The return of Eugenics? What is it for?

[broncofan]

There is epigenetics, morphology and host of other influences that effect gene expression. There is no direct link between DNA and how it is expressed. There is no unique way a given set of 23 pairs of chromosomes can be expressed. DNA does not code for a unique human being, let alone a unique individual. If you gave an alien scientist a complete compliment of 23 pairs of human chromosomes, I doubt that he could reconstruct a human being.

I read a book a few years ago by a woman named Nessa Carey called the Epigenetics Revolution. I probably didn't understand everything I read but she took readers on a tour of how epigenetics translates genotype into phenotype.

She takes the reader through early experiments with cloning, to help explain how scientists figured out how to induce pluripotency in a somatic cell. She discussed stem cells, which are already pluripotent and how it requires an understanding of how to induce changes in gene expression that direct what type of somatic cell they become. Finally, she discussed some relevant issues in epigenetics that were illuminating and challenged ideas about genetic determinism. I really enjoyed it because it seemed to me to provide an opportunity to both understand causes but also to provide clues to potential therapeutic interventions.

Edit: I just wanted to say this is the basis for my understanding of epigenetic changes in trauma victims in my previous post. If any of what I wrote is incorrect or based on a misunderstanding, I am interested to hear. But my understanding is that there is a burgeoning science about how epigenetic changes mediate many pathological physical and psychiatric conditions (including many aspects of who we are that are not pathological) and that many therapies for these conditions often result in identifiable epigenetic changes.

[trish]

Thanks for the recommendation. Having read the Carey book you likely know more about epigenetics than me. My first encounter with these ideas was a (recorded) lecture given by Richard Lewontin who spoke to a general audience about morphogensis and against genetic determinism. He’s written several books related to the topic: Not in Our Genes, The Triple Helix and It Ain’t Necessarily So. It was already somewhat dated when I read it a decade ago. It was more like a collection of essays than the development of a single idea, and very non-technical. I don’t really recall a discussion of eugenics, but the fault may be in my memory. It did have a essay on the genetic modification of food.

[Stavros]

Childhood trauma would very likely result in long-term changes in gene expression.

I was given Adam Rutherhord's book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. The Stories in Our Genes (2016) and in Part Two Chapter 6 he discusses epigenetics but is cautious about its application. He does however draw attention to two examples from history (one in Netherlands, the other in Sweden) that do suggest the children of people who have been through a trauma exhibit genetic expressions they might not otherwise have developed. One is the Nazi 'experiment' known as the Hongerwinter of 1944-45 when the Nazi's deliberately withheld food from the Dutch under occupation. Subsequent studies showed that children born to those women who had starved in that winter were more prone than others of their cohort to obesity, diabetes, schizophrenia (a dubious diagnosis at the best of times), cardio-vascular disease, and in women, breast cancer.

If this is not proof enough, there are two links below that appear to suggest genes do change as a result of some trauma in mothers, but I am not sure if it can be proven that it is derived from traumas suffered by mum and dad or just one of the two that is effective, and again, I am not sure we can be sure that present-day problems are 'inherited' or due to something within the life-time of the person. Isn't there a problem of determinism in this? And does it not mean that someone with problems can be relieved of responsibility by claiming 'it is in my genes' when it might not be but, crucially, the remedy may be within the ability to that individuals to achieve because the 'genetic' reality can be changed -?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2...ons-new-study/

https://childhoodtraumarecovery.com/...to-depression/

[broncofan]

I was given Adam Rutherhord's book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. The Stories in Our Genes (2016) and in Part Two Chapter 6 he discusses epigenetics but is cautious about its application. He does however draw attention to two examples from history (one in Netherlands, the other in Sweden) that do suggest the children of people who have been through a trauma exhibit genetic expressions they might not otherwise have developed. One is the Nazi 'experiment' known as the Hongerwinter of 1944-45 when the Nazi's deliberately withheld food from the Dutch under occupation. Subsequent studies showed that children born to those women who had starved in that winter were more prone than others of their cohort to obesity, diabetes, schizophrenia (a dubious diagnosis at the best of times), cardio-vascular disease, and in women, breast cancer.

If this is not proof enough, there are two links below that appear to suggest genes do change as a result of some trauma in mothers, but I am not sure if it can be proven that it is derived from traumas suffered by mum and dad or just one of the two that is effective, and again, I am not sure we can be sure that present-day problems are 'inherited' or due to something within the life-time of the person. Isn't there a problem of determinism in this? And does it not mean that someone with problems can be relieved of responsibility by claiming 'it is in my genes' when it might not be but, crucially, the remedy may be within the ability to that individuals to achieve because the 'genetic' reality can be changed -?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2...ons-new-study/

https://childhoodtraumarecovery.com/...to-depression/

From what I read of a similar book, there is reason to be cautious of the application of epigenetics when it deals with transmitted tendencies for gene expression. To what extent are changes in gene expression from the parents wiped clean once the gametes form a zygote? One link you included and the example you gave indicate not completely though it's probably a very complicated picture. But I think there is less controversy about those changes in gene expression that occur within a person's life.

I think the relationship of epigenetics to the eugenics discussion is that a eugenicist would believe intelligence is determined materialistically at the level of the brain and that the stuctural correlates of intelligence are determined by genetics. But if childhood circumstances can cause severe differences in temperament and affect and anxiety state, which also are expressed at the level of the brain, then what room do they have to say people succeed because their parents passed on genes conferring intelligence?

But yes, I think there is a problem in determinism whether one is dealing with genetics or epigenetics. We do not choose our circumstances or our diets or thousands of influences on us. What is left of choice and will and concepts like resilience? There is also the issue of your last question that this book I read addresses. Inducing these changes might be more difficult at different times, but there is the opportunity for both self-directed and medically-directed treatments.

I like the interesting links you provided.

[Stavros]

I think the relationship of epigenetics to the eugenics discussion is that a eugenicist would believe intelligence is determined materialistically at the level of the brain and that the stuctural correlates of intelligence are determined by genetics. But if childhood circumstances can cause severe differences in temperament and affect and anxiety state, which also are expressed at the level of the brain, then what room do they have to say people succeed because their parents passed on genes conferring intelligence?

Eugenics is derived from the bogus science of race, that is evident. Contemporary attempts to use science to validate racial difference were made in this century by people like HJ Eysenck as if the 19th century project had been set aside when the key point has always been to confirm that 'northern' 'white' people are more intelligent than 'southern' 'black' people. But whereas the British Empire was once described as an 'improvement' project, Eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries didn't even seem to think there was any purpose to improving the lives of 'inferior' people and opted for mass extermination instead, the cruel irony being that the 'Spanish flu' pandemic that erupted after the First World War killed many more millions and did not discriminate on the basis of 'intelligence'. Indeed, mass exterminations in history, such as various forms of plague, did not advance human civilization but may have forced changes that might not otherwise have taken place. The secular nature of government in the Roman Empire, for example, at its end, when plague had become a devastating force, may have allied with emerging Christian ideas to create a more superstitious reliance on 'God' than the Romans had. The 'dark ages' of pagan ritual and belief may thus have sat alongside Christianity and have been just another form of religious rule for people terrified of the dark side of nature.

None of this emerges in the phoney triumphalism of late 18th and 19th century ideas of 'race' by which time Europeans had encountered the 'others' in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Australian/Pacific regions and used race to convince themselves they were superior beings even though centuries before Europeans had been mired in bleak superstition and incapable of say, great architecture which at the time flourished in supposedly backward places like Benin in West Africa, or the empires of the Inca, Maya and Aztec in the Americas.

As for modern ideas, the horror of the Holocaust, which was based on a dismal theory of race, should have forced a major rethink of Eugenics, yet still ideas persist that attempt to explain why Black men can run faster than White men, as if it as all in the shape of their ankles. Eugenics has thus deleted the 'moral' offence of using words like 'inferior' or 'sub-human' while retaining the right to classify humans in qualitative terms that appear to be different but in reality are not. It doesn't explain why West Africans are better at football than East Africans, or why East Africans can run marathons but never win sprints. Maybe their ankles are different?

The other danger is that epigenetics may be used in litigation. If it is the case that the child of a parent or parents who have been through a major trauma, have problems with obesity, or mental health problems, could that person sue a government or corporation for being responsible for their illness? If the child of parents whose lives have been ruined by opioid addiction develops health problems of their own, could they sue the doctor and the pharmaceutical company on the basis that they were born with genetic 'expressions' that they would not otherwise have had, that can be 'blamed' on the diagnosis and treatment that caused their quality of life to be so poor?

A clear problem similar to this was presented by the Thalidomide scandal. The drug was developed in Germany in the mid 1950s by Chemie Grünenthal as a tranquilizer, but it was discovered to ease the problem of morning sickness in pregnant women and thus became a popular over-the-counter drug. In 1961 it was shown that women suffering miscarriages or giving birth to children with physical deformities -the drug had not been tested on pregnant mice-had been taking Thalidomide, and the drug was withdrawn from sale, although it has remained in use as successful treatment for leprosy. Chemie Grünenthal eventually paid compensation in exchange for immunity from prosecution but the sinister element in this is the claim made in this provocative article in Newsweek:

it is increasingly clear that, in the immediate postwar years, a rogues’ gallery of wanted and convicted Nazis, mass murderers who had practiced their science in notorious death camps, ended up working at Grünenthal, some of them directly involved in the development of thalidomide. What they had to offer was knowledge and skills developed in experiments that no civilized society would ever condone. It was in this company of men, indifferent to suffering and believers in a wretched philosophy that life is cheap, that thalidomide was developed and produced.
http://www.newsweek.com/nazis-and-th...all-time-64655

The lesson may be that one should not play games with genes, that even with best intentions a drug developed to solve one problem, may create another.

More links on Thalidomide here-
http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.o...es/thalidomide
https://helix.northwestern.edu/artic...and-regulation

[trish]

In one sense humankind have been playing games with genes since they first learned, back in the fertile crescent, to select and plant grains that produced the largest seeds. As I see it, there are two differences between the old and new ways: (1) today we directly manipulate the genes themselves, and (2) today we’re attempting to apply that technology to humans.

(1) Selecting and crossing lineages is something nature always did. But when humans did it, it was with design: to produce bigger fruit, larger grains, fatter pigs etc. The results were largely beneficial, but -I would think- they also had an enormous and perhaps unforeseen effect on human civilization too: encouraging an agrarian/polis style of living as opposed to a hunter/gatherer or a nomadic life.

Today we can genetically modify our food with greater design and with quicker results. The real difference today is that we patent those designed foods. To protect the patent, crops are designed so that the seeds they produce, although edible, can never germinate. The idea is to use market pressures and the vast resources of the corporate world to produce monocultures. Farmers that once saved seeds and planted them next season, now have to buy those seeds every year.

Today we also produce insecticides and weed killers that also kill crops that don’t carry the designer gene the gives immunity to these products. So farmers who plant these crops and use these insecticides inadvertently are killing their neighbor’s crops (inadvertent on the part of the farmer - not on the part of the corporation that manufactures these products).

Every time we change our practices or invent something to make life better for ourselves, we too change.

(2) Selecting and crossing lineages of human beings is something too that nature has always done. The gene that produces sickle cell anemia was Nature’s attempt at a genetic solution for malaria. Some humans too have made half-hearted, if atrocious and sometimes cruel and violent attempts to breed with design.
Thanks to our modern understanding of genetics we are verging on the capacity to make designer babies. We may be able to eradicate genetic diseases, but -like nature’s stab at malaria- we won’t always be able to predict all the consequences of our experimentation. The least we can do is try not to use our knowledge frivolously: there’s no need to produce blue-eyed blonds, or musical geniuses or mathematical whiz-kids.

[broncofan]

The other danger is that epigenetics may be used in litigation. If it is the case that the child of a parent or parents who have been through a major trauma, have problems with obesity, or mental health problems, could that person sue a government or corporation for being responsible for their illness? If the child of parents whose lives have been ruined by opioid addiction develops health problems of their own, could they sue the doctor and the pharmaceutical company on the basis that they were born with genetic 'expressions' that they would not otherwise have had, that can be 'blamed' on the diagnosis and treatment that caused their quality of life to be so poor?

I'm not sure epigenetics adds to the danger that already existed before the underpinnings of these conditions began to be elucidated. The manifestations of those changes in gene expression were observable even without attributing the cause.

It was once thought that both obesity and major depressive disorders were fully within the control of the afflicted. Then people started to notice that once a person had these conditions the symptoms were often self-reinforcing, as though something happened biochemically that made it appear there was a new set point or equilibrium. Epigenetics could help doctors understand what occurs, when it occurs, and how to ameliorate it.

It is up to the legal field not to misuse the science to support attenuated theories of liability based on a questionable view of causality. There should be constraints on the legal field that don't necessarily run parallel to those in medical research. The problem with eugenics is that it does nothing to improve the human condition and is straightforwardly dehumanizing because it focuses on traits believed to make some people more valuable than others.

The legal field can avoid the determinism problem by assuming some changes may lead to constrained choices rather than no choice at all. A condition such as ptsd might give one a greater propensity for violence but that doesn't necessarily leave the afflicted no choice in the matter. No matter how good the medical community's mechanical understanding of what factors impact human behavior, we cannot do away with the assumption in our legal system that people have choices and make them (not necessarily the same thing as free will imo but that's a whole can of worms).

Edit: obviously when I discuss some of the shortcomings of eugenics there's a difference between trying to get rid of genetic diseases and breeding children with a certain eye color or trait viewed as qualitatively optimal.

[broncofan]

Stavros, I wonder whether the breadth of your concern (beyond the objectively horrible and racist applications) about these fields is that you don't like theories that reduce human behavior to material or biological causes because you think it removes moral agency? But there are some biological understandings of behavior that don't rule out the possibility of morality or choice. I wonder if there just might be two different levels of abstraction on which to view this.

Do you think if there were a scientist who could understand every determinant of human behavior from the micro to the macro that he wouldn't still think the person who cut him off in traffic was an asshole?

[Stavros]

Every time we change our practices or invent something to make life better for ourselves, we too change.
(2) Selecting and crossing lineages of human beings is something too that nature has always done. The gene that produces sickle cell anemia was Nature’s attempt at a genetic solution for malaria. Some humans too have made half-hearted, if atrocious and sometimes cruel and violent attempts to breed with design.
Thanks to our modern understanding of genetics we are verging on the capacity to make designer babies. We may be able to eradicate genetic diseases, but -like nature’s stab at malaria- we won’t always be able to predict all the consequences of our experimentation. The least we can do is try not to use our knowledge frivolously: there’s no need to produce blue-eyed blonds, or musical geniuses or mathematical whiz-kids.

You refer to both the potential for change to humans, and the use of genetics for commercial gain. I am sort of relaxed about genetically modified crops where they enable farmers to produce three crops a year, not so relaxed about the -often ruthless- commercial drivers taking place with some crops; potentially worried that GM crops could have a long term impact on humans though we can't know if this will be negative. As for the potential changes to humans, I think that is why some geneticists are concerned with the concept of 'designer babies' because on the one hand the opportunity to deal with serious deformity or disease before birth should help to make life better for parent and child, but in reality I doubt it will ever be perfected as there may be an infinite number of 'genetic mistakes' that take place in the womb. I also believe geneticists may be concerned precisely because of the implication that they are being asked to provide the means to produce 'perfect' humans, which links it to the Frankenstein/Nazi model that began with the imperfect human as undesirable and led, via the pursuit of perfection, to fatal mistakes. On the other hand, I have lived through a tremendous period in human history that has seen the eradication of smallpox, and the reduction of once common diseases to being if not rare then manageable and not as devastating as once they were, such as Polio, TB, Typhus Cholera, Measles and this must be a good thing.

I am led to the conclusion that one must trust scientists to be have values that are shared by people in most societies that are rooted in a basic respect for life and the person, and to have learned from the mistakes of the past. I don't think many scientists now subscribe to the ideas of race, yet clearly some do; I am not sure how may scientists are 'in it for the money' but I am sure many are. The problem with Genes may be that once it was trial and error. 'Tribes' that mated with each other died out; Rutherford argues that an entire species of human died out having mated with a variant of neanderthal types close to them -these 'errors' eliminated all but the human species capable of reproducing itself for generations, but it took thousands of years for that 'experiment' to prove what works and what does not.

The 'Frankenstein' era in which we live gives tremendous power to science to modify who we are; it does not give it licence to eliminate who we are. This is a scientific and moral dilemma that has no simple solution, yet as the massacres in Rakhine province show, some humans still think the solution to their problem is the elimination of other people, and, as the massacres in Arakan/Rakhine show, expulsion and slaughter follow, whether there is 'science' in the claims or just prejudice and hate.

[Stavros]

Stavros, I wonder whether the breadth of your concern (beyond the objectively horrible and racist applications) about these fields is that you don't like theories that reduce human behavior to material or biological causes because you think it removes moral agency? But there are some biological understandings of behavior that don't rule out the possibility of morality or choice. I wonder if there just might be two different levels of abstraction on which to view this.

Do you think if there were a scientist who could understand every determinant of human behavior from the micro to the macro that he wouldn't still think the person who cut him off in traffic was an asshole?

Do you think if there were a scientist who could understand every determinant of human behavior from the micro to the macro that he wouldn't still think the person who cut him off in traffic was an asshole?
-As long as he does not dismiss the driver cutting him off in terms such as 'typical woman driver!'. 'Damn, but he must be Mexican...' or 'Now you know why I think men under 25 should be banned from driving' and so on.

I think the question of moral agency cuts to the centre of the argument. The way theories of race developed in the 19th century and emerged in the Eugenics and Nazi policies of the 1930s-40s traduced the idea that science is always progressive and of benefit to mankind, but one could also point to the splitting of the atom and the creation of the Atom Bomb which, when it became a reality in 1945 left the nuclear scientists -most of them- appalled at what science had led them to create. It may seem odd to claim Oppenheimer had no moral agency until after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I think the point is that he and the other scientists were so enthused by the science that they did not think their work would be deployed as a weapon to kill people -this, I guess is the 'Frankenstein' thesis, except that scientists were not mad, or driven mad by the unexpected outcome of their experiment.

If that is a general example, I think also that Genetics may not be the only tool to use when taking human behaviour apart. If, for example, there is a genetic explanation for an habitual criminal, does it apply to all forms of criminality? For example, does the 20 year old who has been stealing cars since he was 13 share a set of genetic markers with a burglar who specialises in robbing wealthy property, a serial rapist, and a 56 year old accountant who embezzles the funds of his employer? How can one explain this in science? Is there a set of genes that determines a person will always break rules when others are obedient?

It becomes more complicated if there are genetic differences between, say, a Norwegian and a Japanese Male. If both are serial rapists, is it because of genetic similarities, or is it because they both share similar views of themselves and their victims? If it is difficult to isolate genes as causes in criminal behaviour, can one extend the experiment to other aspects of human behaviour and why is there a bias toward the negative in almost all discussions? Genes and obesity, drug addiction, schizophrenia, depression, heart disease. Is there a set of genes that explains happiness, that explains happy families?

Even when there is an attempt to explain child prodigies in maths or musical virtuosity, it seems to me to separate 'the ordinary' from the 'extraordinary' but this is merely another version of the 'science' that once explained why Jews are a biological as well as a political and cultural threat to mankind; why 'Negroes' are inferior, why Aborigines are not actually human at all (as an Australian woman once told me with a disturbing degree of conviction).

While I am not going to isolate myself by saying moral agency is the key, I will say that genetics is only one part of a complex mix into which the environmental and social aspects of life must be considered. Someone born into a bourgeois family in England will have different influences from a Black American born on the same day but raised in Brooklyn, it might be the difference between Beethoven and Bird, or a difference marked by private school and state school, a stable family or a dysfunctional family, but it doesn't mean the privileged Englishman and the poor but ambitious American cannot both be lawyers by the time they are 30.

And so on, this is an interesting discussion, but I do wonder why Genetics so often bothers itself with 'things that go wrong' as it is this obsession with the negative that continues to drive Eugenics that in the past produced murderous solutions to problems that in reality I don't think genetics can achieve. Because one person's problem may be another person's opportunity.