Consumer Eugenics
june 2002

Will the human race split as parents are given the option of choosing genetic characteristics for their offspring? As biotechnology develops many scientist anticipate that we will be able to select or even design children that are particularily intelligent, super athletic or pretty as a Barbie doll.
But not all parents will wish to - or have the money - to make use of these possibilities. American molecular biologist Lee Silver believes that within a couple of hundred years there will be variations of humans that have evolved to become so remote from eachother that they will be unable to breed children together.

However, the result might as well be the opposite. British author and columnist Bryan Appleyard believes children could instead become more similar - at least in the short run.
"In adults we treasure abnormality, we treasure extraordinary people, but for our own babies what we want most of all is normality. This is the least risky strategy for our children, and if we had the possibility we would tend to choose a sort of "standard child"", says Appleyard.
"Suppose it was established that homosexuality is significantly dependent on genetics. I think that if people had a choice they would be likely to overwhelmingly choose not to have homosexual children. People who can be perfectly tolerant and have absolutely no prejudice against homosexuality, when asked about their own children they react differently. They would prefer to have a child that's not homosexual", says Bryan Appleyard.

Appleyard points out that if you are choosing not to have children that are homosexual or disabled then you are saying, in a sense, to the homosexuals and disabled people in the world that they shouldn't be here. The possibility to select what children will be like in a rational, almost mechanical fashion could create intolerance towards human variation. And it's a pressure that's already being felt today, argues Appleyard:
"Think of Downs' syndrome: If people choose to have Downs' syndrome children or refuse to have pre-natal tests, then there is already a sense that they will be blamed for that: Why did you have that child - he's stupid…"

Consumer dictatorship
It's an important point about this scenario that it would not be the State imposing homogenisation on the genes of its citizens.
In the earliy twentieth century many countries - including USA; Britain and Denmark - had national eugenic programs. It was the prevailing belief that a humans' character is largely predisposed through the genetic inheretance. The nazis demonstrated with catastrophic clarity what racial theories can lead to, and in the decades after world war two, focus shifted. Upbringing and environment were now seen as shaping our character and abilities entirely.

With the development of modern biotechnology the pendulum has begun to swing back again, and as we start making decisions that affect people and embryos on the basis of their genes, eugenics will once again be a reality. But it will be a new form of eugenics, thinks Bryan Appleyard; the eugenics of the marketplace, emerging as the sum of our choices as individual consumers.
To Bryan Appleyard, this would be a highly risky development. He fears that the tendency to explain genetically every trait we have could undermine the social order:

People become more and more convinced that there is a final physical clue to human difference. When we see, that if one gene is wrong we can get huntingtons chorea or any number of diseases, we also think that because you're violent, alcoholic or schizophrenic this is down to genes", says Appleyard.
Taken to extremes he fears that we would start seeing humans as automatons, entirely subject to the instructions in their genes. Already, there have been cases in court in which murderers were defended by arguing that their genes made them particularily inclined to violence and crime.
"It is difficult to see, once we start going down such a path, where we could stop short of a total dissolution os the concept of a morally coherent and responsible individual" writes Appleyard in his book "Brave new worlds".

The usefull myth of equality
Yet another danger in explaining our behavior as gentically controlled is that it could lead to stigmatizing particular groups:
"Generally speaking, human beings spend a lot of time looking for excuses to kill eachother and in the twentieth century we did with unusual enthusiasm. If you can quantify it, by saying they're different because they're genes are different, then probably quite a lot of people will use that as an excuse to start killing other people", says Appleyard.
It's a fundamental principle of most society that all humans are considered to be of equal worth. This equality is the basis of both democracy and human rights.

" Equality is one of the sacred things of our time. We believe very strongly in equality. But he problem with equality - as expressed by secular liberals - is that it is a metaphysical claim that they say is not metaphysical. They say that equality is a given good, but they don't say why it is a given good - and the only reason it can be a given good is because it has a metaphysical basis.
There's no rational reason to say people are equal. People are flagrantly NOT equal in any meaningfull sense, but the idealism is socially usefull, because it stops radical injustice" says Appleyard.
Previously, in-equality was a subjective assesment. Some people seem more intelligent or healthier than other, but it might our prejudices, or it could be a matter of the conditions that this person up under and the possibities he has to show but his abilties.
The claim that genetics make is that in-equality can be attributed directly to the concrete, mechanical makeup of the genes. Thus it can be proven that are not equally capable. And that's where it gets dangerous:
"If we lose the pretense that we are equal then we've got a problem socially, because then you have to ask yourself what are you going to do with these people, if the rest of the people know that they are genetically inferior. People would be inclined to say, well we can't do much for these people, they are not worth educating. There would be a genetic underclass", he fears.

Science is the new religion
Bryan Appleyard doesn't believe that it will actually become possible to explain all of our complicated characters and abilities by simply looking at our genes. The interaction between the many genes, and the interaction between the genes and our environment is so complex that it would scientist hundreds of years to figure out - if, at all, they can ever do it.

Basically, Bryan Appleyard believes that there is something there as well, something, which cannot be explained in a scientific manner.
We are not just automatons executing a program - and it is become ever more important to insist on this, in an age where science is taking over the role that religion used to play as the only valid explanation of how the world works.

"The core of all of this is that we have to have a metaphysical conception of the world, a sense of the sacred. If you take that away, we lose respect for indicidual human life. Just as equality is a usefull illusion, there are other illusions that are socially usefull, such as that people have transcendent significance and can't be used as a means to an end. If we don't have those, combined with the fact that we have an utterly secularized and increasingly marketized world order, then I'm not quite sure what will stand in the way of an extremely repressive sort of society".

In Appleyards view, science has become our new religion. Genetic engineering promises us more or less anything - from imortality to cures for cancer to a new consumermarket for the genetic traits of our children. But scientific truth is temporary, he warns:
"For years doctors said that peptic ulcers where caused by stress, and that was the truth for the whole world. And then suddenly it turned out to be completely wrong, it's actually caused by a bacteria. Anybody who's know anything about the history of science knows that very few theories last very long. If we pin our entire society on scientific hypothesies that may turn out to be wrong within a few decades then we are in trouble. We need to be critical of science, we have to asses it not as a final form of knowledge but as a temporary attempt to knowledge - but no more than that".