Eugenics!

Everyone is talking about eugenics, so I thought I’d dive into the mix.

It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) February 16, 2020

The first difficulty in discussing eugenics lies in the fact that different people use the word to mean different things. It does no good to use one sense of the term when replying to someone who meant something completely different, so we’re going to have to start with a range of definitions:

1. Selective breeding to positively influence the distribution of traits in the gene pool
2. Anything that positively influences the distribution of traits in the gene pool
3. Purposefully removing specific negative traits from the population
4. Anything undertaken to increase desirable traits in the population
5. Valuing one human life over another
6. Killing off “undesirable” people
7. Genocide
8. etc.

Although the dictionary definition is closer to number 1 or 2, most of the time when people use the word “eugenics”, they mean it in the sense of something coercive and unpleasant. When someone decides that they would rather marry and have children with someone they find attractive than someone they find unattractive, they don’t regard themselves as practicing “eugenics,” though they are making a decision about which traits they are passing on to the next generation.

Even aside from disagreements over definitions, people become emotional about eugenics. Many people are incredibly bad at separating moral and factual statements. Much of the opposition to Dawkin’s suggestion that eugenics works is not actually about whether it works so much as moral outrage over the idea of harming innocent people. They hear “eugenics,” and their brains jump to “gas chambers.” In contrast, when people hear of ways to improve traits that don’t involve harming specific people, they tend not to call it “eugenics.”

For example, suppose we found a vitamin that could reliably make people smarter, so the government decided to use tax dollars (personal sacrifice) to provide vitamins to everyone, even the poor. Most people would think this was fine because it’s a net positive.

Yes, this example doesn’t involve genetics, but it would change the distribution of traits in the population and it would make everyone smarter. It’s also something we already do: we put iodine in the salt, vitamin D in the milk, etc.

Now suppose we could use magic CRISPR bots to remove a person’s propensity to develop Alzheimer’s, fix heart disease, decrease their chance of cancer, etc. Maybe the CRISPR bots are delivered in pill form. If these pills fixed problems like trisomy 21, genetic mental retardation, genetic vision and hearing loss*, etc., most people suffering from these conditions would freely chose to take the pills and would consider them a miracle. If they couldn’t afford them, I think most people would support using tax dollars to fund these treatments in the same way that we pay for normal medical care. Access to CRISPR bots to correct severe genetic defects would soon be considered a basic human right.

These treatments would be true eugenics, but likely wouldn’t be controversial because they wouldn’t directly harm anyone (at least until athletes started using them in the same way they currently use steroids).

By contrast, people would object strongly to something like a government board that gets veto power over who you get to marry–or that decrees whom you must marry. This would be a significant personal sacrifice with a very nebulous promise of social benefit. This is the sort of thing people are actually objecting to. 

*There is some pushback against mechanical (surgical, etc) attempts to fix certain disabilities. Some people in the deaf community, for example, do not think there is anything “wrong” with them and have complained that giving people implants to fix deafness is “genocide” against their community. While this does nothing to the genetics of the population, they clearly feel like it falls under the general category of trying to get rid of deaf people, at least as a culture. This objection is fairly rare, however.

The question of whether “eugenics works” depends on both how you define eugenics and “works”. Certainly if I had supervillain-like powers and an island full of captive humans, I could selectively breed them to be taller, shorter, prettier (by my standards,) etc. Could I breed for personality? Absolutely. We’ve bred for golden retrievers, after all. I wouldn’t be able to breed for anything I wanted: X ray vision probably isn’t possible.

But we live in the real world, where I don’t have god-like superpowers. In the real world, it’d be governments doing the eugenics, and I have some serious doubts about the abilities of real-world governments in this regard.

The Germans are trying, though:

Closing EU borders will lead to inbreeding, German finance minister warns:

In an interview with weekly paper Die Zeit, Mr Schäuble rejected the idea Europe could close its borders to immigrants, and said: “Isolation is what would ruin us – it would lead us into inbreeding.”

Taking aim at opponents of Germany’s border policies, he said: “Muslims are an enrichment of our openness and our diversity.”

Your definition of “good” and other people’s definitions of good are not the same.

Here is an article arguing that interracial marriage is a great idea because it will allow future generations to enjoy a greater combination of genes, letting the adapt faster to novel environments.

Britain also has some eugenic ideas: NHS Staff can refuse to treat racist or sexist patients under new rules:

Sexist and racist patients could be barred from non-emergency care at NHS trusts, under new rules to be enforced from April.

Currently, staff can refuse to treat non-critical patients who are verbally aggressive or physically violent towards them.

But these protections will extend to any harassment, bullying or discrimination, including homophobic, sexist or racist remarks.

We’ll have eugenics one way or another, just not the eugenics you were perhaps expecting.

There is also a big difference between what governments might say they are selecting for and what they would, in reality, end up selecting. For example, at least in Sweden, criminals have more children than non-criminals:

Convicted criminal offenders had more children than individuals never convicted of a criminal offense. Criminal offenders also had more reproductive partners, were less often married, more likely to get remarried if ever married, and had more often contracted a sexually transmitted disease than non-offenders. Importantly, the increased reproductive success of criminals was explained by a fertility increase from having children with several different partners.

The children of criminal parents are more likely to be criminals themselves:

The research revealed that children of criminal parents had a 2.4 times higher chance of falling into crime than children without criminal parents. After the figures had been screened for other factors – such as socioeconomic status, family size, teenage parenthood, conflict with parents, level of education enjoyed, and child abuse – the chance that children with criminal parents break the law was still 1.8 times higher.

But why do criminals have more children than non-criminals? As far as I know, we don’t see this effect in the US, where imprisonment appears to have a slight negative effect on fertility.  The biggest obvious difference between our systems is length of imprisonment. In both cases, incarceration makes existing couples more likely to break up and for men to form new relationships with new women when released, but spending decades in prison has a much bigger hit on one’s net fertility than spending one year.

I doubt anyone in government is thinking “Lets’ increase or decrease the amount of criminality in future generations by adjusting prison sentences.” They are just trying to get criminals off the streets; effects down the road are largely unintended.

So whether or not “eugenics” is “technically possible” for humans depends a lot on whether you are imagining it done by a super-powerful entity that can bred humans like pugs (that would work) or by your local DMV; it also depends on whether you think the traits other people are trying to select for technically can be selected for.

The main opposition to Dawkins’s statement probably comes from people who believe that, under “eugenics”, they or people they like would be put to death. People get really touchy about being killed.

These people aren’t responding to the factual content of Dawkins’s tweet, but his perceived intentions. Their logic is that the only reason someone would even bother to bring up eugenics and say anything “positive” about it is because they want to legitimize it. This is basically how normal people work: once you bring up any emotionally charged topic, they run not on the literal, factual meaning of our words, but on the emotions the words elicit, because they assume that you intended to elicit those assumptions.

These folks would probably claim that if Dawkins had been acting in good faith, he could have used less emotionally charged language like “selective breeding” or “artificial selection.” But this assumes that Dawkins desires to not evoke emotions. If Dawkins believes that arguing emotionally is bad, a sign of inferior intellect, (or, as I do, immoral,) then he is less likely to care that some idiot out there has had an emotional reaction to something he said and certainly isn’t going to craft his statements with them in mind.

A related article:

The analyst John Nerst, who writes a fascinating blog called “Everything Studies”, is very interested in how and why we disagree. And one thing he says is that for a certain kind of nerdy, “rational” thinker, there is a magic ritual you can perform. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y.”

Having performed that ritual, you ward off the evil spirits. You isolate the thing you’re talking about from all the concepts attached to it. So you can say things like “if we accept that IQ is heritable, then”, and so on, following the implications of the hypothetical without endorsing them. Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.

Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them, the ritual lacks magic power. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y,” but when you say X, they will still hear Y.

While many people are indeed bad decouplers, I think that is only part of the story because most of the bad decouplers probably come from one side of the political aisle. I would probably turn into a bad decoupler, too, if you said something like, “It would be totally immoral, but we could save the lives of 30 people if we chopped off EvX’s head and donated her organs to people who need transplants.” I’m self-interested.

Most people have certain classes of people who they are actually okay with killing. Pedophiles and murderers, for example, so long as we only do it to punish them and remove them from the population, not with any intention of removing “criminal genes” from the gene pool.

Rather, people are concerned that someone is advocating for the killing of people like themselves or large swaths of people whom they find perfectly fine. (Of course, say what you will for the morality of genocide, it is a very effective way to kill lots of people.)

In a strict sense, people object to intentional, coercive eugenics that calls on individual sacrifice to benefit society at large. Accidental eugenics caused by the unintended effects of government programs, non-coercive eugenics like editing your own DNA to remove trait that causes cancer, or eugenics that obviously benefit oneself (like aborting fetuses with Down’s syndrome) are generally considered fine.

The actually interesting question in eugenics is whether (and how) the government should respond to the unintended effects of its own programs and apportion limited resources. If the government pays for people’s lung cancer treatments, for example, should people have a right to smoke? If people do smoke, should the government revoke the right to lung cancer treatments? This would, in essence, condemn many people to die because of an undesirable habit.

Or should the government discourage pregnant women from doing things that cause babies to be born with brain damage (or no brains at all) who would be dependent on state support for the rest of their lives? Should the government encourage women to abort babies that would otherwise be dependent on the state?

The US federal budget is now about 4 and a half trillion dollars a year; states and cities have their own budgets, as well. Some of this money comes from taxpayers; some is generated via black magic deficit spending. A government of this size has many opportunities to accidentally fund (or defund) the reproductive ambitions of many. Since this is not intentional, most people do not call it “eugenics”, that doesn’t make it less real. People object to trying to correct for such effects because purposeful action is perceived as real eugenics. (Also, because a lot of people have inaccurate ideas about what the effects of spending actually are, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)

People are more uncomfortable with intentional effects than unintentional effects, even when the effects are exactly the same. This is a generalizable rule across all human activities. For example, the Nazis and Soviets both killed millions of people in pursuit of their ideological policies. The Nazis put people in concentration camps and ovens; the Soviets took food away from poor farmers and left them to die. We don’t have good numbers on the death toll of communism, but 50 million is not a bad estimate.

50 million is a LOT of people.

But Nazism remains a more potent villain to most people because they think the Nazis killed people on purpose and the Soviets by accident. The Soviets had good intentions; the Nazis had bad ones. (In reality, I think it is safe to say that many communists also had very bad intentions.)

Most of the time, of course, other people’s intentions matter. If a bullet nearly hits me, I care a lot about whether you were trying to shoot me or if the gun went off accidentally, and I need to act differently in either case to make sure I keep living. But death doesn’t stop mattering just because it was an accident. A government that accidentally kills millions of people is not somehow morally inculpable. We are at a stage where, despite our instincts, governments are vast enough that we have to consider both their intended and unintended effects.

This is where the very difficult discussion lies, and it is difficult not just because we have emotions or don’t know what other people are talking about. We also have difficulties because we value different things and want to make sure that society will support the things we value. When someone says, “That’s eugenics! You’re a monster!” they aren’t objecting to governments deciding that racists can shuffle off the mortal coil a little more quickly. In fact, they generally favor such eugenic decisions, because they benefit their own side. They are objecting to the valuing of specific traits, like intelligence, because they think racists think they are smarter than black people. (True enough: racists do think this.)

You can tell people to put aside their tribal identities and put down the weapon they’re using to stab the other side, but no, people do not like putting down powerful weapons they use to discredit their opponents.

(The second class of opposition to Dawkins’s statement probably comes from people who don’t really believe that artificial selection works on domesticated plants and animals, either. 

I don’t know how you can actually engage such people, because there is so much basic background they are missing. I, for one, find corn much tastier than teosinte. Did selective breeding produce the pug? Yes. Is the pug evidence that it “doesn’t work”? No; the pug looks exactly as dumb as people want it to.)

Dawkins’s brand of liberalism hails from the era when evolutionists were arrayed against conservative Christians. The evolution-supporters were regarded as rational, educated, even cultured, while the conservatives were seen as irrational, anti-science bumpkins. Dawkins’s “I’m just being factual” approach garnered plenty of outrage, but from socially impotent people; Dawkins has made a pretty good living off his works.

But liberalism has changed since the 90s; today’s liberalism is dominated by the “woke,” who no longer find it useful to distinguish themselves from Christians. It’s not so much that evolution won (plenty of people still don’t believe in it) as that conservative Christians are much less socially and culturally prominent than they once were. Today’s liberals are dedicated to fighting racism (and all other -isms), and within their ideology, Dawkins’s comments do far too much to push the Overton window in favor of making discussion of eugenics publicly acceptable.

Dawkins’s comment and its accompanying backlash provide us, therefore, with a good illustration of this radical shift in political ideology over the past few decades.