by Jared Taylor, The Unz Review:
Well, a lot of us are
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When people who hate me get tired of calling me a fascist or a white supremacist, they let fly with “eugenicist.” But “eugenicist” may be losing its sting. Just last week, the New York Times astonished me by publishing an article called “Should Human Life be Optimized?” It included moving pictures of cute babies who had, in some respects, been optimized.
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It even used the term “liberal eugenics,” to refer to the latest techniques to ensure children get the best genetic start in life by using a method called embryo selection. It works like this: You harvest eggs from the mother, fertilize them with sperm from the father, and after about 5 or 6 days, you sequence the genomes of all the embryos and then implant the ones that have the most promising traits.
This is a company that does embryo selection for complex traits. It advertises only screening against undesirable conditions, but it collects genetic data that could be used to predict which embryos are likely to grow into taller, more athletic, smarter people. It is widely reported that if you can pick from 10 embryos, you are likely to have a child with six more IQ points than a child conceived by chance.
The Times article noted only that it was “controversial” when it included the following statement from someone who thinks higher IQs are good for the country: “Societies that have more intelligent people will have lower rates of crime, of rape, of violence, because intelligence correlates negatively with those societal blights.”
It’s a great, long article, but the Times never once mentioned Adolph Hitler or forced sterilization.
Maybe even more significant was a survey from Harvard Medical School called “Public Opinion on Polygenic Embryo Screening for IVF,” or in-vitro fertilization. A poll in 2023 of 1,400 people found a lot of them liked the idea of screening embryos. People generally think it’s OK to screen out conditions such as Schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s, but they think twice about selecting for brains or height. Here are all the traits the survey asked about, with medical conditions on the left and other traits on the right.
It’s pretty non-controversial to screen out genetic conditions associated with cancer or heart disease. What’s more interesting is what people thought about screening for positive traits such as intelligence, the top item on this graph.
Here, the top two bars — the red and the brown — are strong disapproval and disapproval. And, sure enough, they account for about 40 percent of responses. But 23 percent have no opinion, 24 percent approve, and 13 percent strongly approve. There is even more support for screening out neuroticism or obesity. This is not the ferocious opposition to eugenics that you might expect.
Christian writers tend not to like embryo selection. They warn against “technologies that objectify early human life and rob it of its moral standing.” Furthermore, anyone who believes that life begins at conception will oppose selecting embryos because the ones not chosen are often destroyed.
However, there may soon be ways dramatically to increase the chances of having a genius baby or an Olympic gold medalist. It’s called in-vitro gametogenesis.
You take basically any animal cell, reprogram it into a stem cell, and turn that into an egg. In 2016, Japanese biologists did this with cells from a mouse’s tail. They fertilized the eggs in vitro, put them into a mouse womb and got 10 pups. Some of the pups went on to have pups of their own.
