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Eugenics, statistical hubris, and unknowable unknowns in human genetics

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A new paper just out in Nature , by Peter Visscher and colleagues (including bio-ethicist Julian Salvulescu) explores the idea of polygenic genome editing of human embryos to reduce the risk of common diseases. This is, to say the least, a controversial idea, and a decidedly fantastical one. The authors present the results of statistical modelling which suggests that editing a small number of risk variants in each embryo’s genome could dramatically reduce the risk of a number of common disorders. But there are good reasons (lots of them) to doubt the assumptions on which this modelling is based and to have serious concerns about possibly deleterious unintended consequences of such interventions. I co-wrote a commentary on the article with geneticist Shai Carmi and law professor and bio-ethicist Hank Greely, outlining some of the limitations of the modelling and our concerns over the dangers of the proposed approach. I’ll expand on those points here.   First, the development...
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The Justice Algorithm

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Why do we need judges? Why do we leave important decisions to flawed, biased, distracted, even corruptible human beings? Couldn’t A.I. do this job so much better now? So much more cleanly, precisely – without all that messy, human subjectivity? Couldn’t we just submit the evidence to a great big algorithm to determine guilt or innocence? Or, if that involves too much ambiguity, at least to determine appropriate sentencing, taking all appropriate factors into consideration? Shouldn’t there be a single right answer that can be reached in each case?   After all, we have, in most jurisdictions, a constitution that lays out our moral and societal values and guiding legal principles. Of course, these aren’t specific to any situation, so we also have a set of laws that dictate very clearly what’s allowed and what isn’t. Admittedly, we keep having to make new ones to keep up with a changing world, but they’re as comprehensive and up-to-date as our political systems allow. We know what...
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Undetermined - a response to Robert Sapolsky. Part 4 - Loosening the treaties of fate

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In Part 3 of this series, I argued that organisms really do think about what to do, really do come to their reasons by reasoning, and really do make decisions, in ways that cannot be pre-determined.   If the neural computations are causally sensitive to semantic content, rather than detailed syntax, and those semantics relate to organism-level concepts, and all that information is integrated in a hugely contextually interdependent way, and is used to direct behavior over nested timescales, in ways that cannot be either algorithmically or physically pre-specified, based on criteria configured into the circuits derived from learning, which embody reasons of the organism and not any of its parts, then I would say that just is the organism – as an integrated self with continuity through time – deciding what to do.   I also argued that more fundamental principles of indeterminacy and emergence and organisation are the things that enable organisms themselves to come to be in...
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