This podcast is brought to you by the Albany public library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. God daddy these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning.
Hey everybody. This is Razib Khan with the Unsupervised Learning podcast and also YouTube show. So this isn't the first time that I'm doing that. And so I have an illustrious guest, Dr. Jonathan Anomaly, and that is his last name. You can Google it. It's, you know, check it out. I, when I first saw the name, I thought this was like, I mean, I'm going to introduced Johnny, but I thought it was a joke name that a bunch of academics were using to, to put in like papers that were kind of like pranks. This is a thing in academia. So like, there's no way that someone's last name is Anomaly, you know, but it is. And, Johnny, you're, you are right now working in a stealth startup that people will hear about. And we are here to talk about your book, creating future people, the ethics of genetic enhancement. So spicy topic, we're going to be we're going to be delving into that. But I do want to say anything else about yourself, like, how do you account for yourself, Johnny?
How do I account for myself? Well, yeah, Dr. Anomaly always makes me laugh to anomaly is kind of a fake name. I mean, I did create it. So when I was a student at Berkeley, I changed my name. I was 20 years old, I thought it was funny. I was reading a book, Thomas Kuhn “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. And the word anomaly comes up like every page, and actually just thought it would be funny to change my name. And I did so. So that's it. How do I count for myself? Yeah, I'm here in Ecuador. Last you talk to me, I was in the United States, splitting my time now between San Diego and Quito, Ecuador. This is where my wife lives. I created a master's program last year. And so now I'm supervising that down here. And most of my time is at the stealth startup, as you called it. So yeah,
I mean, Itll be out of stealth soon, so we can talk about that, at some point - right now, we're going to be talking about your book came out a couple of years ago, ‘creating future people: the ethics of genetic enhancement’ Now, the the cover image is very interesting, a little, you know, maybe triggering to some people, it looks like a Greek statue, which -
He’s very masculine.
Yeah, no, but I have certain associations now in our public discourse and the zeitgeist in the United States, Greek statues, these are, you know, bad people, you know, that want to take us back to the mid 20th century to a Central European country. Okay, ‘so creating future people the ethics of genetic enhancement’. Let me just like start really quickly. And I know some of you are gonna be like, Razib, you need to let the guests talk. But let me just set the stage because this is for some of you that, you know, don't know what mutational load and all these other things are. All right. So we vary as a species, genetically, most of you know, we have 3 billion base pairs, on the order of 10 million of those are different from the reference for any given human, there are some variation among those 10 million. And that variation means that some people look like Johnny Anomaly, and some people look like Razib Khan. You know, some people look like Miranda Kerr, and some people look like the opposite of Miranda Kerr, and I'm not going to name who that is, because that's mean. So we have variation in human phenotypes and human characteristics in human traits. And what we talked about in terms of genetics and screening, a lot of the time have to do with disease. So for example, pre - non invasive prenatal screening is ubiquitous in the United States, we don’t talk about it too much. But it's ubiquitous, it's free with most insurance now, especially for older mothers. And, you know, my understanding is more than 50% of the positive cases end in termination. So the pregnancy ends, the fetus is aborted, it is usually a case of Down Syndrome and actually more severe. I'm not going to try to say the names because some of those, like, just so the listeners know, I do actually avoid reading about diseases that tend to affect children. Just because, like, It stresses me out, even before I had
Like Tay-Sachs
Yeah, but like, I think like, you know, like, there's some really, really bad ones out there. And this is why they do do the screenings and knock on wood. I haven't had to deal with it in my own life, and I hope everybody else, you know - but I mean, this is a thing in our world, you know, and so we do take genetics into account already. It's already here, the future is already starting. And so I think what you're talking about Johnny is a little further, let's expand the preview. So, you know, talk about like your book, give us like, the, you know, 50,000 foot view the pressé and then we can go from there.
Cool. Yeah. And you mentioned The cover and I picked that out very carefully. And the first quote on the first page is from Nietzsche from, you know, while he essentially his first use of the term ubermench It's from that book. I also cite George Bernard Shaw, ‘Man and Superman’ a fair amount. And part of the reason for that is I think aesthetics matters, not just not just in terms of the books you write, but the way you present yourself. And I think that clearly one of the first things that people are going to enhance is aesthetics. So one of the chapters in it is aesthetic enhancement. I think the most important chapter is on cognitive enhancement. Another is on moral enhancement. And then the fourth main one is immuno enhancement. So I think yeah, you know, people are going to go with aesthetic enhancements first, as well as immuno enhancements. Like it's going to take a little while before most people think about cognitive enhancements. But um, yeah, that's what I cover in the last chapter is like really speculative. That covers the idea of potentially synthesizing artificial people. That's a really long way away, but we can at least imagine what that world would look like. So I kind of tried to explore the implications of that.
I mean, can you talk about, well, what do you mean by enhancement? What are the logistics here? Yeah, you know, let's, let's talk about the abstract first. What do you mean by enhancement? I think cognitive enhancement. I mean, so you have a, you have a chapter good. What does it mean to be a moral enhancement? What does that even mean?
Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, when I said people are going to enhance aesthetics, first, that's a prediction. Who knows if that's true, Actually, in a way. They're going to care a lot about like moral character. So when you look at what women look for, not just in male partners, but especially in sperm donors, the data is pretty clear. They look for intelligence or proxies of intelligence, things like sense of humor, creative accomplishments, but they also really care about things like kindness. And I think that's more true in the sperm clinic than it is actually in the mating market. Because of course, they're looking for some level of aggression among among men and that sort of thing. They want a guy who can like defend them, protect them. So yeah, women already looked for these traits, they already value them in kids. And I think, once we can select whether we're doing gene editing, which is a ways away, or we selected the, at the level of embryo selection, I think this is going to be one of the main things that women and couples care about and select for. So what is it? Well, we can imagine things like empathy, you know, there's cognitive empathy, and there's affective empathy. So cognitive empathy is just having theory of mind. And as you probably know, severe cases of autism, basically, you know, those are kids that lack a theory of mind, they lack cognitive empathy. But psychopaths, by contrast, lack of affective empathy, right? So they understand what we mean when we say that's morally wrong, or you shouldn't kill people for no good reason. But they just don't care. It literally doesn't matter to them, because they lack affective empathy, or they have very low levels. So I can imagine like a first pass, like people would care about having like normal levels of empathy. Somewhat my some might want more than that. Some might want less. But I can get into details. Actually, I think it's really important. It's not just about empathy, there's going to be things like reciprocity, and even the kind of anger like indignation, that people feel that that turns out for evolutionary game theoretic reasons, to be extremely important. So we can get into that if you like.
Yeah, let's get into that. But I want to ask you a question. Because I don't know this. Yeah, we're talking about psychopaths, like, what proportion of the population are psychopaths, like, how much variation do we have in these things? Are most people good?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess the best estimates I've seen is one or at most 2% are like, legitimately classified as psychopaths. But of course, there's a spectrum, right? In fact, I, when I was at Duke, North Carolina, we had these philosophy and psychiatry meetups, every few weeks. And we had a psychiatrist, go in there and show us a video of somebody that killed a bunch of people, we interviewed him. And basically, our job was to take the psychopathy test, right and score them. And it turns out, like, you know, if you're above a certain number of points, like it's 30, whatever, then you're a psychopath. If you're below it, you're not. But look, the reality is, if score 29 rather than 30. I mean, you're as good as a psychopath. And these traits are distributed along the bell curve, just like everything else is right, just like height and intelligence. And so, and I think it's probably good. Like, we want some diversity, we want moral diversity. For the same reason, we might want political diversity for reasons that like political psychologists have talked about. And cognitive diversity, right people with verbal reasoning skills, spatial reasoning skills. But yeah, this is - like almost all of their traits. It's not binary. You're not just a psychopath, not a psychopath.
So and here's the question, though, you know, because this will go into other things like autism and schizophrenia, there is the argument - So psychopaths, I don't know if this is true. This is not my field, but I've heard there certain professions topflight lawyers, surgeons, there's more people with psychopathic tendencies. And so the surgeon makes sense insofar as like, if you're a softie, to carve humans up and lose a substantial number of them is a lot of psychic psychic affect on you. If you're if you're more psychopathic and tendency, you're emotionally a little bit dead, you can do your job very efficiently one after the other. So that's actually functional. Now, let's say orally enhanced people, all those people are gone. What are we doing here now? I mean, who's gonna be the surgeon? The guy who always cries?
Yeah, good. That's right. And this is like the most common objection. Right? So if everybody has access to this technology, and - they're not going to - but let's assume they do governments are subsidizing it, whatever. We're gonna end up with these, like genetic monocultures, and specifically personality monoculture. So yeah, everyone's full of like, warm feeling. Nobody wants to, you know, do surgery for 80 hours a week and rip people open and reconstruct their bones and that sort of thing. Look, I agree, like, what we want is distribution of traits. And there's, there's nobody that can guarantee that right, whether we have like informal mate selection, or like the really bad version of eugenics, where governments are just pairing people up and telling people who they could sleep with or that sort of thing - there's no, there's no world in which we can sort of guarantee like the distribution of traits we want. And so this is going to be a risk no matter what we do, no matter what people have access to. But I agree, we're gonna want like a diversity of traits. That's not to say, however, that psychopathy or sadism is ever good. It's probably not good for the person that has it, because they usually end up in prison, because they get caught, you know, breaking rules and that sort of thing. It's definitely not good for society, it's set of antisocial traits. And so yeah, you can imagine at least getting rid of some genetic endowments, or at least people selecting out some embryos is just unequivocally good. And then they're gonna have these marginal cases where it's like, yeah, if we had a little bit more empathy in the population, or a little bit less, because we have like, too much pathological altruism, maybe it would be hypothetically better. But I mean, one of the premises the book is, you know, is that there are collective action problems everywhere throughout human life, and there's going to be reproductive collective action problems, what's good for me what's good for you may or may not end up producing an overall distribution of traits that's either optimal or really good. And when it doesn't do that, you know, what, what do we do? Well, we can either, like inform people, we could try to change informal social norms. Or we could do like the really bad stuff, like the old form of eugenics. And yeah, I reject the last one. So I think we just live in an imperfect world. And the best we can do is just sort of point out some of these collective action problems, like if there was a gender imbalance, if there were too many tall people, there would be some incentives, at least to actually select for the opposite gender, or to select a little bit less height, because there are too many medical problems with having really, really, really tall sons. So
yeah, yeah. So just a quick concept here, you know, it is the sex ratio, the sex ratio conundrum is a big one in evolutionary biology, it goes back to R. Fisher, who talked about it. So basically, what John is talking about here is, you know, in a situation where it's extremely beneficial to have sons, you know, you would start to get a skew towards males, you start to get a skew towards males, but as the fraction of males increases, the value of females increases. And so you have the situation where there's kind of a meta stable equilibrium in the situation where you can engage in, you know, sex ratio distortion. And we have like a non biological case of this in East Asia, where Japan, Korea, and I looks like now China, they all went through this shift where their cultural norm was strongly towards male bias. And then once there was an excess, you know, about half a generation to a generation later, they switch and they switch to more female bias. Now, the transition is tough. And you know, we don't need to get to the branch branches. But I think a lot of the listeners and viewers know exactly what I'm alluding to, but, you know, it is « reequalibrerating » quote, unquote, which is like a very antiseptic way to say that it's a pretty tough social and cultural process of changing cultural mores and values because of, well, a lot of men cannot get married, they're desperate, they're going abroad in China. There's issues with sexual slavery and prostitution that start to emerge are these excess male situations, this is not a good thing. So we have a coordination problem in a society. And let's talk about height for example, Johnny, you know, it is optimal from what everything that I've read in the sexual marriage dating life marketplace to be a six foot two , six foot three tall male, but one above that. The height, the mortality starts increasing, there tends to be start to be problems. The human body just can't like keep it together physically. Okay, that's the easiest way to explain it. But the other issue is like, okay, like we're we engage in like a positional game of like competition. How are we going to, how are we going to prevent ourselves from being like a race of giants? That like die of bad hearts.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the answer is there is no answer. I mean, one of the one of the premises that I take for granted is sort of coming out the I should say my training as an economics was philosophy, and I always think in game theoretic terms. And you might think, look, this is a good case where when we have positional goods, arms races, right, where it's like a net negative in terms of welfare, what do we do from an economic standpoint, we tax it. Right. So, you know, typical thing that economists would say is like, yeah, if there are incentives to get taller and taller, where the collective outcome is worse health, and nobody has any relative advantage, then make it illegal or toxic. The problem there is, of course, that doesn't remove the incentives. And unless everyone can do that at once, unless all states can regulate it away, and you can get rid of black markets, you end up inadvertently producing the kinds of inequalities that people worry about. So you get genetic inequalities, the rich, the famous, the well connected, ended up getting the service on the black market, you can of course, like affect demand, on the margin. It's just like with abortion, you know, I'm pro choice. But like, let's say that you're a pro life, and you think it's horrible. And what we're going to do is make it illegal and have fewer abortions, actually, you probably can get fewer abortions, it's not true that the demand for abortion is exactly constant, right. But it is true, that's very high. Because the cost of having a kid if you don't want one is really high. So what you can probably do realistically is lower the number of abortions and then raise like the, the mortality associated with it. And I think the same thing is gonna go here, right? The more the impulse to regulate and make things illegal ends up in policy, the weirder the outcomes you're gonna get where you actually exacerbate inequalities, but you do tamp down demand a little bit, right. So you avoid some of the arms races, but you actually increase inequality. And you make it more dangerous, right? Because what are we get in black markets, the information is worse, the surgeons are less trustworthy, right? So you end up in a situation like the kidney market in India, the drug market in Colombia and Mexico and the United States, where maybe I want some cocaine, it's not great for me, but because of the way the laws are, I ended up with fentanyl and then ended up dead. And the same thing is gonna go with genetic enhancement demand for this is going to be really strong. And we're going to face this constant trade off between trying to solve collective action problems through regulation. And in doing those in solving in those ways, producing new incentives that actually produce new collective action problems. So I hate to say it, but the answer is, it's fucking complicated. There just is no easy answer to these things, all we can do is point them out. And then sort of point out the trade offs between legal solutions and then like social norm solution, solutions, whereby people are like, subtly discouraged from selecting along a certain trade or whatever. I mean,
so you know, the devil is in the details of the trait, right? So chapter four Healthy People immuno enhancement, you're gonna get some people in the US - let’s talk about America, you're gonna get some people in America that will object to this for various reasons. But really, you know, you have the command, you have like high ground. Okay. And then when you're talking about like, pretty people, people are gonna get a little squishy. Okay. Yeah, like, well, what does that mean, you could get cosmetic surgery, you know,
I think, I think chapter three and chapter four actually kind of connect it. To be honest, I think a lot of things that are related to, you know, I think, physical beauty, let's like break it down, I think there's two primary dimensions that I conceive of one is secondary sexual characteristics, which are sex specific, right. The other is facial symmetry. And just like, you know, developed, like normal development, a lot of all the other chapters are actually going to affect the facial symmetry, you know, like people who have like high facial symmetry and good development, that kind of blandly, attractive right? Now, people have like, hyped up secondary sexual characteristics. Those are people that maybe are in like Hollywood, they're kind of like really salient, they really stand out. But I think those people are a little bit of like a fine line because like, you know, you can imagine just like tweak things here or there, and they're just not going to look nearly as good, right? So I think, yeah, exploiting those two apart, I think the secondary sexual characteristics part is going to be the weird one for aesthetics where people are like, okay, like, is everyone gonna is every man going to have a jaw like Jay Leno? You know so?
Yeah. Or a chin like Jay Leno.
Yeah, chin like Jay Leno. And then women with like, you know, big eyes and like that, like, you know heart shaped face, you know, and like there are issues from antagonistic. So if you have,
yes, if you have really, really symmetrical parents, you will be a symmetrical person. So that's just a win win on both sides. The problem that I've seen in some of the literature is extremely feminine women and extremely masculine men have children of the opposite form. So are we talking like a constant engineering race generation after generation?
I think it's inevitable, but I really liked the way that you connected these things. I tried to do that a little bit in the book, but you put it well, I mean, secondary sexual characteristics, the equivalent of peacocks tails for men, you know, the Jay Leno chin, like, let's just imagine, like women were just chin hungry, you know, until we had these like massive chins you know, whatever, whatever the trait is, or waist hips ratios, that sort of thing, breast size, whatever. Um, yeah, these are not necessarily connected to health, they are indirectly right. But they're not directly in the way that symmetry is. So it's weird. It's interesting to point out that like, by doing certain aesthetic enhancements, the way to do them is actually by fixing mutational load or oxidative stress, or, you know, if you have like a really poorly functioning immune system, especially as a child, or when you're in the womb, you're going to actually develop in weird ways, and you get asymmetry. So paradoxically, or at least maybe unexpectedly, by doing certain immune enhancements, you get a sec enhancements through the backdoor, and vice versa, sort of inadvertently. But that's not to say a secondary sexual characteristics like just raw height, or a long chin, or whatever the weird thing is, that that is producing any value, it's not, it might produce negative value, like you get more and more like, you think of the peacocks tail example, you're spending more and more energy on the stupid tail. And now you can't fly around like a bird should. And, you know, we have the equivalent for people. And I can imagine putting this together at the moral enhancement case, you know, we evolved to be virtue signalers, right. And whenever there's a trait that females like, or vice versa, there's often a kind of evolutionary arms race and virtue signaling can be seen when it's honest, as a good thing, right. And when it's dishonest is a bad thing. And you can imagine, if virtue signaling, where it's honest, is a good thing, right, you're advertising true virtue that you have? Well, there are going to be social incentives to fake it. And then there gonna be genetic incentives to to actually amp up virtue signaling. So one of the weird things about moral enhancement is it can be seen as also a kind of aesthetic enhancement, it's something that's attractive or not attractive to either like friends who are coalition members or mates. And in that sense, like, a lot of these traits are actually connected. Moreover, as you know, and this is Jeffrey Miller's thesis. Probably decent amount of cognitive ability is like found attractive to the opposite sex. And so you can also see cognitive enhancement as a form of aesthetic enhancement. That's the kind of Miller story of why we're probably smarter than we actually need to be, in order to solve you know, the kinds of problems that we have. So yeah, these kinds of connections.
I gotta tell you, Johnny, you know, when I was in third grade, and I memorized every castle in the world, all those little elementary school girls were just like, Razib! Like, Jeffrey's idea there. I just I find it amusing. I'm not going to lie
You don't buy it.
Okay, maybe maybe this is not the right…
but wait a minute. But you sure? I'm sure you will admit, the ability to tell jokes, like really clever jokes. And you're funny, dude. I mean, you know, we've hung out like, you're you're the center of attention in a room, people like it. You're funny. You tell stories? I don't know. I mean, I'm not attracted to you, Razib. But if I was a girl, maybe who knows?
All right, this is like, this is getting into like, too personal too much information for the listener for the viewer
It’s too personal.
Yeah, I'm gonna get I'm gonna get some feedback, you know, like, keep it serious Razib you know, this is this is a generational thing. By the way. There's cultural changes where, you know, some of my older listeners, you know, they have different norms, and some of the younger ones. And this is this is like, the antagonistic, like selection issue, actually, like, how do you target an audience when your audience is varied and has different preferences? Okay, so you're talking about some of these, these preferences? Well, there could be trade offs, there could be certain trade offs. Like, okay, like, and like right now, some of it is really weirdly maladaptive. So in the United States and other parts of the parts of Latin America, there is a preference for buttocks on females that are protruding, they're doing surgery on this. Okay. Yeah, we also know, we also know that it's a heritable trait. It varies across populations and within populations. I imagine that, you know, I don't know some, some couples like, I want my daughter to be naturally built like Kim Kardashian. That's actually not totally healthy…
Yeah. So because like Kim is, okay. Like, I mean, let's just say that there's surgery that's involved here, you know, yeah, but, but you know, there are people that are probably can be built like that. And so like, you know, should we be - I mean, should we, I mean, this is like, so I want to go back to like the beauty thing, there's two dimensions of beauty. One of them, it just falls out of not being unhealthy. So I'll give you a concrete example. I have a friend. I don't think he listens to the podcast, so I'm gonna, I can I'm not gonna say the name. I'm just gonna say he's from a country where there's a lot of cousin marriage and you He is the product of a lot of generations of cousin marriage. You know, he has a PhD, he's smart. But when you look at his face, let's just say, you can see something you can see, you know what I'm saying? He's not -
This is getting personal Razib!
. But like, he doesn't listen. But my point is like, see what's going on there, and then you know, his kid, totally different. Right? So,
what's wrong with that? I mean, what so you want to select for a Kim Kardashian body? I mean, it's not healthy if it's not unhealthy, who cares, right.
Yeah. My question, though, is, is it like some of these secondary sexual characteristics. Like are they so these this goes into the evolutionary genetic argument of a handicap principle? Which basically, so the handicap principle is this idea of an Israeli biologists that Richard Dawkins actually kind of dismissed in I think, The Selfish Gene, but then ended up that he was wrong. And the idea is like, the big elk, you know, whatever, the elk with it with the big horns and whatever the you know, they have. They're showing how healthy they really are by expending energy. And so males have high testosterone and like robust features. They're showing how healthy they are, because that actually degrades their immune system. Compared to lower testosterone
Yes, exactly
And so these things are basically signals of genetic fitness. But we don't need signals get to genetic fitness, we can get your whole sequence, right? Yeah, we don't need that as a signal. But our psychology is still evolved to really like for some guys and women. I mean, a lot of this is cultural. Remember, small feat used to be super sexy in China up until they banned it
Well, that's that's actually…
to the point where they couldn't walk.
It's controversial whether that was ever widely considered true. It was of course, convention, it lasted 1000 years. Yeah, the legend is it started with an emperor. And then it spread from him to others. And you probably know, there's, there's there's papers in game theory on this, like, how did this convention last for 1000 years, and then go away in a single generation, it's kind of assurance game. But yeah, the idea is something like, you know, the emperor had, like 200 women around him all the time, guarded by eunuchs, And he would just sleep with two women a day, you know, just just nonstop. And this was a solution, one of two possible solutions to the problem of paternity confidence. One is, well, you get eunuchs to gaurd them, another as He smashed their feet, so they can't run away. And then you try to propagate this idea that this is like a cool thing to do. It's aesthetically attractive. It's unclear whether anyone actually considered it aesthetically attractive, or whether it's a convention that just evolved as a kind of emergent order to solve a problem that all males face, in the same way that in the Middle East, we've got another equilibrium solution to that same problem. And that's called female genital mutilation. You either smash their feet, so they can't run away, or you cut off their clit. So it's not fun to sleep around. So I don't actually think -
Alright. I have to put a warning now on this podcast. Because you just said that, but that's fine
trigged.
Trigger warning. So I don't believe that that was ever attractive in the way that waist to hip ratios are. But I could be wrong. I mean, people are pretty weird. Culture can kind of influence your, your tastes so could be wrong.
I guess what I'm getting at here is, you know, we are talking about ethics of genetic enhancement, we are talking about the traits of people. And so if we can actually build a better if we have the technology to rebuild humans, right. That's what you're talking about. We've already we're, we're already in the early stages, like there are no, you know, Iceland and Denmark have no babies have no infants with Down syndrome. Like they're all terminated. So we are already doing that we look, we've done that for the last 10,000 years with agriculture for the last like 50,000 years, you know, traveling all across the world, we are all the products of evolutionary experiments. And so what we're doing now is, instead of being kind of passive receptacles of mother nature's vicissitudes, we are grabbing her by the horns. And this is going to be a big deal. This is gonna be transformative in a generation unless we have a Butlerian Jihad. Like a you know, a ban on this. Yeah, it stuff is gonna get freaky. I'm just gonna listeners, viewers, stuff is gonna get freaky.
I think that's inevitable. I think like I'm pretty optimistic about most of the traits people will select on. Because you know, as well as I do that, you know, having a higher IQ society. Other things equal if you hold other traits constant, tends to be better. So higher IQ populations tend to be more scientifically innovative, more productive, lower level of corruption. You can read Garrett Jones is work on that. I think moral enhancement of certain kinds is good. I think aesthetic enhancement is actually good, not bad. At least If you're not in these kinds of runaway races, whereby to mention as a hobby, again, the handicap principle, you end up with the equivalent of a peacocks tail. I think that will be self equilibriating for the reasons we mentioned, once you get like something that's so exaggerated, it's actually going to be considered either ugly, or it's going to produce other side effects that are so bad people won't want to do it. So look, I mean, back to your question, it is partly about the ethics of genetic enhancement. And you asked, like, Should we do it? Should we select for I don't know, like a a Kinmy’ K body or something like that, obviously, depends on the traits. Um, I do think that it's actually good, not bad when you're selecting for aesthetic beauty, where what I mean by that is, according to widely shared standards, you mentioned both secondary sexual characteristics. There's like widespread agreement, I think, on what's attractive there, even though there's some divergence. And the same thing for facial symmetry and body symmetry. And those are going to correlate with things like athletic ability. So I'm actually a lot less worried about that, then, let me go back and really quickly say my worry about moral enhancement. I only talked about empathy. And the reality is like moral enhancement is incredibly complicated. So I mentioned things like oxytocin, testosterone, all of these things affect moral behavior dramatically. I mean, you know, the evidence on this, like, women are nicer than men, they fight less, they're less violence. They're more generous, they're more trusting. But that can also be pathological.
Im going to be getting here a lot of comments on this Women are nicer than men? Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, how do you? Look, I don't I'm not the social scientist, you're the social scientists, like tell me like how you justify that?
No, I just mean, look, they have higher levels of empathy. And they start out, they tend to be a little bit more trusting than men are. But I don't want to say that's actually good, because it's actually it's quite bad in certain environments. I'm in Ecuador, corruption levels are high here. And if you just went around trusting people in Quito the way that you do in Minneapolis, you're not only going to make yourself worse off, you're going to incentivize more violence and more crime. And this is the essence of my worry about moral enhancement. So turns out, for example, when you increase oxytocin just to take one example of a biochemical enhancement that's genetically mediated. We know this by just like adding oxytocin to the room when people play prisoners dilemmas. But we can also measure like people higher in oxytocin naturally. On the one hand, it makes you bond more easily with the people around you. But it also makes you more aggressive toward outsiders. And so there's actually a really good reason to think that if you were able to increase the uptake of oxytocin by altering receptors at the genetic level, you would make people nicer to their family and meaner toward outsiders, you would literally make them more racist, more ethnocentric. There's pretty robust evidence of that. And that's just one example where it suggests, like the basic plan, you know, you've got this double the double helix behind you, the way that we evolved is to cooperate with the in group, but actually despise and fight the outgroup. And so there may actually be no literal, just overall moral enhancement. There's just going to be sets of trade offs with respect to the way in which we alter moral dispositions. And let me just say one more quick thing about that. You wouldn't even if you could just alter affective empathy, just make people more empathetic. You wouldn't want to do that. Because it depends on like, who's around them. You actually want them to be retributive, right? You want them to remember? Like, who fucked me over? Or who like, hurt that innocent person down the street? And how am I gonna get get back at them? The worst possible situation for your kid or the world is to have them as a kind of unconditional cooperator. No matter what other people do? I'm going to be nice to them, because not only will they become victims, they actually incentivize more and more of these, like defectors to defect, right? They incentivize freeriding. So yeah, moral enhancement, super complicated.
I mean, you know, what you're opening up here is like a huge can of worms of like, unintended consequences. You know, our species has been around for hundreds of 1000s of years, our lineage a couple of million years. You know, it sounds like, you know, we're gonna have like, Mentats running around, you know, face dancers, for the nerds out there making Dune references, but I mean, you know, we might see this in our lifetime, with the rate of technological change, depending on what we want to do. I mean, you kind of sound pretty sanguine, or about it, but do you think it's just inevitable and we have to figure out how to ride the tiger. Is that what your issue is?
Oh absolutely. So I mean, I'm, I'm not a moralist. As you know, I teach ethics. But I think it's much more interesting to sort of figure out like, what are the widely shared moral values that we have like non psychopaths? You know, we can agree that I don't know other people have some moral status, we should treat them in certain ways. Just a really general level, right? We should follow the golden rule, you know, practice reciprocity. You can kind of pick those out and then just sort of figure out okay, how do those apply in a particular case? And like traditional moralists are like, Well, should you lie to the stranger at the door? You know, under certain circumstances? I don't know, I've never found those dilemmas very interesting. Because we can all think about those in our own like, we don't need an ethics class to think about that, it gets much more interesting to figure out, like, what do we do in cases in which there's either deep moral disagreement, or there's moral agreement, and people are going to act in very different ways. And what we're trying to do with ethics is to try to harmonize private choice and collective welfare. So for example, again, like, you know, you might have tons of incentives to do certain things for your kids, like tutor them or give them music lessons or whatever. And you know, that benefits them, maybe it makes your life go better. Does it impose costs on others, does it not? It depends, maybe in that case, there is no cost and other people. But if you make your kid a little more aggressive than mine, like you said, it might make them a little more likely to become a CEO, who makes more money than mine, or it's just a little bit more attractive to females, if they liked that sort of thing. And now you're talking about imposing costs on me. And often, like, we're used to these situations where, okay, you impose a cost on me, what I'm going to do is say we should pass a law, right? You're imposing costs, like, let's say, pollution, you know, you're you're spewing out a bunch of pollution in the air, and we're all like, we have bad lungs as a result. All right, we should have a law regulating it. But I'm really interested in what's happened in these cases where we have collective action problems, we each have these incentives to do this thing. And the overall outcome is actually either bad or not as good as it could be. And where the laws themselves that we propose, might or might not work. And that's where I see this going, like, I am pretty optimistic. But what makes me pessimistic is people's total unwillingness to go through these thought experiments, like when they hear about this technology, even people with PhDs and MBAs they'll often be like, ban it, or I don't like it, so it's wrong. And that's fine. Like, you don't have to do it. Right. But my view is, whatever you think there's gonna be a huge market for this, we need to figure out what's going on. Like, we need to figure out, like, what kinds of regulations what kind of subsidies should we have? And if we pass certain packages, is that going to drive like our citizens to other countries to do it? And will those be in like, gray markets, black markets? Those are the big questions. So that's why I'm interested in that.
Yeah. Okay, so we've been talking about the ethics, like, let's say you were writing this in the late teens, which is like, an epoch, in -
2018 Yeah.
So now it's, we're going to be going to 2023 soon, some of these things you're talking about. So when you're talking about immune enhancement, a lot of that is actually going to be relatively few genes, a substantial non trivial number, you know, like - So just for the listener and the viewer, let me explain. So for example, here's an idea. You know, some estimates say that 30, novel mutations to you about like 1% of them are going to be in a genic region, that means a minority of people will have a huge hit. So they're probably even if they they're not expressing your recessive disease, because they're not, usually what happens when you have a huge hit, is that it does reduce function somewhat. And so they could be a better version of them, if you go in there. So let's say that you sequence a fetus, and this is imagination, you sequence a fetus, and you see where the novo mutations are. And CRISPR technology is good enough that you can transfect or deliver, I just fixed everything, okay? In fact, you can fix all the mutations for the parents, too. Okay. So you create the best quote unquote, version of this human being right. Okay, so like, that's pretty straightforward. Now, when you're talking about some of these polygenic things, so you're talking to like moral ethical personality is heritable. Depending on the construct, you use 30 to 40%. But, you know, we're really, really far out from doing real genetic predictions that are not trivial on personality. So this is basically written way ahead of its time. What is your sense of when that could even be possible? I think that is the - of the thing get talked about.
Yeah, I mean, personality is in terms of, for example, the Big Five OCEAN, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, that sort of thing. I think that's a ways away, but we're already getting to the margins of that. So when you think about for example, externalizing behavior, we can already select in favor, well, or again. externalizing behavior, and that's basically traits that involve things like low self control, high aggression, basically acting out violating rules that are mutually beneficial. And that's something we can select on now. I mean, we can select on IQ now, like, I know people who are kind of up to doing this right now, um, you know, of course, there's genomic prediction, there's Orchid, there's some of these companies, they offer various health traits, but we're very quickly moving into the mental realm. And so I agree that personality is a ways away, especially the way we traditionally think about it. But cognitive enhancement is basically here, if you want to do it. And similarly, some personality traits, again, like externalizing, we can select against that. So yeah, we're kind of here.
Yeah. So what is your so there are some people who are very skeptical of this sort of thing that it's ever gonna get possible? Like, what percentage confidence? Are you? Are you a 100%? That it's, we're going to do this, we're going to be able to do this.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. This is going to be within? Yeah, I'm sure. The first versions of cognitive enhancement, this is not through CRISPR. But through embryo selection, those models are ready to go right now. So I think the first companies doing this will be emerging really soon. So yeah, this is going to happen. I think personality is a little ways away. But yeah, I'm confident this is not only going to happen, it's going to become widely endorsed, I think what's going to happen is the first companies doing this 30 getting attacked, right? They're already getting attacked by the press. And there's there's two mutually exclusive answers. And they're they're both given in the same articles. One is, this doesn't work. And then the other is it's unfair, because it gives advantages to the rich. And you actually have to choose one of those right? Either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, then you shouldn't worry about any qualities. But often what you see is these companies are getting denounced. Because, you know what, what people do is they have an emotional reaction to it, and they look for any argument against it, right? And the first argument is, well, it doesn't work, right, the science must be bad. And once people realize no the science is probably capable of doing this capable of guiding selection. They quickly think of other objections that sort of justify their gut instincts. And those are inequalities. Those are arms races. Those are things like that, right.
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I'm trying to push back here. Because I think in terms of a descriptive in terms of the descriptive aspect, we agree, I think, in terms of the prescriptive, that's where we might disagree, some, you know, we're talking about selection and what preferences people have. And so you know, in an evolutionary context, things, evolution selects for what increases reproductive fitness success. So for example, if you're creationist, you actually have a higher reproductive success than if you believe in evolution, right. It's just like, that's just how it is. It's kind of funny. But I also agree with Peter Turchin, that, you know, religiosity religious intuitions, they're heritable. And I also believe that these higher quote, unquote, religions associated with cultures, with tribes with social political units are culturally useful in intergroup competition. That's a nice way to say war. Okay. But um, yep. So we can imagine a scenario where people start selecting for a very, super religious, chauvinistic, you know, just fanatics, right, So
Yup, these guys behind me Razib. You've got a double helix behind you look, look at this iconography. Yeah, and yet, I have zero kids, and you have what four? You know, so I don't know.
I have three that I know of.
Okay. Yeah. Good. And one that you don't yeah. Anyway, yeah, yeah, no, this. This is it right. Look, I mean, and I mean, I don't know, let's - we might disagree about this. But I see religiosity as facilitating group selection. And I think political orientation is basically a lot like religiosity, its set of character traits. And it tends to rally around something, whether it be like a political party, or religion or whatever. And yeah, it's pretty clear to me, and I think Joe Henrich also agrees and he has a great article called ‘the evolution of religiôn’, Peter Turkishas well, this is a set of adaptations that leads us to be more fertile, not necessarily to get the world right, you know, so evolution doesn't care about how accurate your beliefs are, right? It cares more or less about how many offspring you have. And to the extent that your brain is oriented toward accuracy of belief, and that helps produce more offspring. Yeah, that will be rewarded. But if it goes in the other direction, it won't be. I agree, I actually think and as you know, Eric Kaufman wrote a book called shall the religious inherit the earth? Same kind of arguments here which is Is that way of thinking tends to lead to more fertility and you can see that between countries and within countries. So the most extreme case is probably Israel, within country, right. So it is the only modern developed country that has above replacement fertility. Even among the secular - but they're barely, they're barely above replacement. They're like 2.1. But the ultra religious are at like, 7, 8, 9, depending on how you define them. And that can't have no effect over time, it's got to have an effect on the political culture of Israel. And this is just a perfect case of gene culture. coevolution. So as religious people or people who are inclined to be religious, even if they're not religious, maybe they're social justice warriors, which is a kind of religion. If they have more children, on average, of course, that's going to reinforce those personality traits. So I think that's inevitable. That's that's the way the world works.
So you're saying John Stuart Mill is self limiting?
Yes, yes, he is. Yeah, the rationalist? Or, or Bo Weingard. Yeah, John Stuart Mill, Bo Weingard, coldly calculating everything right, and just arriving it all and only true beliefs. It's not necessarily the best strategy from a Darwinian standpoint.
You know, Johnny, we can discuss that. No, I'm not
- it’s getting too personal.
Yeah, not like I have. So listeners and viewers do not know this about me, because I'm trying to be mature and serious here. But I love doing impersonations of people. Here we go. That's one of the things I'm not going to do anymore. But just in my real life, I love to do impersonations of people. And I have lots of them. So, yeah, what I wanted to get across to the listener and the viewer is, if we do allow genetic quote ‘enhancement’ - this change, it's going to hypercharged evolution. And it's going to make us to be the selectors of evolution, it's going to turn, you know, science into engineering. And once science becomes engineering, one, you can't deny it. To start engineering took us to the moon. You know, like, we understood the basic principles of Newtonian mechanics in the early 1700s. And then within a couple of centuries, we went to the moon. Now we understand DNA and we understand these principles. We're starting to get the whole genome sequence like I have my whole genome sequence a lot of people do. Okay, this is science. Once we get to engineering, that's going to be crazy. And so -
I like this analogy. Yeah, go ahead.
No, no, what you're talking about is a path into a very, very exciting, stressful, terrifying, whatever.
Yep,
whatever, like hyperbole you want to use, they're actually appropriate.
Yeah, and Razib, Here's why I like the analogy. Because, yeah, the benefits potential benefits are greater and sort of the costs. And I think it's inevitable once again, like, that's why I'm not just a cheerleader for this. So what did we do with Newtonian mechanics? Well, we went to the moon, and we lost a lot of rockets. And a lot of dead people trying to get to the moon, right? There are tons of failures. You know, all we think about like Apollo nine, Apollo 11. But think about all of the all of the people that died along the way, right, in failed attempts. So I think this is inevitable with genetic enhancement, as well, parents are going to make mistakes in the same way they do on the mating market, it's just the stakes are going to be higher. I do think there's one big distinction that your listeners should think about. And that is, there's a difference between gene editing right now and genetic selection. So when you're selecting among whole embryos, these are, for the most part, what they do when you do IVF is they get rid of non viable embryos, or embryos with mosaicism, then they take otherwise healthy embryos. And it's really up to you to just like, randomly select one, or you could test them for certain traits, and then select accordingly. And we were talking about that selecting among whole genomes is not nearly as risky. Even if you don't know what all the genes do, you don't actually have to those are viable embryos. Now, with gene editing, the reason I think it's a little bit early to use this, maybe in five or 10 years, it'll be okay. We simply don't know the downstream effects of a lot of specific genes. And until we do that, yeah, you're gonna get the equivalent of like, failed attempts to go to the moon, where you get a kid with, like, some serious, some serious issues. So, you know, in the long run, I think that's gonna be solved. You're just gonna have more knowledge. Everything's going to be probabilistic, but at least you'll know like, what are the actual probabilities right now? We don't know. And there's a related issue that maybe we should talk about. I think it's the most common objection among knowledgeable people anyway. And that's the pleiotropy objection. That's the idea that there are some genes or some small sequences of genes that encode for multiple proteins or multiple traits. So you have one effect that actually like a benefit, maybe it's an immuno enhancement, whatever. And there's some other downstream effect. And you could probably mention these are, you know, these more than I do, that is a net negative for the welfare of the person. And if you're just randomly editing genes, like, you're really likely to end up with some negative pleiotropy or antagonistic pleiotropy. Having said that, though, and maybe you can give an example. But when you're selecting whole embryos, there's actually really good evidence from Nathan Treff, and others, that when you select against one disease, you actually inadvertently select against other diseases, you don't increase the risk of most other diseases, maybe some, but what you actually do is simultaneously decrease the risks of lots of diseases. So a lot of people worry about pleiotropy and I think that's legit, we really do need to worry about that. But I think the worry is often misplaced. And people don't recognize often enough anyway, that there's positive pleiotropy not just negative planet trophy.
Yeah, I mean, I think what you're so Nathan Treff, by the way, is with Genomic Prediction. Just so people-
Yep. There's no Chief Science Officer at GP. Yep.
Yeah. So I mean, I think what the what he's getting out there is like, often when you have a pathogenic variant, so genes are pleiotropic they affect multiple pathways, if it's pathogenic, it's going to be pathogenic in multiple different ways. That's common sense, right? And so this, again, gets to the fact that of your various chapters, the one that is about immuno enhancement, for example, to some extent, even smart people, is, it's basically going at the low hanging fruit of the rotten fruit of our mutation. Okay, of our mutations.
Okay
So it's like, you know, what we have, what we have in genomics is a consensus reference sequence of humanity. And these are the, quote, wild type. Now, that means that it's not a mutant, it's not bad. There are some cases where the reproductive or the fitness effect is pretty equivalent in different contexts. But really, that's a minority of cases, a lot of the time the mutations that you have, are there, they're not good for you. Like it's in that state for a reason. And so, I mean, I'm talking about intergenic, you know, for the nerds out there. Yes, I understand that only a couple of percent of the genome is protein coding, etc. I know all this stuff. Okay. But I mean, you understand what what I'm getting at here. But when you're talking about enhancing things, like aesthetics, now, this is more like a gain of, it's more like gain of function research. Okay, which like a lot of listeners, our listeners and viewers, whoa, but you know, it's like it was I think there was a difference between abolishing loss of function, because that's what a lot of it is. It's like broken gene.
Yep
Okay. Like you have a risk for type two diabetes, or some of this, like the risk for type two diabetes, Crohn's disease, some of this actually does seem to be pleiotropy due to some diseases in the past as our body it's like a shadow adaptation. I think that's the way I'll explain interesting. So yes, some of these things. Some of these like, look like they were selected during the Holocene, after some disease outbreaks and stuff like that. So its a shadow adaptation - Where the so I mean, this is, this is like a Fisserian like a geometric model of adaptation, where as you converge upon the adaptive peak, you know, you converge smaller and smaller. And then if you have a mutation, it's overwhelmingly likely to shift you off the adaptive peak. Now, there are Yeah, there are some cases where the environment changes so much, that shifting off the adaptive peak gets you benefits. So the obvious case of
It’s like the higher peak, yeah,
This is sickle cell. So the, you know, the consequence of having the sickle cell allele is adaptation to malaria. But the consequence of having to is like you're, you're messed up and you die early, right. But in high malaria situations, it's worth the cost. What should happen over time is better adaptation should emerge. But that takes time, as like modifier genes and other mutations slowly converge back on the adaptive peak. So what we're looking at when we're getting rid of these loss of function mutations is just the adaptive peak that was already there, you know, for a normal functioning human. But the other issue is, okay, like, making people more than they are. So for example, lactase persistence. It's actually a knockout in a regulatory region, that so it's actually a breakage what it's breaking is the fact that mammals at a certain age, they turn off the production of the lactase enzyme and that weens them okay, which is very adaptive in you know, it's like basically you the organism, the animal,
In most environments.
Yeah, so weaning basically, like it doesn't want to breastfeed anymore. It will kill you like it's time to grow up right get out -
And eat meat
Yeah yeah, or whatever you want to do. So that makes sense. And then a small minority of a large minority of humans now are locked is persistence there's a regulatory breakage upstream of the gene, and it never shuts off? Well, I mean, that's kind of functionally, maybe you would want your kid to do that. Or there's the the Delta CCR5 mutation that has shown up in China, you know that that deletion makes us think HIV can't get into the cell. But some of these have some side effects that we probably don't know about. I don't think that big. But, but we'll see. We'll see. So I don't want to like, just wave it away. I know what you're saying. I think it's a little overdone.
Yeah,
a lot of these things. The analogy I use is when people complain about sample sizes. Really, the issue is not the sample size. It's like is your sample is big enough and representative enough for the questions you're asking. Right. So you have like a medium or modest sample size, and the effect outcome is really large. Well, you know, that's a really a big effect outcome, you know, but, yeah, so I mean, I think people have to be careful, and take this one at a time. Um,
yeah, good. Razib, just to follow that up. I think that's a really good point. So I think the pleiotropy objection, just as an example, is super important. And it always will be for all of human history, or for all of the humans that are to come. It's just, it's necessarily an issue that has to be considered. I just want to diffuse the idea that somebody comes along and says, here's a problem, right? We have some uncertainty about the Total effects of, of this gene, that in and of itself is not sufficient to say, okay, don't do anything or make it illegal. It's just an argument for caution. And in some cases, maybe we should have laws against it, right? If we recognize some case of pleiotropy where it's like, seriously harmful, you just want like the perfect nose on your little girl. But it like dramatically impairs your immune system. Somehow. There's some gene that does that. Yeah, I mean, that should be shunned or maybe made illegal I don't know. But there are going to be lots of cases of cloud trophy that we have to worry about. And watch. It's just that you often see these arguments, people raise them, or let's say, like, look, I'm worried about genetic diversity. As soon as you become an engineer, as you put it, rather than letting nature take its course, we have this problem of genetic diversity. And my answer is like, yes, that is a problem. And there are lots of other problems. There's also problems associated with not selecting in favor of certain traits. And so yeah, it's really just a matter of balancing risks. That's why I don't take like a, you know, an extremely pro position in terms of the ethics of enhancement. I just want to point out what the trade offs are, and why it's not obvious that we should make things illegal, even when they might produce some unforeseen consequences.
Yeah, I got it. Yeah, sorry. I'm just getting the hang of this. Yeah, framework. I'm using a different application viewer. So I'm a little a little bit clumsy here. But, you know, we've been, I think we've had a really great conversation. And we'd like, you know, I want to push back on you, Johnny. But I think you're asking questions that need to be asked. I think people like dismiss it. I think we are we are living in interesting times. I'm not saying in a good way or a bad way. I'm saying it in a descriptive truthful way. Right. So you have been thinking about this these issues for a decade or not, or so now. Where are you at? Almost in 2023? Since you wrote the book, like, you know, what are your thoughts about the future? and whatnot?
Well, let's see general thoughts on this. I think the technology is coming along pretty quickly. I think that especially when people first started talking about CRISPR, you know, the discussion was, you know, this is going to this is going to allow us to dramatically reshape ourselves pretty soon. But the more I read your substack, the more I follow people who are in the world of genetics, the more I realize it's more complicated than we could have possibly imagined 10 years ago, 20 years ago, so we actually have more knowledge. And yet, the more knowledge we get, the more humility we have to have. So we have to have a kind of Socratic wisdom about this. In a way, I guess, you could say these these worries about playing God. And these heuristics where people are really scared of doing this. They're not completely misguided. I mean, we should actually worry about these arguments from complexity. However, I think that is blanket arguments, the idea therefore, that we shouldn't pursue this knowledge, and that people should enhance their kids. I think it's naive, I think it's going to happen, I think it's actually a good thing that's going to happen. And the closing thought I have is that the more we realize that genes and cultures co evolve, that different societies have different standards of beauty, different norms, for whether to have kids, how many kids to have that religion actually shapes that and sort of social norms. The more I realized that actually, the debate about genetic enhancement, is also a debate about political societies and political philosophy. Like how should we live together in a political society? You know, China has very different incentives than Israel does. And that's true for religious reasons. It's true for political reasons. And so, in a weird way, I've become more libertarian, because I think we need more experimentation. And I think people make better reproductive decisions when they feel the costs and benefits of those a little bit more directly. And that may sound harsh, but it's actually I think, a good thing. Because, you know, if you have pro social traits, like you're smart, and you're like a really good guy, and you're hardworking and all that, it's kind of a shame if you don't have kids, or if you don't have, you know, if you don't leave behind some offspring that resembles you in some way. And similarly, in the opposite direction, if there's like, no penalty, like socially, I don't mean governments, but like, there's no social sanction for just having like, as many kids as you want, like recklessly? Like, I don't think that's great, either. So I don't know, I actually think we should find ways of creating informal institutions, not not governments, per se, but informal institutions that help us drive evolution in a way that is good for all and that guides individual choices in a way that's collectively beneficial. So that's the kind of closing thought like, how do we harness incentives, such that people make socially beneficial choices? And I think that's like, that's kind of the point of living together in a political society. That's the point of morality and its point of social norms.
Well, I mean, that's a pretty eloquent, final thought from you, Dr. Anomaly, so I think I'm gonna leave it at that.
Dr. Anomaly I feel like Dr. Jill Biden, when you say that, like I'm a fake doctor, you know, it's like, economics and philosophy. It's not -
you know, like, I just like people you like Man, I can't help it like, yeah, it's in my nature, Johnny.
I'm a doctor in the way I'm religious given my background here in the Airbnb, I'm staying at.
Yeah
I mean, I am a real doctor, just not the right kind.
What's the heritability of encourage ability? Because, you know, I think it might be on. We'll see.
Dude, you're the expert. I don't know.
That's great. Thanks Razib
All right. Yeah, no, I'll see you around. It's great talking to you and really fun listeners and viewers just bear with me if that this recording is a little a little wonky. This is my first time I am doing a video recording with someone so I will be out apparently you guys want to see my face. So this is what I'm hearing from my people. So -
I love your face. Razib
You know? Yeah. All right. I'll talk to you later Johnny.
Awesome. Alright, see you later bye.
Is this podcast fo kids? This is my favorite podcast
