Decisions from The Future!

[andrewducker]

A US clinic is allowing people to choose the hair and eye colour of their children.

Now, assuming that all of these things had a genetic component of some kind, and assuming you could influence those factors, without any serious side-effects...
[Poll #1358290]

Bugger - left off "None of The Above". Oh well...

Comments

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

None of the above.

[andrewducker]

It's a shame people can't vote on comments, otherwise that'd be a great way to keep track of that.

Oh well, I fail at polls.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You can submit the poll while checking nothing. While it doesn't show in the same way on the pretty bar graph, it DOES show in the detailed results and in the count of total respondents.

[broin.livejournal.com]

I have no problem with individuals choosing. I have a problem with masses of people choosing.

Individually, I have no problem with people choosing not to have, say, a severely autistic kid. I have a problem with humanity breeding out autism. humanity is just the sort of complex system we shouldn't dick with in the short term, cf climate, economy.

'Empathy levels'? What does that mean?

[andrewducker]

Yeah - I feel the same way about gender. A couple deciding that they'd like a girl, as well as their two boys, is fine. The entirety of China deciding to have male children would have....repercussions.

As for empathy levels, I was thinking of these experiments:

In neuroeconomics experiments that my lab has conducted, we have found that when a stranger places trust in another by making a considered monetary investment that can either be returned or stolen, our brains release an ancient mammalian hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin is what bonds mammals to their offspring, and in humans makes spouses care about and love each other. We have found that trust causes a spike in oxytocin and begets reciprocation – the sharing of money. We are "wired" to cooperate, and we find it rewarding in the same way that our brains identify eating a good meal or sex as rewarding.

Oxytocin is active in evolutionarily old areas of our brain, outside of our conscious awareness. We simply have a sense that sharing with someone who has trusted us is the right thing to do.

We have also found that about 2% of undergraduates we studied are pure non-cooperators. When they have an opportunity to share money with a stranger who has trusted him or her, non-cooperators keep all the money rather than share the largess. The technical term in my lab for these people is "bastards."

Our evidence suggests that bastards’ brains work differently. Their character traits are similar to those of sociopaths. They simply do not care about others the way most people do, and the dysfunctional processing of oxytocin in their brains appears to be one reason for this.

So far as I understand from some reading, you can fuck up people's oxytocin response through childhood abuse (both sexual and nonsexual), but some people seem to be born like that.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

How about being allowed to choose X only if you take Y as well, sort of like a points buy system in an RPG.

It would be perversely amusing to allow someone their perfect nazi aryan ubermensch type, but have the child's sexuality as queer.

[andrewducker]

Best comment I've seen this week!

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Wow, no, that wouldn't be funny at all.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Well, point buy > Method I.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Well, it looks like my parents chose Drive as my dump stat...

-- Steve would've liked a higher CON and STR too, come to think of it.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I'm wide open to the idea of engineering medical conditions (which I guess in some cases would affect intelligence/emotional intelligence/empathy levels), but I find myself a lot more squeamish about the other stuff here than I would have guessed if you'd asked me in non-poll fashion.

Huh.

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

None of the above.

It's a much bigger scale than any individual kid. We're talking about a species here, which is why it should be way out of our hands. We're not equipped to deal with the kind of timescale effects we'd be looking at.

[davesangel.livejournal.com]

Couldn't agree more. It's up to nature how things pan out - making a decision like this is too drastic, and although one minute a person might be choosing their child's hair colour (for example), who is to say that it won't lead to some drastic and disturbing decisions further along the line?

[marrog.livejournal.com]

The answer to this has to be none of the above. I'm not even sure about breeding out genetic conditions, exactly, because it Just Worries Me, partly because, well, we today think we know what constitutes a 'disorder' but not so long ago we considered, for example, homosexuality to be one. And those things we consider to be cut-and-dried 'congenital problems' are by some considered differently - cf: that case where those deaf lesbians genetically engineered (crudely, by careful donor choice) two deaf kids for themselves. I found that utterly morally insupportable, but who am I - who is anyone - to set a hard definition for what can and can't be engineered for.

I don't think parents should be forced to have children with horrible genetic conditions. But this works fine for me since as a pro-choicer, if a kid is going to have a life-threatening congenital disorder then the foetus can be aborted at the parents' discretion.

Finally Gattica. That is all.

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

Finally Gattica. That is all.

Yes! Urgh.

[andrewducker]

The problem with Gattaca is that it's great for looks and tension, but I can't see society actually organising itself that way, because any other society that organised itself based on performance rather than genetic analysis would dramatically outperform it.

I agree with you about the deaf lesbian couple entirely. If it was the kind of thing that happened regularly then I'd happily see laws passed against it.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

My vote is blank because I am uncomfortable with the "designer baby" concept. It creeps the hell out of me, especially given how vulnerable people are to being "trendy" and "hip". Cosmetic genengineering gives me the shivers.

-- Steve does occasionally have nighmarish visions of Chrysalids-like hordes resulting from some popular soap opera.

PS: I just realised why I don't like "empathy level" as a tweekable setting; there are people who think that torture works better than mamby-pamby wimps can deal with and who think that "jungle law" is a good way to run a country. The ability to manufacture sociopaths to order alarms me.

[andrewducker]

See my response to broin above...

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

I have no problem with these, except after reading a few comments down about gender - that does have the potential to bugger things up royally.

Gender is fiddly anyway and there is research that suggests there might be more borderline cases (where neither one gender or the other appears dominant at birth) in which doctors seem to effectively randomly assign gender (there is probably more to it then that right enough).

Really there aren't that many sentient reasons to oppose this sort of choice - other then invoking the "natural is inherently good" fallacy. Thinking realistically by deignt of what we know about dominant skin allelles you can choose (roughly) the colour of your babies skin in choosing your partner. The only realistic application of that I can see is if a mixed race couple wish to choose to have a child definatly of one skin colour or the other, in which case why not. I doubt that if situations existed where people felt to have a child of one skin colour instead of their own skin colour then the racial stereotypes and pressures that led to this attitude would likely mean they weren't in a position to make that choice...

The rest - intelligence? Emotional intelligence? Drive? Empathy? Sure if you can do it why not... Although I can't get past how unlikely some of these would be to change.

As for what I would change - probably nothing. But if I could stop my future spawn experiencing any genetically related diseases or reduce their predisposition to certain 'orrible pathogens and the like of course I would do that.

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

Really there aren't that many sentient reasons to oppose this sort of choice

... if ever I saw privilege speaking, it was right there.

[erindubitably.livejournal.com]

None of the above. If people are so invested in getting a certain variable just as they like it, then they ought to adopt.

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

None of the above!

[broin.livejournal.com]

Thre was a Wired headline, about ten yers ago, about how we were entering the Decade of Yuck. And that people would just have to get over genetic manipulation in much the same way they had to get over the pill or test tube babies. Maybe that'll be 2009+.

[sterlingspider.livejournal.com]

I think the "what'd we get what'd we get!" is one of the cooler parts of the reproductive process so I'm pretty firmly on the none of the above side for my own offspring.

I might be tempted to sign up for heightened intelligence, but I can't say as I think we've got enough of a handle on the human brain to chance it. I've known far too many highly intelligent but otherwise nearly completely non functioning people.

People seem to view the human brain as like a salad; add a little extra vinaigrette or tomato and its still a salad... right? Meanwhile we're actually more like candy or pastry where the change or omission of one ingredient can make something entirely different, and unless you try it out first you can't really be sure whether it will be any good or not.

[sneakingyoda.livejournal.com]

Humans don't really know what they want.

None of the above.

It's much better when it's taken out of our hands.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

I attempted to submit with blank boxes for all - it failed. You fail too :P

[zz]

for #1, eyes and hair, because (apart from ginger stuff) they're not a basis for discrimination.

for #2, gender, just because i'd rather have daughters, as i'm sure i'd be an even less effective male role model for my son than my dad was for me (then again, i'm probably suboptimally oversimplifying "male role model" to "cheerful confident extrovert thug"), and i'd get to go dress shopping. :>

[andrewducker]

Why wait until you have daughters? :->