When people who hate me get tired of calling me a fascist or a white supremacist, they let fly with eugenicist.
But eugenicist may be losing its sting.
Just last week, the New York Times astonished me by publishing an article called, Should Human Life Be Optimized?
It included moving pictures of cute babies who had, in some respects, been optimized.
It even used the word liberal eugenics to refer to latest techniques to ensure children get the best genetic start in life by using a method called embryo selection.
It works like this.
You harvest eggs from the mother, fertilize them with sperm from the father, and after five or six days, you sequence the genomes of all the embryos and then implant the ones that have the most promising traits.
It advertises only screening against undesirable conditions, but it collects genetic data that could be used to predict which embryos are likely to grow into taller, more athletic, smarter people.
It is widely reported that if you can pick from 10 embryos, you're likely to have a child with six more IQ points than a child conceived by chance.
The Times article noted only that it was controversial when it included the following statement from someone who thinks higher IQs are good for the country:
"Societies that have more intelligent people will have lower rates of crime, of rape, of violence, because intelligence correlates negatively with those societal issues."
It's a great long article.
But the Times never once mentioned Adolf Hitler or forced sterilization.
Maybe even more significant was a study from Harvard Medical School called Public Opinion on Polygenic Embryo Screening for IVF, or in vitro fertilization.
A poll in 2023 of 1,400 people found a lot of them liked the idea of screening embryos.
People generally think it's okay to screen out conditions such as schizophrenia or Alzheimer's, but they think twice about selecting for brains or height.
Here are all the traits the survey asked about, with medical conditions on the left and other traits on the right.
Stop the video to look more carefully if you like, but it's pretty non-controversial to screen out genetic conditions associated with cancer or heart disease.
What's more interesting is what people thought about screening for positive traits such as intelligence, the top item on this graph.
Here the top two bars, the red and the brown, are strong disapproval and disapproval.
And sure enough, they account for about 40% of responses.
But 23% have no opinion, 24% approve, and 13% approve strongly.
There's even more support for screening out neuroticism or obesity.
This is not the ferocious opposition to eugenics that you might expect.
Christian writers tend not to like embryo selection.
They warn against...
Technologies that objectify early human life and rob it of its moral standing.
Furthermore, anyone who believes that life begins at conception will oppose selecting embryos, because the ones not chosen are often destroyed.
However, there may soon be ways dramatically to increase the chances of having a genius baby or an Olympic gold medalist.
It's called in vitro gametogenesis.
You take basically any animal cell, reprogram it into a stem cell, and turn that into an egg.
In 2016, Japanese biologists did this with cells from a mouse's tail.
They fertilized the eggs in vitro, put them into a mouse womb, and got 10 pups.
Some of the pups went on to have pups of their own.
It would be a huge breakthrough to do this with people.
The biggest bother with in vitro fertilization is getting the eggs from the mother.
You can get only about a dozen eggs each cycle, and the whole procedure is pretty awful.
Sperm are plentiful.
So if you could just take a woman's skin cells and turn them into eggs, parents might have hundreds of embryos to choose from.
There's no telling what you might end up with.
And this could be possible in 10 or 15 years.
Two years ago, a Brown University doctor was already saying it's time for the public to get a sense of the possible.
It's also time for the country to return to common sense.
Eugenics improves people, just as selective breeding improves plants and animals.
It's why cows give more milk, ears of corn are bigger and taste better, and turkeys are fatter and more tender.
Fast racehorses produce fast colts.
That's why when Triple Crown winner American Pharaoh retired and started his breeding career, his stud fee was $200,000.
In the early part of the 20th century, we understood that these principles apply to us.
Thank you.
to attend free public lectures on eugenics.
They were "fitter families" contests, in which experts judged families on their desirable qualities.
Here are three generations of winners with their trophies.
Laugh at these quaint pictures if you like, but they reflected an understanding of reality.
After the Second World War, a kind of insanity took over that is only now beginning to fade.
The title of the Times article I started with is a question.
Should we optimize human life?
Of course we should.
That's what education, health care, culture, and technology are all about.
You could argue that if we have the means to improve our species, we have a duty to improve it.
What has held us back for decades is the fear that if we start taking human genetics seriously again, we can no longer pretend there aren't genetic differences between races.
We've even gone through a period when we're supposed to pretend that race has nothing to do with genes or biology, that it's a social construct.
When's the last time Professors or journalists try to make us believe anything so colossally stupid.
And even now, we're supposed to worry that only rich white people can afford embryo selection.
So, our intolerable racial gaps will get even more intolerable.
The Times article calls this prospect dystopian.
Even so, after decades of deliberate ignorance, I see signs of light.