by Stefano Vaj
Now, once factors limiting the net reproductive dividend of a “quantitative” strategy diminish, it seems inevitable that the sheer number of successfully completed parturitions become the decisive factor as to the social propagation or persistence of the genetically-influenced parental traits, with a significant edge in favour of possibly undesirable traits discussed above.
Of course there is the question of why genes that code for undesirable traits… do exist in the first place.
A partial explanation, one however which also represents a factor of considerable complication, concerns the possibility that given traits are in fact genetically determined, but derive their expression from the interaction of many different genes, and are basically the result of their simultaneous presence in a particular individual. For instance, at least 25 genes are implicated in the fact that a mouse happens to have particularly small teeth, and the development or not of asthma in adulthood seems, in certain species of monkeys, linked to at least 149 different genes.[109] When the interaction does not take place, the expression of such genes in the organism can fail to take place or be different altogether[110].
Moreover, a genetic defect can be the result of a gene being missing. The Wolf-Hirschorn syndrome, that provokes many congenital defects, is for example due to a deletion in a region of one of the carrier’s chromosomes.[111]
More generally, the answer in the case of many traits is precisely that, even though they are hereditary, they are not inherited, that is, they simply recur via the repeated occurrence of spontaneous mutations, or other incidents when the genetic code is replicated, as already mentioned in the case of Down’s syndrome.
In other cases, one explanation often offered for these mutations relates to the benefits they may offer to heterozygotes, for instance in the case of resistance against malaria of individuals who have received from one parent only the gene for sickle-cell anemia, its greater frequency being not coincidental in areas endemically affected by malarial fever.
Other considerations are also proposed with respect to more complex hereditary features, at the level of the population genetics. In this case the customary example is the high incidence today of diabetes (up to fifty per cent of the adults) among some populations of Central-American Indians, which corresponds to original conditions of perpetual scarcity and famine, that for thousands of years have fine-tuned the genetic make of such populations for survival in conditions of extreme caloric shortage; hence the “defect” in question would only correspond to a bad adaptation to conditions of relative opulence – at least foodwise – introduced by “modern civilisation” into the lifestyle of such peoples,[112] An “opulence” the conservation of which, as is obvious, is far from guaranteed to our species forever and ever.[113] Jacquard writes: “In preventing the gene linked to diabetes from disappearing, medical progress does not perform a dysgenic action; on the contrary, it saves a capital that no doubt is useless or poorly adapted to today’s world, but that might reveal itself precious if ever our food supply would return to a lower average.”
Today such lines of argument presuppose moreover, in the egalitarian-universalist perspective of its proponents, that whoever is alarmed by the dysgenic risk would in fact be aiming at reducing the wealth of the species’ gene pool, eliminating or reducing the “deviant” germ lines, in view of a single “healthy” and civilised human model.
This does not at all necessarily follow; in fact it is the opposite that is true. It does not seem to occur to the French geneticist that the dysgenic risk consists not only in maintaining genetic traits otherwise destined to be eliminated, but also in the elimination or rarefaction of traits which may be in themselves desirable, owing to the active competition (at least quantitative) of the former, as well as to the global uniformisation of selective factors, which together with the gradual attenuation of the factors of segregation among populations, reduces and does not increase the variances among these; and with such variances reduces the richness, the ability to adapt and, in the last analysis, ability to survive of our whole species.
In this case it has been well observed[114] how technologies that are or are about to become banal today, such as artificial insemination, IVF, cloning, the indefinite preservation of gametes (ovules, spermatozoa) or of embryos, become of crucial significance in eugenic terms precisely because they improve our capability to preserve precious genetic material, variants and/or combinations that might otherwise be lost or that are not “naturally” destined to reproduce, or that are threatened by demographic differentials, and that constitute a specific treasure to be safeguarded, indeed for the purpose of intraspecific variance, individual or populational, that only Jacquard’s caricature of eugenism would like to reduce or eliminate.
Not even cloning – which incomprehensibly fires the egalitarian imagination out of its alleged risk of... making allhumans equal[115] – does by itself imply a diminishing of a species’ genetic plenty or diversity. On the contrary,not only does cloning enable science to study the heredity of specifically human traits such as “intelligence” without constraining it to work on natural monozygotic twins (and only people who fear the results of these studies will dispute their potential value for anthropology, public health, education, etc.), but it also makes it possible to investigate how identical genomes, perhaps belonging to individuals that are phenotypically exceptional in some respect or other, are expressed in different, and indefinitely renewable, contexts.[116]
In fact, the objection that the price of such advantages would be a greater “uniformisation” of the human species – a truly paradoxical statement on part of a culture that makes “equality” a positive value – is only valid when faced with the choice of massively cloning one or a few individuals, and at the same time preventing the reproduction of everybody else.
Gregory Stock writes:
The very fact that human cloning has become the rallying point for opposition to emerging high-tech reproductive techniques emphasises the challenges ahead for that opposition. Human cloning is largely a symbol. It appeals to only a tiny fringe. It does not yet exist. There could be no easier target for a ban. And whether or not restrictions are enacted makes little difference, because as Kass and Fukuyama must know, if procedures for human cloning do not arrive through the front door, they will come through the back, probably propelled by state-supported research on embryonic stem cells […] Attempts to prevent cloning in the United States or Europe would simply shift the effort elsewhere [...] At the end of 2002, Britain announced it would add an additional £40 million to the £20 million it had already committed to stem cell research. Japan is building a big centre in Kobe that will have an annual budget of some $90 million. And China and Singapore are also moving ahead aggressively[117].
Actually, the cloned individual implies a genetic loss for his species only in the event that his birth correlates to an extinction of the genome of the potential reproductive partner of his or her parent; that is, in the case where the sexual partner is not destined to reproduce because of the parent’s choice to give birth instead to a clone.
Short of this, reproduction via cloning does not entail more depletion than does the natural occurrence of monozygotic twins in higher animals and in humans, or the reproduction via parthenogenesis of plants and animals that can resort to this as an alternative to sexual reproduction[118]. Besides, in the case of animals, cloning is already used as much to perpetuate the lineage of animals with exceptional characteristics as to preserve species on the verge of extinction[119]. Similarly, human cloning could well be used deliberately to preserve and spread desirable variations inside a given population, which might risk disappearance or reabsorbtion otherwise, ensuring that they are transmitted to the immediate offspring of the individuals concerned, and removed from the genetic roulette of sexual reproduction.[120]
On the contrary, the idea that there is no need to worry about these things, because “it is better to leave it to nature,” on the one hand does not take in
to account the fact that the room left to “nature” is anyhow and inevitably ever smaller; and on the other hand, it exhumes an odd trust in Providence which reflects nothing other than the moral refusal of the very possibility that man can and should choose his own destiny, as a species and, more concretely, as a specific group within the species.
Besides, this choice does not represent anything other than the completion of a process initiated with hominisation. The importance in terms of reproductive success, for instance, of the ability to give birth without assistance, has gradually dwindled throughout the history of humankind, and it is perfectly possible to imagine that the very ability to conceive naturally, carry a pregnancy to completion and bring forth the offspring could be lost in future generations, in the same way as corn has not been able to reproduce unaided by humans for centuries or millennia[121]. This may well be irrelevant when procreation is ensured by other means. It may however be a cause for legitimate concern that the survival of our species be guaranteed by the continued availability of such means; or it is also possible to think that the capacity, “archaic” and today ultimately “useless,” to reproduce autonomously deserves to be retained at least by part of the population for other reasons, perhaps of a cultural or symbolic kind. However that may be, the trend in discussion poses a problem, the terms of which are perfectly known today, and that can only be ignored as the result of a deliberate repression of an all-out ideological order.
If when faced with such perspectives Providence no longer lends a hand, we know in what other alibi we should put our faith to prevent man from playing god: the Economy.
Hence the selfsame Jacquard, who a few pages earlier worried “virtuously” about the risk that possible “positive potentials” of the genetic predisposition to diabetes might be hurriedly eliminated from the human gene pool, now emphasises: “We noticed above all how the expected medical progress [the one that would make it possible to cure one of the most widespread genetic illnesses in Europe] would erase cystic fibrosis as a “defect,” making it no more than a condition that would require some treatment and which, by hypothesis, would be curable. The passage from 20,000 affected individuals to 80,000 would not constitute a genetic burden, but an economic burden [our italics]. Would this weigh trivially when compared with other economic burdens resulting from the imperfections of our society?”
The French scholar continues:
This process is no different from the one that has been going on since the dawn of humanity, since when, having evolved into Homo sapiens, we reacted to aggressions by the external world by inventing appropriate behaviours and did not passively wait for a genetic modification to take place. The invention of fire and the use of animal furs have certainly hindered the elimination of children whose genetic endowments made them less able to resist cold. This, in the long run, ended up transforming mankind’s genetic legacy. Our frailty is no doubt greater, but regarding this frailty as a genetic degeneracy would be excessive. Artificial lifestyles are part of the very nature of our species; as soon as we were able to we no longer accepted passively to endure the selection imposed upon us by the environment; to aggressions and restrictions imposed upon us by the external environment we responded culturally and not, like the other species, genetically; medical progress is just the continuation of this cultural response; the invention of antibiotics is no more “dysgenic” than the invention of fire.
All this is perfectly true, but the author’s conclusion that, basically, genetic decline “simply has to be accepted” is certainly not the only possibility.
5 .Nature, culture, selection
Awareness of the “dysgenic risk” and the substitution of an artificial intervention to natural selection have in fact always been part of humankind’s self-domestication or at least of the cultural response with which historical cultures, and in particular the Indo-European culture, have met this challenge.
Well before anyone thought of the consequences for human groups of Mendel’s laws, Mount Taygetos and the αγωγή (agogé) in Sparta, the Tarpeian Rock in Rome, analogous practices such as exposing newborns among Celts and Germans, and the strict matrimonial rules in ancient India represent a doubtlessly rough, but perfectly ancestral, form of this awareness, which for that matter is also echoed in Plato’s Republic[122] and in Aristotle’s Politics, as well as in various sources of Roman Law.[123] But the structure itself of society and, at the level of aristocracies, the preservation, altogether “artificial” and deliberate, of lifestyles and selective values proper to the pre-Neolithic civilisations, do themselves represent an element of directional selection, at the very least at the level of sexual selection, that should definitely not be underestimated.
Besides, human interventions of this kind represent nothing other than the “cultural” version of ethological modules that have been well described for many animal species that the cultures in question tend to imitate. Adriana del Prete reminds us in a widely circulated science monthly:
In the genetic code of certain races of bees an instruction is written that orders them to eliminate sick larvae. Honey larvae are affected by many diseases, among which an infection which destroys them; this infection is the American foulbrood. It hits some beehives with virulence, others less, while others not at all The stocks that are exempt proceed as follows: the worker bees in charge of the ‘clutch’ identifies the cell of every sick larva, removes the wax lid, extracts the larva, drags it to the hive entrance and throws it onto the garbage heap outside. Geneticists have shown the existence of two different genes: the first regulates the individuation-uncovering, the second the extraction-elimination of the infected larva. The two genes cooperate and each taken on its own is perfectly useless. The result of this collaboration is the downright prevention of the illness: stomping-out, identifying and eliminating; one must work for the health of the community. This is a monition by natural selection.”[124] Nietzsche wrote already along those lines: “It is necessary for the species that the feeble, the misshapen, the degenerate perish.”[125] And also: “It is not nature that is immoral when it is merciless to degenerates: it is the growth of the physical and moral ill-being of humans that on the contrary are the consequence of an unhealthy and unnatural morality. […] There is no solidarity in a society where there are sterile, unproductive and destructive elements that, besides, will have descendants who are even more degenerated than they.”[126]
Besides, if it is true, as Vilfredo Pareto remarks somewhat simplistically, that in a society of thieves the best thief is king, then the cultural traits themselves of a community will decide in the long run its genetic traits, indirectly influencing the reproductive success of their respective carriers. And to these traits belong not just the more or less accentuated, and technical, (in)dependence of the natural selective factors such as illnesses or famines or predators, but also the image that such a community has of itself and of its ideals, that is that which it more or less consciously intends to make of itself and of its members. This in fact decides, as is obvious, of the chances of its individual components to leave behind fertile offspring, as well as of the quality and quantity of this offspring.
This means two things: that any culture is in a certain way a “nature”; and that, accordingly, one can, in the present of our culture, read the future of its biological substratum. Perhaps a remote future; in any case still nebulous at our current state of knowledge of the mechanisms involved; a future upon which attempts at direct intervention imply obvious risks and may, as already discussed, generate effects that are totally contrary to those expected. But also a future that – in case one does not like what may be glimpsed of it, including risks of extinction – ought to induce us to think about both the structure itself of the community concerned, and about our responsibility towards it, which is altogether ours. To say that “God is dead” means precisely that such responsibility can no longer be handed over to Him; neither can it be passed on to the Market; nor to Nature.
This gets ev
en more blatant given the entirely new powers we are about to gain. “To figure out which traits we want for our children once we have the powers to make such choices, we must think long and hard about who we are,” Stock writes[127]. Let’s add: about what we really want to become. Better still, à la Nietzsche: about how to respond to the imperative “to become what we are.”
On the other hand, it is true that if the gene’s only goal is its own propagation, what instead is politically and culturally relevant is clearly the phenotype – the actual characteristics of real and concrete populations. The implausible “right-wing” recourse or trust in some supposed natural selection must reckon with the fact that the effects of modern medicine or of antibiotics are not in themselves distinguishable from those of vaccination, prophylaxis, drainage, a proper diet, hygiene, of physical education and sports for the masses, all “healthy” practices that in fact eliminate or attenuate the pre-existent objective selective pressures – practices that were especially encouraged by political regimes, which in the last century were particularly concerned with eugenics.[128]
The very same eugenic techniques, especially those that tend to limit the risk of giving birth to individuals with birth defects - in the first half of last century by means of examining the family medical history of the members of the couple and Mendelian deductions, today above all by genetically screening the parents and by prenatal diagnostics – can contribute to modifying a certain gene’s statistical success. As Harry Harris remarks, “a woman carrying the gene for haemophilia, that is, a healthy bearer, who would renounce maternity out of fear of generating haemophilic sons, subject to death by haemorrhage from the slightest accident, could opt to have children if she knows she will be able to screen and abort possible haemophilic sons, and to give birth to a female or a non-haemophilic male child of which she had become pregnant.”[129]