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The Unnatural Selection of Our Species: At the Frontier of Gene Editing
In 2018, the first genetically-modified children were born.Now we have the tools to reshape the future of our species.
With a pair of genetic scissors known as CRISPR, we can potentially select the traits of our children, or avoid ageing, or cure disease. But with that ability comes a new set of risks, forcing us to face hard ethical questions.
Torill Kornfeldt has travelled all over the world to meet the people driving this research forward. She has visited fertility clinics in South Korea, oncologists in China who are experimenting on sick patients, and biohackers in the US who want to make the new technology available to everyone. In The Unnatural Selection of Our Species, she How are we supposed to handle these new tools that could end up changing our genetic material?
'Well written, knowledgeable, and engaging – exactly how really good popular science is supposed to be' Gustav Källstrand, Nobel Centre
With a pair of genetic scissors known as CRISPR, we can potentially select the traits of our children, or avoid ageing, or cure disease. But with that ability comes a new set of risks, forcing us to face hard ethical questions.
Torill Kornfeldt has travelled all over the world to meet the people driving this research forward. She has visited fertility clinics in South Korea, oncologists in China who are experimenting on sick patients, and biohackers in the US who want to make the new technology available to everyone. In The Unnatural Selection of Our Species, she How are we supposed to handle these new tools that could end up changing our genetic material?
'Well written, knowledgeable, and engaging – exactly how really good popular science is supposed to be' Gustav Källstrand, Nobel Centre
191 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 8, 2021
About the author
Torill Kornfeldt
4 books8 followersTorill Kornfeldt är vetenskapsjournalist, författare och föreläsare med fokus på biologi och bioteknik. Hennes första bok, Mammutens återkomst, kom ut i september 2016.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 2, 2023
Five stars for readability and relevance. What's in the book will affect everyone if they live long enough. Read to the end of this review for some quibbles.
The Unnatural Selection of Our Species: At the Frontier of Gene Editing (2021) by Torill Kornfeldt describes the evolving impact of genomics on medicine, on society, and perhaps eventually on human nature itself. Ever since Watson and Crick's (and Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling's) discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, the field of genomics has churned out discoveries and Nobel Prizes, along with a mountain of hype that tends to track far ahead of the actual progress. Humanity remains a long way from realizing the full potential of genomics, but in 2012 the discovery of CRISPR gene editing dramatically accelerated progress. Suddenly a whole range of possibilities that had seemed far away has begun to feel almost in reach.
The book focuses mostly on the still-early applications of CRISPR and the torrent of ongoing research. Kornfeldt mentions the similarly momentous technology of GWAS, but gives it less coverage. GWAS may someday become the companion technology for guiding the study and editing of complex (and often controversial) polygenic traits, such as intelligence and empathy. In the short term, the main targets for editing are likely to be the simpler 6,000+ known genetic disorders. Correcting them would eliminate a horrifying burden of disease to individuals and to society.
People generally define "disease" as an unacceptable deviation from some arbitrary baseline of health, but this is a moving target that tends to ratchet up as medical science improves. In the past for example vast numbers of people died from smallpox, and many survivors carried the scars for life, but today medical science has eradicated the disease. What was once a largely unavoidable aspect of the human condition is unacceptable today. In the future it may become unacceptable to have an IQ of less than what would be an IQ of 200 today (IQ scores are always normed to 100, so when everybody is that smart, the new average will still be 100 even though it will correspond to being vastly smarter than today's 100).
This is a good book to read along with Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People (2010) by John Harris. That book pre-dates CRISPR gene editing, and doesn't mention GWAS. Therefore, much of its discussion is hypothetical, but it deserves a post-CRISPR revisit. Harris goes into much more depth on the ethical issues that Kornfeldt barely brushes.
Genomics is a stupefyingly complex topic. Kornfeldt seems to do a pretty good job of boiling it down, but I can't judge how this book works for the newcomer since I read it after a pile of related books. For me at least the book flowed well, and Kornfeldt's narrative style is very readable in the English translation. Kornfeldt includes a large bibliography, which strangely includes only one link to a Wikipedia article. (The English Wikipedia has articles about seemingly everything in the book, if you need more information.) I recommend reading more books for background and perspective, such as:
* A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation
* Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are
* Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality
* Enzymes: A Very Short Introduction
* Evolution: A Very Short Introduction
* Genes: A Very Short Introduction
* Genomics: A Very Short Introduction
* Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
* In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence
* Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (newer 2020 edition)
* Intelligence: All That Matters
* Science Wars: Politics, Gender, and Race
* The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
* The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
* The Neuroscience of Intelligence
* The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature
* The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not
Also see the articles:
* Groups and Genes
* Super-Intelligent Humans Are Coming
***
Kornfeldt does her best to dodge the incendiary topic of race, relegating it mostly to footnotes, including:
All labels are made up, so that objection is spurious. To say there is no scientific foundation for race is like saying there is no scientific foundation for dog breeds, for beauty, for gender, or for dividing people into children and adults. Take gender for example. The great majority of people can be accurately lumped into "male" or "female". But as Kornfeldt points out elsewhere in the book, this lumping doesn't work for everybody; intersex people exist in some intermediate part of the gender continuum. Thus the Christian fundamentalist view that there are two and only two genders that accommodate everyone is clearly not true. But that doesn't mean "there's no scientific basis for gender" nor that gender is difficult to recognize visually or detect forensically most of the time. The made-up label of gender remains useful for characterizing large numbers of people quickly, as long as one doesn't deny the existence of edge cases, or pretend that everyone is wholly determined by their gender. But gender is a grouping that one ignores at their peril. In most social interactions you do not and should not treat men and women exactly the same.
As with races, the lumping into genders has often been a pretext for bigotry and oppression. But we don't fix bigots by telling people to deny the plain evidence of their senses. Even children can recognize that there are, in fact, genders and races. Instead of trying to pretend that human differences do not exist, we should teach people not to discriminate unfairly on the basis of them. And if people are too dumb to learn this (as many seem to be), then that's an excellent argument for CRISPR-ing future people to be smarter (when that becomes reliable and safe). You find a lot less bigotry at a scientific conference than at a Trump rally.
Most people are comfortable with the existence of dog breeds - probably because dog breeds aren't in the habit of oppressing or enslaving or exterminating each other. That is, nobody has a political motivation to deny dog breeds. But the domestic dog has only been around for about 15,000 years, and is therefore much less genetically diverse than modern humans, who have been diversifying around the world since going through a population bottleneck 50,000 to 75,000 years ago. Given that dogs are less diverse than humans, any argument against the existence of human races is an even stronger argument against dog breeds. And to ignore this is special pleading.
In another footnote, Kornfeldt cannot avoid bringing the race concept back, under the euphemism treadmill "population groups":
Unfortunately for people who are squeamish about the word "race," the need for the concept doesn't go away. Kornfeldt evidently thinks the reader will be too dumb to recognize she means exactly the same thing by "population groups." Given the popularity of euphemism treadmilling, perhaps assuming people are dumb is correct more often than it is wrong.
The Unnatural Selection of Our Species: At the Frontier of Gene Editing (2021) by Torill Kornfeldt describes the evolving impact of genomics on medicine, on society, and perhaps eventually on human nature itself. Ever since Watson and Crick's (and Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling's) discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, the field of genomics has churned out discoveries and Nobel Prizes, along with a mountain of hype that tends to track far ahead of the actual progress. Humanity remains a long way from realizing the full potential of genomics, but in 2012 the discovery of CRISPR gene editing dramatically accelerated progress. Suddenly a whole range of possibilities that had seemed far away has begun to feel almost in reach.
The book focuses mostly on the still-early applications of CRISPR and the torrent of ongoing research. Kornfeldt mentions the similarly momentous technology of GWAS, but gives it less coverage. GWAS may someday become the companion technology for guiding the study and editing of complex (and often controversial) polygenic traits, such as intelligence and empathy. In the short term, the main targets for editing are likely to be the simpler 6,000+ known genetic disorders. Correcting them would eliminate a horrifying burden of disease to individuals and to society.
People generally define "disease" as an unacceptable deviation from some arbitrary baseline of health, but this is a moving target that tends to ratchet up as medical science improves. In the past for example vast numbers of people died from smallpox, and many survivors carried the scars for life, but today medical science has eradicated the disease. What was once a largely unavoidable aspect of the human condition is unacceptable today. In the future it may become unacceptable to have an IQ of less than what would be an IQ of 200 today (IQ scores are always normed to 100, so when everybody is that smart, the new average will still be 100 even though it will correspond to being vastly smarter than today's 100).
This is a good book to read along with Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People (2010) by John Harris. That book pre-dates CRISPR gene editing, and doesn't mention GWAS. Therefore, much of its discussion is hypothetical, but it deserves a post-CRISPR revisit. Harris goes into much more depth on the ethical issues that Kornfeldt barely brushes.
Genomics is a stupefyingly complex topic. Kornfeldt seems to do a pretty good job of boiling it down, but I can't judge how this book works for the newcomer since I read it after a pile of related books. For me at least the book flowed well, and Kornfeldt's narrative style is very readable in the English translation. Kornfeldt includes a large bibliography, which strangely includes only one link to a Wikipedia article. (The English Wikipedia has articles about seemingly everything in the book, if you need more information.) I recommend reading more books for background and perspective, such as:
* A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation
* Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are
* Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality
* Enzymes: A Very Short Introduction
* Evolution: A Very Short Introduction
* Genes: A Very Short Introduction
* Genomics: A Very Short Introduction
* Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
* In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence
* Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (newer 2020 edition)
* Intelligence: All That Matters
* Science Wars: Politics, Gender, and Race
* The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
* The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
* The Neuroscience of Intelligence
* The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature
* The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not
Also see the articles:
* Groups and Genes
* Super-Intelligent Humans Are Coming
***
Kornfeldt does her best to dodge the incendiary topic of race, relegating it mostly to footnotes, including:
One aspect of genetics and origins I don’t cover in this book is the issue of human ‘races’. There are good reasons for its omission, as the concept of ‘race’ lacks any scientific foundation. It is rooted in obsolete ideas about human genetics. To find out more, the following article provides a good starting point: Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘There’s no scientific basis for race – it’s a made-up label’, National Geographic (12 March 2018):
All labels are made up, so that objection is spurious. To say there is no scientific foundation for race is like saying there is no scientific foundation for dog breeds, for beauty, for gender, or for dividing people into children and adults. Take gender for example. The great majority of people can be accurately lumped into "male" or "female". But as Kornfeldt points out elsewhere in the book, this lumping doesn't work for everybody; intersex people exist in some intermediate part of the gender continuum. Thus the Christian fundamentalist view that there are two and only two genders that accommodate everyone is clearly not true. But that doesn't mean "there's no scientific basis for gender" nor that gender is difficult to recognize visually or detect forensically most of the time. The made-up label of gender remains useful for characterizing large numbers of people quickly, as long as one doesn't deny the existence of edge cases, or pretend that everyone is wholly determined by their gender. But gender is a grouping that one ignores at their peril. In most social interactions you do not and should not treat men and women exactly the same.
As with races, the lumping into genders has often been a pretext for bigotry and oppression. But we don't fix bigots by telling people to deny the plain evidence of their senses. Even children can recognize that there are, in fact, genders and races. Instead of trying to pretend that human differences do not exist, we should teach people not to discriminate unfairly on the basis of them. And if people are too dumb to learn this (as many seem to be), then that's an excellent argument for CRISPR-ing future people to be smarter (when that becomes reliable and safe). You find a lot less bigotry at a scientific conference than at a Trump rally.
Most people are comfortable with the existence of dog breeds - probably because dog breeds aren't in the habit of oppressing or enslaving or exterminating each other. That is, nobody has a political motivation to deny dog breeds. But the domestic dog has only been around for about 15,000 years, and is therefore much less genetically diverse than modern humans, who have been diversifying around the world since going through a population bottleneck 50,000 to 75,000 years ago. Given that dogs are less diverse than humans, any argument against the existence of human races is an even stronger argument against dog breeds. And to ignore this is special pleading.
In another footnote, Kornfeldt cannot avoid bringing the race concept back, under the euphemism treadmill "population groups":
One of the problems with linking genome-wide association studies to both diseases and heredity is the highly skewed nature of the population screened. Various scientists are working to include more people and more data from under-represented population groups. There’s a good account of these efforts in Giorgia Guglielmi, ‘Facing up to injustice in genome science’, Nature (16 April 2019)So how can this be? If there is no scientific foundation for human races, why do genetic studies of humans need to include humans from different "population groups"? Could it be that these "population groups" in fact have important genetic differences, and to ignore these differences constitutes an "injustice"?
Unfortunately for people who are squeamish about the word "race," the need for the concept doesn't go away. Kornfeldt evidently thinks the reader will be too dumb to recognize she means exactly the same thing by "population groups." Given the popularity of euphemism treadmilling, perhaps assuming people are dumb is correct more often than it is wrong.
April 11, 2023
Very insightful read, with recent examples mapping the development of genetic editing technology globally. Palatable and easily digestible, this book provides many interesting angles on gene editing technology and its bioethical concerns.
Read
January 19, 2022This book is written in a way that allows the idea of gene editing to be manageable for the average reader. As someone obtaining a degree in the field, it was a welcome change of pace to see the variety of potential advantages and disadvantages presented in this way.
April 13, 2022
***ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley.co.uk in return for an honest review ***
A really good read with lots of interesting information. I thought the author was really effective at breaking down a complex information into digestible chunks making the book accessible to a much wider audience.
I've already added another of the author's book to my reading list so that speaks for itself!
A really good read with lots of interesting information. I thought the author was really effective at breaking down a complex information into digestible chunks making the book accessible to a much wider audience.
I've already added another of the author's book to my reading list so that speaks for itself!
April 10, 2022
This book is great for someone who is a newbie in a gene world. Even the most complex information is written in such an accessible way. Even though it felt a little bit repetitive at times, I still recommend to check this book out.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.
June 25, 2023
Note: I received this copy from Netgalley as an ARC. This has not impacted my review.
I really loved this book - breaking down gene editing into terms and concepts that could be read by laypersons. It's a thoroughly engaging topic that is yet to be truly explored in any books I have encountered previously.
I know know infinitely more about CRISPR and the repercussions of gene editing on a society - including the premise of increasing our IQ and life expectancy in the near future and essentially "beating evolution".
I thoroughly recommend this title to anyone who is interested in gene editing but has always been too afraid to dive in due to its perceived complexity.
I really loved this book - breaking down gene editing into terms and concepts that could be read by laypersons. It's a thoroughly engaging topic that is yet to be truly explored in any books I have encountered previously.
I know know infinitely more about CRISPR and the repercussions of gene editing on a society - including the premise of increasing our IQ and life expectancy in the near future and essentially "beating evolution".
I thoroughly recommend this title to anyone who is interested in gene editing but has always been too afraid to dive in due to its perceived complexity.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews