A slippery slope of nucleotides - posted at 19:25

Today's scary wake-up call is brought to you by Escapades of Reason.

There is so much in both Jared's post and the article that it was based on that just screamed "slippery slope" in my mind -- it was like there was a 50-foot neon billboard with those words flashing in hot pink far before the Slate article ever mentioned the phrase. As Jared's subject line suggests, A Brave New World-like scenario is a worst-case scenario that could result from our genetic meddling and tampering, though I hesitate to call it the worst case scenario, as humans have repeatedly shown themselves capable of newer and more horrible ways to treat each other that prove how naive I can truly be.

But I digress.

I think that the thing that bothers me most about this slippery-slope fallacy of modern eugenics is from the scientific point-of-view. We have taken evolution (being the random genetic mutations that give rise to new traits, be they successful or unsuccessful for the being) into our own hands and have essentially taken out the random element. New gene expressions may not get the chance to get a field test and may be snuffed out because they are misunderstood. Genetics is an enormously complex process. Something that may explicitly express itself in an undesirable way may have a dramatic effect in a more subtle fashion, but it may be "deselected" by a white coat because it is misunderstood.

What if someone told you that they had found a gene in an embryo of yours that would cause its all of its weight to be carried directly above the pelvis, causing a host of back and spine problems and (should the baby be female and reproduce) complications during pregnancy and childbirth? Sounds pretty bad, something you wouldn't want your child to have to live with, right? Well my friends, those are side effects from the genes that cause us to walk upright, which is something that otherwise gives us tremendous advantages as a species.

Or what if you were told that your baby would have a gene expression that would cause it to be born early so that it was completely helpless and dependent on you for far longer than is otherwise heard of? That is, of course, if it actually survived the birthing process, which would be made much more hazardous by this new gene expression. The trait I'm referring to here is large brain size, which gives us such formidable intelligence that we have become the masters of our domain and somehow ended up on the top of the food chain, despite being really rather unimpressive mammals, physically speaking.

My point here is that humans have made stupid decisions that we think are actually informed, scientific decisions when in fact they are anything but (CFCs come to mind. Ozone layer what?). What if a 'bad' gene that we think we are totally informed about really has a protective or good property that we don't immediately see? I don't think we humans are doing ourselves any favors by taking the natural selection part of the evolutionary process upon ourselves. Besides, who ever heard of genetic diversity in a population being a bad thing?

Purely scientific issues aside, I see this as causing a whole gamut of social issues (which probably won't sound all that new to those that are familiar with A Brave New World or Gattaca).

Some couples have opted to choose the sex of their baby so that it will "balance" the family. Balance???? What the crap is that? These are probably the same sort of people who think that a household is "balanced" if the man is supporting the family by doing a job that requires: a) a lot of grunting, and b) a drill, and the woman is relegated to the always-in-style barefoot-and-pregnant, dammit-woman-get-back-in-the-kitchen role. Maybe I'm a bit flippant, but I came from a "balanced" family -- one mother, one father, one daughter, one son -- and I still grew up hating Cabbage Patch dolls, I eschewed Barbies in favor of G. I. Joes and Ninja Turtles, used my dollhouse for architectural projects instead of doll-play, and grew up to get a mathematics degree and join the military. Yeah, a lot of good that "balance" did for my so-called feminine gender roles.

But I digress. Again.

In more seriousness, I see this going in two directions that are oddly enough not mutually exclusive.

What's to stop a couple that already has a child or two with given physical characteristics -- say, for fun, blond hair and blue eyes -- from using the 'balance' argument to select the same characteristics for their next child? After all, it would be hard to be a red-headed stepchild in this case, especially if you were really a red-headed biological child. I see this as only being a step or two away -- albeit a more scientifically advanced step or two -- from what the Nazis were trying to accomplish in their experimental eugenics programs.

I also see this as putting new stresses on marriage -- stresses that really shouldn't be there in the first place. Ok, it was all well and good when you couldn't decide what couch to get and what shade to paint your dining room, that was just a house. But now you're trying to design a kid. You may be able to compromise on superficial physical characteristics (you abhor the way your spouse's ears are pointy like an elf's but he or she adores it and wants to pass it on to the children), but when you start talking about who the child will really be, there's no compromising on that one like there was on the rug-and-tile combination you chose for your entryway. I don't see a situation like "Ok, this kid can be really good at science, but I want our next kid to be a jock!" working out. We all have ways that we'd like our hypothetical spawn to turn out (yes, even me) and we all have qualities that we hold as especially important that we may be willing to leave to chance but we wouldn't be willing to sacrifice if we had the option to exercise control over the situation.

I say that the genetic crapshoot of regular old babymakin' sex has been working great for millions of years -- why mess with a good thing? Yes, it would be wonderful to spare new parents the heartbreak of finding out that their newborn has a fatal congenital disease, but at the same time (and I'm so aware that this is spoken just like someone who isn't a parent) I'm not sure that we should have ever started down that slippery slope.

Jared commented:

I was very impressed by the guy's piece, which is why I wanted to pass it on on my blog. The problem is, the guy did such a good job of leading you to see where he's going...and I agreed with him so readily...that I almost felt my blog post was a rehash.

I liked what you had to say. Especially about playing with God's dice. The whole idea is very scary. It's funny that Mary Shelly called it over 200 years ago. And it's not like you have to be a fundamentalist Christian or something to have a problem with this.

What's interesting is that, on the one hand, these sci-fi stories seem so alarmist. But then when you start considering how fast genetics can snowball and what impact this could have on society, you realize that the ideas are not all that outlandish, or perhaps even all that alarmist.

I can think of very few times when science, as a whole, has stopped to consider the ethics of a discovery prior to pushing for it. Cloning, yes. Stem cell research or atomic energy, no. And even when science does lay some groundrules (like with cloning) there is always some lab in France that says they just don't care.

Jitterbean Girl commented:

I'm glad that you pointed out that you don't have to be a fundamentalist Christian to have a problem with this -- when I cross-posted this to another place, one of my right-wing readers made the comment "I'd never imagined you'd write something that could be pretty conclusively interpreted as conservative-leaning." I replied with "call me crazy, but I think that learning from our history is more important than following party lines."

I think that part of the problem with science and ethics is that it's so hard to predict applications for new technologies. It may be intended to help people, but down the road it could be put to unethical use or even harmful use. I think that antibiotics are a great example of this. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be here today without antibiotics (I had recurrent strep as a young child that even developed into scarlet fever once), and I'm by no means the only success story. The problem is that now we use them liberally, indiscriminately, and wastefully, and it's causing the germs that were so easily eliminated with the drugs to mutate into supergerms (evolution and natural selection at work -- oh-so-applicable to what I was writing about above). It could be that antibiotics will be the death of us all.

The way that antibiotics are used in feed lots is even more appalling (if memory serves, this is described in the book Fatal Harvest, but I will need to wander a bring-and-mortar store to confirm that). It's no longer a mystery to me why I feel ill and sluggish after I eat beef. Anyway, the whole system is beyond the scope of a comment, but is more meriting of a separate entry that may be forthcoming later.

Jitterbean Girl commented:

I correct the book title mentioned in my last comment: I had been thinking of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Hooray industrial food chain!