There are several fundamental problems here, but I’m just going to focus on this one; if we intelligent people stop breeding due to this kind of intellectual argument, why do we expect the less intelligent masses to follow suit?
More intelligent wealthy and responsible people, exactly the people this kind of argument (and it’s middle class equivalent, “A nineteenth British scholar unfamiliar with technology curves decided we’re all doomed!”) targets, have the lowest birth rates in our society. This gets more and more extreme the more highly educated and wealthy the people in question are.
On the other side of the coin, the incentive structure of our society encourages our least responsible members to reproduce as much as possible by shouldering most of the burden their children create. Adding more private charity on top of these existing government incentives and cutting off the right-end of the bell curve just means the dysgenic trends in our society will get worse and worse.
Since IQ is 60-80% heritable, and correlates strongly with income education and social responsibility, it is extraordinarily unwise to trade a short-term gain in QALYs for long term damage to the intelligence of the species. Especially if we think technological innovation will be key to solving future problems, any method which puts selective pressure against high intelligence is absolutely poisonous on a societal level.
If we really care about making the world better for humanity in the long run, people with IQs even slightly above the mean need to commit to having enough children to offset the current dysgenic trends in our society and pursue political/economic solutions to reduce dysgenic population growth. This kind of pathological altruism is ultimately short sighted and suicidal.
How long do you think it will be until we understand the genetics of intelligence to the point that “dysgenic trends” don’t matter?
From what we do know now, intelligence is extraordinarily polygenic. Once we’ve identified specific alleles linked to high / low IQ respectively, and figured out what they do well enough to be confident messing with them, and have the ability to modify the genome on the scale of dozens to hundreds of genes at once… well, I’d like to think I’ll still be alive and in the industry by then but who the hell knows.
Isn’t this a much stronger argument for sperm/egg donation than having kids?
The two are hardly exclusive; even in countries with no legal limits to donation you can still always raise another half dozen yourself in addition to whatever number of children you can conceive through donation. We’re talking about reversing trends involving billions of people, no-one can afford to be a slouch.
I agree it’s complicated, but are we talking about more than 50 years?
That’s not really a question I can answer, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if it did.
Basically, to do it right, we’d need a lot of different fields that are in their infancy right now to mature more-or-less all at once. We’re talking about taking macroscopic structural issues like brain volumes in different regions or the size of axon paths between them which are vaguely described by modern neuroscience and the huge number of genes potentially implicated in intelligence and then turning that into a single theory of what ‘g’ actually represents and then using that as a basis for therapy. And that will very likely depend on how good our ability to transfect large amounts of DNA into living cells are; right now you can’t even move the gene for hemoglobin, much less whatever is needed for the hundreds of alleles you might have to change in a full overhaul. Throw in 15-20 years for FDA approval and your standard political controversy and you’re looking at a big question mark.
I mean sure it could be that the problem isn’t as difficult as it looks or the Singularity materializes and drops a solution in our laps, but I really wouldn’t advise you to count on it.
Claimed dysgenic effects are very slow.
The problem is that the rate isn’t constant; Vining, the guy people usually refer to for the “whites lose 1.6 IQ points a generations” figure, pointed out that the fertility differential is highly dependent on overall population growth. In periods of population increase the high IQ tend to lead the pack and the trend is eugenic, while in periods of population decline they trail and create a dysgenic trend.
Currently the US birth rate is below the death rate, with higher-IQ whites and east asians having the worst of it, so it wouldn’t be surprising if by 2048 we see a much larger decrease in global IQs than you could have predicted with data from the 1940s birth cohort.
Not really. If I donate my genetic material it doesn’t decrease the amount of money I have available to donate and only very slightly decreases my time.
If there were lots of people who wanted to have kids but couldn’t because of an egg/sperm shortage, and a significant number were likely to donate lots to charity only if they didn’t have kids, then it would be wrong to donate genetic material. We’re nowhere near that situation on either count, though.
There are several fundamental problems here, but I’m just going to focus on this one; if we intelligent people stop breeding due to this kind of intellectual argument, why do we expect the less intelligent masses to follow suit?
More intelligent wealthy and responsible people, exactly the people this kind of argument (and it’s middle class equivalent, “A nineteenth British scholar unfamiliar with technology curves decided we’re all doomed!”) targets, have the lowest birth rates in our society. This gets more and more extreme the more highly educated and wealthy the people in question are.
On the other side of the coin, the incentive structure of our society encourages our least responsible members to reproduce as much as possible by shouldering most of the burden their children create. Adding more private charity on top of these existing government incentives and cutting off the right-end of the bell curve just means the dysgenic trends in our society will get worse and worse.
Since IQ is 60-80% heritable, and correlates strongly with income education and social responsibility, it is extraordinarily unwise to trade a short-term gain in QALYs for long term damage to the intelligence of the species. Especially if we think technological innovation will be key to solving future problems, any method which puts selective pressure against high intelligence is absolutely poisonous on a societal level.
If we really care about making the world better for humanity in the long run, people with IQs even slightly above the mean need to commit to having enough children to offset the current dysgenic trends in our society and pursue political/economic solutions to reduce dysgenic population growth. This kind of pathological altruism is ultimately short sighted and suicidal.
How long do you think it will be until we understand the genetics of intelligence to the point that “dysgenic trends” don’t matter?
Isn’t this a much stronger argument for sperm/egg donation than having kids?
From what we do know now, intelligence is extraordinarily polygenic. Once we’ve identified specific alleles linked to high / low IQ respectively, and figured out what they do well enough to be confident messing with them, and have the ability to modify the genome on the scale of dozens to hundreds of genes at once… well, I’d like to think I’ll still be alive and in the industry by then but who the hell knows.
The two are hardly exclusive; even in countries with no legal limits to donation you can still always raise another half dozen yourself in addition to whatever number of children you can conceive through donation. We’re talking about reversing trends involving billions of people, no-one can afford to be a slouch.
I agree it’s complicated, but are we talking about more than 50 years? Claimed dysgenic effects are very slow.
Fair point.
That’s not really a question I can answer, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if it did.
Basically, to do it right, we’d need a lot of different fields that are in their infancy right now to mature more-or-less all at once. We’re talking about taking macroscopic structural issues like brain volumes in different regions or the size of axon paths between them which are vaguely described by modern neuroscience and the huge number of genes potentially implicated in intelligence and then turning that into a single theory of what ‘g’ actually represents and then using that as a basis for therapy. And that will very likely depend on how good our ability to transfect large amounts of DNA into living cells are; right now you can’t even move the gene for hemoglobin, much less whatever is needed for the hundreds of alleles you might have to change in a full overhaul. Throw in 15-20 years for FDA approval and your standard political controversy and you’re looking at a big question mark.
I mean sure it could be that the problem isn’t as difficult as it looks or the Singularity materializes and drops a solution in our laps, but I really wouldn’t advise you to count on it.
The problem is that the rate isn’t constant; Vining, the guy people usually refer to for the “whites lose 1.6 IQ points a generations” figure, pointed out that the fertility differential is highly dependent on overall population growth. In periods of population increase the high IQ tend to lead the pack and the trend is eugenic, while in periods of population decline they trail and create a dysgenic trend.
Currently the US birth rate is below the death rate, with higher-IQ whites and east asians having the worst of it, so it wouldn’t be surprising if by 2048 we see a much larger decrease in global IQs than you could have predicted with data from the 1940s birth cohort.
See here.
That depends on how many smart people are available, over time, to analyze the genetics of intelligence.
Within this context, isn’t donating sperm/eggs the same thing as having kids except that someone else will have to bring them up and bear the costs?
Not really. If I donate my genetic material it doesn’t decrease the amount of money I have available to donate and only very slightly decreases my time.
If there were lots of people who wanted to have kids but couldn’t because of an egg/sperm shortage, and a significant number were likely to donate lots to charity only if they didn’t have kids, then it would be wrong to donate genetic material. We’re nowhere near that situation on either count, though.