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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 today I'm gonna have a somewhat different format, where normally it's either me doing a monolog, and I haven't done one of those in a while - I will, I will do those again, but usually it's a conversation between me and somebody else, like the standard podcast format. Today, I have two guests, and I have had two guests on this podcast before. One of those guests is actually someone that was on one of those two guest podcasts. It was James Lee and Alex Young. A couple of years ago, we recorded a podcast. Actually, it was live. Some of you saw the video as well on YouTube about behavior genomics and psychometrics and all those interesting topics. And we also today have a returning guest, Dr. Jonathan Anomaly. I like to call him Jonny. You know, we are all friends here. I guess I'll just like explicitly say that ahead of time, I do know these two gentlemen on a more personal basis. I would say that some of my guests. And so if I get a little informal, you can tell by my tone I think, most of the listeners know if I know someone. And so we all know each other. And so that's going to probably shape the way we're going to talk a little bit. And we are going to discuss embryo selection, the science of the ethics. And part of the reason that we are going to be talking about this is recently Alex Young, who was on the previous podcast with James Lee a couple of years ago that I just mentioned, has announced his association with Herasight, which is Johnny's company, or his company that Jonny promotes, you know, he works for, works with - Jonny has equity in the company. I should also say that. I mean, that's not surprising, if anyone knows his position, so it's Jonny's company. That's why I'm gonna say it. Herasight is now already because of Alex Young's association, I think, arguably, one of the big players, along with Orchid and Genomic Prediction. Actually, did you know prediction have a new name? Again? Does it have a new name, Jonny? Do you remember
They use the name Life View for their embryo reports, but Genomic Prediction, I think is the parent company still and everyone knows Steve Hsu who knows your podcast?
So Steve Hsu has also been on my podcast. I haven't had Nora Siddiqui on my podcast yet. Although I used to promote her company, I had an advertisement readout at the beginning, so people remember that. So I have some association, some connection, with a lot of these companies, with many of these people. And so I proposed this conversation to talk about the various issues that came up. Now, yin previous years So in, say, like, I think this was in spring of 2021, if I recall correctly. Science Twitter, leftist science Twitter is probably the way I should accurately describe it, ran Nora Siddiqui over the coals for her company, Orchid, because it was a bad, bad company because, you know, it was eugenics. Actually like this time around, partly because there is very little science Twitter left of like a highly politicized sort on X, on the post Twitter, you know, on Elon platform. Partly because we have had a vibe shift. And I think academics are actually more concerned with their funding than they are in virtue signaling on the internet right now. And so there was actually relatively minor pushback on Herasight and on Alex Young's association with it. Part of the issue, I think, to be candid, is Alex is a very, very top level researcher in his field of social genomics. And I think a lot of people felt a little uncomfortable doing the usual, oh, these people are engaged in shoddy science, because I don't think anyone would accuse Alex Young of doing shoddy science, right? So most of the blowback was actually more from, I would say, the cultural right, the traditionalist right, the religious right, the Catholic right, you know, more conservatives who are worried about what this does to human dignity and the sanctity of life. And part of the issue has to do with in vitro fertilization. So in vitro fertilization, and I think you know, you have Jonny and James get it to like the nuts and bolts of it. In vitro fertilization, most of us know the word, used to be called test tube babies. And basically, you know, it's a major method in the infertility industry, I guess, or the fertility industry, not infertility industry. I don't know you want to say it. But basically, you know, people are having problems conceiving. They create these embryos artificially. Create these embryos, like, maybe the father's sperm is having problems, or maybe they need another sperm donor, or like a lot of the eggs for the mother are not optimal, I don't know. So they do egg harvesting, you know, they, I think usually, they, usually women, take some sorts of fertility medication. I think that produces a lot of eggs, and they do egg harvesting, and then they fertilize the eggs in vitro, like, I don't think it's the literal test tube anymore, but it's called test tube babies. And then they have all of these early embryos. They have all these embryos. And you put the embryos in. It's kind of like a surgical procedure, I guess. And you hope that it takes. Sometimes they put in a lot of times they put in multiple embryos. And if they have, say, more than two embryos that take. So it's like, could be triplets. There's often selective reduction. It's an abortion where two of them are saved. So usually twins, it's okay, but they recommend you do reduction if it's above twins. So obviously there's a lot of ethical issues from the traditionalist Catholic perspective about in vitro fertilization, artificiality of reproduction, and then also there's an abortion angle. Then there's the issue related to what traits are being selected
I really do not want to interrupt anyone who's speaking, but I think I should point out that IVF technique has actually improved a lot. And if the parents say we want a singleton, they'll implant just one. Yeah. If the parents say we want twins, they'll say, okay, they'll go for that. And if the parents say, We want triplets, usually they'll probably be advised, medically, no, don't, don't do that. But that's how far things have come.
Yeah, let fill in a couple of gaps there too, just just to put a couple points on what you said. So basically, I mean, so more or less, you're inducing ovulation through IVF. You collect the eggs, fertilize them with sperm. But the key point that's been going on since the 1970s as you know - the key point here is that what's new is the ability to genetically test them. So first of all, you can essentially wait for the embryo to grow for about five days, you get a bunch of cellular division. You've got an outer layer called a trophectoderm, and then right around day five, they they biopsy that, which is more or less like biopsying A piece of skin for a person. Obviously, we'll get into whether an embryo is a person, but it is an outer layer. And the point is, it doesn't damage the embryo, but it does take a few cells, and then with those cells, you can test for aneuploidy, which is chromosomal abnormalities like Down syndrome, and then single gene disorders that happened right around the same time. So monogenic conditions since the 1990s have been tested for hemochromatosis, Down syndrome, etc. And the really novel thing that we'll get into, and I'll give it back to you Razib, is of course, polygenic testing, and what makes that possible is, of course, the fact that we can now sequence large numbers of people, hundreds of 1000s, millions, in some cases, create biobanks, like the UK Biobank is the most famous one, but there are many others, and those biobanks are essentially a bunch of people who have agreed to be sequenced, and then they match up those genetic sequences with, let's say, their medical records. Have they been diagnosed with schizophrenia? How tall are they? And in some cases, they can even take an IQ test and that sort of thing. Then you run these so called genome wide association studies and create polygenic scores. I don't want to get into many details, but those polygenic scores are then used either by adults to predict what kinds of life outcomes they might have, or you can take that that same biopsy that they've been using for a long time for single gene disorders or chromosomal abnormalities, and you essentially scan the genome and look for, using polygenic scores, what's the likelihood that a particular embryo relative to another let's say, has a higher risk of schizophrenia, breast cancer, you know, will be a certain height if it's implanted, and so on. So basically, that's how it works. You've got IVF. You wait a few days, you biopsy. Now, for the first time, we can do these so called polygenic scores. And while that's happening, the embryos basically sit in a freezer, and a woman will choose either right after or at some point down the road, maybe a couple years, which one to implant. And as James said, the implantation rates now are so high that you know, whereas in the past, implementation rates were low, so they would just put two or three in there and just hope one of them took but now, now, essentially, you're just going to tell how many kids you want, and they'll just put in one at a time or two at a time. So that's the process,
Yeah, and I want to emphasize so your company Jonny, is really pushing, you know, arguably it's, it's pushing the tools and the methods and the science talking about the polygenic aspect. Because Orchid, I haven't really followed genomic predictions marketing lately, but Orchid definitely emphasizes sequencing and looking at diseases. Like pathogenic characteristics, right? So, you know, having a five point lower IQ or 10 point lower IQ is not considered pathogenic, right? Like, that's not a disease.
So I will say, and I don't want to take too much time, we'll get to James's objections, because I'm especially interested in those, and discussing those. But, yeah, I mean, it's funny, Steve Hsu did briefly when he started genomic prediction offer something like an IQ predictor, but he framed it as selecting against mental retardation, I think, which probably was not the right you'd learn to use at the time. But more or less it was just an indirect way of testing for IQ, everyone kind of understood that. They ditched it after they got into some heat. Times have changed. So we think intelligence is important. Well, James is one of the leading experts in the world on intelligence. He can tell you all about it. But as James would agree, even if he disagrees with embryo selection, intelligence correlates with all kinds of interesting life outcomes, almost all of which are good, whether it's length of life and health and income and educational attainment, etc, marital stability, it's inversely correlated with criminality, etc, and so. So we thought, Look if, if we're going to be able to allow people to select against disease, well, actually, intelligence, in some ways, is related. It's a kind of all purpose trait that helps you live a good life, and is actually related to health. So yeah, we do offer that we have the best IQ predictor in the world, the white paper for that is is essentially written. We're going to come out with that in a few weeks, maybe a month, something like that. But two weeks ago, when we launched, we just wanted to do the white paper for the health traits that we offer, and then compare ourselves against other people who are doing this, both in academia and the private market. And so yeah, we have IQ on our website, but the white paper for that and the validation study is forthcoming very, very soon.
So I guess James, you haven't like talked too much, and so I need to ask you, why are you against nice things?
The embryos that are not implanted in IVF are typically destroyed, so some are - Part of the process is freezing them in liquid nitrogen. But those that are not implanted. We don't have precise numbers. I don't believe, but some guesses say that half of them are destroyed almost right away, and the other half are frozen indefinitely. With embryo selection, because the embryo that is implanted is selected on the basis of a statistical prediction of its future intelligence or physical appearance or what have you. Often, embryos are not rejected for any specific reason, I mean, there might be some visible chromosomal abnormality or something like that. In embryo selection, the embryos have been rejected for a specific reason, so we can be sure that a very high percentage will be destroyed right away, and the vast majority will be destroyed eventually.
Yeah, if I can add to that. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, James.
I'll also point out that, you know, we should use the term embryo selection. That's kind of stuck. However, it is not fully inclusive. I'm sure no one offers - Well, I mean, how would you know? But basically, nothing in the concept prevents the application of this technique to a normal pregnancy beyond the embryonic and into the fetal state. So you get the genetic data from the womb. You decide, well, me and my spouse, we both have PhDs, whatever we can do better than this, and perhaps you terminate the pregnancy and go for a do over. So my opposition is all practices of this kind, but we can call it embryo selection.
Okay. I like that because - yeah, go ahead Razib.
Well, I would say so Non Invasive Prenatal Testing, NIPT, is actually widely done today for all geriatric pregnancies, but also some non geriatric pregnancies. And that involves a blood draw from the mother, and then they try to detect fetal DNA in there, like, fetal genetic material, and they try to detect aneuploidies, and that's an essential part of how they're detecting Down syndrome. And there's some other, there's some other chromosomal diseases that they're detecting. And then those are generally statistics are kind of fuzzy and vague out there, but it looks like over 50% of the positives, those that come back positive and validated in various ways, are terminated, you know, resulting in abortion. So we could imagine a future, I think this is like pretty far. I remember 10 years ago, almost 10 years ago, at American society human genetics, they, they did figure out ways to do like Jason Durrie's lab did figure out ways to do whole genome sequencing from just doing a blood draw. But I guess, I mean it wasn't high enough quality with the coverage and stuff like that. But I can see a future where that might be feasible. And so what James is talking about, where you just do selection based on sequencing of a later stage fetus that was conceived, so a fetus is after nine weeks, that was conceived through natural means where you do the selection through an abortion, you know, in the first trimester, something like that, right? Anyway, go on Johnny,
Yeah. Okay. So I like what James said, because it sort of raises two separate but important issues. One is the kind of moral principle that animates concern over, let's say, embryos versus fetuses at different stages. And actually think I'm going to share some sympathy with them, but there's going to be some difference. So let's get to that. But I wanted to make a more important point, which is this, when you're testing embryos for which one to implant. I mean, the good news about that is that it actually prevents abortions in the sense that women are typically going to, you know, select away from aneuploidy, such as Down Syndrome and other related chromosomal problems. And in fact, by doing that, essentially you're not going to just have to wait for the fetus to grow and have cellular differentiation and that sort of thing six or eight weeks, which is what they normally do, and then test for it, which I actually have some difficulty with. I have to say I have some sympathy with, just like, taking a six or eight week old fetus, and I mean, just because it's sub optimal, you're going to abort it? I mean that that that's a problem. Now I can see why people would abort for other reasons and so on. But, but, yeah, I actually think embryo selection in the sense of doing these genetic tests, then deciding which embryo to implant prevents abortion, which I think is a lot worse than thinking that whatever that embryos have a certain moral status. Nevertheless, I did want to ask James, actually, do you think, sort of sincere question, do embryos have exactly the same moral status as a fetus? As a person? Or are you a gradualist? Do you think it gains more moral status as it develops?
I believe that the intentional killing of any human being at any stage of life is morally impermissible. My grounds for that among one of several - Well, let me, let me pose a thought experiment. So Razib mentioned a practice called selective reduction, this is the use of abortion to reduce a multiple pregnancy, such as twins or triplets, to a lower order pregnancy, a singleton. All right, so imagine that you are a member of a fraternal twinship. Your parents get out your genetic data very early on in the pregnancy. Now suppose that they're told that the genetic data means that you are genetically predicted to have a lower IQ than your twin. On that basis, suppose your parents decide that to undergo a selective reduction, to kill you, and to allow your twin to live. Now let's consider the situation in light of the golden rule, if you think it is okay for something to be done to others, you must be willing for it to be done to you. What you desire out of selfishness, say, your own existence, since your case is not particularly special, you must desire as a universal law. So the question I would ask the audience to pose is, to each person, is if you were in this situation, would you consent to be terminated while still gestating while your fraternal twin is allowed to go on just because the genetic data said that your twin was going to be better in this way or some other way? For my part, I do not consent to it, no matter how genetically superior my twin is expected to be. Now I'm sure that there are those in the audience who are fraternal twins who may be thinking, Boy, I'm sure glad this wasn't around when my mother was pregnant with me. Maybe I'm the one who wouldn't have made it. And as much as we may certainly love and respect our parents, we know that we're all frail human beings. A colleague of mine just said to me, you know, so Noor Siddiqui, the CEO one of these other companies. She was just interviewed in a podcast recently. She talked about how she was planning to do embryo selection. She'd already created all the embryos. I believe she says it created something like 28? 16, or something? I've heard that healthy women in their 20s, that more than 30 is feasible. This colleague of mine just said to me, if we'd been in a pool of 30, all of us would be on ice or incinerated. Now, Europe as a whole, I'm going to pivot to Europe because we can make this thought experiment, I think even tighter. So Europe as a whole is hardly a bastion of Christian conservatism, but European countries often have laws more protective of unborn life than in many American states. So in Germany, the
law permits only three embryos to be created in a given cycle. So given the improvements in IVF technique that I mentioned earlier, they figure if IVF is going to work for you, it'll work with three embryos per cycle. They're Germans afterall. The law further specifies that all three in a cycle must be transferred to the mother. There is no scope for eugenic selection. Okay, so I'm simplifying things. There's all these nuances. Like, you know, if one embryo looks like it's got an aneuploidy or it doesn't look good, they won't transfer it, but that's the basic idea. Usually this will result in a singleton. If a multiple pregnancy results, which is possible up to triplets, although that'll be rare. Selective reduction is permitted, but even then it is discouraged. There is a waiting period and mandatory counseling, although I would imagine in triplets, they wouldn't counsel against it too hard. But even so, the desire the parents, who may otherwise be infertile, to become parents is respected, but at the same time balanced by the goal of minimizing and disincentivizing the destruction of embryonic life. No one conceived through IVF in Germany has to wonder, well, if my parents could have seen my genetic data they might not have chosen me. Now, often it's pointed out that,
well, you know, killing an embryo doesn't seem the same thing as killing an adult human being. It seems to me, the embryo doesn't look like a human, it doesn't have consciousness, it doesn't suffer when we kill it. But to me, the killing of an embryo and the killing of a human who are already been born are equivalent in that, in both cases, we've violated the person's right to live. Now, in cases, other cases, there might be further harms on top of that, such as pain, suffering, depriving that person's loved ones of his presence. But this, to me, does not negate the first type of harm. If it did, it would justify the killing of, say, a homeless person who's asleep and is not conscious at that time, who no one cares about him, no one mourns. Unfortunately, there are deaths like that that occur every day, but nevertheless,
I am sure that the killing of people in that situation is completely unjustified. Even if the person is asleep, you know people who say that it's consciousness or sentience. I believe in those things, although I can't tell you what those are, but
people have argued that. Well, you know, that's that's what really matters. For all we know someone who's asleep lacks those qualities, but it is still wrong to kill them. Well, why not? Well, they don't currently exercise those capacities, but they have the potential to, in the regular course of nature, we expect them to, but that is exactly the case with an embryo.
Good, if you don't mind, I'll say a couple things there. There are about three or four principles tied together there. I think, the first point to make, and we do this in bioethics ever since Derek Parfit his book "Reasons and Persons" in 1984. He identifies this problem called the non identity principle, or the non identity problem. And he has these thought experiments where he sort of says, Look, imagine a teenage girl gives birth to some kid. They're a little too young. Their life isn't quite going as well as it could be. And, you know, they could give the kid a much better life if they just waited till they were married and in their 20s. And we all kind of agree with that. Sure, that makes sense. But then Derek Parfit says, yeah. But you know, the interesting thing here is, of course, if they waited another 10 years, it wouldn't be the actual same person, it would be a different person. So what we're really talking about is what kinds of people or persons should be born in that case, as opposed to, how should this mother treat these different hypothetical people? And now I see embryos a lot like that, and a lot less like the abortion case that you mentioned, James. I think you mentioned, and it's a great thought experiment, you can imagine a couple of twins that are, let's say, six months in the womb. To make it extreme, right? They're, they're actually pretty close to birth. And you might think to yourself, yeah, I mean, what right has mom to to abort me, rather than you, just because I don't know, I'm a little taller or have a few IQ points, or whatever the case is that you mentioned. And yeah, that does seem, to me, actually seem I have a pretty big problem with that. I do defer, usually to to parents rather than the state, because I think they have the best interest generally, at heart and so on. We could disagree about that, but I think what, what is clear for me anyway, and I'll be interested in your view, is that, you know, embryos are fundamentally qualitatively different than certainly full grown people, but even developing fetuses. I'm a gradualist, so I think, like people have rights, and fetuses might even be described as having kind of defeasible rights. Maybe the mother has more rights than her early on, maybe as birth approaches, she doesn't actually and the fetus has full rights. And my view is that we gradually gain these rights as we gain uniquely human qualities, like sentience, sapience, even things like a heartbeat, which a lot of other animals have, I think are morally relevant. And so abortion gets worse as the fetus grows. But here's where we probably disagree. And I'd be interested in your view. I mean, I think a an actual embryo has about the same moral status as a sperm or an egg cell, and to be honest, even a skin cell. I mean, a skin cell has the full complement of DNA, and could be made using, you know, induced pluripotency or something like that. You know, technically we could clone a skin cell and make it into a person. It's a perspective. It's a potential person that may sound grotesque to especially religious people, but in the sense that it could literally become something that breathes and lives and has a heartbeat and feels pain, every skin cell in your body, technically could do that, and certainly every embryo, or at least most embryos, can. And so my view is that what gives something moral significance is not having a certain genetic code, but rather having these kinds of traits that make us into persons, that make us, you know, uniquely moral animals. We can have empathy, sympathy, feel pain, understand people have goals, et cetera. So I think we're gonna disagree on that, but I'm curious what your kind of view is on that James,
So you mentioned gradualism and the question of physical identity. Was this object that existed at a certain time really the same thing as you today? I think that immediately upon conception, the embryo is strongly and inseverably linked in physical identity to the person that it will become. So you mentioned how at conception, the diploid genome of the person is present for the first time in a discrete jump. So my more senior colleagues at the University of Minnesota once conducted a pretty well known study of monozygotic twins reared apart. So monozygotic twins result when -- actually it's very mysterious, although we've gotten some hints recently. But it's a bit mysterious why this occurs every so often, very rarely. But what basically happens is that at any point, typically at some point, five to 14 days after conception, the embryo accidentally splits, and then the two parts, each independently develop into monozygotic twins, or as they're called colloquially, identical twins. Now, back in the day, used to be pretty common for monozygotic twins to be separated of birth and reared in different homes for a variety of reasons. So what my colleagues at the University of Minnesota did was they tracked down as many of these twins as they could find, and then brought them here to be studied. All kinds of measurements were taken. They filled out all kinds of questionnaires, did all kinds of tests. So the first set of twins that were studied were known as the Jim twins. They were both they first met at the age of 39 they were both similar in size, to my eye they're actually not that similar in appearance, but anyway, they were six feet tall, 180 pounds, at least in physical dimensions. Both had been married twice. At that point, their wives had the same names, Linda and Betty. They had given their sons the same name. One was James Alan with an A, the other was James Allen with an E. As children, each had owned a dog named Toy, both had worked as part time Sheriffs, both had installed circular fences around trees in their front yards. Both had taken vacations to the same three block strip of Florida beach. I think they missed each other by about a month. They both drove there in light blue Chevrolets. So that was the first set of twins studied by my more senior colleagues, Tom Bouchard, Matt McCue, Nancy Segal. So they tracked down more, probably the most famous set, though there are many famous sets. One famous set, these twins were born in Germany. One left the country to live with his biological father, and he was raised as Ashkenazi Jew, because that's what his father was. The one who had been left behind in Germany was raised as a German. They met briefly in the 50s, for about a week, and then not again until they were reunited here in Minnesota to be studied. When they came it was discovered that both like to read books backwards. Both like to wear tight bathing suits at the beach. Both had funny senses of humor, like they both like to sneeze loudly in crowded elevators just to see the reactions. I often sneeze involuntarily in elevators, I don't know why, but. Both wrap rubber bands around their wrists. I once had a professor of that same habit, but just in case you need a rubber band, you got hundreds of them wrapped around your wrists. Both were very competitive, they would do the IQ testing, and at the end of the day, they would go up to the clinician and say, Oh, how did I do? Did I beat him? Both were highly ethnocentric, so the German one had joined the Hitler Youth as a boy, although that was something everyone was pressured into doing. So, not much should be read into that. But anyway, he was still very German, very proud of being German. The other was very proud of being an Ashkenazi Jew, and they argued about this long and bitterly, a great source of difficulty in their relationship. So anyway, we can see that - By the way, you know, you can make predictions of phenotypes based on just knowing the sperms genotype, and you can make some predictions that are based on just the eggs phenotype genotypes, but these peculiar kinds of traits that I'm talking about, like both becoming like, there , these twins that both became firemen. There were these other twins were both became owners of body building gyms. And you've heard about, you know, the Jim twins and the German /Jewish twins. A lot of these remarkable similarities are surely due to non additive genetic effects. A technical term for this is epistasis that probably will never be able to - well, who knows - but probably my guess is we'll never be able to statistically predict that well and that are only locked in place once the full genome, full diploid genome, has come together. So I'm not saying that monozygotic twins are the same person in two different bodies. No each obviously develops in a distinct way from conception onward. However, if gradualism is true, no great amount of development ever occurs in any given moment. Well, maybe there are, maybe there are, like Damascus moments that can occur in a person's life, but there, we can't say much about those. Gradualism being true the moment in your life where the greatest amount of development, that is the portion of the causal sequence lapsing so that we can say, okay, certain amount of development is now locked in that moment is conception. Once the cells divide, they immediately start to express different parts of the genome. To ensure all this comes about, different cells start to take on different roles. If a twinning event occurs that's a disruption, but the characteristics of life, starting with the ability to replicate one becoming two and then two robustly recover the trajectory that it was on before the disruption took place. This has all occurred immediately. Let me return to this point about an embryo being no different from what we can do in principle with technology by just scraping off your skins and reverting them to embryos, or being no different morally from a sperm cell or an egg cell. I've just talked about the huge scientific difference between gametes and embryos. Again, what you desire out of selfishness you must also permit as a universal law. If you were to go back in a time machine and then suppose you're a member of a fraternal twinship, and you were to except it's just like back the movie, Back to the Future, right? For whatever reason, things could happen differently. You go back, if you were to see your parents decide, maybe with technology, that suddenly been imported from the future or something now, they can decide, hey, you know, this one has a 1.7% 1.7
probability of having bipolar disorder. The other one is .09. This one's going to be a little bit smarter. This one is going to be a little better looking. Let's kill this one and pick the other one. Surely you would be in agony. You would be Mom, Dad, don't do it. And it would not matter if it was six months in the pregnancy or immediately after conception, because your non existence is insured either way. I could easily assent to a universal law that says, Please, mom, dad, don't kill me. Now. What was the actual plot of Back to the Future? In a sense, the main character, Marty, was trying to ensure his conception because things had gone awry in the past. It looked like his parents were not going to fall in love and get married and so on. And when it looks like his conception is going to be prevented, he clearly is in agony. I mean, as he gets very close to being blinked out of existence. However, no one could will as a universal law that people devote their entire lives to copulating and procreation in order to bring into actuality as much of the abstract space of possible human genomes as possible. Likewise, no one could will as a universal law that if it's possible to make human beings out of skin cells that we're constantly gathering up all the skin cells that we're constantly discarding and purposely, maybe culling them, gathering them up, I mean, to convert them all into human beings as possible. Okay, sorry for speaking so long, but that's, that's what I have to say.
All right, yeah, so we'll let Jonny go. Now, you know, I do want to like, I do want to like, just tell the listener really quickly. Obviously, some of these, some of these segments are gonna be pretty long, but I did tell the guys ahead of time that I really wanted to hear thoughts at length, and that's my point of of this discussion. So just like, bear with me everybody, this is not like, you know, we're not, this isn't the bench appear on the Daily Wire. No offense to Ben, but you know, just like. Yeah, I'm not looking for, like, quick back and forth here and quick hits and sound bites. So Jonny, like, there was a lot there, obviously, to grapple with. So I guess I would like you to respond to that. And you know, we're gonna, we're gonna go over an hour soon here, and I do want us to talk a little bit more about, like, the general issues, and also maybe James' attitude towards the efficacy of Herasight's, particular polygenic products, which have been taking a lot of heat, I would say, you know, compared to the other stuff, which is more tried and tested. So Jonny, why don't you go? Do your thing.
Sure, yeah. But I just want to raise a couple of general points here. So, yeah, this is an area I've taught in for 20 years. I've been through all the arguments in bioethics classes and that sort of thing. And I think one of the things that I like to do, especially when I'm sort of in front of the class, whereas now I'm sort of in it, is just trying to figure out what are the principles at stake, and what do people agree on and disagree on? So one of the things that I'm interested in, James said that he thinks an embryo is more or less identical, So there's a kind of personal identity claim, with the the fetus and then the person, etc. And that's not an unusual view. And in fact, I think that's that's very common for Catholics in particular. So that's one kind of claim to make, Is to say, look, an embryo is not just a potential person, which was the point about skin cells. It is a person. It's literally the same person across time. But I wanted to raise three worries about that. This is not my view at all. And there are a few reasons why. One is actually something James himself said, which is, strangely enough, we get these spontaneous twinning events that can happen that's actually well after the stage of embryo selection, like the stuff our company does. Twinning events occur later on, and it's when one embryo suddenly becomes two or three. And it's kind of an odd consequence of a view, if you think an embryo, a particular one, has a soul or is identical in some way across time with all of its future instantiations. Weirdly, these twinning events kind of pose a metaphysical problem there. Now that can probably be answered in some ways, but there are other interesting things, which is to say, natural childbirth, about 30 to 40% of all pregnancies that aren't using IVF, which is most pregnancies, have spontaneous abortions, not spontaneous twinning, but spontaneous abortion. And we now know that the vast majority those, probably 90 plus percent, are because the body is detecting aneuploidy, more or less Down Syndrome and related problems. And so interestingly enough, like, abortion is happening all the time, often before women even know they're pregnant, and it's because of precisely the kind of tests that are done in IVF clinic. So interestingly like, if you do have the view that that a person is identical from the time they become an embryo until adulthood, you'd have to think like 30-40% of pregnancy is being spontaneously aborted. Like that's a lot of people just being flushed out for biological reasons. And then finally, I wanted to add a third point, which is more hypothetical, but it's becoming more real, and that is - if we think an embryo from the moment of conception, so to speak, when the sperm fertilizes the egg. If we think that has the unique moral status that James Lee has as a 40 something year old adult, there is kind of an odd thing, which is to say, if we edit embryos, which my company doesn't do, but, you know, famously, He Jiankui has done that and in the future, I think we can all agree, probably there will be people doing that whether you like it or not. And there's a strange consequence, which is to say that if a person remains as identical across their whole lifespan, from the moment of conception, if you did some multiplex editing to - this isn't possible now, but let's say make them a lot smarter, or change their personality, or whatever. I'm not saying all of that's completely genetic, but we all know it's partly genetic. Would that embryo, in some sense, just be the same person despite all those changes? And my view is actually no and this is more a metaphysical view than a moral view, but I think it's worth articulating when people think that from the moment of conception, it's the same thing, it has the same moral status. It's not crazy to think that that view is wrong, and I have some pretty good reasons to think that it's wrong, even though I know, again, James is going to disagree on that. So, that's just kind of a few thoughts on that principle. I just wanted to add one more quick thing, and turn it over to Razib for for what's next. But, you know, in terms of Kantian morality, you know, there, I don't want to get into the details, there are three different forms of the so called categorical imperative that James mentioned. But I think it's actually a common misconception that Kant says, you know, only act in ways that you can universalize. The main form of cons dictum is that it's impermissible to act in ways that you can't universalize and and he says specifically maxims that you can't universalize. That is to say principles. And so, for example, if I were to universalize the principle, you know, don't needlessly have abortions or something like that. Could I universalize that? I think the answer is pretty clearly yes. You can universalize that don't needlessly have abortions. And James especially is going to want to say definitely. You don't want a needless abortion. But then that just raises the question of what counts as needless and so on. And the truth is the kind of Kantian maxim of not acting in ways that aren't universalizable. It turns out, like a lot depends on the details. And again, you just have to specify, what is the maxim? What are the empirical circumstances? et cetera. So I just want to say this, like, sort of obligatory, because of, like, all the moral philosophy background, I think these principles are great, and James is part of a probably the majority tradition in the Western tradition, the Kantian tradition. But it gets way more complicated than a lot of people think in terms of applying these principles.
Yeah. Okay, so that let me -- So James, you can respond. I do want to circle back to some of the because, I mean, you've talked about what the world would look like if this sort of selection was much more common, so I do want to talk about that at some point. But why don't you respond to Doctor Anomaly's points there.
Okay, so the point that a large percentage of conceptions are spontaneously miscarried very early on, usually because of aneuploidies, which means that there's a miss segregation of chromosomes so that the embryo may have three copies of one chromosome or no copies of another instead of the usual two. First of all, I think it's very common to I don't know what this is, called the naturalistic fallacy, or something like that, but anyway, regardless of its name, to say that because something occurs naturally - which is to say it occurs with some predictability or regularity in the absence of human intervention, that that justifies the same outcome being brought about as a result of deliberate human choice or to be brought about much more often than that baseline level because of the result of human action or the failure to disincentivize people from doing that. Obviously, there's a big difference between relatedly refraining from trying to save an embryo that's probably enviable, no matter what, with few exceptions, almost all say triploidies of a particular chromosome are absolutely incompatible with life. The difference between that and deliberately going out of your way to kill an embryo that probably has nothing wrong with it except maybe it's got five fewer expected IQ points than another one. Also, the the number of aneuploidies in humans is actually unusual among mammals. Most other mammals don't have this this many aneuploidies. Why humans do is not well understood. But the point is that, I mean, one hypothesis is that it's because of meiotic drive, which is what happens when one allele or chromosome tries to be over represented in the gametes of an or the embryos of an organism, I guess, is kind of what embryo selection is, but, and then generally, that's at a genome wide level, disfavored. And so there will be counter mutations to try to undo the drive. And then, as a result of all this Crossfire, you get all these gametes that have too few chromosomes are too many. So meiotic drives just seems to arise kind of randomly at different parts of the the tree of life. I guess the point is that this high rate of aneuploidies leading to spontaneous miscarriages very early on is actually pretty unusual, and probably is some kind of contingency. Now I also want to point out that additionally that a high rate of early embryonic loss that occurs naturally does not, in my view, justify the killing of embryos. I mean, it used to be that children who'd already been born also suffered a very high mortality rate, 50%, something like that. I think that's why in a lot of cultures, including Korea, they did not necessarily encourage strong bonding with the child right away. For example, in Korea, they didn't celebrate with a big party the baby's birth until 100 days after.
Why people wouldn't name babies right away
Do we need such a high rate of infant mortality? I do not believe that, if that were the case, infanticide would be justified, or that the moral status of infanticide would change as a result of changes in infant mortality.
Can I just say, just to clarify, that was not the argument. So the reason I wanted to focus on that, on those kinds of cases, just to make it absolutely clear, because we probably won't convince each other on the moral status of embryos. But what I was sort of suggesting is, look, I think what's behind probably your view? Correct me, if I'm wrong, what's usually behind the view of people who think embryos from the moment of conception have full moral rights, etc. It's usually the view that God has put a soul there, or there is some kind of religious view. And I'm not saying that's -
I must interject. Nothing I am saying depends on any religious doctrine or ecclesiastical teaching.
Interesting, Okay, my only thought experiment was kind of like, okay, you know, why would a God, for example, abort 30% of early -
I am a prolifer, I will not deny that. But here I am not appealing to any religious teachings,
Yep, no worries at all,
- or natural revelations. Yeah, I don't think relgion is necessary, or maybe even sufficient, to decide the issues we discussing now.
Yeah, for the record, obviously I wouldn't, you know, commit the naturalistic fallacy. I've been aware of this for a long time, the idea that something is natural, so it's good. I mean, obviously, you know, vaccines are not natural and they're good. Cancer is natural. It's not good. So it was more just kind of thought experiments on the status of embryos themselves. But yeah. Maybe, we can talk about the science is that what you want to do?
Yeah. So we've talked about embryos. And obviously that issue, and that has cropped up, it's a bigger issue with in vitros and the destruction of embryos. But, James, I think a couple of years ago, you wrote a shorter piece in The Wall Street Journal early on about embryo selection and why you were opposed to it. And that talked a little less about the embryo destruction aspect, and more about how society -
Sorry to interrupt, yeah, advised by a wiser older man, in most things maybe not all, I was advised not to emphasize that. I regret that now I think I should have written that differently, but this is not to say that I do not fully believe in and endorse what I did write in that op ed in the Wall Street Journal.
Yeah. Okay, so can you talk about, like, some of the issues that you brought up there?
Okay, so, so one argument against embryo selection is that - So the Herasight company's calculator, it has this web tool where you enter the trait that you want to maximize in your offspring. You put in how many embryos you're willing to sacrifice to attain that end. And then you put in some number, 20, 30 -
I have to interrupt. There's no way we would ever describe it that way, how many embryos you have to sacrifice. It's more just to be neutral about it, because I'm not going to promote myself either, but it's basically a tool to calculate the expected gain in terms of disease reduction. Or it could also be things like IQ points given a certain number of embryos. So it's not advising you to have embryos or destroy them, but if you have them, it illustrates what the potential gains could be
All right, fair enough for now. So you put in 20 as the embryo number, something like that, and it'll give back some number, like expected gain of eight IQ points. That's not deterministic. There'll be statistical fluctuation around that, but it'll basically tell you what you can statistically expect. Herasights numbers seem high to me. I need to dig into its scientific materials. But given the personnel working there, I'm sure they're close to correct. Now, the reason why unrestricted embryo selection or even - Well, let me talk about this. This will increase the extent of inequality in society, that is, differences among people in the society in abilities and characteristics related to social class and all the benefits that are thought to come with having a higher status. Well, I mean, we can already see this in reports in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that the early adopters of this technology are people who are alreadypretty smart or highly educated or highly wealthy, very elite people. Okay, so they're jumping out ahead. So in response to this, some say, well, we should just subsidize it or or do something to make it available to everyone. But even availability to everyone is not going to put a break really, on the increase in inequality, because not everyone will use it. I've been informed that in Denmark, where IVF is, in fact, theoretically available to everyone, the kind of infertile couple or what have you, who in fact mixed use is someone who's already highly wealthy or very wealthy or highly educated. Furthermore, people who are not like these Silicon Valley types described in the Wall Street Journal, when they come to this,
You know, you could tell them, Look, the thing that matters most for your offspring success in life is these things that have been studied in genome wide association studies, intelligence, income, years of education. So you might want to attend to those. But
I mean, a lot of people say, and I find it believable, that some people are gonna say, No, I'm want to make my kid, although you're not making any kid anything. What you are is selecting one and killing the rest. But anyway, I want the kid that I have to be an NBA star, okay? And and I know you can do it, because height can pretty much guarantee that. So height, athletic ability, eye hand coordination, I don't care what you tell me about GWAS not having been done as extensively of those things. That's what I want. Or I want my daughter to have big boobs. Or whatever. And they'll say, Well, you know, you're the customer. A bit more seriously maybe, you know, many people will feel, or they might be advised, that they need to attend to other things besides traits closely related to social status. Things like cardiovascular risk, mental illness, substance abuse, autoimmune disorders, all kinds of things. Now these things are usually associated with IQ, maybe because being smarter or more highly educated helps you learn about healthier habits. But these genetic correlations are not perfect. Some of them are probably not due to a causal effect. They're due to some other kind of pleiotropy, or what we call a cross assortative mating, where maybe people who are smarter mate with people who are healthier perhaps, and this leads to statistical associations between the genes for the two traits, even though those are distinct genes. So the way that these other risks, or undesirable traits you can call them, are distributed is probably not as strongly as these traits like intelligence, that are more closely tied to social status, but probably there is a weak correlation such that those who are lower down on the socioeconomic scale have more of these kinds of problems. So to the extent that those problems are attended to by users, they will not be able to max out on things like intelligence, income, years of education and so on,
Good. And that I can tell you actually how people choose. And I already explored this a bit in a book I wrote on this topic called "Creating Future People". And the way I explored it, even before working for this company, is just looking at empirical studies of how, for example, women choose sperm donors. And then evolutionary biology, how women and men choose, choose mates, right? And, and what you can see is, yeah, they're not choosing along one dimension like height or intelligence. They're choosing along many and they're being chosen, of course, in a relationship anyway. But yeah, it's actually pretty good news. I mean, the the the empirical results are that people care mostly about health and kindness and personality traits like that, and also intelligence. They look for proxies of those. And I'm talking about both women seeking sperm donors and our own customers who have come through Herasight over the last couple of years. So, yeah, they're not, they're not just trying to max out. IQ, I don't think I've seen anyone do that. There are, once in a while you get kind of an eccentric one who's, like, really interested in one trait. But normally, what's going on is, if you have a family history of a disease, like schizophrenia, you're gonna really pay attention to that one and then take a glance at the other ones too. Or if you're, like, extremely short, you know, as a man, you know, you don't necessarily want to maximize height, but there are advantages to being at least average. And so we've seen people choose like that, and it really does correspond quite a bit to how people choose mates. So you mentioned the kind of eugenics of it. I mean, mate selection is a lot like that. I tend to shy away from the word eugenics because people tar it with a certain thing. But, you can call this liberal eugenics, or a genetic enhancement, or whatever you call it, but, but the reality is in the sense of looking for proxies of things like health and and, you know, intelligence, you know, having good personality, sense of humor, people do that all the time in the dating market and the fertility market. But let me address, I think the one overarching claim that James really latched on to is the inequality bit at the beginning. And I want to, I want to dissect that, and then maybe he could talk more about pleiotropy, because I think the one thing that we'll both agree on strongly is that pleiotropy is one of the more interesting scientific topics to talk about when it comes to selection. So with inequality, let me just say a couple of things before we move on. One is, first of all, when you see people worrying about inequality, some of it is actually quite important, and I know James is very sincere, but then when you look at some journalists, it's very insincere. Because they'll say things like, embryo selection doesn't work and it's bad because it increases inequality. And you go, you know what? You need to choose one here. And James, of course, knows that it could work in principle. You know, he's an expert in behavioral genetics and, to some extent, statistical genetics, and all of these different areas that really we rely on to create predictors. So he knows, of course, in principle, it could work to some extent. It's just a question of how well it works, and therefore it can increase inequality. And I want to say, I mean for one thing, we already have increased inequality through assortative mating in the 20th century. So as women gain the ability to work and own property and so on, the first thing that you see happen is, although inequality and assortative mating are old, old issues. I mean, our mutual friend Gregory Clark argues in his books that assortative mating has been going on for a long time, but it really seems to have sped up when women could choose their job and then suddenly, instead of the male doctor marrying, you know, the pretty little gardener, or his nurse or whatever, the male doctor marries a female lawyer or something like that. And we can measure that increase in assortative mating, which produces more inequality as a byproduct. Now that's not a justification for it. It's just to say this is actually happening naturally. Will embryo selection speed it up? I think, no doubt it will. I think it's going to be very slow additive effect to that, especially now, you can't have truly massive gains in the next 1020 years, but it will increase inequality. I think we have to face that. And my response is, some kinds of inequality matter more than others. So I really want to live in a society where we have an equal right to a fair trial. We're treated equally under the law. You know, whether you're Muslim or Hindu or whatever, that all makes sense to me, but what I don't care about, and I think James, actually, in some ways, might agree, but I'm not an egalitarian in some deeper sense. And in fact, I'm an anti egalitarian in some ways. I'm a Nietzschean, and I start my book with a quote from Nietzsche, and the quote is at the beginning of Zarathustra, "Man is a rope stretched between beast and Superman. A rope over an abyss" And I think that this new genetic technology is going to increase inequality. It'll probably even lead to speciation, or the equivalent of that in the far future. And I think that creates interesting problems, but I'm a kind of perfectionist. I think that beauty, smart, creative, interesting people are worth creating, worth producing, even if it increases inequality.
All right, that was a lot. What do you think of that? James,
Well, I think the appropriate way for me to respond is to explain why I think everyone, including even the political right, most people on the political right, should be concerned about an increase in inequality in society. So I sort of agree that - Well, you know for some people, inequality is axiomatically bad. There doesn't need to be an explanation of why it's bad. I think there needs to be one. Suppose I have five, you have two. Some innovation occurs. Economic growth now I have 13, you have four. So inequality has increased a lot, but I could say, well, I mean, you still have absolutely more than you used to, so as we're all better off, why should you be upset? But if inequality grows beyond a certain point, there's a reason for everyone, except the people who are at the very top to be concerned every person's interests, rights, and security depend on a balance of power within society, a balance of terror, if you analogize it to the Cold War nuclear standoff. So what that means is that those at the top can't be so far above everyone else that they can impose their will with impunity on everyone below. It has to be possible for factions and combinations among those who are otherwise vulnerable to arise to be able to check the people at the top. Okay,
Yep, that makes a lot of sense
I think that recent elections in America show that we have very imperfect but at least a semblance of such a balance in our society, no matter how badly some group of educated or wealthy elites want something, and even if they play some dirty tricks to get it, they don't always get what they want. Now this is actually a general point. Don't think too much about recent American elections, although that was what I just said, this point applies to more than just recent local politics. So Jonny Anomaly mentioned constitutional rights. Constitutional rights, I've kind of been talking about the virtues of democracy, which Winston Churchill said, is a terrible system, except for all the others. Constitutional rights like the ones that were mentioned, are kind of anti democratic. They're supposed to be rights that protect minorities. So even if a temporary super majority wants to take away your right to free speech, or your right to be free from arbitrary searches and seizures and so on, your right to bear arms, your right to exercise your religion. The Constitution says the super majority cannot have its way. Now, some totalitarian countries have had constitutions that actually go further than ours in protecting individual liberties. But these constitutions haven't been worth the paper they're printed on. It's similar with the democratic principle. I've been talking about how the constitutional principle is actually vulnerable if there's not a balance of power to uphold it. Even the democratic principle can be frustrated if there's not a sufficient balance of power. Looking outside the United States, different times, different places, we see how sometimes, even if a super majority of the population wants something and there's no constitution that says that they can't have it. The super majority still can't get its way. It can't elect anyone or put up any kind of coalition government that'll carry out its will. You could say that sometimes that's a good thing, that actually elites often do know better than super majorities. And actually, I would agree with that. But we're talking about the principle, okay. Something must cow the elites or the majority, uh, depending on who wants to take away whose rights into respecting, uh, all these guarantees. Now in a highly unequal society, even if we're all materially better off. I mean, we're materially very well off now, but that doesn't seem to abate all the frustrations and bitterness that people feel about what we fight about in politics, so status and culture and so on. So that's just a fact. Uh. In a highly unequal society, more unequal than the one we have, it could be that this balance of power will be completely swept away. I'm now going to quote a passage from Dr Anomaly's, recent book, he just mentioned it "Creating Future People" that spells out in vivid detail, not just how people might feel frustrated despite their affluence, absolute affluence, of having little influence on what goes on around them, not just the frustration, but the dangers of a minority within the society, or even the majority for that matter. So this is a quote. "However, if the unenhanced pose a threat to the enhanced, perhaps because they lack the foresight, patience or moral constitution to interact on peaceful terms, they might be coerced to either enhance their children or be prevented from having children at all"
By the way, I have to interrupt there because obviously that as a sound bite, you have to you have to realize, readers, listeners, that is in the context of considering what could happen in the far future. And it's not a set of justifications. It's more exploring what's likely to happen, let's say in 500 years, if there are extreme inequalities. So normally I wouldn't interrupt you, James, but you know how journalists and other people are, they'll clip that out of context and be like, Oh, Anomaly believes X, Y and Z, so go ahead.
Yes, yes. I took this to be a prediction. Not a not perscription
. Yeah. Thank you.
The prediction is that if one element of society does not conform to the beliefs and ways of those above it, it will be exterminated. Join us or be spayed. I also want to point out this is not a prediction that applies only to a subgroup that may hold out from the practice of embryo selection, but any group of people that in this highly inegalitarian society of the future, 500 years or whenever, does anything to annoy those who have the power. I think we're actually in agreement that this will come about as long as there is a positive correlation between gains from embryo selection and initial position. So as long as that's true this is where we're headed.
So my view is embryo selection is probably, it's a really kind of short to medium term technology. It's what's going to happen in the coming decades, and it'll mostly focus on disease. Yeah, there might be some things around the margins of cognitive ability and so on. I was exploring, and I know you know that James, but I just wanted to clarify to people listening. You know, what could happen if there's widespread gene editing, which is nowhere near a lot of people are under the false view that that's that's going to happen now, you know, in the 2020s I think we're not even that close, to be honest, to to really accurate, widespread germline editing. And I'm not making a moral commentary here. I'm making a scientific one. I could be wrong, but I think it's quite a ways away. But if that were to happen, and moreover, if we were ever to create chromosomes from scratch, which is something that Craig Venter has already done with bacteria. You know, you could obviously end up with extremely different kinds of people, not just a little bit of inequality, but massive inequality, and inequalities in many directions. In fact, I'd go as far as to say, you know, when I hear Gattaca and we're gonna have a two tiered society, I always think to people it's just a complete lack of imagination. That's not James, but other people, journalists and so on. I think it's, it's pretty likely we're going to get divergence in many different directions. And really the question then is, again, as a prediction, what can be done about that? And I think the the really dark one would be something like, you know, mass murder, or something like this, but I think it's more plausible that people will separate into different kinds of political communities. People will take voice and exit seriously in the future. And my hope is anyway, I think many modern nation states are too big and too bloated, and so, you know, I'm a fan of Balaji Srinivasan and people like this who are promoting the idea of having, you know, lots of different kinds of states that are more sensitive to people's desires and what they want. And you can take a Singapore or maybe an Israel, these kinds of states, maybe it's a fantasy to think they'll ever dominate in the sense of, there'll be 1000s of them. But I kind of actually like this vision, apart from apart from me predicting that it'll probably come true. I think when there are big differences in cognitive ability, for example, in people. I doubt that they're actually going to want to dominate other people that much. I think they're going to see other people in the same way. And again, I'm talking, you know, 500 years not in 2030 you know, they might see people in the same way we see chimpanzees or something actually, which is like, worthy of preservation and curious, you know, and having a moral status. Now, that's a that's a very sci fi view going way into the future, and that's not something that embryo selection is going to produce. That's more just like playing out, as James said, if we keep going along various kinds of reproductive technologies, especially adenine and then artificial chromosomes, that's one possible future. And James is right. There actually are - It can be terrifying. And in fact, I have to plug this book. My favorite book on this topic is George Bernard Shaw's play, Man and Superman. And he sort of plays out this future. And he just sort of says, Yeah, I mean, it's a dialog, it's a play. One of the characters is really pessimistic and says, Look, man, is just getting better and better at creating more weapons, more technologies through which we can destroy ourselves, et cetera. And the other kind of says, Yeah, but we can use those to save lives in the form of vaccines and that sort of thing, and cancer treatments and and, I mean, I think this is part of the human condition. I think this dialog is permanent. There are, there's just absolutely going to be real potential costs to all of these technologies. My view is that the benefits, at least for embryo selection, pretty dramatically outweigh the costs. I know James disagrees with that, but, but yeah, just to sum that point up, that's, that's my view of that.
All right, yeah, we've been going for a while now, and I think in some ways, this is only scratching the surface of a bigger debate. You know, obviously this touched on things besides embryo selection, like just a bigger debate about reproductive technology, th fertility industry, I think, was the Wall Street Journal article. Wasn't that James was like, The End of Sex, and so, I mean, you basically were addressing, just like, the role of technology in reproduction. And so there's, there's a much, there's a bigger set of issues here that this is in the context of, I wanted to, like, kind of put the spotlight on embryo selection, because Herasight is kind of in the spotlight right now. And obviously, you know, there's some back and forth discussions about it, I guess, I don't know if you're going to speak obviously, Johnny, you're, you're going to be talking about this for a while. Like, this is your company, and you want to promote it, and, you know, and whatnot. James, like, I mean, do you think that you're gonna take a deeper interest in it? I kind of want to know just out of curiosity. Like, look, you're an academic, your professor, and you know, part of academia is remit, is you can investigate and explore whatever you want to do. And I'm wondering if this is going to be a new focus of yours in terms of, like, trying to promote your views on this issue, or the logic that you were outlining here in relation to this sort of stuff.
Yes, I think, yes, that is what I will do. I mean, I've been thinking about embryo selection and related things. For a long time, I have spoken and written against them, as we've heard. But yeah, I mean, I had been thinking, Well, you know if just we raise some awareness, others will surely find this interesting and take it up, and I can just do my academic thing. But no, I realized that I've been too complacent. Those of us who are opposed are too complacent. There's kind of a reason why opposition has not really kicked off because, well, I mean, this stuff is hard to understand, hard for the average person to undertand
It's pretty novel too, isn't it?
I think they can be made to understand, but now people like me , have to do that with the help of others. And yes, I think that that will be my main focus now, to oppose this.
Okay, well, that's, that's a pivot. This is, like, definitely, you know, James, again, I've known you for a while, and your career, I'm not, like, entirely shocked. I mean, people don't know what the youth call the lore. I know the lore in terms of it you've, you've had passions about social and political issues in the past, like, when you were younger, and so I'm not entirely surprised by this pivot. But, I'm very, very interested in some of your long form writings that I'm sure you will come out with, with your ideas. And I think, you know, I'm pretty old school liberal about ideas, you know, John Stuart and mill all that. I do think that having Opposing Viewpoints out there is important to really get at the truth. Get it what we really want. And, you know, have a society that we're happy to be within. Jon, Jonny, you know, really appreciate you coming on,
Yeah, let me just say to James, you know and I've told James how much I respect him. So, yeah, I think I'm actually quite happy for James to enter this arena. And believe it or not. I mean, some of us can be convinced. I mean, I there's a reason I did a PhD in philosophy. I'm very serious about arguments. I take your views very seriously, so I I want you to keep writing on this, and maybe I could even be convinced, at least on some points. I think the other point I want to make with James in the debate and people like him is we can all agree. You guys have seen this. There's a lot of motivated reasoning, especially on the other side of things. So there are many people who will sort of oppose things like this, but it's not for moral reasons they can articulate, as James has. Instead, it's kind of taboos about genetic explanations after the Second World War that fell out of fashion, right? So people will say things like, intelligence, it's not even heritable. So like, obviously you can't select for it, and that kind of nonsense is is worth just brushing aside pretty quickly, especially in a world in which, well, it's pretty clear you can I mean, I don't want to exaggerate what you can select for, but these kinds of debates where people think, yuck, I don't like it, therefore genes don't work, or whatever, this is beyond silly. This is not a serious way to approach an issue. And so, yeah, I just think it's, it's really good to have a serious scientist and a really thoughtful person like James kind of weigh in.
Yeah, no, I really appreciate you guys taking your time out. You know, we are recording in the evening here to accommodate people's schedules. So that is what it is. And I think that's good choice. You know, we've talked for an for for a while now, this is just the beginning of a conversation. I obviously, you know, I know the Herasight team and other Herasight people. I know James, I know people at orchid. This is going to be a thing that I'm sure I'm going to revisit at some point. You know, obviously, ancient DNA is a is a big focus of my podcast. But I also think that the future of genomics is still happening, and that will mean that we as a society in America in particular, probably because we are at the forefront of the technology and pretty libertarian when it comes to reproductive technology in particular, are going to be pushing the edges or confronting those edges, maybe, as James would say, in the future, but thank you guys for your time. Really appreciate it, and I will see you guys around online, and in print, on other podcasts and other forums. Yeah. So let the games continue, I guess in terms of the discourse, because it's just starting. Thank you guys.
