The techno-utopian beliefs known as “effective altruism” and “longtermism” have recently become widely known, judging from Google searches, news articles, and personal experience. Far less attention has been paid to “hipster eugenics,” a term that crudely but accurately summarizes the worrying trend previously known by the perhaps more foolish name “designer babies.” All are closely interconnected.
Effective altruism has been defined rather generously as “a global humanitarian movement in which donors seek to maximize the long-term impact of their donations.” In practice, it is a harder form of utilitarianism championed by Peter Singer, the provocative philosopher who supports animal rights, but also infanticide and euthanasia (and does not agree with this program). It is also more self-serving. Taken to extremes, effective altruism is an excuse to become as wealthy as possible, supposedly in order to donate as much as possible. It is a postmodern mutation of philanthropy and the driving force behind most efforts by billionaires to justify their philanthropy.
The topic received some attention earlier this year with the publication of William MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future. The author is a 35-year-old Oxford professor who has been widely recognized as an intellectual force since 2015 when he published his book Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You Can Make a Difference. At a conference that year he met Elon Musk, who in August 2022 wrote on Twitter that MacAskill’s latest book “aligns very much with my philosophy.” MacAskill connected Musk with Sam Bankman-Fried, the then crypto-billionaire, who considered participating in Musk’s offer for Twitter before backing out.
This was, of course, before the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange company FTX, which within a week made Bankman-Fried a former billionaire. It also drew attention to his lifestyle and financial goals, particularly his role as “the face of effective altruism.” Subsequently, he admitted to Kelsey Piper of Vox that his declared dedication to balancing moral imperatives was “not true, not really.”
Add long-term altruism to effective altruism, and the stew of confused self-justifications becomes exponentially more toxic. In short, this view supports that “the welfare of future people is morally equally important—or even more important—than the lives of today’s people.” Moreover, if humanity survives climate change, there will eventually be far more future people than current ones, so what’s a bit of mass hunger now, if we can save the planet for later, create superior beings, and colonize other planets?
On November 17, Insider published a well-documented article by Julia Black linking these concepts, originally titled: Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by making genetically superior children. Inside the movement to take “control of human evolution.”
Using Musk’s name in the title was simply a gimmick to hype up the article. The piece doesn’t really focus on the world’s most famous billionaire, although he is one of the strongest supporters of many of the things it describes. That’s probably why the title was later changed to: “Can super babies save the world?“
The article hosts Malcolm and Simone Collins, to examine the implications of this concerning approach to the world: a combination of post-humanism, long-term altruism, and effective altruism. The Collins pursue a particular kind of immortality as pronatalists [natalism / pronatalism: a religious, conservative, anti-feminist ideology that supports that procreation is the main reason for human existence. In Greece, the closest is the theories about “birth rate crisis”]. Their theory is a distorted variant of eugenic thinking, which in its classical form assumes that certain groups of people inherently have greater value than others. Business Insider explains their belief as follows:
Since each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for 11 generations, the Collins generation will eventually surpass the current human population. If they succeed, continued Malcolm, “we could determine the future of our species.”
So, 8^11 equals 8.59 billion, and the global population reached 8 billion around November 15, so the math works out, although the assumptions are completely crazy. The projections assume that each of their descendants will be on the program – also that none of them will reproduce with another member of the species, no matter how distant the relation. Additionally, they assume that family life will remain almost the same for 200 years or more. And finally, that despite their declared ambitions, most people will not follow their example – otherwise, the global population could reach an inconceivable number.
Simone’s response to the observation that they are “hipster eugenicists” was that Malcolm would want new business cards: “Simone and Malcolm Collins: Hipster Eugenicists“. No relation to Nazi policies, she insists: “I don’t eliminate people. I mean, I eliminate them from my own genetic pool, but Malcolm and I are the only ones who do this.”
And the self-justification continues: «What we support is a rather mild – although aggressive – post-humanism: improvement and transformation of the human condition through technology. Be against post-humanism as much as you want, but don’t call it eugenic».
Unfortunately for her, that ship has sailed long ago. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, undoubtedly the first major intellectual of transhumanism, was a devoted eugenicist. The same goes for his contemporary Julian Huxley, who invented or at least popularized the term transhumanism. [Chardin, 1881-1955, was a French Jesuit philosopher, supporter of social Darwinism and eugenics. He exerted great influence on New Age philosophies. Julian Huxley, 1887-1975, brother of author Aldous Huxley, was a British evolutionary biologist and the leading proponent of eugenics in post-war Britain]. Yuval Harari [Israeli historian and intellectual, with modest contribution to his field of science but enormous media resonance thanks to his profound revelatory clichés] predicted in 2015 that the rich will become “some sort of divine beings,” while the poor will “die in droves.” And the Collins, aggressive transhumanists as they are, clearly prove that it is possible to be a member of a techno-eugenic elite and simultaneously remain, in certain particular ways, socially liberal:
The Collins are concerned that the overlap between the types of people who decide not to have children with the segment of the population that values things like LGBTQ rights, women’s education, and climate activism—traits they believe are genetically encoded [sic]—is so large that these values could ultimately disappear.
On the other hand:
The Collins do not expect—or even want—all countries with low birth rates to suddenly start having seven or more children. On the contrary, they see themselves as part of an elite group of people who are responsible for increasing their offspring to compensate for all the Americans who choose not to do so.
In May, the Collins claimed that their approach was not to create designer babies, citing the movie Gattaca. However, the movie was not about gene editing, but about selection based on the analysis of an individual’s genome. This is exactly what they did with their third child, which was described in November as a female newborn named Titan Invictus. The embryo they selected was said to have “unusually good odds of avoiding heart disease, cancer, diabetes and schizophrenia“. They decided not to take into account the risk scores for autism, for which Simone has been diagnosed – she admits that she struggles in certain real-life situations, but both insist that she can “dramatically outperform other people“. Indeed, Genomic Prediction, the company that conducted the analysis, scored their choice of embryo at 1.9 on a scale where zero reflects average risk and positive numbers are beneficial, with higher numbers being better. Another embryo, which was naturally discarded, was scored at a suboptimal -0.96.
The couple also assigned the analysis of genetic data to the company SelfDecode, which offers its services mainly to adults, describing itself rather generously as:
The only genetic health test and analysis that reveals your likelihood of facing specific health issues, using polygenic risk scores based on your ancestry… SelfDecode is the only place where you can receive a completely customized supplement formula based on your genetic tests.
Together with the included DNA kit, the Health Insights Plan costs $199 upfront and then $99 annually.
There are other options for the demanding consumer. Conception Bio is currently focused on converting stem cells into human eggs:
We want to help parents have children and we aspire to make future generations healthier. We are working on a technology that will give women the opportunity to have children in their forties and fifties, it will eliminate barriers for couples suffering from infertility and potentially allow male couples to have biological children.
The company has already leased space at theLAB [sic], a massive and controversial facility in Berkeley, and openly boasts that it is preparing to take on human genome processing:
In the long term, this technology could constitute a critical platform that will allow extensive genetic screening of embryos. If proven safe, it could even allow genetic editing to eliminate and reduce the risk of devastating diseases for future generations – such as Alzheimer’s disease, heart conditions and many different types of cancer. This could become one of the most important technologies ever created.
The competition in this arena of overtly genteel capitalism is fierce. Orchid started 2021 with $4.5 million to help couples “conceive with confidence,” and its website still features an interview with bioethicist Jonathan Anomaly, the author of Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement and a paper with the deliberately provocative title “Defending Eugenics.” [Note: Jonathan Beres, who changed his surname to Anomaly (sic), is an American far-right racist and hardcore eugenicist.] He insists that “eugenics does not compel us to accept the coercions imposed on us by the state”—Simone Collins could learn from his approach.
The idea of technologies that will change the world has attracted some increasingly serious investments in genome analysis and what The Economist called “the fountain of youth,” when Altos Labs raised $3 billion in January 2022. The company is slightly less fantastical in its self-description, describing its goal as “to transform medicine through cellular reprogramming” and listing no fewer than four Nobel laureates as directors and/or advisors. Altos faces competition from companies such as Life Biosciences, Turn Biotechnologies, AgeX Therapeutics, and Shift Bioscience, not to mention the techno-fantasies of the rich and famous we described in 2021:
At least four of the ten richest people alive, according to Forbes, have invested significant amounts of money in the search for immortality – Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
With the exception of the Business Insider article and a few other exceptions, most recent comments downgraded the noble ambitions of Collins, Musk, Bezos and the rest, focusing on the dramatic collapse of FTX and the chaotic activity on Twitter. For example, the New York Times published this piece by Anand Giridharadas: This week, the billionaires made a serious attempt to strongly support their self-abolition.
Fyodor Urnov, however, had the substance in mind. Urnov has long been a pioneer in human genome editing, for many years at Sangamo Therapeutics and now at the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a consistent supporter of gene therapy and an equally consistent opponent of editing the inherited human genome. His response on Twitter to the Business Insider article about the Collins was immediate and constitutes an apt summary of the situation:
Let me be ABSOLUTELY clear.
The next step for this movement, for which @mjnblack made an excellent reference, is the “enhancement” of human embryos through CRISPR. This will happen unless we recognize a harsh reality: there is no unmet medical need for embryo editing and therefore we must ban it.
Original title: «Hipster Eugenics: Better Babies for Billionaires»
Source: https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/biopolitical-times/hipster-eugenics-better-babies-billionaires
Translation: Harry Tuttle
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