mobility. If their competitors are literally superior from birth, prior to also getting their personal tutoring and private schools and trust funds and brain implants… at some point, no amount of hard work will make you competitive anymore, the different classes will become insurmountably separated and fixed. Not because the rich parents want this—they just want the best for their children, who wouldn’t. But if access to this tech is not fair, and its legitimate usage is not carefully reflected and set, the changes could be dystopian indeed.
This tech is transformative. I see how it could make humanity better, more just, more diverse, happier… but also how we could end up with an untouchable elite pushing for a narrow norm in which people like me, and many of my friends and loved ones, would have been sorted out for traits that we are glad we have.
Yes, this is actually a fairly common critique of embryo selection. One useful intuition pump I’ve found helps me think about it is the reversal test; should we make people sicker or more mentally distraught to enrich the world? It’s a bit odd to imagine that evolution somehow put us at the perfect equilibrium where any increment or decrement in mental illness rates would result in a worse society. It’s especially odd to think that since evolution doesn’t care at all about either of those things except insofar as they affect inclusive reproductive fitness.
Also, my experience so far just talking to people makes me think parents are going to have different priorities regarding the traits they select for.
I’m sorry about your parents. That sounds like an unpleasant experience.
I don’t think the thought experiment of “erasing” someone like you from existence is really a very good test of the morality of embryo selection. You are a person with decades of memories and ties to the community of people around you. In my view the morality of “erasing” you feels a lot different than making a choice between two embryos. Unless you believe in souls or something, an embryo is almost pure genetic potential. It has no internal organs, let alone a brain. Even the placenta hasn’t formed yet.
I would point out that all the dynamics you described are already true to some degree; there are some people born with such extreme genetic disadvantages (through a combination of parentage and bad luck) that there are some paths in life simply closed to them.
Of course embryo selection will increase variance, so your point is still well taken. I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about this and the obvious solution here is just to work very hard to make this technology cheaper and better. If we make enough progress on that front then we can just have the government subsidize the technology and give free access to anyone that wants it.
Inequality WILL still increase in the meantime, but there are some dynamics that I think help us here:
There is a ceiling on improvements through embryo selection or editing. That limit is determined by the amount of variance in the human gene pool. The ceiling is very high, but its existence makes it plausible that some people will get there first and others will catch up
To push beyond that ceiling you’ll either need to generate new genetic variants and test them out in people. This will require the cooperation of a very large number of people. To make good predictors today, you need literally a million people or more in a database. To a first approximation I would guess you’ll need that many if you want to test out a ton of new genetic variants and have enough statistical power to distinguish true positives from false positives.
The main way rich people can get an advantage in embryo selection is by harvesting more embryos or getting access to better predictors. The predictors are all made from huge databases, most of which are public. So it’s unlikely rich people could maintain a monopoly on the best predictors. Also, it’s hard for them to get a big advantage by selecting from a lot more embryos. You can of course pay to use a better clinic, and you can pay to go through more egg retrievals to harvest more embryos. But there are steeply diminishing returns; you’re still sampling from a normal distribution. The expected maximum value of N samples from a normal distribution is sqrt(ln(N)). That’s an INCREDIBLY slow growing function. If you go from 10 embryos to 1000, the benefit only increases by 70%.
Will rich people still have an advantage? Yes. But genetic enhancement does not have the same runaway “intelligence explosion” dynamics that AI does.
Not necessarily disagreeing with your main point (“discrimination concerns”), but I want to note that the status quo is currently that an alien god gets to choose those traits. Given the option to wrest (more) control away from natural selection, specific humans, or even humanity collectively, might indeed choose to exercise that control in even worse and more horrifying ways than evolution.
So “even more horrifying” is a way things might go, and it’s worth weighing that in a cost-benefit analysis. But I just want to note that, as a transhumanist, I regard the status quo, of ceding humanity’s collective heritage to an unthinking and unfeeling alien optimization process, to already be pretty horrifying.
Partially, I’m horrified at some of the actual outcomes it produces, but I also have a larger philosophical discomfort with trusting something as important as the process by which humans get created to such an alien process, in a universe that (aside from humans themselves) is so unthinking and uncaring and unfair.
I think I have a different perception of nature, and a much more positive one.
With every single life form I see, myself included… I look, and think, your parents survived until they brought children. And their parents survived until they brought children. And their ancestors. And their ancestors. All the way back, for 3 billion years, a single unbroken chain beginning in the first clump of life that hung on, that survived, that hung on, grew, diversified, learned, evolved, a chain of survivors longer than I can conceive. What lives in me now, what lives in all of us, went through this incredible forge, and survived. It has me mesmerised. I look at every strange, random thing, and think, this chose itself, it proved itself, it brought us here.
I look at my body and think, this is a freaking self-assembled nanomachine. I started with two cells, one in the literal nanorange, the other so small it can barely be seen, and that only because it already carried some building blocks for cannibalising later. And they self-assembled into an entire human being, every single step depending on the next, and enterprise that seems insane, and yet here I stand, and this body works. I breathe, I move; my heart cells began beating in the sixth week of pregnancy, and they have never for a single minute stopped since. I can consume practically any organic substance, and my body will disassemble it, and then reassemble it into more of me (how crazy is that?), while breaking down invaders and poisons in the process. I can be cut, and my body will automatically begin self-repairing. I can be invaded by hostile life forms, and have them eliminated. You can destroy a chunk of my brain, the very substrate of my mind, and it will reroute, rebuild, recover.
I walk into a forest, and I am overwhelmed by the beauty, the complexity, the balance of it. I look at plants and think, fuck, this thing is literally made of air. It stole the energy from the sun, grabbed some micros from the soil, and literally built itself out of thin air.
Every time in nature that I encounter something that seems destructive, I see new beginnings emerge from it, nothing wasted, everything re-entering the cycle. The forest fire that germinates the seeds. The flooded areas that have amphibians lay their eggs. The tree struck by lightning that becomes a home to birds and bats.The elaborate net of complex processes that attenuate each other, resilient to catastrophes, rebuilding. I watch the Chernobyl site recover into a jungle, and am in awe; a place which humans did their best to destroy, and nothing to rebuild, just retreated from… and that rebuilt itself. I see how life arounds me is in a constant process of adapting, shifting, making use of new opportunities, evading new threats.
I adore how even the most brutal and horrific thing has a logical explanation—not a kind one, but a true one. I look at this vast web that plays together like a clockwork more intricate than any we have ever made, but a clockwork that is never done, in which an item can be smashed, but then, the whole begins to shift, to change, and a new balance emerges. I laugh and weep at the beauty of it.*Life can be so cruel, so painful, but it is the reason we have sentience at all, feel anything at all. My very joy right now is the result of evolution, selected for its adaptive advantage.* Out of this dead planet, this broiling chaos, we got life, we got sentience, we got minds that can recognise themselves, and think about all this. Not given by a kindly God, or even an evil or uncaring one, but fought for, torn from death and against the chaos.
There is no God, not even an alien one. Noone wanted us here. Noone picked us. Life picked itself. It held together against entropy. Without breaking a single physical law, without magic, without cheating, we still managed to break the consequences and flaunt the result; I see it in every bird that, instead of falling like a rock, soars to the sky. I see it in humans who escape their gravity well. This overwhelming sense of survival, of defiance.
I’m a transhumanist, too. But for me, that does not feel like a contradiction to and opposition of natural life. It feels like its continuation. Something true to the very character of life, to resist, to become something better than there was, to forever change and adapt, to survive, to diversify, to thrive.
But for me, it is also entangled with the other lessons of life; that we are part of a complex whole that exists not for us, but for itself, our origin, and our home, a vast web of interdependence, carefully synchronised.
There are reasons for why nature is the way it is, and while it is not perfect, we need to think very, very carefully when we want to improve upon it as to why it is currently not. We have seen often that optimising for just one thing is nearly always short-sighted. We optimise for human nutrients and against pathogens, with perfect hygiene, and then find that we have starved our microbiome, and that is where we got our neurotransmitters, and destroyed our immune system. We kill the large predators, and then find the forest grazed to death. We produce substances impervious to biological decay, and rejoice, and then find that we have filled the planet with trash that nothing can eat, choking everything. We isolate and overdose micronutrients to get superhealth, and find that they suddenly make us sick without the whole foods they were in. We seal our roads to be perfectly smooth, and then get flooded as the water cannot drain. We fertilise our trees for perfect growth, and do not realise we killed their fungal partners in the process and destroyed their communication system. We protect the crops with pesticides, and find that the pollinators collapse. We discover and burn fossil fuels for abundant energy, and find we have destroyed the climate.
I do think nature can, and should, be improved upon. Improvement is at the very core of evolution, nature is never done, it is ever shifting, changing, reaching. It is not per se good at any one time, just the best it could do, and this best is created out of nothing but errors, the best errors that were selected. If you will, life is not right, but it is less wrong. So I do think it contains a wealth of knowledge and experience we do not immediately see, but that is crucially important, from all the improvements that already preceded us. There are so many apparent imperfections in nature that aren’t imperfect at all, but held in the pool for the unexpected moment where we will suddenly need them again. The blood disease that makes your blood less good at transporting oxygen… but makes you resistant against a severe epidemic. The stupid appendix that can kill you when infected… but is also the safe harbor for your microbiome that will recolonise and save you if its main home is destroyed. The queer offspring that will never reproduce… but that supports, without any competition, the children of their silblings, and so brings through children at times where the restricting factor isn’t birthing, but raising. The neurodivergent children who seems oddly terrible at so many things… but then startlingly brilliant at others.
Diversity is a massive strength of nature. It is the reason we do not all fall as one, that we can survive so much. The strange can become the utterly necessary in strange times. If you encounter something awful in nature over and over, it is generally tied to something good you have not yet figured out, as a consequence or condition or correlation, or has an unexpected use that is not yet apparent, but will be crucial when it does become apparent. It can be possible to take it out, and perfect nature. I love technology that actually does, that seemlessly and gently integrates into a system and makes it more stable, more diverse, that enables self-healing, that becomes a constructive part of the whole. I love using such things, I admire them, they seem the culmination of life as an engineer of its own world, of life not being created, but the thing that creates itself and transforms the world around it. I love things that seed new opportunities, stabilise what falters, enable something novel, heal. But when we view something at a glance, and notice something that seems silly, and eradicate it… we may also remove something else that was important. I think changes need to be done with knowledge, and great care, and observation, and consequences considered. Or what we create will not be better, but instead narrow, fragile, impoverished.