Genotype Fair

Pilgrimage towards less reproduction,
but more fun trying...

Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!
Wolfgang Pauli

Eugenics as a Four-letter Word

Hitler never could manage eugenics, partly because of his politics, but mainly because he just did not understand that in biology saying it’s so don’t make it so.

Not that I say he was wrong, mind you — biologically meaningless ideas cannot meaningfully be called wrong: if something meaningful is wrong, its negation is in some sense right, even if trivial; on the other hand, if I conclude that it is untrue that “Solid vortices do corrode dynamic esurient dispersion”, I then find myself in difficulty when trying to confirm instances where “Solid vortices do not corrode dynamic esurient dispersion”. When both assertions neither can be right nor wrong, they are meaningless. This commonly happens with non-issues arising from confused ideas and delusions. 

And in its fact-denial and issue-evasion, Hitler’s ignorant Aryanism made about as much biological sense as any tooth fairy assertion; he would have fitted perfectly into the politics of plenty of our modern fascistic demagoguery, except that he had too much style to wear a gimme cap.

In fairness, few eugenic practices in history have made more practical sense than Hitler’s, except maybe the Spartans’ leaving newborns out for a night. Why Spartans wanted to select for neonatal brown fat and unattractiveness to foxes, I cannot think, but it probably was more effective than shrieking about Aryans or whining about lost elections, or similar lunacy.

No Time Like the Present,
                      Unless it is the Past

The only thing to prevent what's past is to put a stop to it before it happens
Boyle Roche

But, back on planet Earth, we humans could hardly ask for a more constructive time than now, ripe for some realistic, compassionate, biologically valid, socially responsible, eugenics; our planet has been peaceful for centuries, except for a few inter-tribal squabbles and pandemics, none of which has substantially threatened global population growth, and we are not yet so poor that we can’t afford biometricians, population trend tracking, pop stars, and tobacco companies. Our current population is perhaps twice what our planetary welfare can constructively bear, but not yet so great that we are destroying anything but planetary clutter, such as whales, frogs, and rain-forests.

Of course humanity needs a more efficient and stringent thinning mechanism than war, say a more lethal and universal brand of football hooliganism or political sloganeering, but some violent factions nowadays disapprove of violence, and they cite their politics and other forms of religions in support of killing people to prove it. So let’s consider alternatives.

China made a militant gesture with the one-child-per-family law; it was grossly ill-conceived, but it did at least show that population control could be possible, whether unconditionally desirable or not; all we need in the light of that demonstration is a practical, efficient and constructive way to manage it. To achieve all that without gross rejection, compassion and equitability will be necessary, as well as incentives. 

Humanity’s long suit at present is our planetary population. We currently are numerous enough and varied enough to give us plenty of genetic material to select from. As long as selection is equitable and self-regulating, everyone must surely approve (though many would squeal like pigs in an abattoir, for sheer social prejudice, blank ignorance, and demand for personal gratification; we see similar reactions to vaccination, and women's freedom of choice to reproduce or not). 

But what, I ask, is fairer than permitting everyone in the world one live-born child (implying two children for a contracted couple, for example)? Anyone illicitly having more, we reasonably might treat very, very counter-selectively! A scheme along such lines would reduce the population gently, but quite quickly, because many people want no children, and some die anyway before reproducing. We might halve our population in say, ten generations.

“So we can under-propagate ourselves to extinction, but wouldn’t nukes be faster?” I hear you cry. But a population control scheme on such lines as personal self discipline, or public discipline, would cause less collateral suffering and destruction of assets than we could expect from war, in particular nuclear war (consider say the thirty-years war, or Hamburg, Hiroshima, or Tokyo) and the associated discipline also would serve higher objectives than just being limited to population reduction.  

Negativity and Nihilism

No species before man could select its evolutionary destiny. Armed with knowledge, man can do so.
He can steer evolution in the direction he regards good and desirable.
Or he may elect to drift on the evolutionary current oblivious of consequences.
One thing he probably cannot do is to have evolution stand still.
  Theodore  Dobzhansky

Population reduction in itself after all, is at best a nihilistic negativism; intelligent population control would be a powerful tool for selection without genetic impoverishment. It permits propagation of cystic fibrosis, thalassaemia, dystrophy, spina bifida, Ringo’s nose, groupies’ tone-deafness, and other contributors to the richness of our gene pool.

Conversely, we need not specify the biological parents of anyone’s child ration; let them make their own choices how they go about equitable reproduction. All those not planning properly, with appropriate free assistance from the state, would thereby decrease their own evolutionary fitness: such a person would be likelier not to reproduce as successfully, and the children would have a higher frequency of genetic or birth defects. 

All that without the slightest compulsion from the powers that be. Except perhaps that after any attempt at reproduction that failed in the face of formal warning, permission for another attempt might be withheld.

And in my opinion such rules probably  would tend to increase parents' sense of responsibility and commitment to their children, in comparison to current (and past) generations, in which the prevalence and variety of child neglect and abuse is endlessly nauseating. And all that at the same time as people are making horrified noises about anything as blasphemous as family planning or population-wide vaccination. 

A thought for the unthinking fundamentalists among readers: read your bible! God said: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion  over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth..."

He did not suggest that mindless multiplication was fruitful, nor that wanton, selfish destruction or extermination of His creations by greed and cruelty, was compatible with dominion, much less implied by it. 

And of course, if we were to put any sort of constraint onto any person’s right to reproduction, it would be no more than reasonable, practical, and compassionate to assist in their production of the best possible offspring of their loins. 

Fruitfulness, right? Meaningful fruitfulness.

If someone is known to carry any seriously deleterious genes, the state should support and pay for genetic selection or correction of the gametes or embryos, to produce the most desirable offspring that could practically result, as the parent sees it. It would be better of course, to consult in advance the preferences of the child instead, but that is not foreseeably possible, so we can at best recommend the best practical options of health, social compatibility, functionality, and capability.

The Horror of Engineered
                      Populations and Racism

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer

One hoary bogeyman is the fear that fashion or politics would skew the population into disastrous trends; however, that is nonsense. The only constraint in this context, should be to forbid any preference for either male or female children — and even that could be open to approval and negotiation in a given community, say within a city or county or the like, where it might be desirable to negotiate babies’ gender on parental request, to maintain a healthy gender ratio, but beyond that, there could be direct proscription of gender choice or determination. 

And it is so important to understand the reason for such a prohibition, or at least, constraint. It would be far better to leave the choice to the parent or parents, but the practical reality is that there is such a preference for male offspring, that the resultant skewing caused by free choice simply is not tolerable. Certain exceptions could be allowed for, say, when a would-be parent requests a child of the locally lower frequency, or a couple contracts to have one child of each gender.

But those are details, open to adjustment according to common humanity and practicality.  

Again, there is a dread of skewing the emergent population composition according to prejudice, power, fashion, or traits. That is an impotent bogeyman of far less significance than gender choice: it would not matter a scrap to the community if some insane billionaire were to pay a thousand families to propagate his genes, or even his clones, as their own children, instead of their own genetic material, on a basis of “willing buyer, willing seller”. The rest of his project would be legally subject to everyone’s health. In a population of billions, a few thousands of one genotype would be too trivial a factor to be excited about. The children either could be inviable, in which case they would rapidly breed out of the population, or they could be highly viable, in which case everyone should be happy.

Or those children could on average be within one or two standard deviations of the population mean for most practical purposes in which case there would be nothing for most people to complain about, including the foster families. (Biometricians call that sort of damping effect reversion to the mean)

The only legal constraint that the authorities might insist on, could be to register each child's parentage and genotype, to avoid inbreeding or related problems.

Individual prospective parents could be encouraged to use information from the Human Genome Project to negotiate genetic engineering or adoption or conception by outsiders, as long as the rigid rule for routine cases remains in force: single children for single parents and six-packs for contracted menages-a-sixe or other variations on polyamory, and no monkeying with the gender ratio.

A rule of this type would favour desirable genomes without special compulsion or prejudice, because the incompetent, inviable, and apathetic would propagate poorly. If they chose to offer their breeding licenses to rich folk for binge money, instead of burdening themselves with expensive children instead of lottery tickets, that would be their personal choices. No problem, and none of the community's concern. 

Furthermore, it should in practice reduce the persistence of harmful, in fact tragic, recessives such as Tay-Sachs disease and thalassaemia, as well as genetic accidents such as Down’s syndrome or haemophilia.

Something for Everyone

Loose systems last longer and function better.
John Gall

Once population numbers were suitably optimised, demographers could exploit the slack to breed actively for desired biological quality — nothing Hitlerian: suppose the demographers decided that a surplus of thirty thousand were desired for a given county some year.

I suggest say, a three-way allocation of those thirty thousand spare reproductive slots:

• one third of the slots could be allocated by government invitation based on certified, publicly audited, desirable and willing performers, according to recommendation by medical councils and the like;

• one third could be invited by public vote for extra child tickets for popular heroes who had expressed their support, and they could be chosen irrespective of whether they were pop stars or sports champions or other major achievers. In this connection the public choice would be subject only to willingness of the chosen.

• The remaining third of the slots would be for the nobodies like the rest of us, allocated by public lottery, together with cash prizes. Purchases of multiple tickets and auction of unwanted winnings would be encouraged, always on a willing-buyer-willing-seller basis. The lottery funds could go to suitable benefits such as the upbringing of some proportion of the children.

A reasonable slice of the lottery profits could be allocated to cash prizes for casual gamblers, as well as support for winning parents. And why not? The most successful systems are the ones that are designed to run downhill; if you want spontaneous virtue, you must organise it. No one need enter such a lottery if they wish not to, but with many cash prizes and a few reproduction tickets, no one need be pressured to do anything undesired with his winnings. It even could be arranged to pay back most of the ticket purchase prices, or to offer a free ticket for the next round, to losers who have bought more than one ticket...

Such selection of parents among lottery winners and according to popularity and audited medical assessments would support rapid evolutionary progress without reducing diversity. Genes sufficiently unfit would lose ground to beneficial “extended phenotypes”.

Objectors fear that fads would doom us to a uniform population of Michael Jacksons, or fashionably engineered designer genotypes, or something equally nauseating. But our gene pool has the size and resiliency to outlast fashions and even to benefit from them. Ideals of beauty or of non-functional excellence change several times per generation and usually correlate significantly with above-average fitness anyway. 

After all, just think: suppose a Schwarzenegger or a Woody Allen or a Madonna did sell a couple of million somatic cells for cloning, or gametes for zygotes for implanting, before the fashion changed in favour of some other caricature: those would be a drop in the bucket, and probably a generally beneficial drop at that; even superficial notoriety generally is associated with some above-average genetic attributes.

Suppose too that someone actively wanted a genetically engineered child from their own genetic material instead of from haphazard mating?

As long as the engineers in question could certify the practice and the genetic quality of the output, whether by cloning or otherwise, why should there be any objection, except possibly to a choice of gender? Such a child generally could be expected to be socially desirable anyway.

Again, no matter what the apparent stupidity or nastiness of prominent sportsmen and public figures might be, such figures tend to have a better genotype than the average groupie. And even if notoriety does boost the reproductive success of publicity-plumed cuckoos, I suspect that when the novelty wears off the predominant tendency among rabble eager to improve their own line would be towards a surprisingly sensible selection of gametes.

Possibly even their own.

Religious objections? The only religious objections relevant to one’s own choices, could be to that of limiting one’s own reproduction. 

Tough if that is the way anyone feels about it; if your religion compels you to go out and kill people, the laws in most countries forbid it as being anti-social, no matter what your ecclesiastics demand. The same applies to reproduction: people who wish to propagate ad libitum at the expense of society cannot expect society to support or even tolerate their preferences or selfish demands, any more than a healthy society would support child abuse. Any moral or religious objections to other people’s approved choices are socially as irrelevant as other people’s religious choices, and are not subject to anyone else’s personal judgement.

Sex and Reproduction

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results,
but that’s not why we do it.
Richard Feynman

Sex. . .???

Oh, that!

Why, sex could at last assume its proper functions of fun and bonding instead of listening to idiots who irrelevantly confuse the issue with rights to reproduction. What a selection pressure that will apply!

By all means let anyone who wishes to reproduce by sexual activity do so, whether with a contracted mate or otherwise; that would be largely irrelevant. It only would have to be subject to the same restrictions as any other means of reproduction: one parent, one child at a maximum; ten parents, ten children, even if only one of the ten is a (willing!) woman. If you use up your ticket, do not expect any favours, unless you want to buy a lottery ticket.

Unfair? How could that be unfair? Certainly someone rich enough to buy other people’s reproduction tickets could do so, but only on a willing seller/willing buyer basis. That is not effectively different from rich people at present being able to buy more and better cars than I can afford, even for that matter my favourite car. 

Or lottery ticket holders winning prizes that I failed to win.

Once the Dog Has Caught the Car,
        What is it to DO With it?

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw

What about a lottery winner who lacks the money to support the pregnancy and parturition, and raise the child?

That is a separate question: every birth should be state-supported, including food, health care, education, and general welfare. And what happens after the child grows to majority is a still different question, but not a novel question.

I realise that some people will oppose the very principles of population restriction or population improvement as blasphemous, but I decline to consider such objections before they have been supported in meaningful terms.

I refuse to grant the least toleration, let alone respect, to anyone who would think of opposing population control in favour of supporting a healthy, educated upbringing for every child, both now, and for foreseeable generations.

Meanwhile think about it all, but tread gently in your thoughts; you tread on our future.