#823 - Dr Jonathan Anomaly - Is It Ethical To Hand-Pick Your Child’s Genes?

28:08I do think even from our last conversation where we spoke about the sort of difference between selecting between different offspring. So genetic selection and modifying the traits of the same offspring, which would be enhancements, like actually getting in and tinkering with genes, which were not at the stage to be able to do. It does, to me, feel like a fundamental difference between the two, given that you can't, you know, one of the things that you could be concerned about if you were enhancing an existing embryo by going in and tinkering with the genetic material is that that embryo didn't ask for them to have to be a taller than they were going to be, or for them to be smarter than they were going to be, or whatever.

28:57But when it comes to selecting between different embryos, it's like, well, the only way that you were going to be born was if you were selected and you are the way that you are. You are the way that you were always going to be. So I feel like this sort of first stage of embryo selection is going to encounter some challenges and then when we get to the next stage of genetic enhancement that's going to encounter new philosophical challenges, Marley. Yeah, I think that's right. In a couple of things things that you said first is consent. So typically in medical ethics, what's the foundational principle?

29:32It's informed consent. Your doctor doesn't have the right to act paternalistic toward you, to tell you you should select this embryo. Why? Because I like it. Or you should take this cancer treatment because it's going to cure you. You're allowed to say, look, I know it's more likely to cure me, but I'm a johova's witness, let's say. And I don't want it. You're allowed to do that. And so, you know, that, I think, is the right principle to act from. Informed consent should be the bedrock of medical ethics. It certainly is in legal ethics. But it really doesn't apply when it comes to children because no children has to be born, right?

30:10It's impossible. So, whether it's you just, you know, having sex with your wife and the sperm that happens to join, you know, you could have done it the night before the night after and it would have been a different sperm for lunch. There was a, sorry, that Brian class told me about the fact that, you know, when you're having sex, especially if you're trying to have children, that because of the way that your physiology moves, the difference between this thrust and the next thrust, it is the difference between a different child being born. And I was like, well, just in case any man wants suffering with enough performance anxiety already, the knowledge that the amount of duration that they last for during sex is going to be massively, It's going to completely change our entire future based on whether it's now or is it now or is it now?

30:53Exactly. Yeah, so kids kids never consent to being born, but you might ask yourself this is a kind of philosophical principle um, you know, and it has to do with hypothetical consent like if you were to consent to something or if some being could It would be something like what are the traits that It would consent to having if it had a choice now it'll it never will in the case of a child being born but it would probably be things like generally having a healthy immune system, being reasonably bright, not necessarily a genius, because those are the kind of all -purpose goods that lead to a variety of different good lives.

31:31There's so many different ways in which you could have a good life, but the last thing it would select in favor of is severe disability, or extremely low intelligence or something like that, or poor self -control. And so it's obvious like the things that people would select for in general, if they were the ones doing the select aim, you know, if they were choosing their parents. But they can't. And so I think, you know, as long as your life is reasonably worth living, which is almost all lies, right? There are very few cases to the contrary. You should be happy with your life. And parents, you know, I would trust parents to do this rather than, I don't know, the government or something like that.

32:07Now, to your other point though, about why do we have this treatment enhancement distinction? You sort of said, yeah, I can't kind of shake the idea that maybe it is a worthwhile distinction. I do think it's some context it is. So think about socialized healthcare. To some extent, we all live in a system of socialized healthcare because we have insurance pools. And as soon as we're in insurance pool, we're forced to share the cost and benefits of one another's choices. And in England, it's just one giant forced insurance pool, right? And in cases like this, you know, you have to allocate scarce resources.

32:39And what we wouldn't want, you know, we want the government to say, look, if you're If you're doing IVF, maybe we should also subsidize the ability to select against severe disease. It's totally uncontroversial, right? Or at least, yeah, I think for most people, you'd want to prioritize that, but you wouldn't want to have subsidies for like aesthetic enhancements, where it's like all you're doing is you're spending state resources, meaning my tax money to, I don't know, give your kid a slight advantage, which actually may have a slight negative effect on everyone else because if your kid is taller than everyone else, that means mine is relatively shorter.

33:14And so actually in the allocation of scarce resources where we're going to kind of forced a situation of forced allocation where we're sharing each other's resources, in those situations, I think it's worth prioritizing treatment of existing disease or prevention of disease over, let's say, aesthetic enhancement. It would alleviate potential future burden. Exactly. A burden on everyone in that case, right? Talk to me about this sort of gene erosion and this increasing mutation load. This I read a very spicy, short article taken from something John Tubi wrote a while ago and I kind of can't stop seeing it now.

33:58That's right. Yeah, I briefly mentioned on your show last time actually about a year and a half ago. And Louise Perry is now talking about it too. So I see that as a victory for not so much enhancement as science. I think this is something everyone should know about It's something Darwin wrote about in 1871 in the descent of man, although indirectly because the word gene didn't even exist back then But the idea is something like this You know, we have in nature a set of forces that You know purify the population not in the kind of Nazi sense of purification not racial purification, but Purification in the sense that, you know, evolutionary biology works like this.

34:40You know, we've got a set of people. They have children, they mix their genes, they're a bunch of random mutations that accumulate in your lifetime. You know, the most obvious cases of those are like freckles on your skin. You know, that's a mutation from the sun. But here we're talking about mutations that you pass on to your children. Most of those mutations are going to be bad. They just have to be, right? By definition, they're either neutral or bad. and then rarely those mutations are good and lead to some new innovation at a genetic level. Well, when we have a kind of civilization with advanced healthcare and nursing homes for the elderly and so on, but we're really talking about is healthcare for children.

35:19If you have diseases, when you're a kid, or during your reproductive years, that we can now treat. So I mentioned poor eyesight that we can treat with glasses or lasex surgery, childhood cancers that we can often treat with chemotherapy. There's a whole range of diseases that we can treat now by adjusting the environment to make it easier for you to survive and reproduce, or by actually just giving you medical care if you can't afford it. Those are going to imply almost by definition that we're going to be passing along genes and traits that are unfavorable from the standpoint of genetic fitness or from the standpoint of human welfare.

35:59And again, Darwin understood it in the point in terms of just sort of human welfare, but we can put it in terms of genetic fitness as well. So we're almost certainly accumulating deleterious mutations in civilized societies and passing those along. Those are going to be accumulating. Now, I think what's interesting about this is I actually want to give a metaphor which Louise Perry introduced when I was doing an interview with her last year. and I should have put this in the first edition of my book, I did put it in the second edition, thanks to you and her. And the metaphor is something a lot of people have heard of.

36:31It's Chester Tins fence. So GK Chester 10 is a famous British conservative, religious conservative, and just a brilliant writer. And the metaphor of Chester Tins fence is something like this. In the context of social reform, many of the kind of socialists of the early 20th century, they were, There are little to eager to tear down existing structures, you know, social norms, legal institutions and so on Without thinking about why those things were there to begin with and what is gonna replace them? And I think this is just obviously a great metaphor for a lot of things And so when you think about Chester Tins fence in the context of genetics, you might think We should be cautious before we forget about gene editing.

37:14That's obvious. We should be cautious there But even with embryos selection or I guess even mate selection maybe we should be cautious with what we do You know before we I don't know radically influence the genetics of our children And I think that's a that's a really good point But what I want to bring up now is A term I guess I guess I coined it, but it's really Chesterton's idea I call it Chesterton's post and it's from an earlier essay in 1908 that he wrote And actually, let me see if I can quote it. Yeah, I do have it here from my book. So Chesterton says in 1908, conservatism is based on the idea that if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are.

37:58But you do not. If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change. And again, think about this mutation accumulation thing here. Evolution doesn't stop. If you leave a white post alone, it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white, you must always be painting it over and over again. Broadly, he says, if you want the old white post, you must have a new white post. And let me extend the metaphor to an old Greek metaphor of a boat where, you know, everyone who owns a boat, I certainly don't have the money to own a boat, but we all know that you have to constantly maintain it because the saltwater erodes it.

38:34So you're changing planks one at a time, so to speak, right? And at some point, it's basically a new boat, but you still call it your boat. And the metaphor here is conservatives of which GK Chesterton is a conservative. They often make the mistake that if you wanna stay where you are now, you can just kinda take a snapshot and freeze everything. But in fact, entropy is this universal force that dissolves boats in the water, that dissolves molecules in the universe and that degrades our genome over time. And so I've actually argued that just Chester 10, who is a vehement opponent of eugenics, but by which he met state -sponsored coercive eugenics, Chester 10 himself should probably endorse voluntary eugenics or genetic enhancement.

39:25Because if you like where we are now, well, you probably want to do one of two things. You either want to select in favor of a low disease burden and low genetic load or reintroduce the really harsh mistress that is purifying selection. That is go back to the middle ages, stop taking your antibiotics and vaccines and just allow people basically to have a huge number of kids most of whom died before reproductive age. So I actually think that this is an essay everyone should read. It's called the the race between germline gene editing and genetic meltdown. And we don't necessarily need gene editing, but we could use embryos selection to minimize overall disease burden and therefore stay where we are now.

40:12That's super interesting. I hadn't thought I've learned about this sort of gene erosion thing. the slow dwindling toward us all becoming aliens with big heads and skinny bodies. But I didn't consider that a counter -vailing force would just be, even without the enhancement, just straight up. Okay, well, if we continue to select a disproportionately optimal set of embryos across the board, and if that becomes more democratized, more democratized. It's kind of interesting. I had Malcolm Collins on the show last year, really interesting, a unique guy, and the fact that he's at the forefront of talking about birth rate decline is pretty cool.

41:01One of the things I've been considering is kind of the intersection of declining birth rates with this soon -to -come -on -line reproductive technology, especially given that some of the groups that have the highest birth rates are religious groups, for whom I imagine genetic selection because of IVG and the potential for you having unused embryos left over at the end of this reproductive span for your wife, that they're not going to do that. So it's the groups that are reproducing more highly at the moment are going to be the ones that are potentially unable to use this technology or unwilling because of some ethical consideration that they have as part of the sort of religion.

41:44Have you considered all of these different things together? Yeah. And let me go back to one of those feeds into your previous point. Some people will be unable to use this. I actually think like one solution to this is going to be government subsidizing IVF. China and Israel are already doing this to boost their birth rate. And I think it's actually a decent idea because if you're older, um, it is going to be harder to reproduce. and so if you have crashing birth rates, one way to boost it a bit is to subsidize IVF, but once you do that, it's a short step between selecting among those embryos, because when you do IVF, you have multiple embryos, you're either going to select at random or you're going to select the one with the better genetic profile according to you and not according to the government, hopefully.

42:31And generally, that's going to be the one with the lower disease burden and so on. So actually, think there's two things that are going to follow from this initial unequal access. Governments will see IVF and then eventually companies that do genetic selection on top of IVF as a thing to promote not only to prevent big inequalities but also to promote birth rates. And so I see this as incredibly optimistic actually. I think it'll start in China and Israel and it'll go from there to other parts of the world. Now you mentioned religious groups that are unable or unwilling. So yeah, again, government subsidies might help for this for IVF or insurance subsidies.

43:11I know Tesla, you know, right down the street from us is of course Tesla and Elon Musk companies and Elon of course is used IVF and Emberia selection. Tesla offers IVF and frozen eggs and that sort of thing. And I think this is, you know, going to be more and more common. Now, with religious groups, I do worry that some are going to have a prohibition against this and their kids, not in the first generation, but over two or three or ten generations, could suffer serious genetic disadvantages because of the choices their parents made. Some of them are going to adapt and endorse using IVF and embryos selection and so on.

43:49Others won't. But I don't endorse the government coming in and forcing them to do it. I think the rest of the opposite of forced sterilization is forced selection reproducing forced using of it Yeah, exactly. I don't think governments are especially competent to do that But I will say one more thing And this goes to the point of what you mentioned with Deleterious mutations accumulating in the absence of embryos selection That is a fact so if we want to stay where we are now and simply not deteriorate here's an example where religious groups should endorse and actually use embryos selection. So in Islam, for a long, long time, maybe a thousand years, it's been common to engage in cousin marriage.

44:31And in fact, that is the norm around the world, but especially in Islam, and it's not in Europe for one really interesting reason. And there's a paper on this actually. It's called intensive kinship connect intensive kinship selection the Catholic Church and global psychological variation. That's the name of the paper This is from 2019 and what it argued is that the Catholic Church had prohibitions on first and even second Cousin marriage for more than a thousand years and this actually had an effect on the European population Not only did they have lower disease burdens, but they were selected for various kinds of norms and you see this in every European society including their offsuits like Canada, Australia, the United States, higher trust, more of a sense of an impersonal set of fairness rules and less corruption in the sense of favoring your kin over non -kin.

45:28And these authors have argued that that is actually partly result of an inadvertent ban on cousin marriage by the Catholic Church. Now I don't know if this is true. These are two of the best scholars in the world, Joseph Henrich at Harvard and Jonathan Schultz, who's an economist and statistician at George Mason. This has been replicated by a few teams, but this is wild. So when you think about what what banning cousin marriage can do just doing that right that can have tremendous genetic Effects and in the Middle East I'll just put some meat on this bone I actually think the people that are gonna take up embryo selection first as it becomes more out in the open and more popular our Arabs in the Middle East Bangladesh's and Africans in East Africa.

46:17Why because they engage in more cousin marriage and as you know I mean, as everybody knows, right? European kings who were doing sibling and cousin marriage ended up with all kinds of crazy deformities, low cognitive ability. I mean, it toppled entire regimes, right? And what you have in the Middle East is the expression of rare alleles where if both parents have them, you have this devastating disease, you get cognitive impairments and you get all kinds of deformities, including heart disease and all of these things at much higher rates in those places that engage in cousin marriage than those that don't.

46:53And this is a religious practice. This is within Islam or certain branches of it. So I actually think interestingly, the people who should use genetic selection the most are going to be religious groups and some of them will and others won't and they're going to put their kids at all kinds of disadvantages. That is so fascinating. The fact that you have certain religious groups which have got smaller genetic pools, how would you refer to that? less genetic variation? Yeah, exactly. And that includes my pool. I mean, I'm half Ashkenazi Jew and Ashkenazis were down to a tiny bottleneck of only a few hundred people in the Middle Ages.

47:31And then they expanded quite a bit in medieval Europe. And this is why Ashkenazis have a big disease burden, right? This is why every Ashkenazi, including the most extreme religious person, the kind of crazy orthodox people you see in Brooklyn or Israel, they all get the TASAX test before they go on a first date. This is straight up eugenics and it's straight up genetic selection. They know they're at risk of these things. And so it's better to marry someone who doesn't have that deleterious allele. So actually that's one point. Does that mean that as a Ashkenazi Jew who does have that allele, it's super difficult for you to date?

48:11Yeah, you have to find someone who doesn't, etc. So yeah, you have to worry about it being expressed if you're both carriers. If you're not, it's not a problem. Is if the mating crisis wasn't hard enough as it is, it cut out 50 % of the... So, I mean, that's so interesting. You've got this sort of small genetic pool. And from that, one of the ways that these religious groups could combat the downstream extreme effects is to offset the entropy, offset that sort of deleterious nature by going in and insure, okay, we're okay here, we're okay there. And then after a period of time, maybe that gets you to such a robust genetic standpoint.

48:52Yeah, what is some of the other reasons to be worried about genetic selection? What else have you got concerns about? Let's see, I mean, look, one of the reasons I wrote a book about this long before I was involved, kind of in the industry, so to speak, is I studied economics and philosophy, and so I think in terms of what are the situations in which individually rational choices, these micro -level choices we make every day can sum up to an overall pattern that's either better than our individual choice or much worse from a social standpoint. So the better case is the Adam Smith case about trade, right?

49:34So each of us, the butcher, the brewer, and the baker is just trying to go to good deal, right? The end result is lower prices, higher quality products. That's the economic case for free trade, that doesn't mean infinitely free trade, but other things equal better off to leave people free to own their own property, specialize in what they're good at, and then exchange with one another on mutually agreeable terms. The overall social product is better for everyone, right? We end up with these rich societies. And of course, you see that right? It starts in Britain and the Industrial Revolution. It spreads from there and every society that has private property and market exposure ends up much richer than it was.

50:11So that's like the classic economic case where it's positive sum. But economists often focus on these negative sum games where it's like, yeah, I buy gas or let's say I buy energy from a coal company that coal company produces energy in a way that's really dirty. They're putting all kinds of pollution in the atmosphere. Let's take the case of China, for example. It could contribute to global warming, even if you're not worried about global warming. It's a fact. It produces pollution. That is bad for your lungs. It can reduce lifespan, increase cancer. So those are cases where economists sort of study them because it's just kind of an intellectual puzzle.

50:49It's fun to try to solve them. what's producing this overall pattern, and then how can we incentivize people to act in ways that would be better for everyone rather than worse. It could be attacks on pollution, it could be some kind of control on how people produce energy, et cetera. And then I thought, what is the ultimate collective action problem across societies, across countries, and across generations, and genetic selection? What will happen when everyone has the ability to select embryos or edit those embryos eventually? Is it going to be collectively a good thing or a bad thing? And so I wrote a book about this and I thought, you know, each chapter was on a different topic, like cognitive enhancement, aesthetic enhancement, immuno enhancement, etc.

51:35And then moral enhancement, which I think is the most interesting one. Maybe we can talk about it, but you know, basically, I I think that the risk is there are some arms races that can be collectively self -defeating. Again, take a case like male height. If we each selected an embryo for the tallest possible boy, we ignored everything else. We just get tall boys. Well, now you've got a situation where populations are taller, but there's no relative advantage if everyone else is equally tall. And at some point, there actually may be health risks to being really tall, like cardiac disorders and so on.

52:11right? If you look at NBA players, these are not the longest lived people, right? They live shorter lives and worse lives in in old age than gymnasts too. Why? Because there's a greater burden on their on their joints, on their heart, etc. And so there's actually benefits to being shorter, not taller. So are we going to have this collectively self -defeating arms race? I think just on that point, a couple of interesting pieces of insight, at least when it comes to mate selection, It seems like the height differential is based at least in part. It's anchored to the height of the woman, not just the relative height of other men around them.

52:46So on average, women say they want a partner that's 21 centimeters taller than they are. Now, if we get to the stage where the parents of women, of females, start to increase their height, yes, then we have a true arms race on our hands. And also, I know that there's some really interesting data around whatever it is, like only three times in history, the shorter presidential candidate has won. That definitely are some big advantages to hide. But when you kind of really take the reins off, I would guess that that's going to be self -limiting before we get to a physiological kind of problem. Exactly.

53:25And I like the word that you self -limiting. I would say self -equilibrating just is a more technical game -theoretic term, but it's the same thing. First of all, men tend to prefer short women, not tall women. And vice versa. So it's not clear you're going to get. Imagine if we end up with this fee -five foe from fucking group of guys in a bunch of four for the 11 women. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's right. But yeah, I mean, at the, you know, the serious point is like this arm race is probably self -equalibrating also because even if you didn't have that, you know, short women tall men and they cancel each other out, So when parents are selecting an embryo, let's say, or whatever, you know, a sperm reg, as we said at the sperm reg bank, not that everyone's doing that, that's the minority, of course.

54:10But the ones that are doing that, you know, they're thinking about what makes for a good life. And they're gonna know that being extremely tall, like way outside of the mean, is gonna have these health effects. So it's gonna be self -equalibrating. There's, you know, people know that above, say, six, four, six, five, there's not a big advantage in terms of attractiveness. unless you want to be just the NBA. Exactly, because - Yeah, unless you just want that. Yeah. Interesting bit of basketball trivia for you. For every inch in height that you grow, it doubles the chance of you being in the NBA.

54:41And that's just, that keeps going. So six one, twice as likely as six, six two, twice as likely as six one, it goes all the way up. And less likely to be a gymnast, right? I'm sure it's the same. I would imagine you snap yourself in half. What about a sex ratio imbalance? You know, this is maybe the most basic, I would guess, of genetic selection. Okay, well, we can pick between boys and girls. We don't know what sort of a boy, we don't know what sort of a girl, but we can pick the sex that we want our child to be. Have you looked at any data, do humans, modern humans just have some discriminatory preference for boys over girls?

55:19Yeah, I mean, I think we touched on this a little last time. I mean, I have a hunch that, actually don't have evidence for this directly, but I have a hunch that women will be slightly preferred in Advanced or rich societies and men preferred in poor ones. Why? Because the sheer value of just muscle mass, right? That sort of thing or that the tiny advantage that men have in spatial reasoning just on average That's going to be really important when you're working with your hands and tools and in poorer societies in richer societies the ability to sit still. You know, this is why like guys, I hated school, you know, and a lot of guys have ADHD, which at the extremes, that's probably a real disease, but I think some of it's a bit fake, you know, like boys are diagnosed with it more because boys are programmed more to be fidgety, right?

56:05To use their hands and run around and compete. And so I think actually in the modern environment, women are a safer bet, and there may be a slight preference for them. I don't know, I don't think there's definitive evidence yet, But again, I do think there are some worries that this could be out of hand a bit in the far future However self -equal liberation again because if the current population is trending toward females Well, hell man. My son is gonna have a pretty good pretty good odds Exactly so you've talked about it in the context of like dating apps and this sort of thing but like Yeah, I mean in terms of the overall population big benefits to being a global sex ratio in balance.

56:43All right So moral enhancement, certainly one of the things that most people probably wouldn't be thinking about when it comes to Emberia selection. Oh, maybe maybe you can select for height. Maybe would people choose sort of eye color or because you blue -eyed boy would be pretty or something. Maybe they can but Morality, I think we sort of I don't know where we think it comes from. It's sort of born out of the things that we learn the culture we're in our socialization our values our virtues what does genetics have to say about morality and moral enhancing? Yeah, yeah. Clearly a lot of our values come from our culture.

57:21Obviously, you know, religious cultures tend to be in particular Christianity, Islam, their secular versions of morality. I mean, actually the woke left is, you know, it's often called a religion. It is a set of moral rules, you know, whether you like it or not, you know, it's got a it's got a strict set of rules and so on. So we don't seem to be able to escape either religion in some sense and certainly not morality. And the two are often tied together for good reason. Darwin speculated, and I think he's right, that the two co -evolved to get us to solve collective action problems, right? We're of course naturally a little bit selfish, maybe a lot selfish.

57:57And then through kin selection, we tend to favor our close relatives. That's true in general. But then what do we do when we're in groups of 100, 200 in a tribal scenario? There are always incentives to favor ourselves and our small group, our family over the overall group, let alone a group of 10 ,000 or 300 million in the modern United States. How do we get people to cooperate? And some of that is kind of social technology, called morality or social norms, which embody various kinds of practices and information. You know, we line up in front of a bus and that makes it better for all of us. You know, this time I could do better if I, you know, clobber the old lady and get to the front, right?

58:35But overall, if we have norms that say respect older people and respect the line, we're all going to sort of have a way to coordinate our actions and achieve mutually beneficial goals. That's what morality is. But a big part of it, of course, is you can't get people to behave according to social norms unless they're inclined to do so. This is why psychopaths will follow the norms when people are watching and they won't do it when they're not watching. The more you are in the direction, this is not a binary thing. You either are a psychopath or you're not. You have dark triad traits or you don't.

59:08These are all degrees to which we have propensities like this and as with everything else, there's a big genetic influence on it. So it's both in terms of influencing our overall like affective empathy, which is to say like when we see someone in trouble, are we inclined to want to help them? Just naturally, that's affective empathy. Some of us are more inclined than others toward that, but also personality traits. So for example, the big five, if you are higher in openness and in conscientiousness, which I think are generally good things, you tend to be a team player more and you tend to pay attention to other people's needs and respond appropriately.

59:49And so in terms of moral enhancement, what would you do? It would be something like increasing affective empathy or conscientiousness or whatever. Now, I don't think you should infinitely do this. And one of the reasons I wrote this book is I was annoyed by one of my colleagues back when I was in academic and actually wrote with this colleague. I like him a lot. His name is Julian Savilescu. He's head of the Center for practical ethics at Oxford. And he wrote a book called Unfit for the Future. And he was really worried about these collective action problems on a global scale, like climate change, nuclear war.

1:00:22Toby Ord has written this book, The Pressopist on this as well. I love it. It's one of my top five books ever. Yeah, it's a good book. But one of the ways that they say we should respond to this is let's just make people nicer and then look to operate more and we'll have fewer existential risks. and my response to this, thinking in game theoretic terms is, first of all, if a lot of people are making their kids just unconditional cooperators, they're going to be some that see either they're selecting intentionally or they're not, and their kids are more selfish than average, they're going to take advantage of those kids.

1:00:56And in game theory, as in biology, we have these terms, you don't want to be an unconditional cooperator, you want to be a reciprocal altruist or a conditional cooperator. And in fact by doing that you not only make the world better for yourself because when you find a kind of parasitic kind of personality You know you stay away from them right the actual psychopath shun them right and when you find someone who's nice and cooperative You cooperate with them and a lot of people are in between that And so what you really want to do is be disposed on the one hand to meet out severe punishments even at a personal cost to yourself To the psychopathic types But extend actually quite a bit of decency to normal types and really even amp up crop.

1:01:39Oh, so you kind of want the wrong term moral flexibility is not the right thing, but you want to range within which you can understand you want to be able to be firm and be gentle and the more firm and the more gentle that you can be probably the better. Exactly. And in fact, I don't want to get into the details of game theory, but when you do these, They're called prisoners dilemma tournaments and you can iterate at many times over or public goods games You know, we couldn't get into that but maybe it'll bore your audience. I don't know Either way what you find in those games is The best outcome is be is to cooperate with people when you identify them and amp up cooperation Right to get active enjoyment in finding the cooperators You know kind of like what we do in team sports when you find someone who's willing to pass even when they might have taken credit for the goal, but you had a slightly better odds or ability to get the goal.

1:02:32And the people are willing to do that. We really enjoy being around them for a good reason. They make it better for the team, but you want to also be the kind of person who will actually be willing to lose a game to punish that asshole who simply won't pass. I like to use this as a metaphor. Think of the World Cup in it was circa 2010, when Germany just absolutely destroyed Brazil in the World Cup 7 to 1. It should have been like 12 to nothing. It almost was, but in the last minute there was a pity goal for Brazil. And it was because these individual Brazilian players were probably better than the individual Germans, but they were just show -offs.

1:03:11And the Germans were engaged in this like precision passing. I'm going to sacrifice a bit of my welfare and a bit of camera time so that I can make sure my team wants and they destroyed them. And in fact, E .O. Wilson has this great, you know, the great evolutionary biologist recently passed away. He has a really great line, which is when we think about groups of people, selfishness actually wins within a group, but groups of selfish people lose to groups of altruistic people. And so when we're thinking about, when we're thinking about moral enhancement, we should think about evolutionary psychology, which I know you know a lot about and think a lot about and think about what what kinds of problems did our moral conscience and our moral practices evolved to solve.

1:03:57And that is collective action problems where their individual benefits to defecting from this overall group goal. But there are big benefits over time. If you can program yourself to kind of cooperate, whether it's hunting, whether it's warfare, whether it's sports, in accordance with those group goals. And how do we do that? We find the cooperators and And we have these emotions that positively respond to cooperators and not only negatively treat the non -cooperators, but give us joy in fucking killing those people, right? Finding them and just slaughtering them. And so we have this weird set of dispositions where it's called moralistic aggression, actually.

1:04:38And moralistic aggression is a good thing because it leads to cooperative outcomes being more likely to materialize. Yes. Positive reinforcement for the good things, negative reinforcement for the bad things. Exactly. Didn't I learn from you that IQ also plays a role in cooperation, collaboration, intergroup stuff? Yeah, it's interesting. I actually don't think it's IQ per se, but what we found, my colleague, Garrett Jones, has done a lot of tests, actually, President of the LUMAS test. So he gets his groups of his students to play in these games where there are individual benefits to To um going your own way, but but collective benefits to cooperating with the group and what he found is that again corrected for socioeconomic status smarter people tend to be more cooperative in these kinds of collective action problems or prisoners of Emma games now I think it's not intelligence per se I could be wrong about this and it's certainly not that that smarter people are nicer What I think is going on is that, and he does too, smarter people tend out longer time horizons, and so they see the advantage over long periods of time of taking the decision now to give up some benefits in the short term in order to foster group benefits in the long term.

1:06:03And this is again, probably why smarter people tend to stay out of prison more. It's because they tend to, even if they're actually not very good people, they tend to see the individual benefits of doing the thing that's socially beneficial. It has a positive, extra knowledge. So great. So, sort of selfishness is short -sightedness in many ways. In many ways. Yeah, not exclusively, but it's this sort of one of the ways that you can arrive at selfishness is by being short -sighted. Maybe that would be better to say. And if you're not able to accurately predict the long, long -term repercussions of you fucking this person over or you saying that particular thing, or maybe it doesn't even appear in your mind.

1:06:45You know, we look at a lot of people and I think this is one of the problems with the world being run by at least moderately well -educated people that have got, you probably IQs at standard or above. The problem of that is that they often look to the behavior of people who maybe don't have that same sort of computing power and assumed that, well, the only way that you could elect to go and rob this particular store or go and do this particular sort of reprehensible thing is if you fully understand he knew, they knew that what was gonna happen, he knew what he was doing. It's like, did he? Did he?

1:07:25Like if this is someone that's in the bottom, you know, 10 % of IQ distribution or whatever, or this is someone that's got some unbelievable psychopathic pathology or whatever, I'm not saying that, you know, these are good people. or they deserve to be let off the hook or whatever, but I think that it gives a more nuanced explanation of why people do the things that they do. And using your theory of mind and saying, what situation would I need to be in in order for me to do that, doesn't take into account. And this is the problem with fucking blanks' litus because it does flatten that playing field.

1:08:00Yeah, good. Yeah, let me put a couple of coins together there. I like that. But first of all, yeah, I mean morality is complicated. It's a set of norms where we fear violating those norms because we just fear being punished selfishly. But also it's a set of moral dispositions where most of us enjoy treating other people with kindness. You don't just help the person who's in a wheelchair through the door when other people are looking. You do it even when no one's looking. And that's of course you deserve more moral credit when you do that. But the reality is like moral behavior is super complicated.

1:08:35It's a mixture of selfishness and long -term thinking and genuine altruism. And it's hard to detect what's what in a particular case. But the smarter person with a good theory of mind who's not necessarily consciously thinking about it, but kind of instinctively understands their benefits to long -term cooperation. They tend to follow these mutually beneficial rules. And therefore, there are these like positive externalities. In fact, going back to Garrett Jones, he and I have a paper on this called Cognitive Enhancement and Network Effects. How individual traits influence social welfare, and we gave an argument, this is back in 2020, for why voluntary embryo selection for IQ would actually be a pro -social thing.

1:09:17Not just because it's making people nicer, it's probably not. You should have other reasons to make them nicer maybe. But because it has these effects, and it also produces, you know, smarter people produce more wealth in the world, more innovations, et cetera. And so what does that do? It enables us to create a society where we're so wealthy, we don't have to worry about, should I commit crime or not? You can just get a job and you're fine. Like you can actually, you know, wealthier societies can afford to treat strangers with kindness rather than hostility because you're not constantly worried about how to put a meal on the table or something.

1:09:53So it's interesting, these things interact, moral behavior and intelligence in ways that are really kind of counterintuitive to be honest. But the ability to work out the repercussions of your actions to, you know, again, it's, I understand why many people that are maybe first being introduced to this, people who don't like the idea of individual differences from genetic factors or group differences to genetic factors can understand why it feels so lucky every time that you say either were genetic or genetics. I've just got this like Pavlovian fucking Ick response to it, which I still, after thinking about this for, you know, 18 months, I still haven't really actually been able to get myself past but you know, maybe shows just how ingrained that is, you know, eugenics and sort of the horrors of Nazi Germany and that period just did so much to really cloud any discussion that even veers in the remote sort of region of that direction.

1:10:52But if you were to say to someone, do you think it would be better for there to be less crime in future because the very people that many of the, I guess, skeptics or critics of genetic enhancement people from the left, well, one of the reasons that you're trying to do this at least originally was that you wanted to raise up the working class. You wanted to improve the situations of poverty, of strife and struggle for the sort of normal working man, the proletariat. And you go, Okay, well, this is something that can be quite, it can be achieved. But if you assume, if your worldview is that the only reason that you get different outcomes is because of different opportunities, because of exclusively structural, systemic, societal factors, this is not something, this is not an opportunity to, that presents itself.

1:11:42And I think we both said last time that a lot of the people who do have this sort of blank slate view of humans are going to be faced with a very difficult, like literally an unlimited conveyor belt of difficult decisions. First off, what are you going to do with your child? If this technology is on the table and you can afford it and your right -leaning colleague at work has decided that they're going to get it because they don't have the same egg factor that you and your particular group do, then, okay, well, that's fine, but your children are maybe going to have a lesser robust immune system or they're maybe going to need glasses at five years old or maybe the risk for autism's higher or maybe they're going to be into more externalizing behavior and they're more likely to go to jail.

1:12:23That doesn't seem very good. So, okay, so put your money where your mouth is personally. Then when it comes to what happens more socially too, you think, well, if we can show that this kind of intervention, that these kinds of genetic selections actually do make for less crime, actually do make for this, you go, where's that effect coming from? Because it's still the same racist this bigoted transphobic homophobic environment, for the first time ever, we're actually able to manipulate the genetic environment, not just the post -woom environment, or we're able to select before the, before the womb.

1:12:58Because up until now, the only, if you deny the genetic reality, the only acceptable explanation was environment, because that's the only thing that ever sort of oscillates. Whereas now we actually can get in there, And you know, who knows? Maybe there is a country. Maybe in 50 years, we look back and we go, wow, China, the crime rates declined by 50 % over and they didn't do what the guy in El Salvador did. And we have the opportunity to do that. It's fascinating. You know, by the way, that there is a very naughty paper written about those in the 1990s and the idea behind this paper was an economist, was that the abortion ban in certain American states in the 1970s being lifted because of Roe v.

1:13:48Wade resulted in a much lower crime rate in the 1990s. And the way that happened is children, unwanted children, who worked born, but otherwise would have been forced to be born because now there was the opportunity for abortion actually ended up resulting in fewer of those children and therefore less crime. And the way that they tested that hypothesis is look at the states in which abortion was legal before Roe v Wade versus those in which it was illegal. And what you see is dropping crime rates 20 years later in the states in which it was illegal and became legal. Should that would be that would be more of an environmental insight than a genetic one unless people that get abortions happen to have some particular genetic predisposition that can get passed on to their kids.

1:14:41It could be either or both. And of course, the kind of people who wandered an abortion but couldn't afford to go to another state to do it might be a certain kind of person or unwilling to do it or whatever. I don't want to weigh in on that. I'm just saying that argument has been made. It's an interesting way. It was in the book Freakinomics as well. So it's a very mainstream economist who did it named Stephen Levit. But in terms of the point that you made on blank slatism and the kind of cognitive dissonance that elites have, well, there's this phrase, you know, blank slatists in the streets, hereditary and between the sheets.

1:15:17And, you know, we all see this. I was in academia where, you know, maybe I don't care that much about IQ, although we're talking about it right now. I mean, I'm just telling you, putting my cards on the table, I don't want to be an IQ maximizer for my own kids. I know some people who would be. I care more about personality traits and health, even though I think IQ matters a bit. But my colleagues who had denounced me for even talking about IQ, I mean, they're the ultimate IQ realists, again, because they're obsessed with it and selecting their spouse and thinking about, I want the smartest grad students, I want to appear to be smart and I want to please my colleagues.

1:15:54So they have a lot of cognitive dissonance. In fact, blank slatism has always been selective. They don't really believe it in their private lives, which is why I said, blanks latest in the streets are redditarian between the sheets, but they also don't even fully apply this consistently. So a very famous and widely read book is Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. And he argued in this book, the point of this book is actually pretty interesting in many ways, showing like history is partly determined by what diseases happen to be near your tribe at the time. or did climate change happen really dramatically in Iceland at this time?

1:16:32And that's gonna have a facts on who lives and who dies, who succeeds. That's all true. But he says he's so obsessed with being a blank slaydist and showing like, it's all just arbitrary. Like, why is England richer than whatever, Somalia or something? And so he says on page 22, it's always struck me that the New Guineans that I work with are on average much smarter than than Europeans and Americans. So he throws that in there like as if we're supposed to just go away. You're a blank slate is but you're actively saying this group that has Stone Age technologies obviously smarter than brands or Americans or whatever.

1:17:08It's like okay I get it. This is this is a political game you're playing. You're not even a blank slate is you're a selective blank slate is. So again this is stuff that we inherited from the war. I understand why we inherited it. We inherited it because there were claims made, especially by Germans, look, we're racially superior to other groups. This is a justification for, you know, colonialism, hegemonia and war, and so what happened is this overreaction, or we're supposed to think there are just no differences, and people make even this absurd claim while we're watching the Olympics that Africans are not faster runners than, let's say, Europeans.

1:17:47That is fucking crazy, right? It's just so obvious that for short -term sprinting events, people from Jamaica on average are poorer. Yeah, sure. They practice more, maybe. But why do they practice more? Because they're better at it, right? I mean, you have to deny so much reality to sort of get you there. Or men and women, right? We just saw this like transgender box or what you know. I need to, we need to talk about this. So for the people that don't know, Italian box acquits about sparking fuel over gender at Olympics. The Italian Angela Carini stopped fighting only 46 seconds into a match up against Imaine Calif of Algeria, who had been barred from a woman's event last year.

1:18:29And Italian boxer abandoned her bout. The Italian boxer withdrew after she had the shake kicked out of her. Calif 25 was permitted to compete at the Olympics even though she had been barred last year. After boxing officials said she did not meet eligibility requirements to compete in a woman's event. Another athlete also barred from last year's championship under similar circumstances, Lin Yu Ting has also been cleared to fight in Paris, the presence in the women's competition of being the latest flashpoint in the politically charged debate over gender and fair play in sports. The IOC doesn't use quite the same set of criteria to judge sex, gender, this particular the previous competition did, but it seems like you have two biological males competing in the one sport that you shouldn't have biological males competing against women in, which is the one why they literally punch each other in the face.

1:19:23Yeah. I mean, I would go farther and say other sports. I was a professor at Penn when the transgender swimmer, Leah Thomas, switched teams, and one of my students actually has now come out, you know, finally and over the last year or so and said, not only did I oppose this from the beginning, but I was like, I'm going and I'm talking about it now and how they've graduated, but our coach told us not to talk about it. We're gonna get in trouble if we even question this person's gender. I mean, this is wild. And I mean, just putting this all together, denying, you might say, oh, we're obsessed with genetics because we're talking about genetic influence on things.

1:19:59I'm not. I actually just think like we should acknowledge a genetic role, we should acknowledge a social role, social norms matter, parenting matters, all of it matters. but by denying any role for genetics is not taking the mortal high ground. It's causing women to be oppressed in the name of women's liberation, and it's causing, as you said, to make your previous point, if the best or most effective way of advancing your children's prospects is to, if you're doing, for example, IVF and embryos selection, just to take that case, is to select one that has a low disease burden and relatively high cognitive ability.

1:20:39And you say, look, we're gonna deny that genetics matters and we're gonna make this illegal or shun people for doing it. You're actually oppressing the people that you're currently claiming to defend by saying, oh, you're structurally oppressed in its bad schools and whatever racism's enophobia, wait a minute. Why don't you just acknowledge reality on its own terms? Schooling matters, society matters, parenting matters, and genetics sure as hell matters and let people make use of the best about available technology to actually increase their children's prospects. If you cared about inequality that would be the thing that you'd really want to target.

1:21:17Why do you think people don't? I think they will soon. In fact I have an essay coming out and I'm giving some talks on this lately called Breaking the Blank Slate and And what I argue in this is more or less the following. We have this cognitive dissonance by the elites we've talked about. We inherited it, again, post -World War II norms. It's starting to break down already. More people, of course, are pushing back on the transgender stuff. I think they're going to do the same for the genetics in general. And I think what's going to happen is the following. Companies come out very, very publicly in the coming years.

1:21:56And they offer, for example, embryos selection for various traits, including personality intelligence. It's going to be harder and harder to deny that these things are real, that they're influenced by genes. Elites are going to publicly condemn it while privately using it. I can name some people. I won't do it, but who are already doing this? I've dealt with them, actually, working with companies that do this. And what's going to happen is people will eventually figure out, wait, the elites are playing a game here. They actually are taking advantage of their inside knowledge that these things are are highly heritable.

1:22:32They're using it to the best of their ability and telling us like, oh, you know, we shouldn't do this. It's wrong. And I think this cognitive dissonance will grow until we get elites and by elites, I mean, often they're fake elites, but journalists, professors, et cetera, people in positions of power, whereby eventually they're just going to come out and say it. Like I'm doing it, I think it's fine. You should do it too. And then we're going to get a preference cascade, right? Right now we're in, let me give you an analogy. It's, it's like we're in East Germany in, you know, 1988 and everyone knows communism is bullshit and everyone knows even the stossy in East Germany know it's bullshit.

1:23:11It causes poverty and misery and it's just we're spending more money on monitoring people to make sure they affirm the official ideology, everyone knows it's fake. And basically what's gonna happen is, as people in positions of power come out and say, look, this is real, I'm doing it, it's fine. We're gonna get a massive preference cascade. We're 10 years from now. It's a preference cascade. It's a preference cascade is basically where, you know, we've got these, we've got these people publicly lying about what they publicly or privately know. And so they're expressing false preferences, right?

1:23:51This is called preference falsification. My old colleague Timur Kuran at Duke University, we were colleagues for about seven years in the political science department. He invented this term and it was a book called Private Truths Public Lives. He invents this term of preference falsification. What he basically said is a lot of elites play this game and it's inter -eleete competition. They have this ideology, all this gender stuff, for example, ordinary people. They don't care. They know it's bullshit. It's the elites in academia and journalism that do it. You know, oh, we have to call them she, her, and he, him, and all that stuff.

1:24:28But they know what they know what the reality is privately. And so what happens is once you get this like pressure cooker and it's often not evidence and arguments, right? I've given evidence and arguments, the people just brush it off or call me a huge genocist or something. But when the technology comes out into the open and people are actively doing this and knowing that they're doing it, other people know they're doing it, then what happens is you realize, oh, okay, the real preference is actually to do genetic enhancement and it's fine and it works and lots of people are going to do it and suddenly you get this falsified preference becoming the openly stated preference, which is it's okay to do this heritability is real, blank slate of those false, and then rapidly everyone else adopts this in the same way, rapidly everyone sees through the lie of communism.

1:25:20Once the first person starts breaking the wall and then the policeman follows him, then everyone gets on the wall, destroys it, and they're like, we always knew communism was bullshit. My hope is, by the way, this week, that Venezuela follows suit. So Venezuela is very close to my heart. I know a lot of Venezuelans because I worked at Ecuador and I know how many smart and great Venezuelans are in the world. I know a lot of them in Austin here and My great hope is that the pressure put on by Elon Musk by Bukheli and El Salvador, Malay in Argentina and Maybe Trump or whoever wins the election will basically cause the Venezuelan people to rise up and people in the military Once that first general says, this is bullshit.

1:26:06Maduro did not win this election. We know he didn't. Once he defects, everyone else defects, and you get this preference cascade. So that's what it is. It's so interesting, dude. I think it's going to be just, there's this odd sort of cathartic fantasy I have of all of the people who are claiming to not believe a thing or that a thing doesn't actually happen. And just having to see that, that discordance sort of come out front, it's going to be, it's going to be oddly satisfying. And I wish I was less petty. I wish I was less petty. But it's true. One of the studies that I came across, I already wanted to speak to you about, Remy, Führer and colleagues, public attitude interest and concerns regarding polygenic embryos screening.

1:26:55You must have seen this. Yep, I should have. I met him last year in Cambridge. Can you, how well do you know that study? Could you give an overview of what was found? He's been on at least two relevant ones for our purposes. So he's a bioethicist, really good guy. I think he's either Swiss or French, but works at Harvard in Cambridge. He's part of a team that studies polygenic risk scores. And we talked about that last time, but a polygenic risk score is just this idea that you can take these highly polygenic traits like risk of diabetes or how tall you are or whatever, these things are influenced by thousands of small genetic variants and based on the kind of data we have from bio banks you can assess individuals' risks of developing diabetes or being a certain height or whatever, right?

1:27:38So they study polygenic risk scores and public attitudes toward them and specifically in this context, I think you have in mind public attitudes toward using polygenic risk scores to select between embryos if they're doing IVF. So one of their studies that he's actually on too, but one of their studies, I believe he was on the first one, just compared, you know, would you use tutoring to improve the prospects of your kids getting into an elite university? The second question would you use embryos selection for it and then would use gene editing assuming it was safe? They found almost everyone would use tutoring.

1:28:13Many people, even among Americans, about half would use embryos selection and slightly less would do So, gene editing and then if you ask them, what if people around you were doing it or people you respected were doing it? And this is of course, the secret of human societies, right? We basically copy the norms of high status people, right? So what if high status people were doing it? Then everyone's like, I would do it. But their second study, this is more recent, found something a little bit different, a little bit of discordance there. They found that like the vast majority, I think it was like 70 something percent.

1:28:48I'd have to look at the study. I've got, I've got the, you've got, oh yeah, go for it. Yeah, tell us what they found. I've got the charts in front of me. So basically the sort of two differences here, they looked at health conditions on one side and sort of traits on the other. Remi, fewer and colleagues, survey Americans about the risks and benefits of polygenic and embryo screening. They found that a large majority of respondents believed that screening should be allowed. However, the level of approval varies substantially with the target trait. it is high for diseases, moderate for intelligence and low for skin color.

1:29:19So just having a look here, sort of cascading down from most highly agreed with, so people could strongly disapprove, disapprove, neither approve or strongly approve. Cancer, almost, you know, what's that? 50 % of people strongly approve, and then 35 % of people approve. So almost very, very high. I can't believe, you know, 5 % of people strongly disapprove, and 5 % of people strongly disproved. Yeah, cancer maximizers. Yeah, honestly, basically the same for heart disease, nearly the same for Alzheimer's, diabetes a little bit less, schizophrenia a little bit less, bipolar autism, all of these are, you know, combining a proven strongly, a proven the 70s, blood pressure, interestingly, actually doesn't get quite so much.

1:30:07OCD less, ADHD significantly less. I wonder if that's because a lot of people know that they have it. Or they know that it's overdiagnosed, which I think. That's interesting. But obesity, seen as a health condition running a trait, that could be controversial in and of itself. What's that? 55 % between the top two. But then we get into traits. intelligence is the most highly approved overall, but it's significantly lower. You're talking about, what's this, 35, 40 % of approval and neuroticism the same, BMI. So obesity, they're actually track the same thing. Like, the trait of BMI versus the health condition of obesity.

1:30:58So that tells you everything you need to know about framing that you gain when you gain by framing these two things. You gain... I don't need to tell you, Chris, you're probably considered obese because you're pretty buffed in. BMI is not good. Obesity is alright though. Life satisfaction, like selecting for life satisfaction. Height, height, the trait of height, not good educational attainment, also the same, agreeableness, baldness, the baldness maximizes 25 % of people strongly disapprove with selecting a gazed bald. Chelsea, those are the people with good hair. Yeah. They want to keep their advantage.

1:31:38Openness to experience, really interesting. Openness to experience and extroversion to of the lowest. How much does the normal person know what extroversion is? these think we're going to be surrounded by a lot of parties. I wonder about sort of the education. And then skin color really, really, really highly strongly disapproved. But I mean, some of the most sort of surprising ones in there to me, extraversion openness to experience, life satisfaction. Why is life satisfaction? Why would you want to ever select against that? Like, it's literally the only thing that we're all here for. All of these other things, cancer, heart disease, ADHD, HD intelligence, neuroticism, skin color, all of these things, presumably are in service of some form of life satisfaction.

1:32:22And me, even if that's impossible, even if you can't select for it, which I'm not sure that you can, saying, I don't think that we should go directly to the source and didn't hand someone's fucking life satisfaction. Wild. Wild. Chris, I'm going to push back on you here. I'm going to agree with the crowd. Maybe the first time in my life, you know, I'm going to be the conformist. Let me give you good arguments for this. I mean, first of all, this is just interesting data. And yeah, you got to take it with a grain of salt because how many people even know exactly what the big five are, the personality traits, how heritable they are.

1:32:53Probably you'd want to prompt them first to get good answers. But there seems a lot of wisdom in these answers to me. So first of all, if people are not very superficial, they really care about the quality of their children's lives. Skin color probably should be near the bottom. You shouldn't, you wouldn't want to emphasize it too much. Now, I don't think it should be illegal, you know, et cetera. I think that's stupid. And in fact, I think most people would not select for the whitest possible skin. They'll select for tan skin. My skin looks really orange right now because of the light in front of me.

1:33:25But I've got like Homer's Sincens skin right now. But what I would want is like a little bit tanner than I naturally am. So you don't get too many skin cancer. That's sort of thing, right? It's sunburn. So I think a lot of people have a sense like it's superficial and probably dumb to like focus too much on skin color, you know, something like that. But health does seem to me, it seems right, that you should focus that on that the most. Intelligence, I think people have an excusable ignorance about this, right? So that was somewhere in the middle and it's probably because people, they're often told that, oh, you know, smart people, yeah, maybe they make more money, but they're actually much more prone to depression and mental health disorders.

1:34:06And that's false. That's just obviously and completely false. We know that from just huge numbers of studies. There have been one or two that alleged that and then they get debunked and there's a million studies to the controversy. So I think some of this is ignorance. Some of it is actually correct. And let me give you an argument for why life satisfaction is good. You know, the upside of depression, here's the argument. I mean, maybe what people are thinking there. Some of them is you wouldn't want a kid who's overly satisfied with the existing social order or their place at it. You want someone who's like in a cheever and someone who's too easily satisfied.

1:34:44You know, they break up with this great girl that they were with for a couple years and they're not depressed at all. They're like, let's get back on it, man. I'm on Tinder tomorrow. And it's like, no, actually you should probably do some self -reflection, you know, Todd, listen to some Chris Williamson episodes and you know, so that you can absorb some of my low life satisfaction. I don't think that that's too bad. I think that certainly wallowing and reflection, moving slowly, that kind of melancholy, there's lessons from it. So probably what you should do is select, I mean, should, I mean, what I would do anyway, I don't want to give people advice, but select against like severe depression, that's obvious, right?

1:35:23But overall, life satisfaction, Do you really want to be at a 10 all the time? Maybe some people do, but I think that might be correlated with being all too easily. I don't know, manipulated or just like accepting the status quo for what it is. It's kind of like agreeableness. Do you just want to maximize that? Like, fuck no. You know? I want to push back on like some of the popular wisdom, which I think is false. So if there's like, and that requires a little bit of discreability. Yeah, that is interesting to consider the advantages of melancholy and artistic advantages. You're not going to make a good acoustic guitar rock star.

1:36:08Your lyrics are going to suck. You're going to outsource them to some corporations. So fucking happy. Shut up. I don't know any here about that. So just one other interesting sort of consideration. What about political trends, group affiliation, ideology, living setup? We're talking, we've got so far to go, and I wonder how quickly this is going to be adopted. Actually, two separate points. First off, how quickly is this going to be adopted? Obviously we're at least rate limited by the rollout of the technology by the sort of cost, the accessibility, I've got a fucking facility within 100 miles of me that I can do it with, blah, blah.

1:36:54And then we've got this kind of, I guess, conceptual inertia thing which is going on. But what's your predicted uptake? How many kids are we going to see in the Western world born through using embryo selection over the next few decades? Well, I think really by the end of this decade, there's going to be a lot of uptake. But by a lot, I mean, whatever, a couple percent or something. Look, infertility is on the rise. People are having kids later. Some of which is good. They build their career, some of which is bad, because if you wait too long, you accumulate mutations. We know that especially on the male line, which is why autism is on the rise.

1:37:36But yeah, so more people are using IVF anyway. I think more people are going to use it who don't need to use it, in order to select against family disorders. I actually think that's a good thing. I think once companies start moving from disease traits to non -diseas traits, more will do it. There's going to be a network of facts where once governments, especially governments like South Korea, Israel, etc. with small populations that have enough money, and they worry about declining birth rates, I think they're going to subsidize it and hasten it. And once that happens, yeah, you're going to get a much more rapid uptake of it.

1:38:13So, you know, IVG, this thing we talked about last time where you can take an adult cell, turn it into a clary potent stem cell which turns into an egg. If that becomes feasible in five, ten years, let's say, and cheap enough and accurate and all that, then you could of course select among hundreds, thousands of embryos, which is pretty wild. I think if that became feasible, it would be taken up really quickly because it obviates the need to even do IVF, right? You just take a violet blood and do it. So yeah, there's uncertainty about this, but I think the ideological resistance is going to melt away very soon, like in the coming five years.

1:38:50You know, when some of these companies come out into the open with cognitive ability, personality, there's going to be the New York Times, you know, slings, shit at them and calls them Nazis. That's all predictable and boring. But what actual people will be doing is sort of going, huh, is this real? And they'll start reading up a little bit more about it because it is real. And I think that's going to change the incentives and ways that are hard to predict. That's going to drive costs down quite a bit. And I will say this, I won't mention the technology per se, but there will be ways for everyone to ignore to use this very, very soon, like within a year or two people around the world, because there are some innovations where you're not going to necessarily need all of the clinical equipment that is currently needed to do this.

1:39:37I'll just hint at that and not say much more about it. Very sexy. Okay. And then downstream, what are we going to see in terms of social, setup, political, what's going to change if this sort of technology starts to be rolled out on mass? I think for the most part, you know, things will be quite good because as I mentioned, I mean, one in eight people in the world married their cousin and in the Middle East in parts of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it's close to half, like 50%. So we're going to see a dramatic reduction in disease burden in those parts of the world and that's going to lead to, you know, more flourishing for those people.

1:40:23Imagine you're some Saudi kid and you're born to a cousin marriage. Like, what are your prospects versus not born to a cousin marriage? So we're going to see a lot more people taking heredity into account when they choose their mates. And then on top of that, because there have been generations of cousin marriage, I think selecting embryos to minimize disease burden. So we're going to see a lot of people in a lot of countries with far fewer diseases, both monogenic and polygenic. And then we're going to see some pretty wild things. we're probably going to see mild gains in cognitive ability, which will counter the kind of sterilizing disc genic trends of liberalism.

1:41:00You may have seen this meme online of cities being IQ shredders. What happens in the West now? The smartest people go to Ivy League schools or Cambridge and Oxford. They then take their talents to live in a city and make a bunch of money as bankers and London and New York and so on. And they have 1 .1 kids or whatever at the age of 40. you know, this is not great from the standpoint of civilization across long tracks of time, even if it's good in the moment. And so I think we're going to see as people on the one hand making different kinds of decisions with their lives, but you're also going to see a counter -veiling force where a lot of people are going to be gaining slight amounts in IQ as well as decreasing disease burdens and over a few generations that really makes a difference.

1:41:45But here's a kind of distopian scenario. I don't think it's gonna happen too much, but I think it will a little bit. It's possible that when people realize that religiosity and political orientation are about point four heritable, they're moderately heritable conditions. You don't inherit Christianity per se, but the tendency to be religious and to seek out that kind of community instead of beliefs, that is heritable. And so is, again, political orientation. The tendency to score really high on openness and some of these other traits underlies that probably. I can imagine a world where religious people find this out and eventually use embryos selection or possibly weigh down the lion using gene editing to select in favor of religiosity or political extremism.

1:42:36It's kind of a wild thought, but I don't know why wouldn't they if what they wanted to do? I want my daughter to be a part of my church. I want my daughter to come, you know, if you really are about your politics. Well, we see really think that, exactly. Daniel Cox did some really interesting research about this stuff. And you know, you're seeing huge swaths of Gen Z girls with Republican fathers and mothers pivoting left and going to Democrats. So, you know, this, the heritability that there is for religious affiliation has really been or does something going on that has managed to sort of less interesting.

1:43:17That shows two things. One, culture in the short term, culture swamps the heritability of religiosity or political orientation. No doubt about that, right? That's the short term. But over long tracks of time, evolution is a real thing. And the choices we make and differential choices, differential birth rates, we know we talked about it last time both within countries and across countries, religious conservatives simply have more kids than atheistic liberals. And Jonathan Hayte and others have talked about this. I know you've had them on the show. He mentions this in his book, The Righteous Mind that has to have genetic consequences over time.

1:43:54It just may take a long time. But it may also be when you think about, yeah, Jen, Jen Z, you've got boys turning more right wing and girls turning much, much more left wing. That's obviously because the institutions are left wing. I mean, I was a professor in these elite schools and, you know, Duke was pretty moderate, but it was still pretty left wing. Penn was off the charts left wing and pretty much everywhere else I've been. So they get indoctrinated. Girls are also on average more conformists. And they know, like, if you want to climb in polite society, who are the elites? They're obviously left wing and so they swing more left wing.

1:44:31But when you look at the 1970s and universities, women were more conservative than men. And I think that's because at that time, in their culture and given what their parents were doing, you know, religiosity, conservatism were bigger cultural forces. Yeah, you had the hippies, but they were the outliers. And so I think what's going on here is just, there's women being more conformist on average than men, the institutions being completely captured on the left for now, maybe that'll change. And you're not seeing like a huge, you know, deep down really felt change. It's just more of them responding to the environment.

1:45:08So, so yeah, I think there are cultural forces in the short term that simply swamp those genetic forces. Very interesting, man. I mean, the next few years are just going to be so fascinating and the fact that you get to be commercially or academically close to the front of this must be, must be pretty exciting. What should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you've got going on? Yeah, well, maybe we can leave some links in the show notes. I mean those papers by Remy for example on the Heritability of traits and you know how people feel about that. That's some pretty cool stuff There's actually a group called peer PEER That it's a collection of scientists and ethicists that are are sort of tackling these problems and they're based at Harvard and Cambridge.

1:45:52So, you know, the usual biases apply, but they're really good. I mean, the scientists in particular just rock solid. But obviously, yeah, I have a new book on this. Here it is. Creating future people, the science and ethics of genetic enhancement. And you can buy the paperback that's always, I like to read physical books, but there's also a free version too, open access. So I can send that out to you to have the link. but I also have a website. So if you want to read sort of, I have a column for psychology today called sex and civilization and I kind of go through like what's happening, you know, first it starts with the birth control pill and all these innovations we separate more and more sex and reproduction.

1:46:35Some of that's good, some of it's bad, but what are the big cultural consequences? So yeah, I tried to outline some of that stuff and listening to your show Actually, it is pretty damn good. I mean, you have a lot of great guests. So that's what we need. I'm just looking at your psychology today. Techno traditionalism. The label for review that we can embrace traditional values, whilst also endorsing the use of reproductive technologies. I am gonna go and read that. May, I really appreciate you. I'm fired up to see what you do next. And yeah, let's get you on. We need to have a chat about the sort of modern world of cancel culture and academia from a front lines perspective.

1:47:10I've had an online stalker for years and some of my friends, he's trying to take down at Cambridge and other universities. There's never been a better time to be a psycho on the internet who just shitposts all day and cancels Akadamics and other people. So yeah, maybe one of these days we'll talk about that. Thank you. Appreciate you, man.