Science fiction loves
eugenics. It's been used in works as weighty as Brave New World and
Gattaca, and as slight as Star Trek and Battletech. And of course,
it's really just a continuation of the age-old concept of classes and
castes, transposed into a more respectably intellectual milieu and
given a quick gloss of scientific grounding. It shouldn't be any
surprise that the idea of breeding humans who are better, stronger,
faster than their fellows, or alternately who are simpler, slower and
more malleable, should hold some appeal. In the west that great
utopian thought-space, Plato's Republic, set the stage or it
thousands of years ago, and people have been merrily examining its feasibility ever since.
With rather widely varying results...
At the moment, eugenics
isn't a particularly serious concern. While we can test for all
sorts of genetic conditions in utero,
that's mostly all that can be done. There are no meaningful tools
for enhancing a foetus' intellect, its aptitude with musical
instruments, its eye and hair colour, height and weight and so on.
We can evaluate, but not significantly alter, a person's genetic
makeup. And that's good, because we're only just starting to grope
towards, not an understanding of the kinds of issues such abilities
would create in society, but that we even need to consider working
towards such an understanding. But I suppose we have to start
somewhere.
One suspects you would be
hard pressed to find a parent who wouldn't want their child to be
smarter, or stronger, or more flexible, or more creative, or more
whatever than everyone else. Every parent wants the best for their
children, though not necessarily for everyone else's, and there are
completely valid evolutionary and social reasons for that. The thing
of it is, though, that what's perfectly understandable for an
individual can be problematic for a society, often only once it's
safely too late to do anything about it. Already, there are groups,
such as those representing people born deaf or people with Down's
Syndrome, warning that early genetic identification of those
conditions is leading to the eradication of such groups from the
wider population. Whether you believe those with such conditions
would be better off not having existed in the first place is a
personal matter, but in terms of genetic diversity the wholesale
removal of certain expressions of genetic construction should raise
some concern. One of the most common issues raised is the potential
impact of discovering a 'gay gene', and whether it would lead to the
near-extinction of the homosexual population. I don't actually worry
about that, for various reasons (primarily, those most likely to view
homosexuality as a negative condition are also those least likely to
view abortion and genetic re-engineering as legitimate), but you
could make the same point about nearly any group within the broader
human species. To hypberolically borrow a turn of phrase, first they
came for the autistic foetuses, and I did nothing, because my foetus
wasn't autistic.
A solution to this could
be the introduction of new laws, but despite my general faith in the
institutions of government it's not one I favour. The law is an
often blunt instrument, and frankly it's impossible to think of a way
to craft a law to protect such groups that wouldn't run well afoul of
the rights to bodily autonomy that underlie the protection of
abortion rights in most developed states. You can't be pro-choice
only when people are making the choices you agree with. Instead, I
think it's going to have to come down to an evolving concept of the
relative value of human beings, something the law isn't nearly
delicate enough to construct. Historically, the human ideal has been
someone with no physical or mental handicaps, for the very simple
reason that there were no safety nets; it was every person for
themselves, and if you couldn't contribute, either you were going
down alone or you were going to drag your family down, with you. But
there's more to the working world than just hard physical labour, and
our technologies have made our societies rich enough that caring for
those with serious physical or mental issues is feasible. We aren't
one bad harvest away from starvation anymore; we don't have to leave
babies out overnight to see if they're tough enough to be worth
keeping.
It's an inexact method, anyway. About time it was replaced.
Ideally, what society
could really use are another dozen or so Stephen Hawking's, people
whose bodies are utterly useless in a conventional sense but who have
made enormous contributions through the sheer power of their
intellect. The only way to undercut the threat of a large-scale
genetic arms race is to lead people to an understanding that there is
a way for every person to contribute meaningfully and live with
dignity and comfort. Thankfully, despite the sharp dislocations
produced by the 2008 'Great Recession', and the more widespread but
less individually disruptive eruptions as new technologies supplant
old industries, there is reason to believe that we are on the cusp of
creating just such a society. There's every reason to believe it
will be a profoundly difficult transition, but for the first time
since the Industrial Revolution, there is a fundamentally different,
and most likely superior, way of life on the horizon.
It can't be about
prohibiting parents from seeking to offer their offspring every
possible advantage. Prohibition is a tactic of last resort, for the
simple reason that it's inefficient and even counter-productive.
Instead, it has to be about showing people that their offspring don't
need every possible advantage, because the competition isn't
life-or-death and the opportunities are expanded beyond all prior
imagining. The 'American Dream' and its cousins in nation-states
around the world will no longer suffice, because they practically
require the most extensive genetic enhancements possible. That is
the true scale of the challenge confronting society. But on the
other side of failure is at best a world like that in Gattaca, where
genetics determine potential placement, and at worst the world of
Aldous Huxley's foetal alcohol syndrome-suffering Gammas ruled by
genetically perfect Alphas who lack either empathy or ambition.
It's worth a little more
work, to get this right.
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