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>they have been accused of “opening a new door to eugenics”, according to the title of a 2018 MIT Technology Review article by science historian Nathaniel Comfo

>they have been accused of “opening a new door to eugenics”, according to the title of a 2018 MIT Technology Review article by science historian Nathaniel Comfort. I don't understand this position. Should we just ignore entire branches of science just because their results are inconvenient for some people/narratives? Meanwhile we allow sloppy, one sided science from the socially acceptable camp to influence social policy in a potentially totally broken way. Agenda driven science is bad science. You cannot solve social issues if you refuse to consider where the problems may actually come from. If there's any validity to social genomics, then perhaps our approach of blanket solutions to all groups in society will be shown to be ineffective, and this is a critical avenue to explore because it would indicate that our current allocation of resources is suboptimal.

vanderZwan 7y ago
> Agenda driven science is bad science. You cannot solve social issues if you refuse to consider where the problems may actually come from. The problem is that genomics (and anything to do with heredity before it) has been and still is abused in the opposite way: people pretending it to be an inevitable predictor like the law of gravity is, while claiming to not have any social agenda until they have had a glass of wine or two and you start hearing absolutely disturbing things. I've worked for molecular neurobiologists working on brains - the vast majority of them are fine. They research schizophrenia and such that do have genes associated with them, but also get that a lot of the genetics are about incrasing risk factors, not determinism. But once you hit the sub-group that researches the heritability of IQ... well, let's just say that there is a very suspicious aspect to the self-selection bias in the people who decide to research that topic.
- deogeo 7y ago
  Yet most (western) countries immigration policy is set on the opposite assumption - that personality traits (of which IQ is only one) are not heritable. The caution and "well it's complicated" shouldn't run in only one direction.
  - vanderZwan 7y ago
    > Yet most (western) countries immigration policy is set on the opposite assumption - that personality traits (of which IQ is only one) are not heritable. This is something often said by white people who never had to deal with the many issues around migrating to Western countries, even though we have the entire history of eugenics and "scientific" racism proving the opposite. > The caution and "well it's complicated" shouldn't run in only one direction. That would assume that there are two equally valid opposing views here, and yet there is nothing here to back that up. Science doesn't run on "both sides"-isms.
    - deogeo 7y ago
      > That would assume that there are two equally valid opposing views here, and yet there is nothing here to back that up. So why does the opening of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ say "Twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73% with the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80% and 86%."? Is the mountain of research on the heritability of psychological traits so obviously 'nothing', you don't even have to bother giving a source for your claim?
      - throwawaytkgll 7y ago
        Wikipedia isn't as authoritative a source as you think it is, especially for subjects like this that are heavily gatekeeped by people with an ax to grin (without necessarily having the actual credentials to back it up) And heritability doesn't mean what you think it does I'm choosing to believe you're arguing in good faith, so prepare to ingest a decent amount of material if you want to understand why: http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html
        fakegalitarian 7y ago
        I read your link: > Do I think there are currently any genetic variations which, holding environment fixed to within some reasonable norms for prosperous, democratic, industrial or post-industrial societies, would tend to lead to differences in IQ? There my answer is "yes, of course". > [If you put a gun to my head] Here, my honest answer would be that I presently have no evidence one way or the other. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to guess, and I couldn't tell what answer you wanted to hear, I'd say that my suspicion is that there are, mostly on the strength of analogy to other areas of biology where we know much more. Great. Did you know conscienciousness is heritable too?
- shi314 7y ago
  I thought anything you say under influence is not credible.
throwawaytkgll 7y ago
You are erecting a strawman. When scientists express concern towards a misapplication of a result, such as eugenic policies that would derive from the identification of variants associated with whatever trait, they don't just think it is morally abhorrent, they also think it is wrong, misguided and fruitless. When He raised controversy with his CRISPR-engineered twins, it wasn't just because he bypassed all ethics standards, it was also because what he did was reckless and did not in fact protect the twins from all forms of HIV. When evoluyionary biologists express skepticism towards claims made by behavioral "geneticists" or "evolutionary" psychologists, they are in fact pointing out the shoddy assumptions and flawed methodology, independently of whether the conclusions are morally abhorrent or not (they often are, but it's orthogonal to the point). As strange as it may sound, the entire scientific community is not in fact conspiring to hide inconvenient right-wing truths from the common people, and if they do happen to overwhelmingly lean left that does not entail the existence of such a shadowy cabal.
- ZhuanXia 7y ago
  The gains from engineering human capital are so large they will be plucked. Screaming “eugenics” is not going to change that. One slur does not an argument make. Gains of several standard deviations in mental traits, including intelligence, are looking very plausible with minimal technological progress. We are well past the speculative phase. As we live in a competitive technological landscape and China, Korea and India do not share our taboos against genetic enhancement, we will be forced to embrace this, too. Tar and feathering human enhancement as “eugenics” worked when human enhancement was not possible. We no longer live in that world. The signal is no longer cheap. Whatever nations fail to embrace embryo selection, iterated embryo selection, and eventually genetic engineering for intelligence will find themselves as children, competing in a technological landscape they are too dull to understand. Like Lysenkoism of old, our modern mental Lysenkoism will become unsustainable. We would be wise to discard it now.
  - throwawaytkgll 7y ago
    The problem with "eugenics" isn't that it's morally wrong, it's that it's just wrong. He Jiankui screwed up royally and endangered the life of two girls without even giving them immunity to AIDS. If there was a safe way to do "eugenics" without detrimental and unintended effects such as causing cancer due to CRISPR side effects or disrupting hitherto unknown metabolic pathways, believe me we wouldn't have waited for China. In fact, in many countries rudimentary forms of "eugenics" already exist - e.g. you're allowed to abort your fetus if it is found to have an extra chromosome. As for "intelligence" selecting for IQ points doesn't make sense. There's little reason to beleive g is anything but an artifact from factor analysis that's completely unsupported by any neurological data or known causal genetic mechanisms, and in fact a g-like measure can be proven to exist for any set of variables that positively correlate with each other regardless of existing causal links among them. The non-additive interactions with the environment are also just too high. Selecting for IQ would just result in random artificial genome drift (beyond the first obvious gains from developmental defects etc. but we sort of already do this). I think there's a real disconnect between how HN techies think about genetics and biology and the actual state of the art - it's much less grandiose than they think. Science is generally boring.
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
> Agenda driven science is bad science. The people promoting eugenics dressed up with trendier terms also have an agenda.
- ZhuanXia 7y ago
  To eliminate Mendelian disease. To increase lifespan, health, intellectual ability, and productivity? This is quite possible with minimal technological advancement. Why exactly is this bad? Because we saw a Star Trek episode? Shunning these technologies will be seen, in time, as akin to the shunning of inoculations in the Victorian era. When you find yourself cheering on, however indirectly, Mendelian disease consider perhaps that you are one of the baddies.
  - throwawaytkgll 7y ago
    We are nowhere near any of the things you mention and a bunch of GWASes aren't going to change this.
    - MagnumOpus 7y ago
      Genomic diagnostics for trisomies or other conditions on embryos are routine. Pre implantation diagnosis for all the conditions mentioned above will be commercially available in 2-3 years, and cheap enough for the Everyman in less than 10. And everyone who can afford it will use it, no matter their public views.
      - throwawaytkgIl 7y ago
        Yes, we picked the low hanging fruit a long time ago - the rare variants causing devlopmental defects etc. This is not what we are talking about. As for your predictions - they've been said over and over again ever since I started embarking on the genomics hype 7 years ago. The reality is much more boring and selecting for complex traits that heavily interact with the environment is bound to have disappointing returns.
- 7y ago

vanderZwan 7y ago

> Agenda driven science is bad science. You cannot solve social issues if you refuse to consider where the problems may actually come from. The problem is that genomics (and anything to do with heredity before it) has been and still is abused in the opposite way: people pretending it to be an inevitable predictor like the law of gravity is, while claiming to not have any social agenda until they have had a glass of wine or two and you start hearing absolutely disturbing things. I've worked for molecular neurobiologists working on brains - the vast majority of them are fine. They research schizophrenia and such that do have genes associated with them, but also get that a lot of the genetics are about incrasing risk factors, not determinism. But once you hit the sub-group that researches the heritability of IQ... well, let's just say that there is a very suspicious aspect to the self-selection bias in the people who decide to research that topic.

deogeo 7y ago
Yet most (western) countries immigration policy is set on the opposite assumption - that personality traits (of which IQ is only one) are not heritable. The caution and "well it's complicated" shouldn't run in only one direction.
- vanderZwan 7y ago
  > Yet most (western) countries immigration policy is set on the opposite assumption - that personality traits (of which IQ is only one) are not heritable. This is something often said by white people who never had to deal with the many issues around migrating to Western countries, even though we have the entire history of eugenics and "scientific" racism proving the opposite. > The caution and "well it's complicated" shouldn't run in only one direction. That would assume that there are two equally valid opposing views here, and yet there is nothing here to back that up. Science doesn't run on "both sides"-isms.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    > That would assume that there are two equally valid opposing views here, and yet there is nothing here to back that up. So why does the opening of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ say "Twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73% with the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80% and 86%."? Is the mountain of research on the heritability of psychological traits so obviously 'nothing', you don't even have to bother giving a source for your claim?
    - throwawaytkgll 7y ago
      Wikipedia isn't as authoritative a source as you think it is, especially for subjects like this that are heavily gatekeeped by people with an ax to grin (without necessarily having the actual credentials to back it up) And heritability doesn't mean what you think it does I'm choosing to believe you're arguing in good faith, so prepare to ingest a decent amount of material if you want to understand why: http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html
      - fakegalitarian 7y ago
        I read your link: > Do I think there are currently any genetic variations which, holding environment fixed to within some reasonable norms for prosperous, democratic, industrial or post-industrial societies, would tend to lead to differences in IQ? There my answer is "yes, of course". > [If you put a gun to my head] Here, my honest answer would be that I presently have no evidence one way or the other. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to guess, and I couldn't tell what answer you wanted to hear, I'd say that my suspicion is that there are, mostly on the strength of analogy to other areas of biology where we know much more. Great. Did you know conscienciousness is heritable too?
shi314 7y ago
I thought anything you say under influence is not credible.

throwawaytkgll 7y ago

You are erecting a strawman. When scientists express concern towards a misapplication of a result, such as eugenic policies that would derive from the identification of variants associated with whatever trait, they don't just think it is morally abhorrent, they also think it is wrong, misguided and fruitless. When He raised controversy with his CRISPR-engineered twins, it wasn't just because he bypassed all ethics standards, it was also because what he did was reckless and did not in fact protect the twins from all forms of HIV. When evoluyionary biologists express skepticism towards claims made by behavioral "geneticists" or "evolutionary" psychologists, they are in fact pointing out the shoddy assumptions and flawed methodology, independently of whether the conclusions are morally abhorrent or not (they often are, but it's orthogonal to the point). As strange as it may sound, the entire scientific community is not in fact conspiring to hide inconvenient right-wing truths from the common people, and if they do happen to overwhelmingly lean left that does not entail the existence of such a shadowy cabal.

ZhuanXia 7y ago
The gains from engineering human capital are so large they will be plucked. Screaming “eugenics” is not going to change that. One slur does not an argument make. Gains of several standard deviations in mental traits, including intelligence, are looking very plausible with minimal technological progress. We are well past the speculative phase. As we live in a competitive technological landscape and China, Korea and India do not share our taboos against genetic enhancement, we will be forced to embrace this, too. Tar and feathering human enhancement as “eugenics” worked when human enhancement was not possible. We no longer live in that world. The signal is no longer cheap. Whatever nations fail to embrace embryo selection, iterated embryo selection, and eventually genetic engineering for intelligence will find themselves as children, competing in a technological landscape they are too dull to understand. Like Lysenkoism of old, our modern mental Lysenkoism will become unsustainable. We would be wise to discard it now.
- throwawaytkgll 7y ago
  The problem with "eugenics" isn't that it's morally wrong, it's that it's just wrong. He Jiankui screwed up royally and endangered the life of two girls without even giving them immunity to AIDS. If there was a safe way to do "eugenics" without detrimental and unintended effects such as causing cancer due to CRISPR side effects or disrupting hitherto unknown metabolic pathways, believe me we wouldn't have waited for China. In fact, in many countries rudimentary forms of "eugenics" already exist - e.g. you're allowed to abort your fetus if it is found to have an extra chromosome. As for "intelligence" selecting for IQ points doesn't make sense. There's little reason to beleive g is anything but an artifact from factor analysis that's completely unsupported by any neurological data or known causal genetic mechanisms, and in fact a g-like measure can be proven to exist for any set of variables that positively correlate with each other regardless of existing causal links among them. The non-additive interactions with the environment are also just too high. Selecting for IQ would just result in random artificial genome drift (beyond the first obvious gains from developmental defects etc. but we sort of already do this). I think there's a real disconnect between how HN techies think about genetics and biology and the actual state of the art - it's much less grandiose than they think. Science is generally boring.

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago

> Agenda driven science is bad science. The people promoting eugenics dressed up with trendier terms also have an agenda.

ZhuanXia 7y ago
To eliminate Mendelian disease. To increase lifespan, health, intellectual ability, and productivity? This is quite possible with minimal technological advancement. Why exactly is this bad? Because we saw a Star Trek episode? Shunning these technologies will be seen, in time, as akin to the shunning of inoculations in the Victorian era. When you find yourself cheering on, however indirectly, Mendelian disease consider perhaps that you are one of the baddies.
- throwawaytkgll 7y ago
  We are nowhere near any of the things you mention and a bunch of GWASes aren't going to change this.
  - MagnumOpus 7y ago
    Genomic diagnostics for trisomies or other conditions on embryos are routine. Pre implantation diagnosis for all the conditions mentioned above will be commercially available in 2-3 years, and cheap enough for the Everyman in less than 10. And everyone who can afford it will use it, no matter their public views.
    - throwawaytkgIl 7y ago
      Yes, we picked the low hanging fruit a long time ago - the rare variants causing devlopmental defects etc. This is not what we are talking about. As for your predictions - they've been said over and over again ever since I started embarking on the genomics hype 7 years ago. The reality is much more boring and selecting for complex traits that heavily interact with the environment is bound to have disappointing returns.
7y ago