The piece was about Silicon Valley start-ups now getting into babies — specifically, letting parents screen embryos for disease risk and, if they’re feeling ambitious, for height, IQ, even eye colour.
The Boss read out a line about how parents could soon choose between, say, 10 embryos and add a few centimetres and a few IQ points to the finished product. Then he looked at me — the way he looks at the vet’s bill for my monthly shots.
“Imagine,” he said, “if we could have done that with you.”
I let this sit for a moment, the way you let a fly sit before you inhale it.
Because naturally, once a Chessie starts thinking about designer humans, he starts thinking about designer dogs, and it turns out we’ve had this technology since 1878. It’s called breeding, and unlike the embryo start-ups, we didn’t need a PowerPoint presentation promising a disruptive approach to waterfowl retrieval.
A century and a half of it has given the world greyhounds that can outrun a rumour, border collies that do calculus with sheep, and pugs with a face so cute and flat they can no longer breathe through the nose.
So, before anyone gets too excited about the future of selecting for desirable traits, I’d point out that we’ve already run the experiment, and the results are mixed.
For every genius sheepdog there’s a dachshund built like a thin pork sausage with a spinal disc problem waiting to happen. This is what “optimising for one trait” actually looks like, once biology sends the invoice.
Applied to dogs, though, I can see the appeal. Screen out the hip dysplasia, certainly. Screen out the tendency some retrievers have to eat entrails the fox leaves behind — I have no comment on this.
But I’d stop well short of the height-and-IQ menu, because a genuinely optimised dog is a nightmare scenario for everyone involved.
Nobody wants a dog who’s read Kant.
He'd fetch the first duck, calculate that fetching another offers diminishing utility, and lie down to write a memoir instead.
The whole point of us is that we’re irrationally, cheerfully committed to a task nobody asked us to do. That’s not a fault. Take away the enthusiastic stupidity and you’ve just built a very hairy accountant.
While the article denies it’s about eugenics here, it argues children could be bred to be a few IQ points cleverer and a few centimetres taller (although I’d like the record to show that neither of those things has ever once helped a person throw a ball straight.)
The Boss is, by his own account, clever, but he still manages to leave the stove on and burn the porridge while we’re out for a walk. Selection pressure only gets you so far. After that it’s character, and nobody’s found the gene for that yet, thank goodness, because the whole comedy of family life depends on nobody knowing what they’re going to get.
Which brings us back to his question — could a designer version of me possibly be more perfect than the model currently occupying this sunbeam? He seemed to think the answer was obvious.
I’d remind him that I get up when called, I forgive his questionable life choices by dinnertime and ask for nothing more than said dinner arriving on schedule. I'd like to see a tech wizard code loyalty that cheaply. Woof!
