Is there a major flaw in the idea of designer genes? Shakespeare never had any “equivalent” kids, Benjamin Franklin and Richard Feynman never did, John Lennon and Frank Sinatra didn’t and neither apparently did the famous racehorse Secretariat. They are all thought of as possessing “emergenic genetic traits” which cannot be passed on through inheritance. I just don’t believe that anyone will ever be able to go into a gene shop and successfully buy, say, Bob Dylan genes for their baby with the intention of creating a revolution in popular music 25 years down the road. I don’t believe a Bob Dylan clone could do that either. Bob Dylan’s personality was shaped by influences that would not be able to be reproduced.
So after all that (my longest intro ever) does anyone else agree with me that designer babies are rubbish?
Look honey, we can make our baby a musical (or some other field chosen at random) genius! Yeah, well, what if you choose for, say, violin, and Pookie Jr. would rather fix cars for a living?
Look honey, our baby can have blue eyes! Aren’t blue eyes purdy! (Said Mr. Wang to Mrs. Wang)
But still genetic engineering could be great news for so many reasons. Tay sachs a thing of the past. Downs syndrome gone. Diabetes, bye-bye. These are the good things, but it could be used to “phase out” left-handedness, or other “faults” that are just variations.
Like any technology, it can be applied for superficial reasons. (Cell phones strapped to every schmuck in the Mall) Or it can be of great benefit. (Cell phones in the hands of a child trapped in the trunk of a car.)
I am definitely not against phasing out Down’s Syndrome or quality of life destroying conditions. It just seems to me that a lot of geneticists are way over confident about what they can achieve. Some things are just out of their control. Personality for one thing seems to exist as something intangible, something you feel about someone. It can’t be assessed by any other method but human feeling. It can be described as a constellation of traits, sure. It has a definition that way, but I don’t think anyone believes any given personality is duplicable.
Thank God that that’s the case. And G. Nome, I don’t think most geneticists want to produce designer personalities. Apart from some strange people who’re trying to make a fast buck I haven’t seen anyone claiming that it is possible.
Can you imagine if it was possible to pre-order every single characteristic of your child? Scary. I’m very thankful that that would be pretty much impossible, and that what is possible (theoretically) is the major physical stuff, like Down’s, diabetes, maybe even short-sightedness. Personality is way too complex, and way too environmentally influenced.
Did anybody else see that 60 Minutes article that featuring the Nobel Sperm Bank? There, for a healty fee, women can be inseminated with the seed of the genius of her choice.
They interviewed a few of the children produced from this place, and none seemed any more talented, bright or accomplished than any other child I’ve met who was raised in an achievement-oriented household. And one child in particular was a total mutant!
So, no. While I think that to some degree intelligence has a genetic factor, the concept of breeding “designer babies” is misguided. Though hopefully we will be able in the future to screen out some of the most serious genetic diseases from the gene pool.
If Wife’s theory on the origin of John Lennon’s talents (Cynthia, Julian’s mother, wrote the good stuff) has any basis in fact (John didn’t write anything good after the divorce), then Julian, who looks a lot like his father, was SUCCESSFUL genetic engineering. Unfortunately, he seems to have inherited his father’s lack of knowledge.
I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but in this exchange George Bernard Shaw summed up the basic flaw of designer babies a century ago:
An actress wrote to Shaw suggesting that they get married. “After all,” she wrote, “think of the advantages our children will have with my looks and your intelligence.”
Shaw wrote back saying “But what if they had my looks and your intelligence?”
I’m sure that intelligence is not yet fully understood. I can never get over the hubris of social scientists who seem to believe that free education over the last 100 years has “sorted” people correctly with the result that intelligent are now at the top and the unintelligent at the bottom of society. I don’t think so. The great-great-great grandparents of most of today’s lawyers, doctors and scientists were peasant farmers and unskilled workers last century. The 22nd Century descendants of today’s factory workers could well be architects and astronauts. Why not?
There are a lot of educationally thwarted people around. Intelligence is easily damaged by misery and emotional stress and children with that to deal with will probably never realise their potential. It doesn’t mean they have low IQ genes though.
What has always peeved me is the assumption that our foreparents were so stupid that they needed alien help to build the pyramids, etc. If anything, modern civilization has thwarted natural selection for intelligence, as well as eliminating an environment in which quick and intelligent thinking are required.
And don’t worry. The 19th was the “last century” to me, too.
It’s known that both genetics and environment have at least some impact on intelligence, personality, and other mental traits. The debate is how much those factors influence such traits. In other words, nobody believes that a clone of Lennon would be guaranteed to be a musical sensation, but such a person would have a somewhat higher-than-average chance of being a success in music. How much higher, of course, is not known.
There’s a very common statistical phenomenon known as “regression toward the mean,” which is what prevents most Nobel Prize winners and concert violinists from having children of equal ability. Also, such abilities are extremely complex and environmentally influenced, unlike the genes for eye color. This does not mean that the whole idea of genetic engineering is rubbish. In fact, a great number of people have offspring of equal or greater talent than themselves. There’s around a half-dozen Nobel prize winning scientists whose children won as well. Jacob Dylan and Tal Bachman are both doing well in the music biz. Many athletes had children who far exceeded their careers (Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Kobe Bryant, etc.). The failure of Secretariat to sire another champion does not change the fact that virtually all champion horses do have a spectacular pedigree. And don’t even get me started on the political and acting dynasties!
So, bottom line, no, you won’t be able to go into a shop and ask for the baby with the Einstein IQ, Tom Cruise good looks, and Beethoven musical ability. But we will be able to manipulate genes to create babies that are very smart, very good looking, and very good at music. It’s the different between the top 1% and the top .00001% that we’ll never be able to control. The question of whether we should do this is, of course, a whole different ball of wax.
There is a theory that creativity arises when individuals are out of sync with their environment. Misfits have the motivation to take risks and prove their worth. They have less to lose and more to gain than people who are in sync. Very good looking, very intelligent people who are good at music can’t help but be in sync. Where is their motivation going to come from? How will they create art from frictionless lives? They will have no drive.
Philip K. Dick would probably say such people would have to be abused in an organised and calculated way. In a perfect world, creativity will, in fact, have to be farmed by a bit of cruelty now and again. A few bad hair days, that kind of thing. Jacob Dylan? I don’t think so.