Article: Edge/What Should We Be Worried About Poll

[LWPD]

Online magazine Edge recently conducted their annual poll question, this time regarding what 'we' should be worried about. The responses come from a grouping of top scientists, technologists, writers, and academics. This project offers a worthwhile look at a very diverse range ideas, many of which may not be on the mainstream radar, but probably should be.

Courtesy of Edge.org

We worry because we are built to anticipate the future. Nothing can stop us from worrying, but science can teach us how to worry better, and when to stop worrying.

WHAT SHOULD WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

Tell us something that worries you (for scientific reasons), but doesn't seem to be on the popular radar yet—and why it should be. Or tell us something that you have stopped worrying about, even if others do, and why it should be taken off the radar.

List of Contributors

Full Responses

Summary

1. The proliferation of Chinese eugenics. – Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist.

2. Black swan events, and the fact that we continue to rely on models that have been proven fraudulent. – Nassem Nicholas Taleb

3. That we will be unable to defeat viruses by learning to push them beyond the error catastrophe threshold. – William McEwan, molecular biology researcher

4. That pseudoscience will gain ground. – Helena Cronin, author, philospher

5. That the age of accelerating technology will overwhelm us with opportunities to be worried. – Dan Sperber, social and cognitive scientist

6. Genuine apocalyptic events. The growing number of low-probability events that could lead to the total devastation of human society. – Martin Rees, former president of the Royal Society

7. The decline in science coverage in newspapers. – Barbara Strauch, New York Times science editor
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8. Exploding stars, the eventual collapse of the Sun, and the problems with the human id that prevent us from dealing with them. -- John Tooby, founder of the field of evolutionary psychology

9. That the internet is ruining writing. – David Gelernter, Yale computer scientist

10. That smart people like those who contribute to Edge don’t do politics. –Brian Eno, musician

11. That there will be another supernova-like financial disaster. –Seth Lloyd, professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering at MIT

12. That search engines will become arbiters of truth. --W. Daniel Hillis, physicist

13. The dearth of desirable mates is something we should worry about, for "it lies behind much human treachery and brutality.” –David M. Buss, professor of psychology at U of T

14. “I’m worried that our technology is helping to bring the long, postwar consensus against fascism to an end.” –David Bodanis, writer, futurist

15. That we will continue to uphold taboos on bad words. –Benhamin Bergen, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, UCS

16. Data disenfranchisement. –David Rowan, editor, Wired UK

17. That digital technologies are sapping our patience and changing our perception of time. –Nicholas G. Carr, author

18. An “underpopulation bomb.” –Kevin Kelly, editor-at-large, Wired.

19. That funding for big experiments will dry up, and they won’t happen. –Lisa Randall, Harvard physicist

20. “I worry that as the problem-solving power of our technologies increases, our ability to distinguish between important and trivial or even non-existent problems diminishes.” –Evgeny Morozov, contributing editor, Foreign Policy

21. Not much. I ride motorcycles without a helmet. –J. Craig Venter, genomic scientist

22. Catharsis is a transcendent joy that—can you repeat question? –Andrian Kreye, editor, German Daily Newspaper

23. “I've given up asking questions. l merely float on a tsunami of acceptance of anything life throws at me... and marvel stupidly.” (complete answer)--Terry Gilliam

24. “We should be worried about the new era of Anthropocene—not only as a geological phenomenon, but also as a cultural frame.” –Jennifer Jacquet, clinical assistant professor of environmental studies, NYU

25. Cultural extinction, and the fact that the works of an obscure writer from the Caribbean may not get enough attention. –Hans Ulrich Obrist. curator, Serptine Gallery

26. The Danger Of Inadvertently Praising Zygomatic Arches. --Robert Sopolsky, neuroscientist

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27. That we will stop dying. –Kate Jeffery, professor of behavioural neuroscience

28. That there are an infinity of universes out there, but that we are only able to study the one we live in. –Lawrence M. Krauss, physicist/cosmologist

29. The rise of anti-intellectualism and the end of progress. “We’ve now, for the first time, got a single global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together.” –Tim O’Reilly, CEO and founder of O'Reilly Media

30. We should worry about several "modern" States that, in practical terms, are shaped by crime; States in which bills and laws are promulgated by criminals and, even worse, legitimized through formal and "legal" democracy. – Eduardo Salcedo-albaran, Colombian philosopher

31. “We should worry that so much of our science and technology still uses just five main models of probability—even though there are more probability models than there are real numbers.” –Bart Kosko, information scientist

32. “It is possible that we are rare, fleeting specks of awareness in an unfeeling cosmic desert, the only witnesses to its wonder. It is also possible that we are living in a universal sea of sentience, surrounded by ecstasy and strife that is open to our influence. Sensible beings that we are, both possibilities should worry us.” Timo Hannay, publisher

33. Men. –Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist

34. The social media-fication of science writing. –Michael I. Norton, Harvard Business School prof

35. Humanity’s unmitigated arrogance. –Jessica L. Tracy, professor of psychology

36. That technology may endanger democracy. –Haim Harari, physicist

37. Don’t worry—there won’t be a singularity. –Bruce Sterling, sci-fi author

38. Mutually-assured destruction. –Vernor Vinge, mathematician, computer scientist, author

39. “The diversion of intellectual effort from innovation to exploitation, the distraction of incessant warfare, rising fundamentalism” may trigger a Dark Age. –Frank Wilczek, MIT physicist

40. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us better than we tend to be. It seems to me that the greatest challenge we now face is to build them. –Sam Harris, neuroscientist

41. "I worry that we don't really understand quantum phenomena” –Lee Smolin, physicist

42. That Americans are homogenizing and exporting their view of a normal mind around the world. –P. Murali Doraiswamy, professor of psychiatry

43. The future of science publishing. --Marco Iacoboni, neuroscientist

44. That the new digital public sphere isn’t really so public. –Andrew Lih, journalism professor

45. “I further postuate we should in fact be "Worried" not just about a single selected problem, but about all possible problems.” –Richard Foreman, playwright and director

46. Stress. –Arianna Huffington, aggregationist extraordinaire

47. “We should be worried that science has not yet brought us closer to understanding cancer.” Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing

48. That we will literally lose touch with the physical world. –Christine Finn, archaeologist.

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49. “We should all be worried about the gaping psychological chasm separating humanity from nature” –Scott Sampson, dinosaur paleontologist.

50. That we are becoming too connected. –Gino Segre, professor of physics & astronomy

51. That we will worry too much. –Joseph LeDoux, neuroscientist

52. “What worries me is that we are increasingly enmeshed in incompetent systems, that is, systems that exhibit pathological behaviour but can't fix themselves.” –John Naughton, Edge editor

53. Too much coupling. –Steven Strogatz, professor of applied mathematics, Cornell

54. That the internet will end up benefiting existing power structures and not society in general. –Bruce Schneier, security technologist

55. That this year’s Edge topic has been poorly chosen. –Kai Krause, software pioneer

56. That we will see the end of fundamental science –Mario Livio, astrophysicist

57. The paradox of material progress. –Rolf Dobelli, journalist and author

58. That we will become like rats stuck in a blue marble trap. –Gregory Benford, prof of physics and astronomy

59. That humankind will stop pursuing close observation. –Ursula Martin, computer scientist

60. “What worries me is the ongoing "greying" of the world population, which is uneven globally but widespread.” --David Berreby, journalist and author

61. “We should be worrying about a growing dominance of the Fourth [pop] Culture and how it may directly or indirectly affect us all." –Bruce Parker, professor

62. The coming fight between engineers and druids. –Paul Saffo, technology forecaster

63. “As someone fairly committed to the death of our solar system and ultimately the entropy of the universe, I think the question of what we should worry about is irrelevant in the end.” –Bruce Hood, mondo-bummer

64. A scarcity of water resources. –Giulio Boccaletti, physicist

65. That we "are inarticulately lost in Modernity. Many of us seem to sense the end of something, perhaps a futile meaninglessness in our Modernity.” -- Stuart A. Kauffman, professor of biological sciences, physics, and astronomy

66. “ I worry about the lost opportunity of denying the world's teenagers access to education.” Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

67. Augmented reality. –William Poundstone, journalist.

68. That big data and new media will mean the end of facts. --Victoria Stodden, computational legal scholar, statistics professor

69. That we will spend too much time on social media. --Marcel Kinsbourne, neurologist

70. That Idiocracy is looming. –Douglas T. Kenrick, psychology professor

71. That the gap between news and understanding is widening. --Gavin Schmidt, NASA climatologist

72. “I worry we have yet to have a conversation about what seems to be a developing "new normal" about the presence of screens in the playroom and kindergarten” --Sherry Turkle, pshcyhologist, MIT

73. “That we will become irrationally impatient with science” --Stuart Firestein, professor who is working as hard as he can, dammit

74. That we will get our hopes up for interstellar space travel, because it’s not going to happen. --Ed Regis, science writer

75. That global cooperation is failing and we don’t know why. --Daniel Haun

76. That we worry too much. –Joel Gold, psychiatrist

77. “I worry more and more about what will happen to the generations of children who don't have the uniquely human gift of a long, protected, stable childhood.” --Alison Gopnik

78. That synthetic biology will spiral out of control. –Seirian Summer, lecturer in behavioral biology

79. The death of mathematics. -- Keith Devlin, mathematician

80. That we will outsource too many skills to machines. –Susan Blackmore, psychologist

81. “We should be worried about online silos. They make us stupid and hostile toward each other.” –Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia

82. That we worry too much. –Gary Klein, scientist at MacroCognition

83. That the human species will lose the will to survive. –Dave Winer, Blogging and RSS software pioneer

84. The surplus of testosterone caused by a gender gap in China. –Robert Kurzban, psychologist

85. “A worry that is not yet on the scientific or cultural agenda is neural data privacy rights” --Melanie Swan, systems-level thinker, futurist

86. Armageddon. –Timothy Taylor, archaeologist

87. There’s nothing to worry about, even though the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t turned up any new discoveries. --Amanda Gefter, editor

88. “What I worry most about is that we are more and more losing the formal and informal bridges between different intellectual, mental and humanistic approaches to seeing the world.” -- Anton Zeilinger, physicist

89. That we worry too much. –Donald D. Hoffman, cognitive scientist

90. The Growing Gap Between The Scientific Elite And The Vast "Scientifically Challenged" Majority -- Leo M. Chalupa, ophthalmologist and neurobiologist

91. “I worry about the prospect of collective amnesia.” –Nogra Arikha, historian of ideas

92. That we worry too much. –Brian Knutson, associate professor of psychology

93. That we do not understand the dynamics of our emerging global culture. –Kirsten Bomblies, assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology

94. “We should worry about losing lust as the guiding principle for the reproduction of our species.” –Tor Norretranders, science writer

95. That we worry too much, but about fictional violence. –Jonathan Gottschall, English professor

96. “We should be worried about the consequences of our increasing knowledge of what causes disease, and its consequences for human freedom” –Esther Dyson, Catalyst, Information Tech Startups

97. Natural death. --Antony Garrett Lisi, theoretical physicist

98. “What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary” -- Simon Baron-Cohen, psychologist

99. The demise of the scholar. --Daniel L. Everett, linguistic researcher

100. The Unavoidable Intrusion Of Sociopolitical Forces Into Science. --Nicholas A Christakis, physician

101. "I am worried about who gets to be players in the science game—and who is left out.” –Stephon H. Alexander, physicist

102. “The fact that so many people choose to live in ways that narrow the community of fate to a very limited set of others and to define the rest as threatening to their way of life and values is deeply worrying because this contemporary form of tribalism, and the ideologies that support it, enable them to deny complex and more crosscutting mutual interdependencies—local, national, and international—and to elude their own role in creating long-term threats to their own wellbeing and that of others.” --Margaret Levi, political scientist

103, 104. That we will be unable to facilitate effective synergies. --Stephen M. Kosslyn, Robin S. Rosenberg, psychologists, synergy fans

105. I’m not worried about Super-AIs ruling the world. --Andy Clark, philosopher and cognitive scientist

106. The posthuman geography that will result when robots have taken all our jobs. –David Dalrymple, MIT researcher

107. That aliens pose a danger to human civilization. --Seth Shostak, SETI astronomer

108. That the role of microorganisms in cancer is being ignored by the current sequencing strategies employed by the medical community. –Azra Raza, M.D.

109. That humankind’s social and moral intuitions will stifle technological process. –David Pizarro, psychologist

110. “The illusion of knowledge and understanding that can result from having information so readily and effortlessly available.” -- Tania Lombrozo, assistant professor of psychology

111. The end of hardship inoculation –Adam Alter, psychologist

112. The exploding number of illegal drugs. –Thomas Metzinger, philosopher

113. Superstition. –Matt Ridley, science writer

114. That historically entrenched institutions will prevent technological progress. --Paul Kedrosky, editor

115. That “in one or two generations children will grow up to be adults who will not be able to tell reality from imagination.” --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist

116. That we worry too much. –Virginia Heffernan, Yahoo News correspondent

117. “We should be worried about how we go about finding the wisdom to allow us to navigate developments as we begin to improve our ability to cheaply print human tissue, grow synthetic brains, have robots take care of our old parents, let the Internet educate our children” –Luca De Biase, journalist

118. That genomics may fail us when it comes to mental disorders. --Terrence J. Sejnowski, computational neuroscientist

119. “What really keeps me awake at night is that we face a crisis within the deepest foundations of physics. The only way out seems to involve profound revision of fundamental physical principles." –Steve Giddings, theoretical physicist

120. “The most worrying aspect of our society is the low index of suspicion that we have about the behavior of normal people.” –Karl Sabbagh, writer, TV producer

121. “Many people worry that there is not enough democracy in the world; I worry that we might never go beyond democracy.” –Dylan Evans, CEO of Projection Point

122. Not population growth, but prosperity growth—the prospect of the entire world consuming resources like Americans and Westerners do. –Laurence C. Smith, geography professor

123. That we’ll begin to treat technology like magic. –Neil Gershenfeld, MIT physicist

124. The rise in genomic instability. –Eric J. Topol, M.D., professor of genomics

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125. That authorities and companies will soon be able to read people’s brains. –Stanislas Dehaene, neuroscientist

126. That economic growth will halt. –Satyajit Das, financial expert

127. “I worry that free imagination is overvalued, and I think this carries risks.” –Carlo Rovelli, theoretical physicist

128. That we worry too much. –James J. O’Donnell, classical scholar

129. That we worry too much. –Robert Provine, neuroscientist

130. That we won’t have enough robots to do all the jobs we’ll need them to do in coming decades. –Rodney A. Brooks, roboticist

131. That we will have no Plan B when the internet inevitably breaks down. –George Dyson, science historian

132. The Singularity. That we “are curiously complacent about life as we know it getting transformed. What we should be worried about is that we're not worried.” –Max Tegmark, MIT physicist

133. “There are known knowns and known unknowns, but what we should be worried about most is the unknown unknowns.” –Gary Marcus, cognitive scientist

134. That the brain is unable to conceive of our most serious problems. –Daniel Goleman, psychologist

135. “We should be worried that scientists have given up the search for determining right and wrong and which values lead to human flourishing just as the research tools for doing so are coming online” –Michael Shermer, publisher, Skeptic magazine

136. The loss of our collective cognition and awareness. –Douglass Rushkoff, media analyst

137. The decline of the science hero. –Roger Highfield, Director, Science Museum Group

138. That we are unable to identify “the good life.” –David Christian, historian

139. Electric tattooing on Facebook and beyond. –Juan Enriquez

140. Federal regulatory capture—ie, the fox watching the hen house in industries like oil and coal extraction. –Charles Seife, journalism professor

141. “Society's Parlous Inability To Reason About Uncertainty” –Aubrey De Grey, Gerontologist

142. That knowledge is getting too fast. –Nicholas Humphrey, prof. at the London School of Economics

143. The "Nightmare Scenario" For Fundamental Physics. Peter Woit, mathematical physicist

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144. The homogenization of the human experience. –Scott Atran, anthropologist

145. That we won’t be able to understand everything. –Clifford Pickover, math author

146. That we worry too much, and “package our worries” in a deleterious fashion. –Mary Catherine Bateson, professor emerita

147. That because of climate change, resource shortages, drones, or other unanticipated reasons, a major war will arise. –Steven Pinker, psychologist

148. Stupidity. –Roger Schank, psychologist

149. I have stopped worrying about the problem of free will, because it will never be settled. –Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education

150. That science is in danger of becoming the enemy of humankind. –Colin Tudge, biologist, editor at New Scientist

151. That we will be unable to live without the internet. –Daniel C. Dennet, philosopher

[LWPD]

Zero population growth is a very real issue in developed parts of the world. Immigration policy currently prevents America from facing the same daunting demographic challenges found in greying nations such as Japan, Germany and Russia. Yet if this trend eventually becomes a world wide norm, Kevin Kelly may look like Nostradamus.

The Underpopulation Bomb
Kevin Kelly
Editor at Large, Wired, Author-What Technology Wants

For many years overpopulation was the Ur-worry. The prospect of too many people on a finite planet stood behind common environmental worries from pollution to global warming. Significant numbers of educated couples skipped having children at all, or no more than one, so they would do their part in preventing overpopulation. In China, having a single child was a forced decision.

While the global population of humans will continue to rise for at least another 40 years, demographic trends in full force today make it clear that a much bigger existential threat lies in global underpopulation.

That worry seems preposterous at first. We've all seen the official graph of expected human population growth. A steady rising curve swells past us now at 6 billion and peaks out about 2050. The tally at the expected peak continues to be downgraded by experts; currently UN demographers predict 9.2 billion at the top. The peak may off by a billion or so, but in broad sweep the chart is correct.

But curiously, the charts never show what happens on the other side of the peak. The second half is so often missing that no one even asks for it any longer. It may be because it is pretty scary news. The untold story of the hidden half of the chart is that it projects a steady downward plunge toward fewer and fewer people on the planet each year—and no agreement on how close to zero it can go. In fact there is much more agreement about the peak, than about how few people there will be on the planet in a 100 years.

A lower global population is something that many folks would celebrate. The reason it is scary is that the low will keep getting lower. All around the world the fertility rate is dropping below replacement level country by country so that globally there will soon be an un-sustaining population. With negative population growth each generation produces fewer offspring, who producer fewer still, till there are none. Right now Japan's population is way below replacement level, as is most of Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Former Soviet Republics, and some Asia countries. It goes further; Japan, Germany and Ukraine have absolute population decline; they are already experiencing the underpopulation bomb.

The shocking news is that the developing world is not far behind. While they are above replacement level, their birthrates are dropping fast. Much of Africa, South America, the Mid-East and Iran have fertility rates that are dropping fast. The drop in fertility has recently stalled in some sub-Sahara African nations but that is because development there has stalled. When development resumes, fertility will drop again—because fertility rates are linked to urbanity. There is a deep feedback cycle: the more technologically developed a society becomes, the fewer offspring couples will have, the easier it is for them to raise their living standards, the more that progress lowers their desire for large families. The result is the spiral of modern technological population decline—a new but now universal pattern.

All that it would take to break this downward spiral is that many women living in cities all around the world decide to have more than 2 children in order to raise the average fertility level to 2.1 children. That means substantial numbers of couples would have to have 3 or 4 children in urban areas to make up for those with none or only one. It is possible it could become fashionable to have 4 kids in the city. The problem is that these larger families are not happening anywhere where the population has become urban, and urbanity is now the majority mode of the population and becoming more-so. Every developed country on the planet is experiencing falling birth rates. The one exception has been the US because of its heavy immigration, primarily because of catholic Hispanic immigrants, but even that is changing. The most recent report shows that the birth rates of Hispanic immigrants in the US is dropping faster than ever. Soon the US will be on par with the rest of the world with plunging birth rates.

To counter this scary population implosion Japan, Russia, Australia pay bonuses for newborns. Singapore (with the lowest fertility rate in the world) will pay couples $5,000 for a first child and up to $18,000 for a third child—but to no avail; Singapore's rate is less than 1 child per woman. In the past drastic remedies for reducing fertility rates were difficult, but they worked. Drastic remedies for increasing fertility don't seem to work so far.

Our global population is aging. The moment of peak youth on this planet was in 1972. Ever since then the average age on Earth has been getting older each year, and there is no end in sight for the aging of the world for the next several hundred years! The world will need the young to work and pay for medical care of the previous generation, but the young will be in short supply. Mexico is aging faster than the US, so all those young migrant workers that seem to be a problem now will soon be in demand back at home. In fact after the peak, individual countries will race against each other to import workers, modifying immigration policies, but these individual successes and failures cancel out and won't affect the global picture.

The picture for the latter half of this century will look like this: Increasing technology, cool stuff that extends human life; more older people who live longer, millions of robots, but few young people. Another way to look at the human population in 100 years from now is that we'll have the same number of over-60-year olds, but several billion fewer youth.

We have no experience throughout human history with declining population and rising progress (including during the Black Plague years). Some modern countries with recent population decline have experienced an initial rise in GDP because there are fewer "captias" in the per capita calculation, but this masks long-term diminishment. But there can always be a first time! We might be able to figure it out.

Here is the challenge: this is a world where every year there is a smaller audience than the year before, a smaller market for your goods or services, fewer workers to choose from, and a ballooning elder population that must be cared for. We've never seen this in modern times; our progress has always paralleled rising populations, bigger audiences, larger markets and bigger pools of workers. It is hard to see how a declining yet aging population functions as an engine for increasing the standard of living every year. To do so would require a completely different economic system, one that we are not prepared for at all right now.

The challenges of a peak human population are real, but we know what we have to do; the challenges of a dwindling human population tending toward zero in a developed world are scarier because we've never been there before. It's something to worry about.

[LWPD]

An interesting point and counter-point spouting from Geoffrey Miller's controversial views on the 'threat' of China's eugenics program. Original article followed by a critique.

Geoffrey Miller
Evolutionary psychologist, NYU Stern Business School and University of New Mexico; author of The Mating Mind and Spent
Chinese Eugenics

China has been running the world's largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China's ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.

When I learned about Chinese eugenics this summer, I was astonished that its population policies had received so little attention. China makes no secret of its eugenic ambitions, in either its cultural history or its government policies.

For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, more recently, the Chinese gene-pool (jiyinku). Traditional Chinese medicine focused on preventing birth defects, promoting maternal health and "fetal education" (taijiao) during pregnancy, and nourishing the father's semen (yangjing) and mother's blood (pingxue) to produce bright, healthy babies (see Frank Dikötter's book Imperfect Conceptions). Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and "the science of deformed fetuses" (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China's rightful place as the world's leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism. The Communist revolution kept these eugenic ideals from having much policy impact for a few decades though. Mao Zedong was too obsessed with promoting military and manufacturing power, and too terrified of peasant revolt, to interfere with traditional Chinese reproductive practices.

But then Deng Xiaoping took power after Mao's death. Deng had long understood that China would succeed only if the Communist Party shifted its attention from economic policy to population policy. He liberalized markets, but implemented the one-child policy —partly to curtail China's population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic fertility among rural peasants. Throughout the 1980s, Chinese propaganda urges couples to have children "later, longer, fewer, better"—at a later age, with a longer interval between birth, resulting in fewer children of higher quality. With the 1995 Maternal and Infant Health Law (known as the Eugenic Law until Western opposition forced a name change), China forbade people carrying heritable mental or physical disorders from marrying, and promoted mass prenatal ultrasound testing for birth defects. Deng also encouraged assortative mating through promoting urbanization and higher education, so bright, hard-working young people could meet each other more easily, increasing the proportion of children who would be at the upper extremes of intelligence and conscientiousness.

One of Deng's legacies is China's current strategy of maximizing "Comprehensive National Power". This includes economic power (GDP, natural resources, energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, owning America's national debt), military power (cyberwarfare, anti-aircraft-carrier ballistic missiles, anti-satellite missiles), and 'soft power' (cultural prestige, the Beijing Olympics, tourism, Chinese films and contemporary art, Confucius Institutes, Shanghai's skyscrapers). But crucially, Comprehensive National Power also includes "biopower": creating the world's highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population's genes, health, and education (see Governing China's Population by Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winkler).

Chinese biopower has ancient roots in the concept of "yousheng" ("good birth"—which has the same literal meaning as "eugenics"). For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children. The current "gaokao" exams for university admission, taken by more than 10 million young Chinese per year, are just the updated version of these imperial exams—the route to educational, occupation, financial, and marital success. With the relaxation of the one-child policy, wealthier couples can now pay a "social fostering fee" (shehui fuyangfei) to have an extra child, restoring China's traditional link between intelligence, education, wealth, and reproductive success.

Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more "next-generation" DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state. Given what I understand of evolutionary behavior genetics, I expect—and hope—that they will succeed. The welfare and happiness of the world's most populous country depends upon it.

My real worry is the Western response. The most likely response, given Euro-American ideological biases, would be a bioethical panic that leads to criticism of Chinese population policy with the same self-righteous hypocrisy that we have shown in criticizing various Chinese socio-cultural policies. But the global stakes are too high for us to act that stupidly and short-sightedly. A more mature response would be based on mutual civilizational respect, asking—what can we learn from what the Chinese are doing, how can we help them, and how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world?
_______________________________________________________________

Courtesy of eastasiastudent.net
Outrageously bad “Chinese Eugenics” article published on Edge.org
By Hugh Grigg

In Edge.org‘s 2013 collection ‘What Should We Be Worried About?’, the first piece is ‘Chinese Eugenics‘ by Geoffrey Miller. It’s one of the worst nonsense-mines I’ve ever tumbled into. Apart from being classic, semi-racist “China is going to take over the world” fear-mongering, it’s also wildly inaccurate and misleading, and just completely wrong in many places.

Irritatingly, the Edge.org interface doesn’t seem to let you comment directly on individual articles, so I’m making my response a full post here. Just to give you a taste of what Miller’s article is all about, here’s a quote from the first paragraph:

China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization.

Total misrepresentation of the one-child policy

The main premise of Miller’s article is that there’s an orchestrated eugenics regime in China that’s been taking place on a huge scale for a few decades, but even before that this idea has been central to Chinese culture since the dawn of time. Now, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there is / was eugenics research going on in China, even on a large scale (as there was in many countries in the 20th century, including the USA), but it’s nothing like how Miller tries to claim.

It would have been quite interesting if Miller actually documented or gave any evidence at all for “the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program” of which “China makes no secret … in either its cultural history or its government policies”. But he doesn’t – he just makes some vague hints about it and tries to link to to much larger, better known policies such as the one-child policy.

Miller seems to think that the one-child policy isn’t just about controlling China’s population growth (that is what it’s for), but also about somehow ensuring that better genes are passed on. He doesn’t give any evidence for this whatsoever, and doesn’t even explain quite how this would work scientifically. Each couple being limited to one birth doesn’t somehow make the children “higher quality” (Miller’s term).

What the one-child policy does do is reduce population pressure on infrastructure, health, education etc. etc. that the Chinese state is still struggling with anyway. It’s not like this is a mysterious area with little research – the whole world knows about the one-child policy and there’s masses and masses of research on it. There would at least be hints in academia if there was some sort of eugenics conspiracy or program wrapped up in the one-child policy.

The Chinese government also seems to be wrapped up in an internal debate about whether or not to relax the one-child policy, as it’s currently generating a dangerous side-effect: a top-heavy population with, to put it bluntly, too many old people and not enough young people. That doesn’t seem to me to be the expected result of a finely crafted mass-eugenics program.

The other thing that Miller totally glosses over (or is just ignorant of) is that the one-child policy is a) very badly implemented in many places and b) has had all sorts of terrible side-effects (other than the top-heavy population issue). The first point is that the one-child policy is not evenly implemented, and is very vulnerable to corruption, loop-holes, mismanagement etc. etc.

The second point is that the one-child policy is creating huge social problems, particularly a dangerous gender imbalance. China’s population is steadily moving towards a higher proportion of males, which is really dodgy territory for a society. As well as that, having too many males is bad for a population genetically, completely going against Miller’s point.

Update: Pete pointed out in the comments that the one-child policy is actually set up in such a way that non-Han ethnicities and the rural poor have more children than Han urbanites. Again, this is the complete opposite of Miller’s argument.

A healthy babies conspiracy!

The “Chinese Eugenics” article also tries to claim that the concept of eugenics is not a modern addition to Chinese knowledge and culture. Apparently, this has long been a particular concern of the Chinese, and they’ve always made efforts to ensure that their babies are healthy and intelligent.

If that sounds totally normal and unremarkable to you, that’s because it is. Every culture everywhere since ever has been interested in healthy babies. It’s human nature. It’s not even just human nature, it’s just nature. There is nothing interesting about the fact that trying to create healthy babies is important in Chinese culture.
Pointless pinyin

There are many stupid things in Miller’s article, but one of the most stupid is his pointless insertion of pinyin (the standard romanisation system for Mandarin Chinese) for terms he uses. Inserting pinyin like this is fairly standard practice in academic literature, supposedly because it makes it easier for people to follow the terms being used and to look them up if necessary. However, this only makes sense if you’re quoting a translation of a Chinese source or are referencing actual Chinese terms.

If you’re not, then there is absolutely no point whatsoever in inserting the pinyin. Why not insert the terms in Arabic or French? Miller has randomly sprayed his article with the pinyin for translations of English terms he uses, but for no reason. We can look the terms he uses up in an English-Chinese dictionary if we want to know what they are in Chinese. Here’s an example:

For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, more recently, the Chinese gene-pool (jiyinku).

See how pointless that is? He’s not using Chinese terms or a quoting from a translation, he’s just inserting pinyin for his English, presumably because he thinks this makes it look more legitimate. Perhaps (yexu) we should all try this technique (zuofa), as it will certainly (kending hui) make everything we write (women suoyou xiede dongxi) seem more believable (kanqilai geng kexinde).

Hard and soft power

Moving on, Miller tries to claim that China is going from strength to strength with its hard and soft power abroad. One strategy for this is apparently “owning America’s national debt”. That China completely owns America’s national debt is a common misconception and a favourite of fear-mongering politicians (I wonder why Miller included it).

Unfortunately, it’s not true. China owns about 7% of America’s national debt. It’s still a significant chunk, but it’s nothing like what Miller implies by failing to give the real figure when he says “owning America’s national debt”. Plus debt is not a good investment, and if the US economy goes bad then so will China’s. This arrangement doesn’t give China any real ‘power’, hard or soft, over the US.

The idea that China is working its soft power influence across the globe is a complete joke. China does not have a good image in the vast majority of countries, and a lot of layers in its government seem to be trying as hard as they can to make this worse. See this, this and this for some quick-fire examples of hilariously bad soft power cock-ups from media and government organisations in China.

Total misrepresentation of China’s education system

Miller then decides to turn his attention to another famously-flawed area of modern China: its education system. I’ve written before about how badly the media in other countries misrepresents China’s education system. According to Miller, though, it’s producing a generation of intellectual, scholarly types who will go on to run the country due to their superb leadership skills and education (rather than, you know, political maneuvering, family ties, blind party allegiance etc.).

Miller even references the gaokao. This is the widely-hated pre-university exam that is extremely unfair and showcases the worst of rote-learning-for-the-exam style education. It in no way fits in with Miller’s ridiculous idea of a concerted effort to produce a generation of super-children.
Ridiculous assertion of ‘co-operation’

That last point brings me on to what might be the most ridiculous sentence in Miller’s whole article:

There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state.

Where do you even begin with that? It isn’t just wrong, it’s at the complete opposite end of the spectrum to right. Co-operation between government, media, academia, education, media, parents, consumerism? That genuinely is a nice list of competing factions in China’s political landscape. Again, Miller makes no effort to provide any evidence for this wild assertion (because there is no evidence for it at all).

Miller than caps it off with the use of the term “utopian Han ethno-state” – it almost sounds like he’s swallowed a large quantity of internal Party memos and ended up believing it all. Sure, the CCP might dream of a “utopian Han ethno-state”, but it’s not going to happen.
China is not going to take over the world

Sadly, I think Miller’s whole article just boils down to a disgusting attempt to stir up some fear and hatred by promoting the worn-out idea that China is coming to get us. This is now an old, boring idea that really should be heading for retirement, but it keeps popping up in the media, probably because it sells newspapers and gets traffic.

Miller pretends that he’s spreading this bullshit out of some sort of weird concern for ‘the West’ and for China in his final paragraph, which begins: “My real worry is the Western response.” It ends with:

A more mature response would be based on mutual civilizational respect, asking—what can we learn from what the Chinese are doing, how can we help them, and how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world.

What a complete crock of shit.