Sex selection

So, the Bioethics Council has recommended that parents using IVF be allowed to use pre-implantation genetic testing to choose the sex of their children. And thinking about it, its hard to see why they shouldn't be. The biggest objection is the effect such sex-selection could have on the overall gender ratio. But when only 450 IVF babies are born in New Zealand every year, its hard to see this being a real problem.

What about the more general issue? Should we even try and select the sex of a child? Again, I don't see why not. Sure, it's "unnatural", but big deal. So is surviving past 25, living in houses and not being eaten by leopards, and very few of us have a problem with that (those that do should stand by their beliefs and form an orderly queue outside the leopard cage at the nearest zoo). More philosophically, any claim to an inviolable "natural order" runs smack into Hume's is-ought distinction, which basically says "you can't derive moral values solely from facts about the world" - you need some sort of linking premise. The classic ones are a simpleminded identification of "natural = good" (which falls over the moment anyone actually bothers to look at nature), or "god said so" (which might convince a rather stupid four year old, but is unlikely to convince anyone else, particularly if they do not share your imaginary friend).

So much for "nature". What about practical reasons? That brings us back to gender ratios. The ex-expat expresses concern about this, based on what has happened in China and Korea where sex determination and selective abortion have produced severe distortions. But as someone who doesn't think the "need" to perpetuate the human species justifies any intervention in people's reproductive choices whatsoever, I certainly don't think a mere gender ratio is sufficient (or the need to preserve blonde hair, green eyes, or any other part of the human gene pool). People's reproductive choices are solely their own, and no business of the state, no matter what. Yes, an imbalanced gender ratio would constitute genocide if it was the deliberate result of government policy. But if it’s the result of millions of individuals choosing to favour one gender over another, then it’s just Other People's Choices, and we just have to live with it.

Retraction: Jim Flynn and Eugenics

The Alliance blog has a long piece by Jim Flynn explaining his position on eugenics. It seems that he has been seriously misrepresented by the Sunday Star Times, which somehow managed to turn his opposition to eugenics into support for eugenic policies. Instead, Flynn argues that:

• The correlation between university education and IQ is mild;
• The downwards trend in IQ is both insignificant and counteracted by a much stronger upward trend;
• The upwards trend is not likely to disappear, and that there are many ways (such as social democratic social policies) to continue it;
• That better access to family planning will reduce the differential the eugenicists care so much about anyway.

So, it would seem I owe Professor Flynn an apology for this post. And it would seem that the Sunday Star Times owes him rather more than that.

On the plus side, I now know how to respond to those who do believe that IQ decline is a problem: grant them every one of their assumptions, and then point out that their "problem" is so miniscule that it doesn't justify any policy whatsoever.

The Marching Morons

Bad ideas never die, and so over the weekend we saw an excursion into eugenics from Univerity of Otago emritus professor (and former Alliance candidate) Jim Flynn. Drawing on statistics from the 2006 census showing that university educated women have fewer children on average than those without tertiary education, he warns that this could lead to a long-term decline in IQ. He therefore advocates putting contraceptives in the water supply to stop the poor from breeding.

There are all sorts of responses you can make to this. You can ask why Flynn focuses on women - it takes two to tango, after all - or why he seems to believe that every woman's womb is public property, to be directed by the state according to its whims. You can ask where a self-proclaimed liberal and social democrat gets off on implicitly assuming (among other things) a strong correlation between intelligence and socio-economic status - something I'd have thought to be disproven by the sheer unfitness and stupidity of those who have occupied the top of the socio-economic pyramid for much of human history, not to mention by everything the left knows about social class. Or you could ask why, if he feels so strongly about preserving the gene pool, Flynn doesn't just do something about it himself - sure, he's 73, but there are solutions for that, and I'm sure there'll be no shortage of nubile young women lining up to bear children to such a superb genetic specimen as himself. But instead, I'll just cut to the chase, and ask why the fuck anybody even cares.

Flynn puts his case in a nutshell as follows:

in a socially mobile society such as New Zealand's, those who remained uneducated had poorer genetic material in terms of IQ. Over time poorer genes would take their toll, leading to a "decay" in genetic quality.

"If you imagine this as a long-term thing, extending over three or four generations, it would be a cause for some alarm," he said.

Hardly. The best estimates of this effect are around -0.9 IQ points per generation. Meanwhile, the Flynn effect has seen IQs rise by 3 points per decade during the 20th century. So, assuming that the latter stops and that the decline is real, in a hundred years - Flynn's three or four generations - we'll be as stupid as we were in the late 1990's. And in 800 years - which ought to be well beyond anyone's planning horizon - we'll be as stupid as we were in 1905, when IQ testing began. Quelle horreur!

The "threat" of a long-term decline in IQ simply shouldn't be a concern to any rational person, any more than the "danger" of being outbred by the Teeming Foreign Hordes should be. And it certainly doesn't justify the sort of mass, involuntary medication (and consequent side-effects) or eugenic program that Flynn is advocating. But then, it's difficult to see what would. How many children you have and who with is one of the most personal decisions you can make, and I can't actually imagine anything which would justify state interference and coercion in such choices.

Update: yes, I have seen this - but notice that while Flynn resiles from the arguably technologically infeasible solution (though by claiming he was "only joking" - the last defence for the indefensible), he does not resile from the central claim that there is a problem, or from his creepy assumptions about who gets to make these sorts of choices and on what grounds.

Didn't they teach him at kindy to keep his hands off other people's gonads?

Fucking the natural order

A couple of years ago, scientists in the US achieved an enormous breakthrough: they took stem cells from a mouse, artificially differentiated them into sperm, and fertilised an egg with the result. Now, they've begun duplicating the process in humans, successfully differentiating human bone marrow stem cells into spermatagonial cells, the precursors of sperm. It's only the first step, and there's still a long way to go, but if it pans out it will see us able to differentiate both sperm and eggs, vastly increasing the range of infertility problems which can be treated, as well as allowing gay couples to have kids using only their own genetic material (gay males would obviously still need to find a birth mother). And given the centrality of children to many people's lives, and the degree of unhappiness infertility can cause, IMHO that can only be a Good Thing.