Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People, by John Harris

Enhancing evolution: the ethical case for making better people John Harris Princeton University Press, 2007On reflection, the expense and effort most parents will bear in order to ensure the birth of a healthy child is remarkable.1 Equally remarkable are the burdens which parents will shoulder in order to ensure that their child succeeds in life-success in terms of educational success, financial security and physical health. Until the advent of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and genetic engineering, most interventions were extrinsic to the unborn-from proper nutrition and avoiding potentially hazardous chemicals during gestation and private schools, to identifying high quality mates with whom to have children. Wanting healthy children who have the potential to do great things with their lives is a natural parental wish. Doing whatever it takes to have such children is perfectly understandable.Science has advanced to the point where it is possible to identify which embryos possess genes that underlie serious disability or are at high risk to develop chronic illness. In the near future, it may be possible to select embryos for particular physical and cognitive attributes (Shulman & Bostrom, 2014). Indeed, "successes" described earlier are correlated with intelligence, which is significantly genetic in origin. One would think that these technologies would be readily embraced by all parents.In fact, while a significant majority is in favor of using IVF screening to detect disability/disease, few are in favor of applying "IVF" and "embryo screening for strength or intelligence" (Shulman & Bostrom, 2014). However, attitudes over IVF have dramatically shifted over time, such that a significant majority opposed to IVF was 9 years later significantly in favor of it. Perhaps such a change in opinion will also occur for "embryo screening" for physical and cognitive abilities. Nonetheless present-day objections concerning the replacement of natural selection with selection by humans themselves as a process that promotes human improvement will need to be drastically altered.The current book by bioethicist Professor John Harris, University of Manchester School of Law, delves into current objections to "enhancement technologies," or technologies that increase "human capability, both physical and intellectual" and extend life, and his rebuttal against these objections. As defined by Professor Harris, processes that would lead to performance "enhancements" would also include every day treatments such as vaccines, mechanical devices (e.g. pacemakers, glasses) and health promoting medications as well as those processes that many find objectionable. Professor Harris points out that humans now have the technical ability replace Darwinian evolution by natural selection, which takes "millions of years," with "deliberate selection" or "Enhancement evolution". Rather than leave the uplifting of mankind to natural selection (or, as Professor Harris suggests, to "chance"), human improvement by "directed" enhancement evolution will be seen "almost immediately," relatively speaking. A betterment of the human species then, in Professor Harris' view, will increase everyone's socio-economic status. Furthermore, he envisions that an enhanced technological level, the result of increased cognitive ability, will lead to greatly improved natural resources management, which, in turn, will lead to an improved global environment; the world will be a "better place". The ultimate objective, to Professor Harris, of enhancement evolution is making "the world a better place".It is a rare book these days that unhesitatingly supports of the use of medical technology to increase human performance, whether applied to the embryo or adult. The current book gives indirect support to established findings that many important traits have a significant genetic component. The book explicitly supports raising intelligence via genetic manipulation at the embryonic or gamete stage. …