After Darwin--then what? Finding a moral compass without a compass

When one is aware of the fact that life is the result of the evolutionary process it is only natural to think about the implications for how we live our lives—how we try to find a moral compass ….without having one handed down from On High.

Charles Darwin; drawn by Anne Buchanan

In 1859, Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species shook the world.  His discovery, that all life had evolved by a natural historical process from a common origin, overturned the widely accepted view that species were separately created by God.  With legendary evasiveness, all Darwin said then about humans was that

“Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”

During his 5-year world voyage as naturalist on the Beagle in the 1830s, Darwin noticed that the plant and animal species in a given place included groups that were more similar to each other than they were to somewhat similar species in other parts of the world.  Fossils also resembled the living animals in the area where they were found, and similar species have similar body structures, embryology, and even behavior.  Darwin realized that this resemblance is due to descent from common ancestry, and it is of course that fact that enables us to say that species are ‘related’.

Humpback whale; Public Domain

Darwin was also struck by the adaptations of species to their particular environment; mammals are land animals but whales can swim, hummingbirds have long beaks to reach nectar, cacti thrive in arid deserts, birds are reptile descendants but they can fly.  How could such adaptations have arisen, if not by divine Creation?  Darwin had an answer, and it was based on the cold cruelty of life and death:

“Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, nor more difficult—at least I have found it so—than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. . . .We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, [but] we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey.” 

Darwin also studied the exceedingly slow change in geological formations, which revealed the vast age of the earth.  Among other things, he found shells inland at high elevations, and he studied the slow formation of coral atolls.  Synthesizing these various facts and with deep and incisive insight, he reasoned that over countless thousands of generations, the ‘fittest’ individuals—those carrying genetically determined  traits that gave them even a very slight competitive advantage, survived and reproduced.  Eventually, their descendants evolved into new species—thus the ‘origin of species’—while extinction was the fate that awaited the less ‘fit’.  Darwin called this process “natural selection,” and he thought that it was a universal law of life, in the same way as Newton’s law of gravitation is a universal law of physics.

Struggling with the implications of his view, Darwin rationalized (with, we think, more than a bit of wishful thinking) that

“When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.” 

Painless?  No fear?  Well, in any case, to Darwin, a law of universal cruelty generated what he famously called the ‘grandeur’ of life.

Thirteen years after writing the Origin, Darwin finally did deal with human evolution.  In The Descent of Man, he showed in convincing physical and behavioral detail that we, too, have evolved as part of the living world.  He did acknowledge that in the Origin

“I perhaps attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest….[but]… I may be permitted to say …. that I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.” 

In fact, some recognition of the too-old-for-Genesis earth and the succession of species had been seeping into cultural awareness for some time even before down. Leading intellectuals of the day were understandably shaken by this new view of life, as well as its challenge to their faith.  They included novelists like Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot whose troubled reactions show up in her novel Middlemarch, and poets like Matthew Arnold, and Alfred Tennyson who gave us the phrase “Nature red in tooth and claw.” 

First edition title page of Middlemarch; Wikipedia

Though he is much less well known, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace discovered evolution independently, and at the same time as Darwin.  The two became friends, but Wallace struggled to accept that evolution could apply to humans: he felt that things like our mathematical and musical abilities could not have evolved by natural selection.  After all, hunter gatherers didn’t compose piano sonatas or work out integrals.  When in 1869 Wallace wrote that such abilities were evidence for the guiding intervention of God, Darwin famously replied in frustration,

“I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.” 

We now have wholly plausible general explanations for traits evolving in one way and being used in another at some later time.  But it was a very logical question for Wallace to have raised.

Always a modest man, in a letter explaining his theory to the American botanist, Asa Gray, Darwin quipped,

“This sketch is most imperfect . . .[and] . . .your imagination must fill up many wide blanks.  Without some reflection, it will appear all rubbish; perhaps it will appear so after reflection.”

Natural selection is still today widely taken as law-like dogma, but while Darwin’s theory was deeply insightful, some of it is, in a sense, a sort of rubbish, at least because the truth is not so simple!  

The ability of natural selection to generate adaptive variation, and the glacial slowness of the process in what was by then recognized to be a very old earth, together removed the need to explain the diversity of life by sudden events of divine creation.  But that same snail-like pace means that competitive advantages at any given time must themselves usually be very slight. 

That’s important to our point here, because it means that relative success in life is mostly the result of chance, or luck, or happenstance, and not inherent genetic superiority. Harmful traits might be selected against if their bearers do not survive or reproduce. Even clearly genetic traits are typically affected by variation in many different genes, so that the ‘same’ trait will be genetically different in each person to a considerable extent.  Species are adapting simultaneously in many different ways, and so there are usually many ways to be ‘fit’.

As a result, in general, at any given time and place, the main criterion for what is ‘better’ is what happens to be luckier. An oak tree makes hundreds of thousands of acorns during its lifetime, but in a stable environment only one, on average, lives to become a mature oak itself—at least, we cannot say that the genetically very best acorn—whatever that could actually mean!—is that very one in a hundred thousand. 

Acorns; Wikipedia

Even individuals with otherwise slightly more advantageous genes that could otherwise make them, say, better hunters or gatherers, or bankers, violinists, athletes, nurses—or even professors or drug dealers!--may instead be the victims of accident or childhood disease, fail to find a mate, and so on. This quite obvious fact undermines the yen of a strict believer in natural selection for a single, precise law-like natural underpinning of life.  Life is just much more nuanced than that.

There are many religious questions about the implications of evolution.  For example, there were religious skeptics and atheists long before Darwin.  In a rather passive sense, these people simply did not see convincing evidence for the truth of sacred texts or of a personal God.  But evolution is different: it shows in an active sense not stories about where we might have come from, but facts about where we have come from. This insight removes the need for an external Creator who is also the provider of an absolute moral compass, a True North, by which to live, or claim to live, or try to live, our lives. 

Instead, evolution is an impersonal process, with no mission nor set of values.  But this need not be entirely distressing, because the fact of evolution liberates us to explore a moral compass for ourselves. 

It is certainly true that some people find that compass in Darwinian evolution itself, taking relentless natural selection as the True North of existence, at last revealed by science—Nature red in tooth and claw, in your face, whether you like it or not!

That Darwinian dogma has been used as justification for all sorts of real rubbish, including a cornucopia of discrimination, racism, and violence of humans against each other. This rationale—perhaps better called an excuse—is still reflexively and routinely extended to justify competition among societies, organizations, businesses, and even universities (beyond just their football teams)! At the extreme, leading scientists used evolutionary dogma to justify sterilizing the impaired, and providing cover for Hitler’s racist horrors on the grounds of preserving the supposed genetic superiority of the Aryan race. 

Cathedrals of unutterable evil have been constructed by people who, we must acknowledge, have in their own minds, and sometimes in Darwin’s name, as clear a moral compass as have saints.  But so have cathedrals of incredible beauty been constructed on Darwinian grounds.  In fact, if you try hard enough, you can find credible ways within Darwinian theory to account not just for mass murder, strident atheism, or nihilistic existentialism, but also for any of a smorgasbord of more ‘positive’ values, including sustainability, vegetarianism, social kindness, polygamy, even self-sacrifice and celibacy. 

In that sense evolution is a Rorschach test.  It’s most basic truth is successful descent with modification from a common ancestor.  Beyond that, you see in the theory what you bring to it.  If almost any behavior, even direct opposites, can be shown to be consistent with evolutionary theory, as they can, then to that extent the theory of evolution is no more useful for developing a moral compass than a creationist’s just saying “God said so”.

So, then, what about God?  Darwin recognized that evolution neither requires, nor precludes, a God—at least one who, as deists (probably including Darwin) might say, started everything and (given the state of the world) has been on an extended coffee break ever since. 

Evolution makes it possible for us, as beings, to conceive of and believe in a God, or many gods, or a world of spirits, or of none. Whether such beliefs are factual or not, it is perfectly consistent with evolution to believe in a Heaven paved in gold, if it comforts, because we evolved to seek comfort and safety. 

The point is that evolution itself doesn’t dictate the answer.  Despite the impression one might get from the daily news media’s hot new stories about genes for this and genetic cures for that, not everything we do or think, or that happens to us, is determined by our genes. The very notion of right and wrong is culturally constructed, and changes over time and place. As existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said:

“Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie.” 

A moral compass is a choice we must make for ourselves. Sometimes we invent our own, sometimes, consciously or not, we adopt one, but it is always based on our individual experiences.  

Of course, the fact that there is no easy answer ‘out there’ can be a challenging burden to accept.  Darwin himself faced this challenge, as do we all; his writings portray a complex man continually revisiting his own moral compass.

Three of his 10 children died young, one severely disabled.  As he wrote of his favorite daughter Annie, the joy of his life, who died painfully at age 10:

“We have lost the joy of the Household, and the solace of our old age:— she must have known how we loved her; oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still & shall ever love her dear joyous face. Blessings on her.”

Darwin had been studying theology as a student at Cambridge, preparing to become a vicar, when he was offered the trip aboard the Beagle. As he viewed the natural world, his orthodox belief faded, and Annie’s death is said to have extinguished any remaining faith he may have had in a personal, intervening God.

Annie Dawrin's grave, Malvern, England; photo by A Buchanan

But he didn’t just brush her death off as the normal consequences of evolution, as a good and natural thing because it reflected natural selection.  Instead, Darwin had all the human inconsistencies that any of us do. And he had as much sympathy and empathy as well.  He wrote of the horrors of slavery that he had witnessed in his travels, and became a fierce abolitionist, yet he held a rather hierarchical view of human populations (with the ‘civilized’ ones like imperial Britain on top, naturally).  He was a humanitarian, yet he was comfortable with his status in the wealthy leisured class.

And if unlike his personal life, his theory stressed Nature’s harsh realities, Darwin also knew of the softer wonders of life, even if this appreciation may have come to him later in life: as he wrote wistfully in his autobiography

“… if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week. . .  The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

So Darwin was not a one-dimensional man, and his Origin of Species is not a sacred text, not The Word from on high. Instead, it’s the fact of evolution in itself that provides an external kind of ‘authority’ that forces a recognition that there may be no external personal authority, and that we have to decide individually what to believe about what is right or wrong. 

If evolution’s impersonal nature seems a lonely view of life, evolution has also produced the almost mystical collective wholeness of life: everyone here, and every butterfly, mouse, tree, and blade of grass—yes, even every cockroach!—shares a single 3.5 billion year unbroken chain of successful ancestors.  

This magnificent cosmic unity will not remove the challenge of individual isolation, nor the pain of loss.  But it can lead to a greater appreciation of friends, family, colleagues, and social fellowships.

It is at the very least more than a small comfort to know even if facing the sorrows of life is a challenge, when you are trying to find your own moral compass these softer truths provide the joy of being able to live in ways that have been chosen by you, rather than for you.  This isn't written in evolutionary theory, but it is a direct consequence of knowing the evolutionary facts of life.  

The new religion: 'next gen' hype?

Ken and I were visiting with a woman the other day whose elderly husband is dying.  In his 90's, he has long had seriously impaired vision and hearing, and in recent years has become less and less mobile. And, he has been losing his memory.  Now everything else is failing.  This he seems to know, at least at some level, and as he languishes in a nursing home, usually asleep but sometimes not, in many of his more lucid moments he says depressingly that he has had enough.  But, of course, he can't do anything about that now.  Now he must wait for the Fates to decide when he has had enough.

Perhaps you read the thought-provoking story by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago about Sandy Bem, a woman with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease who decided that when she felt she was no longer the self she recognized, she would commit suicide.  She lived with her declining memory as long as she felt she wanted to, and then ended her life.  Of course there is disagreement about whether people should have a right to make a decision like this, but we think there is a lot to be said for our freedom to make that choice.

So when our friend said that it was a relief to know that someday people won't have to go through what her husband was going through, we thought we agreed with her.  We assumed she meant humane assisted suicide should be legal and available. But no. "Soon," she said, "because of genetics, people won't have to die."

She is an atheist, and has no belief that her husband, or she herself, or anyone is going to a better place when they die.  So clearly it's comforting to her to think that, while she herself may not benefit, in the future life truly won't need to end once geneticists have sorted out the science.  I think Ken muttered something about how genetics is a long way from that, and we quickly changed the subject to talking about the weather. Who are we to take away this comforting thought?

The new religion
But where did she get this idea?  She certainly didn't invent it.  She is thoughtful and educated, reads, she watches the news; this idea came from scientists. All that human genome project hype, before and after it was 'finished', reputable scientists promising us the end of disease, and even that one day genetic knowledge would let us live forever, or at least as old as Masuthelah.  Now the new million genome talk is much the same.  Our genes will predict the diseases we'll get, precisely, and because of genetic engineering, gene therapy and targeted pharmaceuticals, we'll be able to prevent or cure them.  Worth every penny of the billions that are going to be spent on setting up the infrastructure, collecting all the genomic information, doing the analysis.

We've already blogged about this new phase of very expensive research (including here: "What's 'precise' about 'precision' medicine (besides desperate spin)?").  So the iffy payoff is not our point today.  Today we want to imagine that the promises all come true -- your future is written in your genes, and whatever you are destined to get is predictable from your genome.  And then prevented because gene therapy will soon be routine, like having your oil changed, and bad genes will be replaceable.  Or, if you do get your disease, it will be treatable with personalized pharmaceuticals, targeted at, well, we're not really sure what they'll be targeted at but they'll work that out.

 "Gold Pan" by Nate Cull from Christchurch, New Zealand - http://flickr.com/photos/64857724@N00/2876115. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

And it's not clear what the ultimate goal actually is, either (other than the 21st century version of the Gold Rush, when the Levi's makers, the gold pan producers and the saloon owners got very rich).  Disease prevention?  Treatment?  Immortality?

But let's think this through
Unless every conceptus is sequenced, most pediatric genetic diseases won't be preventable by precision medicine that much better than they are today with genetic counseling and early tests like ultrasound, unless every potential set of parents is vetted for carrier status for every known genetic disorder, and IVF is used to conceive and produce the perfect-child.  Maybe people with money will do just that (indeed, direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies now offer testing for carrier status for a number of diseases) but who will pay for it to be done routinely for everyone?

And, we're a long long way from treating genetic diseases routinely with gene therapy, never mind with other, non-genetic treatments.  And, somatic mutations that occur in the fetus are responsible for some pediatric genetic diseases, and they aren't predictable or preventable.  So, we'll still have pediatric diseases.

And, we'll still have accidental deaths, and deaths from infectious diseases, because no antibiotic strategy will be perfect, and bugs will always outrun them anyway, and we'll probably have wars and suicides, so we won't all live forever.  (Speaking of unequal access to medical knowledge and let's throw in care as well, shouldn't we be thinking about the unfairness of who gets those infectious diseases, and will continue to do so, as we dedicate billions of dollars to the promise of preventing genetic disease? Or who goes to war?)

So, presumably it's those of us whose fate is late-onset chronic disease that precision medicine is aiming at.  Presumably those are written in our genome.  But, what about our friend's 90+ year old husband, who is dying of old age?  Would his death have been preventable, in theory?  Nothing there to prevent, except wearing out.  Oh, wait, telomeres.  Right, he'd have had his lengthened long ago.

What about diseases that are largely due to lifestyle?  Heart disease or type 2 diabetes caused by obesity, which let's say is due to inactivity and poor eating choices (this week sugar, last week high cholesterol animal proteins)?  Even people who believe GWAS is showing us the cause of these kinds of late onset diseases acknowledge that they are polygenic, and that genes don't explain all the risk.  How will they be prevented with increased genetic knowledge?  Oh, not to worry--computers will do it if we turn enough statisticians onto the job!

But, ok, let's say that despite our sneering, it really is possible
We really can predict and prevent genetic disease.  Then what?  Either telomere therapy will be keeping us all young forever, or more and more healthy but old people will be stacking up at the other end of life. (Will we have prevented dementia? Joints wearing out? Not clear.)

Neither of these options looks good to us.  How will the young-in-years ever get jobs if the young-at-heart keep them for 2, 3 hundred years, not to mention forever?  Or, who will take care of all the healthy elders, and where will they live?  We will have to feed, clothe, house, heat and cool, transport, and entertain them, or they will stay in the labor force and we'll have to figure out what new generations of new people will do for a living. If the elderly and super-elderly become feeble and need special homes and care, well, that will at least provide jobs for the young.

'Housing' has hidden implications.  Housing takes space, uses energy and water, generates sewage, and that must come from somewhere.  If we stop plowing under former people, we'll have to plow under farm land.  Or maybe we'll just stack condos on top of each other until they reach as high as those skyscrapers oil-rich regions are building.  Oh, of course, we'll put roof-top gardens on them. And, perhaps we'll either build some on Mars or one of Neptune's moons, or we'll grow beans and cattle there and fly them 'home'.

And, what about the extreme inequality of maintaining  more and more old people, at huge cost, in rich countries, as they consume more and more resources, while people in poor countries continue on as now, with no access to the brave new world of precision medicine?

Demographic inevitability looms over any promises of genetic nirvana.  It leads not just to population growth, but generally to exponential growth, that gets wildly out of any realistic sense of control rather quickly.  Yet demographic unconstraint looms silently behind all the rosy promises that health research hyperbole make.  Like death, immortality is something we don't really want to think about.

Rosy reassuring promises have been a long-standing strategy of politicians and preachers and it's no surprise that geneticists, being intelligent people, see the gains to be made by making them.  But even if they don't, the more one thinks about this, the more of a social wrong the promises of precision medicine seem to be.  Someone needs to tell the people.

Late news flash!
As if to help us make this point, as this post was just being finished, a news item appeared reporting that the FDA has just approved what appears to be a major new drug to combat high 'bad' cholesterol levels, LDL. Clinical trials have shown the drug (which mimics the action of a genetic mutation that blocks LDL production) to drastically lower LDL cholesterol, but whether this leads to drastic reduction in heart attacks is not yet known.  Assuming it does, then what we'll get over the next few decades is more and more people living long enough to become like our friend's husband.  How many will wish they'd had a mercifully quick heart attack instead of the lingering decay they will suffer as a consequence?

There is no easy answer.  Preventing disease is surely good.  Over-promising is surely not -- except for the beneficiaries of the resources that go their way as a result.  And the makers of the gold pans. But, with less disease and more and more people dying at older ages come profound social implications, and these should be part of the discussion.

The abbatoir, the lab, and pre-medieval behavior

It's a lazy August day and one wonders what to write about.  So I took a walk with my constant companions--sadly, not a dog, but my iPod.  I was listening to one of the BBC Radio4 program podcasts that we like, and I thought it would be worth putting down some thoughts, hoping to make them relevant.

Abbatoirs, or slaughterhouses, are among the most sensitive kinds of industrial plants.  This post was stimulated by the  BBC story I was listening to (File on 4: Inside the Abbatoir, June 17, 2014).  A standard protocol for killing mammals is to stun them with an electric shock to the brain, knocking them out to they'll feel no pain or terror, and then quickly killing them by, for example, stringing them up, slitting their throat, and letting the blood drain. Then they are butchered. The treatment of food birds is something like this, as I understand it, but the birds are first hung up by their feet, so they probably feel more terror before the deed is done.  Of course, all of this may be more gruesomely done on the farm, for both birds and mammals, though there are certainly farmers who work hard to ensure that their animals are calm until their sudden end.  But an abbatoir does it to numbers that would match a WWI battlefield--every day.

A properly run abbatoir, gruesomely, uses the same idea we have with human execution: a nice last meal, and a blindfold or for those to be done in with chemicals, a tranquilizer first.  Similar considerations are given to pets who are put 'to sleep' by a vet when they are old and suffering.

In the slaughterhouse, Lovis Corinth, 1893; Wikipedia

The BBC story described how this killing is done when done right.  It's properly supervised, sanitary, and the like.  If an animal has to go, well, it's better than how most wild animals have had to make their exit, being torn apart by a predator while alive or suffering an injury or disease without medical care or even (with some exceptions) sympathy from friends or relatives.

But the BBC story also describes how some Jews and Muslims are excused from this humaneness, and allowed to engage in pre-medieval slaughtering techniques (i.e., no stunning first), because, apparently, God (the loving one, that is) apparently said we have to torment animals to please Him.  That doesn't seem very different from Aztecs cutting out the hearts of their living victims (although, I vaguely recall their victims were at least intoxicated on something first).  I only pick these examples because I am too ignorant to have any idea how much other savagery we humans allow today in the name of other Gods or for what rationales.

If stunning is humane and if we are to eat meat, the killing is probably not exceptionable.  However, the BBC story reports various lapses in the system, disturbing instances of lax inspection, and cheating for sport, anger, or for convenience. Even in this sensitive context, are the insensitive among us.

What about fish?  We are generally quite happy with dragging them up from hearth and home, by the net-full, only to suffocate en masse, not so different from, say, the gas chambers, I guess.  Or, when undertaking mere individual slaughter, by hooking them (for sport) in the mouth before asphyxiating them.  Fortunately, thanks to research in part by faculty here at Penn State that shows that fish are not just automatons, there are growing numbers of human fish abbatoirs, that use altered water or stunning to lull the animals to their doom, as humanely at least as the fate we dole out to mammals.

Our concern for doing our killing gently is clearly inconsistent even when applied to other humans. Just look at the latest news. Bombing of children and hospitals, beheading or crucifying captured people because our God (the loving one, that is) says it's the thing to do and (we say) doesn't like their God. He must be a blood-sport fan.  In that regard, it is interesting to read, as perchance I've been doing, Milton's Paradise Lost, in which there's a Hollywood-like tale of wars among the 'angels' in that Heaven we so aspire to attend.

We justify at least instant killing on the grounds that we have to eat and that, given those conditions, instant killing is at least terror and pain-free.  But one reason vegetarians believe as they do is that killing sentient animals (some would, properly, include all animals) is in itself cruel no matter how kindly done, and since we can live perfectly well, and more economically sustainably, on plants, that's what we should do (though, personally, I question the plant exceptionalism since plants clearly respond to environmental trauma and threats).

Experimental abbatoirs
But MT is generally a science blog.  So let's talk about what goes on in the animal research lab.  IRBs (Institutional Rationalizing Boards) generally approve research procedures as being useful to human knowledge, and good for the research business, so long as they don't outright torture the animals. There are at least some limits.  But speaking of things pre-medieval, the reality is closer to saying that, as God (the loving one, that is) pronounced, the rest of animals and plants are just here for us to exploit, and we countenance a lot of things being done to animals, effectively under such an implicit assumption.

For example, what about, say, flies?  Here, the rationalizing gets even more contorted, or perhaps less. Insects and such simple creatures are said either not to feel pain or experience terror.  The way they're sometimes treated flies must absolutely like to have their body segments altered, or electrodes stuck into their brains.  Observations of insects in nature suggests they do sense and recoil from danger, and experience distress.

The arguments justifying research-based experimenting with animals is that that's how we learn about the world (and there's the widespread treatment of science as a largely unquestioned good), or that making countless animals experience a nasty disease or experimental 'procedure', often the only life they'll know, will eventually prevent humans from having to suffer in the same manner we make the mice suffer. We at least claim to try to minimize the trauma, but many in science know the more grim reality.  It's human exceptionalism, but since we're the ones in charge it's no surprise that we behave that way.

Just as we give life and then taketh it away from cows and chickens, so do we for lab mice.  They have their day (in the artificial light of the mouse room), at least, existence they'd not experience were it not for our NIH grant.  Some even get to have a rather active sex life (though, if female, usually they are killed while pregnant, so we can study their not-yet-offspring).


If we accept the reality and inevitability of mortality, then one can accept the killing for food as well as research. But need we accept the torment?  Could we at least have more stringent limits? Animal rights lobbyists, descendants of anti-vivisectionists, are irritating to those running research labs, but perhaps at least help keep things somewhat tempered.  After all, this is nothing new:  The great Roman physician Galen was famous for doing dissections on live unanethesized animals--in the name of science, and indeed somewhat theatrically.  We're not as savage as that!

We can always make up a rationale about human good or basic knowledge, or that the animals don't really suffer; but the fraction of lab animals who shed much light on scientific knowledge is small, and what we're allowed to do to them not so small, even though certainly many lab animals do 'contribute' to ultimate human good.  These are not easy issues (and I say this not in an accusatory way: I worked on developmental genetics of mice for many years).

We all have to die, humans as well as other animals.  The pre-scientific belief systems promise something better afterwards, and if you believe that kind of thing, then lucky you!  But we can at least do our best to make the exit of those enslaved by us a painless one......I had intended again to say a 'humane' one, but that now somehow seems an inappropriate word.  Thinking about the abbatoir, and other aspects of human behavior, puts these issues in stark perspective.

Eugenics continued -- its modern guises

We have mentioned eugenics in several recent posts (e.g., here and here), but it's a thorny subject worth pursuing more fully. Indeed, 'Deadly Medicine', an exhibit from the US Holocaust Museum, is at Penn State for the next few months, reminding us that eugenics was alive and well in the US before the Nazis put it into practice.

There are two faces of eugenics. One is the goal that parents have of not bearing undesirable children. Normally, that means children with serious disabling disease. It can be a noble wish and even a noble act. So long as abortion or in vitro fertilization (IVF) and embryo screening are considered morally acceptable options, and the suffering of the embryo or fetus is not considered to be great, genetic screening can achieve this end. Premarital screening also works, if couples can be dissuaded from marriage (or from child-bearing) if they could produce such offspring (and, indeed, an AP story reporting that many genetic diseases are in decline because of prenatal testing was widely published on Feb 17).

If two carriers of recessive alleles (genetic variants) that are potentially harmful have children, then 1/4 of their offspring would inherit the 'bad' allele from each parent and would be affected with the disease. Call the defective allele 'd' and the normal one 'D'. Each parent is a Dd genotype. Randomly picking one of the alleles from each parent gives a 1/2 chance of picking d from each, or 1/4 chance of picking d's from both. These are the classical proportions discovered by Mendel.

There are many single-gene diseases for which, if the 'd' alleles are known, parents can be screened to determine if they are at risk of producing a dd offspring. Not implanting such an embryo, or aborting such a fetus, prevents the birth of someone carrying the disease.

Tay-Sachs disease in the Jewish population, and serious anemias called Thalassemia, are examples of diseases that have actually been substantially reduced or even nearly eliminated by such screening programs.

The fact is that, like much else in life, the genes have many--often hundreds--of alleles, and only a few of them are known to be seriously harmful. Others confer lesser risk and for most of them we simply don't know. It's less clear about alleles whose effects are uncertain, with comparably complicated moral issues associated with aborting these if they're detected. Still, even those few that are known are clear.

Most of us these days would consider this not just acceptable but a good form of personal eugenics. Others, however, object morally to any abortion, to making God's decisions, or to labeling disabled people as somehow not fully human or not worth living. A whole field of 'disability studies' deals with these issues, and much is being written about the degree to which meaningful, valuable lives can be lived by those formerly considered unworthy--hence questioning blanket policies of aborting them. These are ways in which the morality of eugenics enters society.

Is there a place to draw the line as to what counts as disease? If we ever learn to evaluate a fetus's IQ from its genotype, would it be OK to abort 'stupid' fetuses? If so, should parents be allowed to determine the decision point on the IQ scale? What about, say, musical or athletic ability? What about engineering genes into an embryo to give it traits you want your children to have?

Most if not all the humans who have had their whole genomes sequenced have genotypes at some genes that are 'disease' genotypes. The discoverer of DNA structure, Jim Watson, is one. As someone has quipped, if his own technology had been available to his parents, in the current climate of personal eugenics, he would have been aborted!

What about sex? In some countries there is reportedly substantial prenatal testing and aborting of female fetuses, because sons are more valuable to the parents than daughters. Is that OK? As long as the parents, and not society, make the decision?  Of course, this can have ramifications into succeeding generations, as males find it difficult to marry, creating a sort of pendulum effect as to which sex is more valued.

The fears of eugenics imposed by society, as was done in the first half of the 20th century, spook many people as we increasingly enter the genetic age in which the belief is strong that genes generally will predict one's traits, one's identity as a person. We might not impose gas chambers on people because of their group membership, but what about policy involving insurance, employment, access to education, and the like aimed at individuals? Or in the classical example, to screen potential immigrants? Will subtle or unsubtle pressure be imposed on those who would choose not to screen, on the grounds that their impaired offspring will be a burden on the health care system and hence on everyone? (That's a classic argument used by the original eugenics movement, and vigorously used in Germany to justify 'euthanasia' to countless thousands of 'defective' societal burdens)

These are issues we'll have to be facing in the future. And we don't need to raise the Nazi holocaust specter to see that they will be important. They involve both our concepts of genetic causation, our concepts of personal value, and in subtle ways our concepts of societal responsibility. There will be a great increase in the number of genetic variants that have high predictive power.

A lot of the eugenics movement in the last century, and even the rationale for the holocaust, was framed around evolutionary and Darwinian ideas. Nature eliminates the unfit, so why can't we help Nature out? If we don't, will our advanced medical and social-net system lead to the gradual pollution of the human gene pool? If so, it is not just the right of individual parents to decide, but society's, because society pays the bills economically and in terms of its abilities, for decreasing overall 'fitness'. These were the classic arguments. Is there a risk that renewed darwinian determinism--of some form specific to our time, not last century's, will lead society in similar directions?

These issues will not go away. But, in our next post, we'll raise important additional questions about what the impact of screening is in terms of the human gene pool, and what the impact on society of widespread personal eugenics might be.