Good Luck With That
Irradiated by LabRat
A ways back in the week when I was pretty crunched for time and motivation, Blunt Object ranted about an article on Slate badly misunderstanding genetics and what we can know from it. It’s pretty typical boilerplate biology-is-scary stuff, or at least the part he’s ranting about is; there’s essentially one paragraph of raw stupidity in the middle of an otherwise reasonable piece talking about the implications of fetal genotyping. The relevant paragraph:
What fetal genes might one day suggest about a baby’s eye color, appearance, and intellectual ability will be useful to parents, not insurers. But with costs coming down and insurers interested in other aspects of the fetal genome, a Gattaca-like two-tiered society, in which parents with good access to health care produce flawless, carefully selected offspring and the rest of us spawn naturals, seems increasingly plausible.
Well… no, not really. To put it mildly. If the world worked like this I’d be able to write poetry in Linear A, but merely finding something that does something in particular and making some more or less educated guess as to what it does does not translate into being able to use it for engineering.
The analogy Blunt used was programming, and it’s a pretty good one; I set out to quote it for effect but wound up concluding it really just needs to be read in its entirety. It’s not long, and is resistant to excerpting.
The only issue with his analogy is that it doesn’t even capture the impossibility of pulling off something like the Slate author’s scenario adequately; at least a piece of computer hardware and its programming were produced via a process we could find relatively intuitive. Genomes were produced by evolution, with no one on hand trying even remotely to ensure that the code was efficient or clean, let alone commented. Kludges and elegant solutions exist side by side, sometimes in several different copies, some of which are broken and others of which do subtly different things in each version. Much of the information is if-then instructions and operating instructions, sometimes to provide for cases that are remote or no longer exist. If your computer were equivalent, it would have every operating system and program you had ever used installed at once, with the instructions for which pieces work for what and are active at any given time being completely hidden information. All possible hardware styles and protocols are present as well, and which ones are active or not is equally obscure.
Among the list of what the fetal testing is meant to do: determine Rh-factor, sex of child, presence of Down’s syndrome. Testing for any of these things is not like looking for a line of code in a computer program; it’s like seeing if a hard drive rattles or not when you pick it up, or how many USB ports there are. The number of chromosomes as well as what kind there are at pair 23 is determinable by technology we’ve had since the early part of the twentieth century; it is to genotyping as correctly naming a shape to be a square is to polygonal geometry.
Let’s tackle the first line in the author’s GATTACA scenario piece by piece:
What fetal genes might one day suggest about a baby’s eye color, appearance, and intellectual ability
1. Do you know we currently have no idea how eye color genetics work beyond two genes that happen to handle “blue” or “brown” relatively straightforwardly? Beyond that we know that there are many more genes that affect eye color, that there are two more genes that definitely do something though we’re not positive what, that there might be as many as 16, and that green and gray and hazel are handled somewhere entirely different, but you’re simply not going to know what color a baby’s eyes are going to be based on even its entire genome- because we only know what two genes are going to do and can’t even find the rest to see if they’re present and what they’re going to do.
2. You can know everything about a baby’s appearance that is determined by a single, stand-alone trait that we know about, understand to be a trait influenced by a single gene or at least a manageable handful of them, and know exactly which gene does that. Compared to all factors of a baby’s appearance, the number of traits this describes is teeny tiny. If the driving force of your curiosity is knowing whether a baby boy’s ears will have attached pinnae, you’re in luck*.
3. We don’t currently even know what intellectual ability quite is. We can’t nail down a single test accurately measuring “general intelligence”, all the tests we currently have produce wildly different results from one another, and while we know more or less that there are different cognitive domains and skills, we can’t nail any of them down particularly well either. Worse than that, we understand vaguely that intelligence is more of an emergent property of many systems and skills, but we can’t quantify or measure it well. For something like a car, “speed” is an emergent property with no corresponding part of the car that develops out of nearly every other part of the car- but we can concretely and easily measure speed.
Most of what we know about genetics and intelligence can be summed as this: 1)It seems to be, broadly, heritable, and 2)cognitive impairments are much, much easier to detect and quantify than variations in normal intelligence or extremely high intelligence. This is, in fact, what IQ tests were originally designed for- picking out those sufficiently impaired to need different schooling. We can expect legitimate bioethics issues surrounding the ability to detect those sorts of cognitive impairments caused by developmental disorders that are known and genetically quantifiable- not engineered superbabies versus dull “naturals”.
So, of the author’s three projected super-baby traits, one of them is a simple thing that turns out very much not to be on the genetic end, and two are emergent gestalt qualities we cannot even quantify, let alone reverse-engineer. Provided we develop the ability to directly engineer in the first place, which currently we can’t.
As science-fiction-come-reality scares go, I’m not that impressed.
*Actually I’m lying. This old chestnut of simple Mendelian genetics, as well as sex-linked traits, turns out to involve multiple alleles of opaque effect as well. Surprise!
May 1st, 2012 at 8:15 pm
Note to self - Write script to parse LabRat’s posts and automatically create report detailing things she writes about that I should know and understand, but don’t.
Great rebuttal of fear mongering, BTW.
May 1st, 2012 at 8:38 pm
…which is why I was hoping you’d get around to writing something like this. Score!
Although:
My experience with “I’m-not-a-computer-person” people who insist on ‘splaining their frustrations to me is that they believe squishy biological stuff to be friendly and intuitive and common-sensical, and computer hardware and software to be the mind-blasting result of eldritch magic. But my sample is probably biased from the population.
May 1st, 2012 at 8:44 pm
“We can expect legitimate bioethics issues surrounding the ability to detect those sorts of cognitive impairments caused by developmental disorders that are known and genetically quantifiable.”
This. I’m not concerned about superbabies, but I am very concerned about the rapidly rising frequency of hostile comments I’m hearing and reading regarding children with Down Syndrome that insist that their existence has a negative value to the world and that their parents had a responsibility towards society to abort them as fetuses, and generally follow by saying that the rest of society should refuse people with Down Syndrome or their families any medical, educational, or social assistance or accommodations that would otherwise be given if their disability wasn’t detectable prior to birth.
It’s become so predictable in the past few years that I pretty much know that anything I read on the internet that mentions Down Syndrome, especially in a child, will at some point be followed by at least one such comment.
May 2nd, 2012 at 8:01 am
Meh- A continuation of the bio-ethics scare tactics which assume John Q Public will never bother to fact check anything. Good rebuttal, and good points about how LITTLE we really know about genotyping, and a myriad of other factors surrounding genetics in general. The infinite creativity available in the DNA strand is, I believe, far more complex than any of the scientists really understand (hence the huge research budgets)… Thanks for a well thought out and enlightening post (as usual)!
May 2nd, 2012 at 9:52 am
Fear superbabies?
Hell, they should be subsidized.
Spending government money to allow idiots to breed without producing more idiots looks like a damned good use of tax money to me.
That being said … we ain’t anywhere near their yet. Trying to figure out how DNA works is like trying to debug completely uncommented code that has gone through millions of new versions over the course of 3 billion years, with programmers that range in skill from near divine ultra hackers to monkeys with a broken 110 baud teletypewriter.
Do-able, but still a bear of a job.
May 2nd, 2012 at 11:10 am
If DNA was truly like computer code, then we could a could remove the bits that commented out the prehensile tail section. Tails for everyone!
May 2nd, 2012 at 11:11 am
Damn right.
And that’s without even including epigenetic effects on gene expression…
It’s more amazing that we can predict anything at all, at this point.
May 2nd, 2012 at 12:25 pm
LauraT:
Erm. Blithely uncommenting arbitrary chunks of code in a ten-year-old codebase is a dangerous proposition, roughly akin to putting a paper bag on one’s head and dancing in rush-hour traffic. I don’t even want to think about what it’d be like in a codebase a few million years old.
May 2nd, 2012 at 3:25 pm
bluntobject; considering the unadulterated hell I had in highschool anatomy with the endocrine system aloine, it blows my mind to think anybody would believe biology is less confusing than technology…sorry for your frustration…
May 2nd, 2012 at 7:13 pm
Maybe it’s not so much a matter of less confusing so much as more familiar to some people…. Doesn’t matter how simple a model something is if it’s just totally foreign to you.
May 2nd, 2012 at 8:20 pm
True that, BH. (Most people don’t spend much time thinking about their endocrine systems, either.)
May 3rd, 2012 at 11:06 am
Well, obviously the intelligence gene is linked to the one that controls melanin production. Ask Murray and Herrnstein. Duh.
(Just in case nobody is picking it up, the above should be read as dripping with sarcasm.)
Sorry, been exposed to too much pseudo-evolutionary biology from people who wouldn’t know a nucleic acid from a nuclear warhead lately.
May 3rd, 2012 at 11:41 am
One of the posts sitting perpetually in draft form while I chew the idea over and decide when I feel like dealing with the resulting comments is pointing out that there actually can’t be a “culture-neutral” intelligence test because intelligence itself isn’t culture-neutral.
Whatever sterling qualities I may have in my culture, if I were to find myself in a society with no written language whose primary subsistence was fishing and foraging (say ancient Polynesia), by every single possible relevant measure I would be very stupid.
May 4th, 2012 at 8:15 am
Stupid, or merely ignorant? I’m betting that you’d pick up on foraging and fishing skills, and related social expectations, pretty darn quick.
In fact, I think we* should develop a new intelligence test that involves dumping people into completely foreign locations and seeing how long it takes them to assimilate. Hell, we* could turn it into a reality TV show, thereby keeping testing costs low. Think of the possibilities!
* where we=somebody else
May 4th, 2012 at 9:06 am
“Stupid, or merely ignorant? I’m betting that you’d pick up on foraging and fishing skills, and related social expectations, pretty darn quick.”
Maybe (though I don’t know — anyone who’s immigrated to a very different culture can tell you that many things are very subtle and hard to ever learn fully when you’re thrown in in adulthood), but I think you might still find many of us who are considered ‘intelligent’ in our own world might be less so in another.
E.g. a lot of what we call intelligence in modern society tends to focus on understanding and manipulating logical relationships between abstract concepts, and relating symbols to ideas quickly.
Another society might care more about the ability to learn physical skills with good coordination and reacting quickly and ‘intelligently’ to physical feedback, or about oratorial and verbal debating skills.
I’m sure there would be a significant correlation, but the same people probably wouldn’t end up ranked the same way in both societies.
May 4th, 2012 at 9:12 am
“In fact, I think we* should develop a new intelligence test that involves dumping people into completely foreign locations and seeing how long it takes them to assimilate.”
You mean like ‘immigration’?
Though that’s usually a much milder version of what you’re talking about. Globalization has made most countries more similar than different, particularly when it comes to things like higher education.
May 4th, 2012 at 12:36 pm
Actually stupid, not merely ignorant. The cognitive domains I’m weakest in are merely quirks or somewhat funny weaknesses in this culture; they’d be crippling impairments in one different enough from my own.
The most relevant example I can think of is spatial reasoning. I have no sense of direction at all; I can be reliably counted upon, when faced with a choice of direction, to pick the wrong way every time. In a culture with GPS, roads, cars, and cities this ranges from “endearing quirk” to “freaking annoying”, but it’s not a major problem; in a nomadic foraging culture and particularly in a seagoing one this would be even worse than being illiterate is in our society.
Likewise I’m physically clumsy and slow to pick up new large-motor skills. I can do it, but it takes me longer than it will someone who’s more average/normal in this realm. Again, in modern Western culture this goes along with my overall “geek” image and is not really a problem- in that same foraging nomadic culture, it would mark me as an idiot and not in a harmless way.