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Genetic Illnesses
There is no such thing as immutability in biological stocks, for
with each new generation a species inherits new genes in the form of
mutations. On rare occasions a mutation can improve the individual’s
survivability chances, and the new gene then becomes more widespread
in the population as a whole. Nevertheless, the vast majority of
mutations end up reducing the number of offspring. This is the
classic balance of mutation and death which is called “natural
selection,” and it is accepted by biologists as decisive in all
species. This book aims to pose certain broad philosophical
questions about the values and goals of human civilization and the
path which humankind will follow in consciously choosing either to
pursue or to reject artificial selection. It is not intended as a
discussion of the complexities of human genetic disease. By way of
analogy, one could compare this document to a roadmap rather than to
an automobile repair manual, but a few particularly important nuts
and bolts still need to be mentioned.
We have made such advances in medicine that natural selection has
been reduced to almost zero. Already 98% of Americans survive at
least to their twenty-fifth birthday.20 Medicine is intended largely
to benefit its creators –the currently living. Thus, if we speak
about illness, the emphasis is on “horizontally transmitted”
infectious diseases over “vertically transmitted” genetic diseases.
It is, after all, very difficult for a doctor, a pharmaceutical
company, or a hospital to collect a fee from people who have yet to
be born. Medicine is a business that depends on paying clients, and
the most motivated clients –those who not only can but who are eager
to pay –are the ones who are hurting now.
The Encyclopedia Britannica succinctly presents some of the salient
facts related to the 3,500 autosomal dominant, autosomal recessive,
and sex-linked disorders that have already been catalogued (the list
is rapidly expanding):
Epidemiological surveys suggest that approximately 1 percent of all
newborns have a single gene defect and that 0.5 percent have gross
chromosomal anomalies severe enough to produce serious physical
defects and mental retardation. Of the 3 to 4 percent of newborns
with birth defects, surveys indicate that at least half suffer a
major genetic contribution. A minimum of 5 percent of all
conceptions that evidence themselves have gross chromosomal
anomalies, and 40 to 50 percent of spontaneous abortions involve
chromosomally abnormal embryos. About 40 percent of all infant
mortality is due to genetic disease; 30 percent of pediatric and 10
percent of adult patients require hospital admission because of
genetic disorders.
Medical investigators estimate that genetic
defects –albeit often minor – are present in 10 percent of all
adults…. About 20 percent of all stillbirths and infant deaths are
associated with severe anomalies, and about 7 percent of all births
show some mental or physical defect.21 It gets scarier. Spontaneous
mutation rates, genetic “typos,” have been estimated at 200 per
person,22 most of which appear to be neutral, but an unknown
percentage of which are undesirable when expressed, their effects
being cumulative. Aside from genetic anomalies which are
necessary and sufficient to cause a specific illness, a much larger
number of multifactoral illnesses exist in which certain genes
create a disposition toward specific illnesses, for example, most
cancers, diabetes, and hypertension.
Early eugenicists had the naïve notion that simply to prevent
persons suffering from genetic illness from having children was
sufficient to produce a healthier population with each generation;
however, most genes which cause diseases are both recessive and
extremely rare. Thus, the number of carriers greatly outnumbers the
number of persons actually affected, and the nonreproduction of
actively ill individuals could achieve only an extremely slow
reduction of the disease in subsequent generations. This means that
if an undesirable trait occurred in 1% of the population it would
take 90 generations to reduce the incidence to 0.01 and 900
generations under conditions of random mating to achieve a reduction
to the level of one in a million.23 Even then, a natural spontaneous
mutation rate would remain, which would also have to be countered on
a never-ending basis.
Genetic engineering techniques are advancing rapidly. It is already
possible for carriers of genetic diseases to conceive children in
vitro, then perform embryo screening, known as preimplantation
genetic diagnosis, and select a healthy embryo for implantation in
the mother’s womb. This is a eugenic technique which is already
being implemented on a voluntary, gradual basis. In the not so
distant future it will be possible to make changes in the germ cells
(those involved in reproduction), and not just in the somatic cells
(those not involved in reproduction). Germ-line therapy does not fit
into either positive or negative eugenics, both of which amount to
encouraging or discouraging an individual from entering into the
sequence of generations, but such therapy is unquestionably
eugenics. When the possibility first arose, the general attitude was
one of absolute condemnation; now the tendency is to speak more in
terms of a moratorium of this new therapy. The bioethicist Fritz
Mann at the Free University of Brussels writes:
Aside from religious grounds, there exists no ethical justification
for not influencing the germ line. If one day a cure is discovered
for healing a hereditary disease in this fashion, not only for its
bearer, but for all his descendants, what reason could there be for
forbidding it?24
Such an achievement will represent a genetic
breakthrough, but the puzzle of genes and their interactions is only
beginning to be solved. Nevertheless, geneticists are already
altering the germ lines of plants and animals, and human germ-line
therapy is only a question of time. Meanwhile, genetic counseling
and treatment are on occasion helping those alive today at the
expense of future generations. A prospective parent who knows that
he or she is the carrier of a recessive gene which can cause illness
in subsequent generations, can selectively abort fetuses in which
the gene will be actively expressed. Thus, the immediate children of
the union are free from the illness, but the number of carriers of
the recessive gene increases further down the generational chain.
The question is whether parents have a moral right to bring children
into the world who will be disadvantaged by their heredity.
To quote
the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas,
“my son is not simply my creation,
like a poem or an object. He is not my property.”25
Can parental
responsibility be sloughed off, denied? Marcus Pembrey, a professor
at the Institute of Child Health at the University of London, in
discussing genetic counseling argues that The aim should not be to
reduce the birth incidence of genetic diseases, because to make that
the objective of the services would be to by-pass the mother’s
choice in the matter of selective abortion… The view that reduction
in the birth incidence of genetic disorders is not an appropriate
objective for genetic services is finding wide acceptance.
This is the so-called “personal service model”27 of genetic
counseling, which subordinates children’s well-being to that of
their parents. Such a view could well be challenged in the courts,
perhaps in wrongful life legal suits (which first appeared in the United States in 1964, claiming wrongful death suits
as a legal precedent) or even on a class-action basis. Whereas we
may have previously lacked the knowledge to reduce genetic
illnesses, the ignorance argument will have less and less weight in
the future. The parental appeasement posture will not be comparable
to the Thalidomide baby scandal of 1957-1961, for this will be an
act committed with full knowledge and intent.
Germ-line interventions will encounter resistance from people who
feel, some on religious grounds, that such therapy is “unnatural”
and that we have no right to “play God.” Even conventional care is
rejected, for example, by certain religious groups, and one
occasionally comes across newspaper articles describing a family
whose child has died for lack of medical treatment. There will also
be nonreligious objections by people who are wary of making
mistakes. Indeed errors are a real possibility. When we will have
achieved a much better understanding of human genetics, however, the
nonreligious objectors will have considerably less wind in their
sails. Israel has been a forerunner in genetic counseling. In the
words of a researcher at Ben-Gurion University, “Eugenic thinking is
alive and well [in Israel] today.”28 Gideon Bach, head of Genetics
at the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem
commented:
We now know that most, if not all, human disorders have a genetic
background, and we’re acquiring the tools to study, treat and
eventually prevent or cure them…. Israel, with many inbred ethnic
groups, has proven a rich human laboratory for genetic detectives.
It’s far easier to trace genetic anomalies in inbred groups with
homogeneous pedigrees.29
Ashkenazim, who until some forty years ago
largely intermarried, carry a dozen recessive genetic diseases with
relatively high frequency. The best known is an autosomal disorder
christened Tay-Sachs after its description in 1881 by the British
ophthalmologist Warren Tay. It is caused by the hereditary lack of a
crucial enzyme that normally breaks down fatty waste products found
in the brain. If both parents are carriers
of the gene, the child has a 25% chance of suffering from the
disease, and a 50% chance of being a carrier. One in 27 Jews in the
United States carries the gene. A baby suffering from the disease at
first appears normal, but becomes hypersensitive to sound after a
few months. Eventually the child becomes deaf, blind, mentally
retarded, and unresponsive to outside stimuli. Death results by age
five.
In 1985, Rabbi Joseph Eckstein, citing the Bible and the
Talmud, founded the international genetic testing program call Dor
yeshorim (“generation of the righteous”) with the goal of preventing
further children from being born with the illness. In the program,
Orthodox Jewish students are tested to determine if they carry the
gene. If only one prospective parent is a carrier they are not
advised against marriage, but if both test positive they are
counseled to choose a different marriage partner.
Israel has one of the highest screening rates in the world, testing
well over ten thousand people a year.30 The writer Naomi Stone
expresses what is evidently the general Jewish attitude toward
prevention of Tay-Sachs:
Perhaps, the disease can be eradicated entirely from populations
where it is concentrated, and if this were the case, who could
reasonably express qualms?… I am an Ashkenazi Jew, and I know that
it is my obligation to be acutely aware of my heightened risk factor
for the disease.31
Understandably, eugenic practices in the United
States are often resisted among representatives of the handicapped
community. Bioethicist Adrienne Asch writes:
My moral opposition to prenatal testing and selective
abortion flows from the conviction that life with disability
is worthwhile and the belief that a just society must appreciate
and nurture the lives of all people, whatever the
endowments they receive in the natural lottery.32
Much the same position is held by the Canadian ethicist
Tom Koch, who believes that all diseases are part of the diversity
of the human race.33
Gregor Wolbring, another Canadian active in the movement of
handicapped persons against eugenics, goes even further:
I can say, without hesitation, that my life has been richer because
I have MS. How can anyone who has no experience with disabilities
understand that?34 Mr. Wolbring, who runs a website with materials
both supporting and attacking the eugenics movement35, points out
that he himself is opposed to eugenics.
Another internet document reads:
The underlying issue in eugenics is that someone decides, based on
stated or unstated values, which characteristics are worthy enough
to be part of society and which are not [Discrimination]… The key
question is how a society (social eugenics) or a person (personal
eugenics) decides which characteristics are permissible in an
offspring/ offspring to be. Can a society influence or regulate the
decisions of social/personal eugenics? Is there a rational way to
distinguish between Tay-Sachs, beta-Thalassemia, sickle cell anemia,
thalidomide, Alzheimer, PKU, gender, sexual orientation (if a way
were ever found to predict it), mental illness, cystic fibrosis,
cerebral palsy, spina bifida, achondroplasia (dwarfism), hemophilia,
Down Syndrome, coronary heart disease, osteoporosis, and obesity?… A
war of characteristics is on, which will disenfranchise many
characteristics from the human rights movement and from equality
rights. This has to stop.”36
While this anonymous author does indeed
raise thorny questions with regard to certain characteristics –for
example, sexual orientation, dwarfism, and obesity –the defense of
some of the named horrendous diseases is disconcerting, albeit
stemming from a legitimate and well-founded fear of discrimination
against the persons who suffer from them. It is our duty to ensure
that we indeed discriminate against the disease and not against the
victims.
Back
Scientific Method
Any attempt to channel the sexual act requires that society first
dismantle the devilish scaffolding of taboos, phobias, neuroses, and
fetishes that has been erected around human reproduction.37 Given
the fundamental continuity of the human animal with the entire
biological kingdom in general and with mammals specifically
–including such intimately related species as the higher primates
–the revolution in developmental and molecular biology is resetting
the intellectual climate by conceptualizing human reproduction in
accordance with the principles of animal breeding.
Genetic selection presupposes genetic variation; otherwise there
would be nothing to select from. Heritability is the yardstick by
which both natural and artificial selection are measured.
Heritability scores are mathematical correlations ranging from 1 (a
parental trait is inevitably passed on to the children) to 0 (the
children are no more or less likely to possess it).
The heritability of economic traits has been intensively studied for
farm animals.
For example, milk production is 0.25, yearling body
weight in sheep is in the range of 0.2 - 0.59, and feedlot gain in
beef cattle is 0.5 - 0.55.38 The heritability for height among white
European and North American populations is 0.9.39 Using data from
twin studies, Thomas Bouchard and colleagues at the University of
Minnesota have placed the overall heritability of personality at
about 0.5. Heritabilities of social attitudes are even higher: 0.65
for radicalism, 0.54 for tough-mindedness, and 0.59 for religious
leisure time interests. Occupational interests correlate at about
0.36.40
One study of monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic
(fraternal) twins showed that monozygotic twins showed a
significantly higher correlation than dizygotic twins for being
frank, active, talkative, gregarious, extroverted, assertive, calm,
self-confident, even-tempered, emotionally stable, kind, polite,
pleasant, agreeable, thorough, neat, systematic, conscientious,
inventive, imaginative, original creative, open to experience,
refined, sophisticated, and flexible. Model-fit analyses
suggested about 40% genetic, 25% shared environmental, and 35% nonshared environmental influence.41 Although the heritability of
any trait or combination of traits can be measured along this same
scale, it is the intelligence controversy which has attracted the
most heated attention. Low estimates of IQ heritability in human
populations are generally on the order of 0.4, with 0.8 being the
ceiling for high estimates.
How to disentangle nature from nurture? The correlation between the
IQ scores of the same person taking the same test a second time can
serve as a benchmark; it is 0.86.42 The prominent English
psychologist Cyril Burt located a number of identical twins who had
been raised separately. In 1966 he reported an IQ correlation of
0.77 among 53 pairs of identical twins whom he had studied. When
Burt, who died in 1971, was posthumously accused of having falsified
his data, the purported scandal made for major news. Now, however, a
great deal more research has been done on the topic, and Burt’s
findings have been replicated repeatedly, including Bouchard’s study
of 8,000 twin pairs, which came up with a correlation of 0.76 for
identical twins reared separately and 0.87 for those reared
together. 43
In another study of adopted children, conducted by
Sandra Scarr and Richard A. Weinberg, also at the University of
Minnesota, the adoptees’ IQ scores correlated significantly more
positively with those of their biological than with those of their
adoptive parents.44 Natural selection depends not only on genetic
variation but also on environmental variation. The greater the range
of the two forms of variation, the greater the intensity of
selection –that is, the faster the rate of evolution. For millennia
now, without any knowledge of Darwin’s theory of evolution, people
have been able to pursue artificial selection successfully in plants
and animals by simply breeding the most desirable individuals with
each other under the principle “like breeds like.” This is still the
chief methodology of animal breeders. When, however, low variation
or low heritability impede selection, modern genetic tools are
employed: frozen semen, separation of male- and female-producing
sperm, superovulation, embryo storage and
transfer, in vitro fertilization, and transfer of genetic material.
The use of artificial insemination renders eugenic measures applied
to males far more effective than to females. For example, by
employing modern techniques a bull can theoretically be made to
produce 200,000 breeding units of semen per year.45 One bull already
has 2.3 million granddaughters.46 Furthermore, sperm can be frozen
for long-term storage and later use.
If there is no shortage of premium-quality sperm, the same is also
true of eggs. Only a tiny percentage of the eggs created in human
females at birth are ever fertilized. In vitro fertilization, with
resulting embryos implanted in a womb other than that of the
original mother, would make it possible to achieve a revolution in
population quality without creating a quantitative bottleneck.
Cloning is a still newer technique. During the process a genetically
identical copy of a biological organism is produced by asexual
means. Cloning is common in nature. Any plant that can grow from a
cutting, or animal tissue that can reproduce itself in a Petri dish,
in the process also produce clones.
During laboratory cloning (“nuclear transfer”), the genetic code of
an individual organism is inserted into an egg that has been
stripped of its own nucleus, and that egg is then implanted in the
womb of a “birth mother,” just asis already done in cases of in
vitro fertilization. The child who is born is the donor’s identical
twin. The first animal clones were produced in the late 1950s. In
1993 US researchers experimentally cloned a human being as a
possible treatment for infertility, but the experiment raised a
storm of criticism.
The cloning of the sheep “Dolly” did not take
place until 1996. Other mammals already cloned by scientists include
horses, rabbits, cows, goats, deers, pigs, cats, rats, and mice. The
current debate on cloning is focused on therapeutic cloning. For
example, it may be possible in the future to clone cells from a
person suffering from cardiac insufficiency, develop those
replacement cells into heart muscle, and then transplant
that muscle back into the same patient without fear of rejection.
The real issue, however, is reproductive cloning –conceiving babies
who will be brought to term and who will enter the general
population as independent persons. Reproductive cloning can be
pursued for two reasons: first, as a device to combat infertility,
and second, to enrich the human gene pool. I refer here to the
latter as “eugenic cloning.” Cloned embryos, as well as embryos
produced during in vitro fertilization, could be implanted in a womb
which might be human, animal, or even artificial.
“We can see all
too clearly where the train is headed, and we do not like the
destination,” wrote Leon Kass, chief of George W. Bush’s Bioethics
Council.47 Revealingly, Kass, who is an observant conservative Jew,
has also come out against the dissection of cadavers, organ
transplantation, in-vitro fertilization, cosmetic surgery, and
sexual liberation. Virginia Postrel, editor-at-large of Reason
magazine, responded to the views expressed by Kass by commenting
that “This isn’t about the 20th century. It’s about the 16th.”48
Much of the criticism of cloning stems from a fundamental
misunderstanding –that there is an intent to produce a race of
identical creatures lacking any and all individuality. This is
definitely not the case, and no such practice has ever been
advocated. Rather, it is the expectation that persons born as the
result of a cloning process would enter into normal sexual relations
with the vastly greater population of individuals born as the result
of traditional sex and would multiply in the traditional fashion,
thus increasing the frequency of advantageous genes in the following
generations.
Despite some well-publicized successes, there remain a
number of difficulties to be worked out, and the failure rate is
still high. For example, cloned animals often have abnormal
placentas –a factor that affects size and survival. Part of the
problem evidently lies in abnormalities in gene expression. Much of
the resistance to cloning comes from religious groups, but is not
limited to them. Aside from a fully legitimate fear that we may
still not be knowledgeable enough to proceed immediately to human cloning, the resistance to cloning per
se is startlingly reminiscent of the traditional argument against
evolution –that it is “an assault on human dignity.”
That was
precisely the text and heading of an open letter addressed to
President George W. Bush in the Washington Times in January, 2002,
signed by 29 conservative political and religious leaders.49 The
media have waged an energetic campaign against cloning. We have
examples in the 1976 novel, The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin, made
into a film starring James Mason in 1978, and most recently in 2002,
with the appearance of Star Wars Part II: Attack of the Clones.
There is even a canard as to whether human cloning methods might be
patentable.
The New York Times is entirely correct: “Opposition to
reproductive cloning is universal in Congress,”50 and if any senator
or congressman secretly harbors a more benign view of the procedure,
the chance that he or she will express that opinion publicly is
absolutely zero. In 2001, the House of Representatives voted to ban
all forms of cloning, but the Senate resisted a total disallowment.
Congress has thus resolved to criminalize reproductive cloning, even
though Congress’s unanimity in this area is not shared by everyone
in the scientific and scholarly community. According to the Wall
Street Journal, “some diplomats said they believe the U.S. stand in
the U.N. was primarily intended to score domestic political points
with religious conservatives and antiabortion activists.”51
But such moods are hardly limited to the United
States. On November 6, 2003, by a 80-79 vote, with 15 abstentions,
the United Nations narrowly resolved to delay by two years a vote
supported by the United States and the Vatican to outlaw both
therapeutic and reproductive cloning. A number of other countries
supported a Belgian proposal to ban reproductive cloning while
permitting therapeutic cloning. Animal breeding methods usually
amount to producing a specific type on the basis of very strict
characteristics. The same is true for plant selection, in which a
rich variety of strains is usually replaced by a few
monocultures.
Nothing of the sort would be appropriate for human
populations. Human selection, as proposed by proponents of eugenics,
would be aimed at a far more limited reduction in genetic variance.
Diversity is viewed not simply as a great source of strength but
also as an integral part of what we are and want to be. A certain
reduction of this variability, on the other hand, is the
mathematical goal. Eugenicists argue that even a very significant
channeling of motherhood and a far more stringent selection among
men would still leave billions of people reproducing. By comparison,
all thoroughbred race horses stem from three Middle Eastern
stallions, and natural selection can be even more draconian.
Back
Mapping the Human Genome
We have the intestines of chickens
to tell the fortunes of war.
We have slaves
that they might be silent.
We have stones
that we might build.
Why then should we trouble the gods?
Osip Mandelstam
“Nature is the Same Rome…”
Genetics is a very young science. The theory of evolution was not
forwarded until the late 1850s. In 1866 the Austrian monk Gregor
Mendel had begun to attempt to pry open the secret of creation when
he published the results of his controlled pollination of the garden
pea, but his discoveries were ignored for the rest of the century,
and Galton never learned of them. Even the discovery of the
mechanism of fertilization as a union of the nuclei of male and
female sex cells was not made until 1875; 1888 saw the discovery of
certain deeply stained bodies in cell nuclei, which were christened
“chromosomes,” and in 1909 the word “gene”came to be applied to the
Mendelian factors of heredity.
The first in vitro fertilization
(rabbit and also monkey) was not achieved until 1934, and as for the
double helical structure of DNA, its discovery dates back only to 1953. This is all so recent that although
early eugenicists had set their goals and methods they were largely
ignorant of the mechanisms involved.
The mapping of the human genome is still in an early stage. The
amount we don’t know vastly dwarfs what we do know. There appear to
be approximately three billion bases, or chemical letters, making up
the nucleotide sequences that form 20,000 to 25,000 genes which code
directly for proteins. Just how genes and the proteins they produce
interact is still poorly understood.52 But protein-coding genes
comprise only 2% of the human genome. The functions of other DNA
sequences are still largely a mystery.
We do know that some of them
contain switches that turn genes on and off, and we have learned
that at the ends of the chromosomes there are telomeres, whose
shortening appears to be related to the aging process, and
nonfunctional genomic parasites, whose only function in our bodies
seems to be to replicate themselves. An estimated 40-48% consists of
repeat sequences. Even when we will have sequenced the genome, we
will still have to determine how these data relate to expression.
The sequences are only a parts list to a grand machine, the outlines
of which we are only beginning to trace.
Scholarly opinion is rapidly growing more cognizant of the role of
genes in human society. In 1998, University of Massachusetts
political scientist Diane Paul wrote that just fourteen years
earlier, in 1984, she had labeled as “hereditarian” or “biological
determinist” the view that differences in mentality and temperament
were substantially influenced by genes –employing these terms as
though their meanings were unproblematic. That usage today would
surely be contested. For the view implicitly disparaged by these
labels is once again widely accepted by scientists and the public
alike.53 The bottom line is that with every day we gain greater
knowledge and that in the not all that distant future we will be
able to predict with a high degree of certainty the genetic load
that we are passing on to future generations.
Back
Ideology
Essential Conditions
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
I Corinthians, xiii, 9
Proponents of eugenics see the movement as an integral component of
an environmentalist policy. They reason that, while we cannot
predict the distant future, we can with a fair degree of confidence
trace out certain conditions which will always be essential or at
the very least desirable:
-
a supply of natural resources
-
a clean, biodiverse environment
-
a human population no larger than the planet can comfortably
sustain on an indefinite basis
-
a population which is healthy,
altruistic, and intelligent
The blessings that we are reaping from
the industrial revolution are, to a significant degree,
unsustainable. We are systematically depleting the planet’s riches.
Debates as to how long this or that resource will hold out are
essentially trivial in the greater scheme of things, for eventually
we will have thoroughly sifted through the earth’s accessible
subsoil. The only resources that we can count on over the long run
are those which are truly renewable or inexhaustible. As for
science-fiction fantasies about relocating to other planets, this
“trash-the-world” vandalism is unfeasible for billions of people. Of
course, it can be argued that the inevitability of resource
exhaustion makes it a non-topic.
What is the difference if this
process is completed sooner or later? The eugenicists’ response is a
moral one. We embarked upon the industrial revolution only two
centuries ago, and we have a huge transition to go through if we do
not wish our offspring to return to a hunter-gatherer economy in
which there will be precious little left either to hunt or to
gather. We need to husband our precious,
finite resources to get through this transition in as chary a
fashion as possible.
Traditional societies live in harmony with nature. Modern industrial
society clearly does not, and we have already overwhelmed much of
Nature’s ability to heal itself. An enormous number of species have
been wiped out, while still others have been transported by man to
different environments where, lacking natural enemies, they have
followed the example of man in replicating his devastation.
Globalization is already delivering devastating blows to the
planet’s biodiversity. As for pollution, while it has gone so far
that it becomes too painful to even read about in the papers, much
of it can still be reversed.
And there are population problems which may overwhelm the planet in
a relatively short period. In traditional societies children, being
the only form of social security around, represent for their parents
an economic good. More is better. In economically developed
societies, on the other hand, children are strictly an economic
liability, and the surest way to maximize consumption (for many the
ultimate purpose of life) is at the very least to reduce the number
of children.
In 2003, the Total Fertility Rate in East Asia was below replacement
at 1.7. The national TFR had even dropped to 1.3 in Japan and
Taiwan. Europe’s TFR had fallen to 1.4. Canada’s and the United
States’ TFR were 1.5 and 2, respectively. In sharp contrast, Latin
America’s TFR was 2.7, while Africa’s was 5.2.
The global TFR was
2.8, the planet’s population having swollen six-fold over the last
250 years. It is still growing by leaps and bounds, although more
slowly than formerly. The largest growth is taking place in the
poorest countries. While it is hoped that the entire world will
eventually pass through the demographic transition, it is not
impossible that before this happens individual countries will
undergo horrendous Malthusian collapse. Bangladesh, for example,
which has a population of 134 million on a land mass roughly the
size of the state of Wisconsin, most of which is an alluvial flood
plain frequently ravaged by hurricanes, is projected to
increase its population to 255 million by the year 2050. Other
countries provide even more rapid growth rates:
The Palestinians during the same period are predicted to increase
their numbers to form a population 3.3 times its current size, and
this on land where water is already in critical shortage. India is
projected to add as many people as Europe’s entire population by
that time.54
Demographic predictions are not made with any claim to
precision. There are low, medium, and high projections. And there
are questions to which no one has any answers. What is the long-term
carrying capacity of the planet? How many lives will be carried off
by phenomena that reduce the population not by decreasing fertility
but by increasing mortality? Already there are projections of a loss
of fifty million deaths from AIDS. Where will it end? What new
plagues lurk around the corner? Military conflicts could easily
result in the deaths of billions of people. Demographic predictions
are really no better than stock market predictions. In any case,
eugenicists argue that the wisest approach is to err on the side of
caution. A smaller population capable of surviving by the use of
current renewable resources will create less stress and make the
transition to a new economy more manageable.
Back
Altruism
You among the dry, dead beech-leaves, in the fire of night,
Burnt like a sacrifice, you invisible…
D. H. Lawrence
“Scent of Irises,” 1916
Darwin pointed out that natural selection favors behavioral patterns
which promote survivability. Suicidal behavior, it would seem,
should lead to the destruction of the animal involved, thus
preventing it from reproducing. How then, sociobiologists asked,
could the behavior of a honeybee be explained when, in stinging a
perceived threat to the hive, it rips out its own belly together
with the stinger and thus perishes? The answer is that survivability
of the genotype, not of the individual, is crucial. Although the
individual bee dies, the other members of the hive are genetically
identical copies, and the chances for the
survival of their genes are improved by the sacrifice of the
individual.
Up until quite recently, survival of a human individual was
extremely problematic. People are physically unimpressive animals,
with easily torn skin, no claws, weak musculature, and atrophied
canines. In primitive times opportunistic out-of-clan cannibalism
would have improved survival chances. Thus, such individuals or
groups would have been viewed not merely as enemies but as potential
food. We are the products of precisely such an evolutionary process.
In all animal species, out-of-family altruism is the rare exception.
Survival requires maximum expenditure of effort, and efforts
expended on alien genes (dispersed or nonfocused altruism) waste
effort and thus, by definition, reduce survivability. Most traits
are arranged along a continuum, and altruism is no exception. If a
statistical curve were drawn to display diffuse altruism at one end
and focused altruism at the other, the result would be radically
skewed toward focused altruism –that is, toward immediate offspring.
As man moved into larger groups (tribes), specialization and
cooperation went hand in hand.
The skew was retained but became less
pronounced, and people learned to “live by the rules” and even to
feign nonfocused altruism. But the genes really didn’t really change
all that much. Homo sapiens’s political history presents an unbroken
string of violence, and any objective determination of his
coordinates within the animal kingdom places him among the
predators. What sort of a society do we want? To the degree that
altruism is determined by our genes, artificial selection could
theoretically make it possible to create a social profile skewed
toward diffuse altruism. The difficulty of working toward a better
society is that such a process necessarily entails effort and even
sacrifice on the part of the currently living, who have the power of
absolute dictators.
All this leads to gloomy conclusions. Professor of human ecology
Garrett Hardin wrote that it is futile to expect people to act
against their own self-interest,55 and the bioethicist Peter Singer defines “reciprocal altruism” as merely a “technical term
for cooperation.”56 The big question, of course, is how to select
for altruism. The same questions must be answered here as for other
traits. How to measure? What are the relative contributions of
nature and nurture? Which genes come into play and in which
combinations? What is the heritability? What combinations of
positive and negative eugenic approaches are likely to prove most
effective?
A good Trekkie, the eugenicist wishes to create a global
civilization which does not set consumption as its primary goal but
longs for a loving, nonpredatory society that pursues the goal of
intellectual enrichment, a society that will achieve a material
standard of living as a byproduct of this mentality. Culture and
science are seen as goals in and of themselves, not just means to a
material end. A high material standard of living is viewed as coming
from knowledge and love, not the reverse.
No philosophy of life can logically justify its basic premises.
These are givens, the values of the individual or the group. The
society that acclaims maximized material consumption as its ultimate
goal, that expresses only passing concern for the fate of future
generations, that places no value in culture and science other than
that which derives from their contribution to consumption, proceeds
from a point of reference that cannot be logically overthrown. Such
a worldview is the product of an evolutionary process of selection
which rewarded clan-specific altruism.
By contrast the eugenics movement advocates a universalism that
encompasses all humanity while recognizing the continuity of our
species with all other species on this planet, disavowing any
exclusively homocentric orientation that would view our fellow
creatures as mere fodder for our usage. Eugenicists also perceive a
need to be open to genetic manipulation, machine enhancement, and
even contact with beings from other planets.
The operative phrase of this ethical system is “the greater good,”
which is understood more in the spirit of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) than in the hedonistic
pronouncements of a Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). The philosophy
extends beyond the creature universe to thought itself.
Eugenicists argue that there is much in our genes which may have
been advantageous to previous generations and species, but
conditions have now changed radically. They maintain that we can
either work with nature and achieve utopia, or we can in our greed
reject reform and perish. Dangerous? Unquestionably. It is entirely
possible, for example, to create people with limited intelligence to
perform our manual labor for us, just as we currently import such
persons through our national immigration policy. Given our current,
still limited understanding, we can easily overestimate our power to
predict. And there is the danger of being overly narrow in
separating the desirable from the undesirable.
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Society and Genes
Politics: Manipulation Masked as Democracy
I believe in the division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass
laws under which you make money… and out of your profits, you
further contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to
pass more laws to enable you to make more money.
Senator Boies Penrose (R-Pa), 1896
There are two things that are more important in politics.
The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.
Senator Mark Hanna (R-Oh)
Chairman of the Republican National Committee, 1896 In 1999, even as
we forged into the new millennium, the Gallup Poll found that 68% of
Americans still favored teaching creationism together with evolution
in the schools, with 40% favoring exclusively creationism; 47%
percent subscribed to the view that,
“God created human beings pretty
much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years
of so” (up from 44% in 1982!).57 In the words of the theologian John
C. Fletcher, such “controversy clouds rational discussion with fear
and misunderstanding.”58
The genetic bases of social and political
structures constitute a topic that even bolder sociologists and
political scientists have been leery of raising for two-thirds of a
century. It is a taboo which grossly distorts our understanding of
ourselves. There probably has never existed a society with a totally
rigid structure in which ability played no role. Under the Caesars,
the Pharaohs, the Ottomans, the Tsars, and probably even the Mayan
princes, the gifted slave could on occasion demonstrate his ability
and achieve high rank. In modern society, however, where such
mobility has been immensely increased, universal education combined
with assortative mating is creating greater and greater genetic
stratification into classes which are then
overlaid with stratifications of wealth and power.
In a dictatorship, government is more inclined to determine directly
the various functions performed by its citizens, whereas in a
democracy the citizenry usually enjoys greater freedom of selection.
But even in the most permissive democracy, if the individual does
not possess independent means and does not want to starve to death,
he must perform some function to which society assigns a value.
Compulsion is a key word in both systems. This is not stated as a
value judgment, but is simply a fact of life. The distinction
between democracy and dictatorship has to do primarily with how the
authorities get the same tasks accomplished – everything from trash
hauling to school teaching –and thus make it possible to maintain a
functioning social mechanism and allow those in power to remain in
power.
The Skinner box of capitalism has proven to be far more efficient
than the Gulag in raising production/consumption. Evidently we have
much more in common with cattle than with cats, for we are herded
with amazing ease. True democracy is not possible if the people fail
to understand the issues. Political history is really nothing more
than a broken string of days that will live in infamy.
Dictatorships are difficult to maintain, since a leader who refuses
to take account of the disposition of forces in that society will
eventually be overthrown. Democracies, on the other hand, possess
considerably greater flexibility through manipulation of the popular
will.
As for political dialogue, it takes place on three levels:
a) sham
issues intended to manipulate the masses
b) the true (usually
clandestine) views of the ruling elite
c) long-term species
survival issues, which, since the beneficiaries do not constitute a
constituency, are generally more ignored than suppressed
In 1933, gazing around him in dismay at the Great Depression and
peering back at the “holy war fought to make the world safe for
democracy,” the former civil servant John McConaughy in Who Rules
America? defined his country’s “invisible
government” as “the political control for selfish, if not sinister,
economic purposes – by individual men, or groups or organizations,
who are careful to evade the responsibility which should always
accompany power. They operate behind a mask of puppets in politics
and business.”59 Exactly a half century later the sociologist G.
William Domhoff, whose political views were far to the left of
McConaughy’s, arrived at similar conclusions in his Who Rules
America Now? when he described a cohesive ruling class that shapes
the social and political climate and plays a dominant role in the
economy and the government with the goal of promoting its own
self-interest.
No human interaction is more fiercely competitive than politics.
What is the true nature of that process? To take but one example,
Washington, D.C. is home to a society of “networked,” monied,
politically sophisticated individuals, while 37% of that same city’s
residents read at a third-grade level or lower.60 The situation is
comparable to a champion sprinter competing against a 90-year-old in
a wheelchair. Not surprisingly, the “winners” in this race favor the
process that allows them to achieve and maintain their spoils
system, and to do so without any sense of guilt.
One percent of American citizens now own 40% of the nation’s
wealth.61 In elections vested interests make electoral campaign
contributions, parts of which are used for polling the voters to
learn what they want to hear, while the lion’s share is invested in
advertising that is as based as little on logic as an ad for a soft
drink. The resulting advertising presents a combination of what the
pollsters discover and what the propaganda specialists consider the
populace will accept. To make matters worse, literally a handful of
people now control most of the media, and there is no talk of
applying antitrust legislation to stop even further amalgamations.
And the system functions incredibly smoothly –exactly as intended.
When the candidate is eventually elected, having outspent his
opponent, he then goes on to do the bidding of those who paid the
bill. Should the electoral results be in doubt, the candidate has
merely to wrap himself in the flag while denouncing his opponents. The result is an unbridgeable chasm of
understanding between elites and the broad masses. A serious book
published by a university press may have a print run of a few
hundred copies, while a television show of only middling popularity
will measure its viewership in the tens of millions, and Hollywood
aspires to an audience of billions all over the world. Intellectuals
are supposedly free to express their opinions (as least as long as
they do not threaten the powers that be), but informed opinion is
irrelevant to the political process.
This situation has been made possible by the failure of the general
populace to comprehend the true nature of the issues. Indeed, how
can any rational observer view any human society as a collective of
informed individuals making rational decisions? In a 2000 Gallup
poll, 34% of those questioned were unable to name the probable
presidential candidates. For persons having a high school education
or less and earning less than $20,000 annually, this particular
quotient of ignorance rose to 55%.62
According to a survey done by
the National Assessment of Education Progress, 56% of those tested
could not correctly subtract 55 and 37 from 100; 18% could not
multiply 43 x 67; 24% could not convert .35 to 35%; and 28% were
unable to express “three hundred fifty-six thousand and
ninety-seven” as “356,097.”63 In addition, 24% of adult Americans
were unaware that the United States had fought the Revolutionary War
with Great Britain, and 21% had no idea that the Earth revolves
around the sun.64
According to the Northeast Midwest Institute, a
nonprofit and education research group, 60 million adult Americans
cannot read the front page of a newspaper.65 Three Americans in ten
between the ages of 18 and 24 could not find the Pacific Ocean on a
world map, while 67% of Brits did not know the year World War II
ended and 64% did now know which country the French Alps were
located in.66 As for art, philosophy, serious music, literature, and
so on –that intellectual thought and creativity which should lend
greater meaning to our lives than those of other animals that love,
hate, and dream much as we do –such matters are a subject of disinterest for the overwhelming majority of people.
But even this does not represent the furthest extreme of egalitarianist politics.
The millions of people ill with dementia to
the point that they are unable to dress themselves or recognize
family members also participate in selecting national leadership.
Surveys of patients at dementia clinics in Rhode Island and
Pennsylvania found that 60% and 64% had voted, respectively. Brian
R. Ott of Brown University found that 37% of patients with moderate
dementia and about 18% with severe dementia had voted.67 In
selecting out individuals of ability, modern society now has
stripped the broad masses of society of the brilliant artisans and
poets who formerly created and maintained national cultures.68 A
visit to the magazine section of the local supermarket or a flip
through the hundreds of television channels is a dismaying
experience.
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Welfare and Fertility
See yon blithe child that dances in our sight.
Sara Coleridge, “The Child”
Is the goal of the so-called welfare state fundamentally dysgenic in
nature? In 1936, the famous biologist Julian Huxley laid out a
hard-hearted version of the hereditarian view in his Galton lecture,
delivered before the Eugenics Society:
The lowest strata…, allegedly less well endowed genetically…, must
not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the
removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too
easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment
should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be
contingent upon no further children being brought into the world.69
We must remember that this was written at the depths of the Great
Depression, and that many of those on welfare were simply victims of
failed financial policies, not bad genes.
While the average welfare mother receives payments for only two
years, never-married mothers who have babies in their teens average
eight years or more of dependency.70 These are the so-called chronic
welfare cases. On average the mothers of illegitimate children score
ten points lower in IQ than mothers of legitimate children.71 These
babies make an incommensurate contribution to the future pool of
rejected, abandoned, and battered children.72 The mechanism would
appear to be economic.
A young woman of average or greater ability
can look forward to life’s many opportunities and finds little
temptation in a modest welfare payment, whereas a woman of low
intelligence may rationally see government assistance as a ticket to
independence and freedom from the hand-to-mouth realities of a
minimum-wage job. It would seem logical that the higher the
payments, the greater the temptation. Nonetheless, the link between
economics and fertility has been challenged as still unproven.
Demographer Daniel Vining, for example, has pointed out that lower
welfare payments in southern states has not led to significantly
reduced fertility patterns.73
We are faced here with a terrible
dilemma. Society has an obligation to care for its weakest members,
but the flip side of the coin is that in doing so we have
significantly increased the fertility of low-IQ women (who generally
tend to marry low-IQ men in what is known as “assortative mating”).
And we pay them more for each child. Mothers on AFDC had an average
of 2.6 children each; non-AFDC mothers averaged 2.1.74 This is a
major factor in American fertility patterns. What to do? Deny poor
women and their children financial assistance? Bribe the upper
classes into childbearing? Or throw up our hands in dismay and allow
society to be genetically dumbed-down? Indeed, given political
realities, what can we do?
Certainly, at the very least, it would
behoove us to increase family-planning services to the poor. It is a
simple fact that current state policies –both domestic and foreign
–already influence differential fertility patterns, despite the fact
that the current political climate makes it virtually impossible
even to discuss this factor.
Since future generations by definition represent a zero
constituency, the public sphere is largely defined horizontally,
whereas vertical or longitudinal effects are mostly relegated to the
private domain and thus ignored –that is, remain unregulated.
Eugenics opposes this horizontal/vertical opposition, maintaining
that, since the unborn constitute a vastly greater potential
population than do the currently living, their rights take
precedence. Politics is, by definition, a struggle among the
currently living, and what may well be a victory for some faction in
their midst may well be a disaster for their children, just as the
disasters of the parents may be to the children’s good fortune.
We are now able to separate sex from procreation; either may occur
without the other. It is now even possible for women to bypass the
male’s sperm.75 Thus, while leaving the right to sexuality within
the private sphere, eugenicists argue that procreational rights
–inasmuch as they define the very nature of future people –can be
ignored by society only to its own detriment.
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Crime and IQ
Oh blood, which art my father’s blood,
Circulating thro’ these contaminated veins,
If thou, poured forth on the polluted earth,
Could wash away the crime…
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“The Cenci”
Genes play a major role in virtually all behavior, including
alcoholism, smoking, autism, phobias, neuroses, insomnia,
consumption of coffee (but not tea),76 schizophrenia, marriage and
divorce, job satisfaction, hobbies, and fears. Curiously, while one
study shows no genetic role in singing ability,77 another shows
pitch perception to be highly heritable and estimates the
heritability of tone deafness at 0.8 –about as high as it gets for
genetically complex traits, rivaling features such as height.78
Animal breeders and even pet owners have no doubts about differences
between and within species, and we all
know from everyday experience just much people differ innately from
each other. Genes evidently also play a role in crime.
In the mid-nineteenth century, criminal justice systems were still
guided by the assumption of man’s free will, and crime was viewed as
a sin which had to be expiated. In the late 1850s, the French
physician B. A. Morel established the field of criminal physical
anthropology. Galton himself favored compulsory means to limit the
breeding not just of the insane, the feebleminded, or confirmed
criminals but also of paupers.79 In 1876, just five years after the
appearance of Darwin’s Descent of Man, the Jewish-Italian
criminologist and physician Cesare Lombroso published The Criminal
Man, which attempted to demonstrate the biological nature of
criminality. Lombroso claimed to have established during autopsies
certain physical stigmata characteristic of the born criminal, whom
he saw as possessing a more primitive type of brain structure. If
one accepts such biological determinism, punishment becomes
meaningless.
Lombroso’s theories are now generally rejected as invalid, but
studies of the role of genes in crime have not been confined to the
nineteenth century. A 1982 Swedish study found that the rate of
criminality in adopted children was 2.9% when neither biological nor
adoptive parents had been convicted of criminal activity. When one
of the natural parents was criminal, the figure rose to 6.7%, but
when both biological parents were criminal, the figure was nearly
twice as high –12.1%.80 At first the left tended to sympathize with
biological positivism, but soon Marxists came to view crime as
environmentally determined. The anarchists even sympathized with
criminals, who were seen as rebels challenging social injustice.
Crime in a capitalist system came under the rubric of justified
revolution in miniature.
If the egalitarian Franz Boaz was the “father” of anthropology, the
paternal rights to criminology (sociology’s “stepchild”) have been
ceded to Edwin E. Sutherland, for whom learning was entirely a
social product disconnected from biological
structures. In 1914, he published Criminology, the most influential
book on the topic during the twentieth century. Thanks in large
measure to its resonance, and especially that of later reworked
editions, many textbooks in the field never even mentioned IQ, and
when they did the treatment was largely dismissive.
At the same time, intelligence studies have consistently
demonstrated a lower IQ among those found to have committed criminal
acts than among the general population. The intelligence ratings of
200 juvenile offenders consigned to training schools in Iowa show a
mean IQ of 90.4 for the boys and 94.1 for the girls. The mean IQ for
non-delinquents was 103 for boys and 105.5 for girls.81 The 1969
police records of over 3,600 boys in Contra Costa County,
California, show a relationship between IQ and delinquency of
-0.31.82 A group of 411 London boys was followed over a ten-year
period so as to compare delinquent and non-delinquent groups. While
only one in fifty boys with an IQ of 110 or more was a recidivist,
one in five of those with an IQ of 90 or less fell into this
category. 83
Since the advent of the revised Stanford Binet and the
Wechsler-Bellevue scales in the late 1930s, it has been consistently
found that samples of delinquents differ from the general population
by about 8 IQ points84 –a significant but not an overwhelming
difference. One can only surmise that perhaps the gap would be even
narrower if it were possible to control for a higher arrest record
among juveniles less skillful in the art of deception. The same
general tendency exists within the adult population. Criminal
offenders have average IQs of about 92 –that is, 8 points or
one-half standard deviation below the mean.85 What is actually
happening? Life itself is a cruel competition, where the vanquished
have ended up more than once skewered and slowly roasting over the
victor’s cooking fire.
Now civilization imposes rules
(so-called middle-class values) that allow some people more success
at winning. Imagine a situation where the fastest runner would be
the only one to get supper. After a time the slower competitors
would be sorely tempted simply to hit him on the head rather than futilely attempt to outdo him in speed. The same is true
with intelligence. The successful stockbroker, surgeon, and lawyer
do not need to commit crime to gain wealth, but further down the
professional scale are those individuals whose low intelligence
literally dooms them to a life of material slavery. Can at least
part of the explanation for criminal behavior be as simple as that?
To what extent is inherited low altruism a factor in crime? Before
axing the old pawnbroker in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment,
Raskolnikov first rationalizes away his guilt. Clearly, the general
population contains a vast pool of individuals for whom guilt is, at
best, an underdeveloped emotion.
Can we really entrust the awesome task of guiding human evolution to
the bureaucrats? Are we not still far from understanding the nature
of crime? Do we want passivity bred into the population? Is not
crime the statistical tail of such desirable traits as
adventuresomeness and the willingness to take risks?
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Migration
Settling and dominating the entire planet, our species has devoted
an immense amount of effort to moving around. In the process, entire
civilizations have been displaced, conquered, infiltrated, and even
swamped by imported alien populations. In economic terms, greater
and greater specialization has replaced self-sufficiency and created
ruling classes that are often recruited from a multiplicity of
ethnic backgrounds.
Since the pool of global talent is neither diminished nor enhanced
when a person moves from country A to country B, migration
constitutes a zero-sum game. Nevertheless, some countries are
winners while others are losers. The United States attracts large
numbers of very talented individuals but also many who are unlikely
to leave the lower economic rung. The mean IQ of immigrants in the
1980s has been estimated to be about 95, or only about one-third
standard deviation below the mean.87 This is a small enough
difference that it may well be explainable by
the disadvantaging environment from which many arrivals come.
Early man migrated slowly, creating diversity by virtue of lengthy
periods of relative genetic isolation. Now, however, the revolution
in transportation is undermining this isolation. The United Nations
Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that 53% of
the 6,809 languages spoken around the world are at risk of
extinction by 2100. The destruction of this “reservoir of human
thought and knowledge”88 is accompanied by a loss of genetic
diversity that would cause dismay among ecologists if it were to
occur in any species other than man.
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