Don't Edit that Genome!

There has been a bit of upturn in talk on scientific ethical questions, from stem cells to fetal body parts to sex selection.

I have found far too much of the bioethical complaints come from a position of poor social structures, and not from simply the science itself. Perhaps that is necessarily true but ethicists spend far more time contemplating the science side instead of engaging in social theorizing or social critique.

A case in point is fetal selection and genome editing. This can be seen quite clearly with the simple tool of recognizing the sex of a fetus. Given a society that believes that males have greater worth than females, the technique of identifying the sex of a fetus along with the simple tool of abortion (or genome editing) may lead to some people using these technologies to select for a greater number of males. Assuming that we all accept this is problematic, the lesson here should be that we have significant social questions to be asked about sex and gender, not that there are scientific questions to be asked or scientific discoveries to limit. For one thing we are talking about rather simple techniques that should get easier with time and with new technologies. Bioethicists would create far greater good in the world by social critique than by trying to worry that a group (of idiots) over here will use this technology in this way. If we had solved gender and sex relations in the 1920's then our eventual technological achievement of fetal sexing would be moot as regards ethical concerns.

Baldly stated, there was immense social danger when individuals discovered they could sharpen a stick, but the answer to such dangers was not to shield people from the knowledge of stick sharpening. It was instead to build safer, globally connected societies, which we did not begin to accomplish for tens of thousands of years after inventing stick sharpening.

Too much of bioethics fits the above mold: complaints and restrictions on scientific advances and not due concern with our social institutions and structures. Was the scalpel a dangerous tool in the hands of Nazis? Yes, but the problem was always Nazis and not the scalpel. Similarly, genetic understanding is a basic insight. It was dangerous when it was blossoming within racist and classist societies. That does not mean we are better off by trying to curb our best understanding of genes, even during the messy beginning of such knowledge. The problem was always racist societies and our inability to reflect on such.

I will grant that we live in a messy world and country, one where a great many still cling to their tribalistic instincts, but the answer to these problems is generally a cultural/social one, and not one that should have us holstering science in any significant way. If we have a social problem that the introduction of a new technology will greatly exacerbate, then we should easily recognize that we have a serious social problem. Lastly, our best scientific understanding, say of the brain and genes, should help us understand our selves better and to further such social changes.

In other news, complaints on stem cells and the use of dead body parts are inane. If as a religious person you believe that your body needs twenty days of decay for some one to bless it, that is fine. We can, for the most part, accommodate your carrying out such. But if you wish to come before our society and claim that your (empty) belief should hold for all dead bodies, then you must give the rest of us useful reasons for such.

Moral Tribes

Opening of chapter 7 in Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes:

[Obama] Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion specific values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or [invoke] God's will- I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

[Greene] "As Obama's remarks suggest, modern herders need a common currency, a universal metric for weighing the values of different tribes. Without a common currency there can be no metamorality, no system for making compromises . . .

The most fundamental challenge comes from tribal loyalists. Obama urges religious moral thinkers to translate their concerns into 'universal' rather than 'religion-specific' values. But what if you firmly believe that your specific religion delivers the universal moral truth. In that case, the distinction between universal and religion specific values makes no sense. (Obama is aware of this problem.) Santorum, declared that Obama's position makes him sick to his stomach. “What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?' Santorum is overstating. No one said religious people can't make their case. Instead, says Obama, they must make their moral cases in secular terms. But to many religious moralists, that's like telling a ballerina to dance in a weight-suit. Try translating 'The gay lifestyle is an abomination against God 'into secular terms. No wonder Santorum feels queasy.”

I liked much of Greene's book, and this was an enjoyable anecdote of U.S. Politics. There are things that are missing in the book, generally speaking, of which much of this blog is a counterpoint to. 

The idea, Obama's here, that democracy as a whole should be based on secular reasons as agreed upon by the public, instead of on shared values of the majority, shows that what we (most of us) mean by democracy is really secularism. That is, we mean a politics devoid of cultured or religious positions. The idea that anyone's belief systems or political positions can surpass that kind of cultured washing, such as the way in which many of our values are just given by our culture or by religion, seems a far stretch. Not to mention that it is a stretch that Greene is trying to come to grips with throughout much of his book. It is also to worship at the altar of Reason, where we believe that hyper-rationality is a consistent and appropriate stance that can soak through our decisions. In the end, there may be nothing else to believe or no way for two people to come to discuss broad social issues other than through some kind of secular reasoning, but it is questionable whether it makes sense to try to define what is happening in our societies or our political systems as working within such.

The moral of this story is that if you really want to be a good utilitarian, you have to forego not only religion but culture and social institutions in a larger respect. Likewise, it was something that Rawls's original position did not do very well, nor did socialism or communism do very well. Neither reached into the fabric of our socially mediated identities to then make judgments about the kind of beings that we are and thus the kind of social structures we could erect or would want to erect. They left off the difficult part about the interplay between our social structures and who we are, and thus even the rationality and discourse framing that we would find moving. Where they held useful political positions, it was not from a sacredly-removed understanding about the nature of human beings, but was instead a parochially positioned structure given the embedded culture that they were arguing within. There were many other equally moving social positions or rationalities that one could take (say gender and sex institutional makeovers), but such positions were not considered.

As we start delving into more of our identity and our social institutions, we can then use even broader positions to ask appropriate questions about what we want. Which again, given the tenor of much of Greene's book, say a broad-based progressive-liberal-utilitarianism, there are places of our identities that he is unwilling to ask about. He is unwilling to come to grips with certain social contingent facts about our identity and the kind of social structures and political reasoning that we may embark upon, once we lay such social contingencies on the table. There are important reflections that he, like Rawls, is unwilling to engage in.

On a further note, some of Peter Singer's work pushes a hyper-rational utilitarianism to the extreme. One example is the idea that we should ignore natured/cultured emotions when our own 1-year-old is dying and instead save two foreign 10-year-olds (or even one other 10-year-old). Many naysayers believe that natural identity structures (say the emotion that nature has provided us of impassioned love for our own children) is a good thing, helps society tick, and is impossible to reflect upon or change. Again, much of this blog is counterpoint to the notion that such a nature exists within our identities, and that often subtle cultural structures are erected upon such emotions or body structures. 

I believe that a culture and identities that were awash in our best understanding about the self-awareness of 10-year-olds versus 1-year-olds, understood the structure and reasons of our natural inclinations, were more capable of prying apart social institutions that nestle onto such genetic structures; such selves would be more capable of making the more appropriate, utilitarian judgment about how to structure societies and how to make such judgments. And they would be more capable of making decisions that supposedly cuts against such indelible natures. Outcries like “I would do anything to save my child” or “I think my emotion to want to thoroughly harm some one who has hurt my child is a good thing” are outcries from positions that are weak at reflecting on who we are and what we can be. Such positions buy into a socially conservative position that cannot imagine selves or societies structured very differently. Many of the claims from evolutionary psychology (etc.) help bolster this unthinkable idea about the existence of different selves and different reactions to events. Lastly, it is one thing to say that for the time being we need to continue allowing these emotions to guide us, or to say that politically this is what I think best for us to continue to reproduce in society and identities. It is an entirely different thing to believe that we have found a basis of human nature or have something upon which we can erect moral responsibility.  

Importantly, in the end, all children would lead far better lives if we came to embrace such a cold understanding of who we are. There would be better focus on socialization and education of every last member. Accepting the kinds of machines that we are, individuals who can see beyond “death-to-my-child's-murderer” are individuals who know that individual love is an insane position to allow for the arising of the kind of disparate environments we allow around different developing machines. This includes not just between the haves and the have-nots, which disparity is of course absurd. But it also gives us better focus on the vastly disparate developmental programming we put around most adequately wealthy children. That is, when we take arbitrariness of differential developmental programs off the table, ignore the emotionally-structured belief about parent-child guided arrangements, we will see the basic necessity of appropriate programming for every last individual. As we move into our best naturalistic understanding of our world, I am confident that this is the understanding that we will eventually embrace. It will erase U.S. processes of socialization/education and familial structures, but it will also erase other social systems that believe they are erecting a fair meritocratic program of achievement, one where everyone has the “opportunity for success.”

So, when our best and brightest cling to their supposedly natural or culturally-induced emotions, and say this is just how humans are suppose to be, we have good reason, that in the end, our world will see beyond such people. We will see beyond the social structures (moral responsibility, e.g.) and the selves that such people think necessary to erect or to reproduce. 

Jay Joseph on Heritability

The latest post by Jay Joseph at Mad in America is a good rundown of heritability:  Are DSM psychiatric diseases 'Heritable'?

Even when heritability is high, or even when it is 100%, a simple environmental change or intervention can have an important preventative or curative impact. In most cases, therefore, heritability estimates tell us nothing about the potential effectiveness or non-effectiveness of an environmental intervention, or to what extent a psychological characteristic is or is not changeable.

Rutter cited flamingos as an example of gene-environment interaction. He noted that both genes and environment play a crucial role in the ability of flamingos to turn pink, and that “you could feed seagulls for ever on the same diet and they would never turn pink.” He concluded that “it would make no sense to say that flamingos’ color was 50 percent due to genes and 50 percent due to diet. It is 100 percent due to genes (which have to be present) and 100 percent due to the environmental diet (which has to be present).”

As an example of how heritability estimates do not measure the “strength” or “magnitude” of genetic influences, imagine “Country A,” where all citizens (100%) carry the gene predisposing them to favism (glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency), a disease marked by the development of hemolytic anemia. Favism is caused by an inherited deficiency of glucose-6-phosphate located on the X chromosome, combined with the consumption of fava (broad) beans or the inhalation of fava bean pollen. In other words, both “beans and genes” are necessary for favism to appear. Let us then imagine that 3% of the citizens of Country A, all of whom are of course genetically predisposed to develop favism, consume fava beans and are subsequently diagnosed with favism. 

In this case, because all citizens carried the gene but only some ate fava beans, all favism variation in Country A would be caused by environmental factors (fava bean exposure), and the heritability of favism therefore would be 0%. At the same time, it obviously would be mistaken to conclude that genes play no role in developing the disease in Country A, or that the genetic influence is weak or irrelevant. A genetic predisposition is, in fact, a prerequisite for developing favism.

On the other extreme, in “Country B,” 100% of the citizens eat a diet that includes fava beans, but only some citizens carry the favism gene. All favism variation in Country B therefore would be caused by genetic factors (carrying or not carrying the gene), and the heritability of favism in Country B would be 100%. As we see, heritability estimates assess variation as opposed to cause, and do not at all indicate the strength or weakness of the genetic influence—or by implication the strength or weakness of the environmental influence.In the above example, the heritability of favism is 0% in Country A, and 100% in Country B, even though the causes of favism are the same in both countries. As Moore concluded, “Because heritability statistics are about accounting for variation and not about causation, they do not actually reflect the strength of influence of genes on the development of a trait, even if it seems like they do.

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I have tried to give examples of both of the above in terms of behavioral analysis previously on this blog. Social behaviors are far messier than the fava bean example. So, when we turn to something like introverted/extroverted and start trying to understand and analyze behaviors (and I do find it best to turn such psychological trait into behavior speak), trying to tease apart what exactly genes are coding for in these examples becomes absurd. Furthermore, like the fava bean example, when we radically alter a social condition, analogous to replacing fava bean consumption with wheat consumption, we can radically alter behavioral expression. We can make it so that a “psychological trait,” or whatever genetically is structuring that psychological trait, such as introversion/extroversion, play a much different role in the life, identity, self of any individual.

On a simpler note, we have beliefs about identity, about why we are the way we are. So much of our identity becomes essentialized in the world. It becomes simply the way that “I am.” And to that all-encompassing personal gaze, it is all that it ever sees its self as. That is, having a self that has arisen in a socially contingent environment, its reflection on its own characteristics within such an environment gives us great difficulty in imagining a self, and thus behaviors, that would have arisen in our body given a vastly different environment. Similarly, parents have a difficult time understanding the contingent social factors that lead their girls to like pink, for example. Instead, they rely on a constant, consistent interaction and behavior anticipation that encourages them to see this as simply always an aspect of their child's identity. Perhaps the Rawlsian veil of ignorance is a pipe dream.

An example: You give me the right social matrix, and any set of genes will by necessity be a “wide receiver” within that social environment. That is, we may have reared apart identical twins that both bizarrely go on to be wide receivers, to exhibit “wide receiver” behaviors. They may, as well, have many other coexisting behaviors. But our inference about what exactly genes are encoding for within these two individuals is of course barren. If other complex factors go with the “wide receiver” social function, such as lack of school study and very high praise from social groups, then we may have further characteristics that are seemingly similar in these twins. Of course, the only things that were structured by the genes may have been that they would be (with certain environmental minimums) a 6'3” individual that runs very fast.

There is good reason to believe that identity and self-models complexly interact with the world they inhabit. But there are surely similar structuring factors. Thus, we can see the similarity of the identity and self models that have been internalized by our two wide receivers above. That is, there is good reason to believe that these individuals will exhibit other similar identity characteristics. This is especially true given environmental overlap, such as the fact that a certain group of 8-year-olds will be influenced by the movie Shrek at the same time and at similar developmental stages, and will thus hear the same message at a similar stage of development about how to treat ugly looking people (?). Or, better still, as budding 13-year-old star wide receivers, our twins above both internalize the public role models currently exhibiting “wide-receiver” behavior at that exact moment. Also important, all their friends and teammates also learn what it is to be a star wide receiver, and how one should “treat a star wide receiver.” This is of course some standard sociological theory from the likes of Cooley, George Herbert Mead, and Berger and Luckmann. But, the key here is that the analysis of the identity and behaviors of these two twins (including most behavioral and emotional elements) will be far better told by asking about the interplay between socially contingent structures along with genetic factors. The final stories about why any given individual shows behavior X is going to be far more parsable within such an analysis than it is by many of the behavioral claims of the geneticists, of evolutionary psychologists (see this latest Guardian article about genes for sexuality). The messiness with heritability claims as shown above is but one slice of why genetic behavioral techniques and claims are problematic.

Comfort on Genetic Engineering

Well said by Nathaniel Comfort at the Nation and at Genotopia.

“Here’s why: Sci-fi genetic fantasies, whether hand-waving or hand-wringing, divert our attention from other, more important determinants of health. Studies by the World Health Organization, the federal Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and academic researchers leave no doubt that the biggest factors in determining health and quality of life are overwhelmingly social. Genetics plays a role in disease, to be sure, but decent, affordable housing; access to real food, education, and transportation; and reducing exposure to crime and violence are far more important. In short, if we really wanted to engineer better, happier, healthier humans, we would focus much more on nurture than on nature.”

I am in general agreement about social structures being a better, more robust line of attack for helping almost all people, for changing societies.

I see the fear of genetic changes as overstated as well. I agree that the cultural zeitgeist of genetic determinism leads to some current social conservatism. But surely both flowers can bloom. The genetic knowledge and manipulability that we are acquiring does not preclude making important social changes. Quite frankly, better genetic understanding should eventually lead to the call for greater and more precise social changes (assuming my understanding is right). Furthermore, there are many reasons for our rather conservative present, with genetic claims being but a small fraction of that.

This leads to the next point: Pushes for massive (but well-intentioned) changes to social structures can be just as damaging as pushes for genetic changes. Genetic alteration should not be placed in some anathema category of unacceptable anymore than social alterations. Perhaps we fear one from past eugenics movements, while others we fear from “argument from USSR” or from cult-like entities. The overreaction to both leads to dead ends, to poor social results and thus to poorer lives lived. Of course, some people took the failures of socialism to give us lessons about human nature (thus genes), which were really bad arguments.

I know I am not making much of an argument strictly for genetic engineering. But I do have confidence present day Germany or the US would harbor genetic technologies without reproducing stupidities of the past. Making sure no individual is born blind today or in the future is not casting aspersions on blind people or putting roadblocks to their living good lives today. The inequality argument is powerful, but (read Comfort above) our most pointed inequalities are happening for social reasons, ones that hopefully we eventually change. I would hope such changes would ensure more equal access to genetic technologies.  

This all brings me to: I am enjoying Peter Watts' scifi, very sciency, Blindsight.

Mental Imagery (or why most people are lying)

Every now and then the issue of mental images takes me in. In general it is an understudied and underdetermined conceptual schema. I get the feeling that it is just terminological and conceptual confusion. I will grant that it is one's own mental image, but we can still ask certain questions that clear the air. Here are the pointed questions that takes care of some confusion, but they are often not asked or illucidated within such discussions:

• Are your conjured mental images as robust as real life images? If you create a mental image of an apple, is it as detailed and vivid as looking at an apple on the table? (I find most people deny this when pressed.)
• What is the relationship between dream images and mental images? Are your consciously created mental images as strong as dream images?
• Do your dream images seem as real as everyday real images?

I find in these discussions that people who claim they have mental images usually leave it baldly stated (“Yes, I have mental imagery”) and do not state what exactly they are experiencing. Often, if such people are pressed, they will allow that such images are not as vivid as dream images, or some people will say they do not have dream images as vivid as everyday life.

My general taxonomy here encourages me to say that all perception is mental imagery. When you look at an apple on the table, you have a mental image of that apple as mediated through sensory content. In a dream you (or I at least) have mental images of an apple, seemingly the same as if you are looking at it in real life. If in waking thought I try to create a mental image of an apple, I create nothing that is like the real life image or dream image of an apple.

I can accept that we need image-like or representational talk for much of our brain processing (see Damasio, for instance). My concentrating on a virtual apple allows me to do all sorts of things. It can instigate knowledge about apples, or instigate sensations of hunger and other emotions. I accept that my trying to image an apple is using and reproducing some underlying processes of “apple representing,” that it is using some "image-like" process broadly speaking. There is certainly a street from past immediately perceived imagery, to memory, to present recalling of that past image. When I have a night-dream image of a face I saw today (a perceived image that I had earlier), the image structures in the night-dream is similar as the earlier perception because the “picture” structures are in my head, so to speak. When I close my eyes and try to imagine that face, I am tapping into those “picture” structures and therefore can remember features of such a face or object.

I also admit that there are (at least) two other classes of people. On one hand there are people who have significant processing deficiencies or significant imagery deficiencies. There may be people who do not dream at all. Or there may be people who have significant perceptual and consciousness difficulties, such as blindsight. On the other hand, there may be people who have really strong hallucinations of non-existent phenomena. We should also say that psychostimulants or other conditions create robust images in some unusual way.

But back to the idea that there is a large percentage of people that have robust daydreamed mental imagery and another large (but supposed minority) percentage of people who do not have these mental images. The papers, the wikipedia pages, the Stanford Encyclopedia, and blogs that I have read do not give me confidence that this is anything more than two classes of people who are not expressing their selves in useful and coinciding ways. I will fully admit that fault may lie with me (and others who follow my schematization). That is, it may be that my seeming “darkness” of thought holds imagistic and representational processes that I access when doing my best to think about my house, and that these processes and thoughts may be worthy of the name image. I also agree that in some conceptualized way we may need to refer to what is happening in my brain as an image. That is, there may be brain processes that are relaying information about object structures. If daydreaming processes are giving information that is robust, such that those processes provide rich detail (so that I know or can imagine redecorating every wall of my house, and this provides further information), then it may be prudent to say that almost all individuals, including my self, have mental imagery.

As it stands, if I try to image an apple it is nothing like the vivid image of directly perceiving a real apple, and it is nothing like the vivid image of dreaming of an apple. I question that most people's phenomenology is that different from mine. It seems far more parsimonious to me that most people have rather similar experiences and instead we have had some stupid language and expression problem. If someone has a good study or a good way of explaining what they experience in their mental imagings, I am all ears.

(My latest perusing led me to Eric Schwitzgebel's account, which gels well with the issues I raised above.)