• The 'Designer Baby' Myth
• Places & Culture
• July book blog

THE 'DESIGNER BABY' MYTH

After a month of mapping change in the world (see parts 1, 2, and 3), some healthy humility about our ability to predict global change may be in order. A recent op-ed in the London Guardian by MIT professor and Blank Slate author Steven Pinker is a provocative counterpoint to the frightening conventional wisdom that "designer babies" are just around the corner. Parents, we are led to believe, will soon pick and choose hair colors and personality traits for their offspring as though at a salad bar. "Not only is genetic enhancement not inevitable, but it is not particularly likely in our lifetimes," Pinker argues—not when you consider 1) the limits of futurology, 2) the science of behavioral genetics, and 3) human nature itself. Although Pinker completely ignores the more pertinent debate about using genetic research to identify and eliminate birth defects, his well-argued and clearly written piece deserves a closer look.

1) Presuming that current genetic research necessarily portends designer babies is a case of "climbing trees to get to the moon," Pinker says. Generally, the fate of futuristic fantasies such as the domed city and robot maid should instruct us about their reliability. Futurologists "routinely underestimate the number of things that have to go right for a development to change our lives. It takes more than a single eureka!; it takes a large number of more boring discoveries," Pinker says. Besides, futurologists tend to see only the benefits of technological developments, "while actual users weigh both the benefits and the costs." We want to know that the computer won't crash before we let it run our refrigerator.

2) Not only is futurology problematic in general, but blind spots of genetic research in particular seem to doom the designer baby idea. "We may have mapped the genome, but we have a long way to go before we understand how genes relate to each other and how they can be manipulated," Pinker says. The act of assembling genes like salad ingredients to get an expected effect remains well out of our reach. "The human brain is not a bag of traits with one gene for each trait. Neural development is a staggeringly complex process guided by many genes interacting in feedback loops…. . Most genes have multiple effects."

3) Even if an exotic genetic cafeteria were to come about, it's not clear that many people would go for it. Parents tend to obey the "first do no harm" principle when considering their children, and may not warm to the idea of genetic manipulation replacing the natural method of reproduction. "It is misleading," Pinker says, "to assume that parents will soon face the question, 'Would you opt for a procedure that would give you a happier and more talented child?' When you put it like that, who would say no? The real question will be, 'Would you opt for a traumatic and expensive procedure that might give you a slightly happier and more talented child, might give you a less happy, less talented child, might give you a deformed child, and probably would make no difference?' For genetic enhancement to 'change human nature' not just a few but billions of people would have to answer yes."

Pinker concludes that these doubts about genetic advances should quiet pleas for a ban on genetic research. Since its results are so limited, he says, we should let research proceed without fear that it will outrun our discussions of ethics; "designer babies" won't arrive before a long talk about whether we should have them. This conclusion seems too laissez-faire, and ironically serves to motivate the scientists whose ambitions the article devastates. But overall, Pinker brings the often far-flung debate over bioethics back down to earth.

• Read Pinker's op-ed

Related:Wariness of the genetic revolution, by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times.

Earlier in this weblog: the geography of genetic research (second item here)

Related from B&C:

Interview with Francis Fukuyama, author of Our Posthuman Future

Interview with bioethics expert Lori Andrews

(see also this article by Andrews in Christianity Today)

Review of the book The Spirit in the Gene

Review of "Should We Change our Genes?" a lecture by ethics professor James C. Peterson in Calvin College's January Series.
 

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Washington Post:

MADRID — For a glimpse of Europe's young generation on the move and the future of the borderless continent, head to the late-partying Spanish capital, drink a strong shot of coffee and try to keep up with Stina Lunden, a 25-year-old Swedish transplant. Lunden is part of the new "Generation E"—E for Europe, a continent that has been essentially without borders for most of Lunden's and her peers' adult lives. For them, traveling from Sweden to Spain is about as simple as it is for an American college student to take a spring break drive from the Northeast to Florida. While bureaucrats in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union, toil away at highly technical regulations aimed at forging a single, more integrated Europe …. educated young people like Lunden are traveling farther from home, crossing borders to study and work, learning more languages, building cross-cultural friendships—and chipping away at the old national stereotypes and animosities of their parents' generation. Full story

HONOLULU — The grave robbery occurred nearly a century ago, a brazen incursion into a burial cave of ancestral Hawaiians. But its legacy of intrigue and deceit still haunts Hawaii today, and has ignited a renewed struggle over the fate of the stolen artifacts. The artifacts, considered sacred by some Hawaiians, were taken from the cave by an antiquities buff in 1905… . [and] spent nearly a century in Honolulu's prestigious Bishop Museum until three years ago, when they were spirited away for reburial. Today, the museum and several Hawaiian native groups are vying for control of the cache in a controversy that also spotlights a debate over how to treat archaeological items that have spiritual significance, as well as cultural, historical and educational importance. The question is whether the relics should remain in the remote cave, reunited with the presumed remains of Hawaiian chiefs on the Big Island of Hawaii; or be turned over to the museum. Full story

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JULY BOOK BLOG

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• New York Times Book Review cover story on George Marsden's Jonathan Edwards.*
• Reissued biography illumines Erasmus' role in the Reformation, says the Yale Review of Books.
• Mountain climbing loses its religion, from the NYT.*
• Textured biography of John Winthrop, from the Boston Globe.
• Thomas Carlyle: how not to have a marriage, from the Atlantic Monthly.
• The science of sleep, from the Times Literary Supplement.
• Insects as integral cogs in the global ecosystem, from the Boston Globe.
• Unsolved mysteries in mathematics, from the NYT.*
• The plight of writers in Sierra Leone, from the London Guardian.
• Glib but unblinking look at the fate of cadavers, from the London Spectator.
• Rich study of the rise of Western Christendom, says the Washington Post.
• The opening of Old Japan, from the NYT.*
• A new look at the six wives of Henry VIII, from the Christian Science Monitor.
• Sage analysis of miscalculation and hubris in the Peloponnesian War, from the Washington Post.
• The history of the income tax, from the Yale Review of Books.
• Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, and racial progress in America, from the Washington Post.
• On the boogaloo and other African American popular music, from the New York Review of Books.
• Victory riots and other stories of California cities during World War II, from the San Francisco Chronicle.
• Wired magazine and a cultural revolution, from the Washington Post.
• Cookbooks and their attitudes about gender, from the Christian Science Monitor.
• Probing description of West Point life, says David Brooks in the NYT.*
• Fluid rhythms in late poet laureate's collection, says the NYT.*
• Roundup of recommendations from the San Francico Chronicle.
• Religion roundup by B&C contributing editor Lauren Winner in the Washington Post.
• Roundup of books for children from the London Guardian.
• More book reviews: NYT | W.Post| L.Gdn| Chr.Sci.Mtr. | BGlobe | SF Chrcl |
  Times Lit. Spt.
• June book blog

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Nathan Biermais editorial assistant at Books & Culture.