Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with Jonathan Anomaly (Director of Research & Communication at Herasight) to finally reveal the company they’ve been quietly working with for years on embryo genetic selection.

After years of secrecy, we dive deep into:

* How Herasight achieves dramatically superior polygenic risk scores compared to competitors

* The recent drama and plagiarism allegations surrounding Nucleus Genomics

* Why selecting for higher intelligence correlates with better health, lower addiction rates, more cooperative behavior, and overall life success

* The truth about pleiotropy: why selecting for positive traits almost never comes with serious downsides

* How Herasight’s patented technology allows parents anywhere in the world (even where PGT-P is banned) to get polygenic embryo reports

* The coming era of germline gene editing and why refusing these technologies may soon be seen as morally irresponsible

* Why this technology is fundamentally pro-natalist and will help high-fertility families have healthier, thriving children

This is one of the most important conversations happening right now about the future of humanity.

Learn more about Herasight here

Follow Jonathan Anomaly on X

Episode Transcript: Malcolm Collins: . [00:00:00] Hello. I am excited to be here today because today we can talk about something that we have had to keep quiet for years which is, if you know the Collins family lore, it’s that we did a large batch of embryos because we had to, Simone was unable to get pregnant naturally, and we then did genetic sequencing on them to decide the order in which we did the implantation.

Now. For a long time we just had to say that we did this with a group of scientists. And when people were like, well, so people use this company or this company, we say, well, the company that they should probably be using isn’t out there yet. And the reason why this is really important when we’re talking about independent companies with good genetic data on humans is as time has gone on, the genetic data that is held in the public sphere by scientists and everything like that is.

Decreasing in quality. And specifically what I mean by this is there was a, the famous case where the national Biobank [00:01:00] in the UK ended up closing off their genetic access to a lot of publishers because one scientist accidentally found that one group was in the United States, was having daughter within the uk Your daughters

Simone Collins: within the uk Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: in the uk.

Something like 14000% the rate of any other group. And that was a naughty fact. And so now they’re like, now we need to screen all research for anything that could be naughty facts. The problem is, is that naughty facts are the facts we really need for humanity to move forwards, which includes things like genetic correlates to intelligence.

And the reason why I have been so impressed by this company, and, and it’s the reason we’re gonna be doing this and talking about this, not just about their work around intelligence and their work around the correlates to intelligence, which is really interesting because almost everything is correlated with intelligence.

So if you’re selecting for, if you’re like. I as a country will not allow people to select for intelligence. I will only allow heart health. You are also selecting for intelligence because these, these things are highly correlated with each other. So we’re gonna go into that. We’re gonna go into intelligence associations with social behavior patterns and everything like that because [00:02:00] obviously that’s important.

And we’re also gonna go into. Oh gosh.. I was just gonna say that now anyone can do this. So if you’re anywhere in the world, even if it’s illegal to do within your country, because Pgt PA is illegal to do genomics in country, they’ve got a unique technology that allows you to transfer p gt to BA stuff twofold, genomic stuff.

So we’re gonna move ahead with Johnny Anomaly an old friend of ours who is working with these guys. Yeah. So Johnny

Simone Collins: Anomaly is the director of Research and Communication of Parasite, which finally we can say is the company we’ve been working with on all these things that has been taking what we think is the most conscientious, thoughtful science, first detailed autistic in the best possible way approach to this.

Johnny Naly is a background as a bioethicist, and he’s just an overall awesome guy. He’s a major proponent of this technology and he’s kind of the. The gateway person to anyone who wants to enter this sphere and learn more about it. So we’re really grateful to you joining us today, Johnny. Thank you so [00:03:00] much.

And also, if we have a little bit of time to the end of this, I’d really love for you to dive in. Or maybe we could even start with it just ‘cause it’s like salacious drama, some drama that played out this week between sort of not just parasite and nucleus genomics, another company that gives apologetic risk or data to parents but also nucleus genomics and genomic predictions, which is another apologetic risk score company.

So just maybe to start, would you mind just telling us, because it helps us understand sort of how parasite is different and, and what other companies in this space are doing possibly wrong. What, what played out on X this week about nucleus genomics and another company in this space?

Jonathan Anomaly: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me guys.

And Yep. We’ve been working together and we have many common friends here in Austin and other places where I am. But let’s see here. So there was quite a bit of drama, and I didn’t get into this business for the drama. As, as you know, I, I wrote a book about this. I was an academic, I’d been interested in this topic long before [00:04:00] I, I went into the private sector and joined this company a few years ago.

So I really want things to be done well, and we stayed in stealth for a really long time, you know, more than three years. And the reason is we knew that, first of all, this is a nascent science. So the, the science of polygenic prediction that is using genomic data to predict traits about, let’s say embryos or, and by the way, this is why it’s not mysterious.

Or using it to, we might say, retrofit traits about past people. So for example, the Reich Lab at Harvard, David Reich wrote a book called Who We Are and How We Got Here, and he recreates the ancient past and migration patterns and, and even, and even makes inferences about the traits that people had in the past based on polygenic scores.

That’s so funny. This is not mysterious technology. We use it all the time in history and, and going forward in personalized medicine now for embryos. Nevertheless, I understood it was a nascent science. It’s, [00:05:00] it’s pretty new. It’s very complex. You need some of the world’s best statistical geneticist, and I’m not one, you know, I studied economics and philosophy.

That’s what I taught. But we hired some of the best and it takes a while, right, to lure him from academia. They knew Alex Young, for example, who’s our true superstar. He’s still at UCLA, but you know, he got in a little bit of hot water as soon as he announced that he was with us. Mm-hmm. Even though it’s like, what are we doing?

We’re reducing. Disease in the world and maybe marginally increasing intelligence a bit, but that’s considered controversial. So anyway, that’s just the background of why we were in stealth, why we wanted to hire the world’s best first. Do the best research, validate our predictors, and we can talk about how that’s done later.

And it was only then that we emerged from stealth. Nevertheless a company that had been around for a little while called Nucleus decided to launch just before everyone knew we were about to come out the closet. My gosh. And yeah, they had done [00:06:00] that a few months ago, just about a month or two before us and announced they were now going into doing embryo scoring.

And we took a look at some of their reports and found them, let’s just say lacking. And so we decided when we launched, we were gonna launch with a white paper. And Oh, I love hearing baby sounds. Only on your podcast. Is it one of the babies chosen the system.

Yeah. I

love it. This is beautiful. And we’ll talk about maybe Tism later too, but Nice.

But anyway, we, before we launch, we really wanted to make sure that we had validated the best predictors on the planet, made it really clear how we did that, et cetera. And as part of our initial validation paper, we have an appendix showing what Nucleus genomics was up to. And it was, it was not kind, but it was accurate.

Scott Alexander picked up on it and Scott also had talked about, you know, using us and, and that sort of thing. And he didn’t wanna be too partial. I mean, it was a, a partial endorsement of us, [00:07:00] but really a survey of the landscape, like what is the state of the art when it comes to this And

mm-hmm.

Anyway, that kicked off the initial controversy, but last week, last week, some anonymous blogger, I guess he’s a Chinese guy who lives in, in the Bay Area called Siwan Malala, like bad Sichuan. Yeah. He decided to do a pretty thorough takedown of Nucleus. Some of it was citing our earlier work. And then apparently Nucleus found our work so good, our white paper, that they decided to more or less copy and paste it without citation as, as their own.

And so. You know, it’s, I’m not gonna say too much about that, but I guess that’s a great honor for us that they decided to do that. So, sit, so I’ll say this, so

Malcolm Collins: you don’t need to worry about getting yourself in trouble. So basically what it came down to, if you read this guy’s take down, is this other company launched with a largely plagiarized version of this other company’s white paper, but with just worse data pasted in.

Yeah. Like

Simone Collins: where, ‘cause you know how when you plagiarize something, you gotta change a couple [00:08:00] things, but like, the stuff they changed just made it strictly worse.

Jonathan Anomaly: I’m, I’m, I’m just in case there’s you know, any legal risk I’m not gonna use, you know what, whatever words that might get me in trouble, I’ll just say, you can read the papers and compare them for yourselves, but the allegation, everything allegedly, certainly plagiarism and I think the more easy this Yeah, go ahead Malcolm.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Where this matters to me is how, because I think this is a, this is relevant to especially our audience, which is gonna be more skeptical. How did you guys get such good information? You must have been getting access. Two populations or data that other companies didn’t have access to. How is that sourced?

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And how is your data so much better and how can parents know who to trust? Because also, like, yep. None of us are experts, you know, who are, who are doing this, you know, even like people who are doctors who are using parasite. Like, it can be hard for any of us outsiders to know, like, oh, I, I, I nucleus is, I, I don’t trust them.

[00:09:00] But parasite, they have their act together. Like, what, what makes you guys different?

Jonathan Anomaly: Yeah. Good. So let me answer that. Let me put a bow on the last point for Yeah. For 30 seconds, and then answer the two your questions together, because that is the most important question. It’s not even just where do you get your data, although happy to tell you that it’s how do you justify and validate your predictors?

What really matters is not how you create things, but how do you prove that they work? Mm-hmm. And I’ll, I’ll mention that in a second, but to put a bow in the previous point. Yeah. Apart from the allegations that this blogger made about plagiarism and. You know, and, and sort of sloppiness by nucleus, I mean, one of the funniest bits that I saw I’ve been kind of a third party.

I’ve stayed out of it for the most part. But, you know, nucleus apparently had these reviews that were either AI generated. One of ‘em was like from an LL Bean catalog. And, and, but yeah, like the, the photos

Simone Collins: of of reviewing parents on their website were just fake

Jonathan Anomaly: photos of people of testimonials where it was like stock photos from the internet.

Yeah. And then sometimes it would be [00:10:00] a black guy, but then another time it would be like an Indian guy with the same review, but they like face swapped ‘em. And somebody said yesterday, my favorite commentary on it was. You know, why are people mad at a genetics company that has actually changed the race of someone that shows how effective they are, you know?

Yeah. How powerful. Good point. Good point. But anyway, I, so I don’t wanna get into the drama. I will say that everyone should listen to Alex Young again, who’s our superstar at UCLA. He’s gonna be on the show that was debated yesterday on Twitter. I guess it was this anonymous poster creme against Kian from Nucleus Genomics.

So, Kian didn’t agree to debate, but he, they did do a side by side first. They had Creme on, then they had Kian on. Now they’re gonna have Alex in studio next week. And Alex is again, one of the world’s authorities on this topic in statistical genetics. Now, having said that, let me just say never just take someone’s [00:11:00] authority for granted.

Alex is an authority and he’s, you, you can read his work, but what really matters is not the person, it’s the method. How do we justify and validate our scores? So first of all, it’s worth saying like, how do you build a polygenic risk score? Or what is one?

Mm-hmm. It’s

the tool that we use to make predictions about either individuals who are, who are born now, like, what’s your susceptibility, Simone to Alzheimer’s disease, or Malcolm.

Mm-hmm. How tall are you? And you know, we, you know, we can’t do this perfectly, but we can get it more or less close to where you are using polygenic risk scores. And the idea is all of these traits that you really care about, not, not t Sachs disease that’s caused by one gene, right. Not sickle cell anemia, also caused by two copies of the same variant, but rather height, intelligence, schizophrenia, all these things are caused by.

Thousands or even tens of thousands of small genetic variants that add up to an overall risk, which is why it’s called a polygenic risk score or just [00:12:00] a polygenic score. So those are the things that we’re using to, to, to measure your likelihood of developing a trait or a disease as an adult. But similarly, since embryos are just bundles of genes just like you are, and the genes don’t change over time,

Malcolm Collins: our, our audience will be aware of all of this.

Yeah. Okay, good. What, what, what I think our audience is more interested in is how did you get more accurate polygenic scores? Yeah, yeah. So let me, let me

Jonathan Anomaly: get into that. I just wanted to define what a polygenic score was first. So good. Yeah. So the first thing you need to do to construct a good polygenic score, everyone has to do this, is access biobanks, right?

Mm-hmm. And

one of the things that we were a bit surprised by, because these other companies, you know, we’re a bunch of nerds who were in stealth for a few years, and yet we had applied to just about every biobank we could possibly apply to in the world. Sometimes you get denied, but we often got access because, well, A, you need a PhD, you need to justify why you have access and what you’re studying.

Usually it’s disease and so on. And so that’s the first thing [00:13:00] is we have access to a lot of bio banks. A lot of companies don’t seem to even apply to very many, which is a little surprising to us. It’s partly one of, one of our, our, our theories about why is there is a public catalog of polygenic scores that anyone can use.

The problem is those are usually five years old. They’re not nearly as good as the state of the art because academics don’t have an incentive, a market incentive to really just like ramp up the value of those scores because they’re not, they’re not, they have no profit incentive. So anyway. Mm-hmm. For step one is access as many biobanks as you can.

Step two is hire the talent that it requires to actually interpret that data. And then step three is when you’re validating the data. And this is what Alex Young is most famous for, is using within family studies. And what you’re really trying to do when you’re making embryo predictions, you’re not predicting traits about random people in a population.

Mm-hmm.

You’re predicting traits about potential siblings and then choosing which sibling will be [00:14:00] born. And the idea is if you’re doing that, the way to validate your scores. Is run them through adult siblings. Just imagine this, you have, you know, 12 brothers and sisters, which hopefully your children will have and, and we say, look, if we can take their DNA and predict how tall are they or do they have schizophrenia or whatever, and we can do this across tens of thousands of sibling pairs, then there’s no question the scores work.

The only question is how well do they work and how well do they work across ancestry groups? And just to put that, put all those little pieces together when you’re thinking about embryo selection, remember that embryos have the same relationship to each other and to their parents as adult siblings do to each other and their parents.

So if you can predict scores really well for adult siblings, then first you can predict ‘em well for embryos. And second, you don’t need to wait a hundred years for an army of, of embryos to be implanted. And then they grow up and they develop Alzheimer’s or not. [00:15:00] You simply don’t need to do that. I mean, it’s a nice closing touch to absolutely prove mathematically this works.

But it’s actually, it’s actually too much of a demand for rigor to say that, well, we can’t know anything about this or whether it works until all these people are born. No, no, no. As I said, you can prove it on adult siblings and David Reich at Harvard already uses these to reconstruct the ancient past.

Nobody bats an eye. They’re like, well, that’s cool. Nice finding, dude. You know, and so, so really the only reason I think that there’s a lot of controversy around this is A, some companies are not doing this properly, and B it is morally controversial as you know, at least among some people. And so some scientists are looking for any excuse to just say like, this doesn’t work.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Which I, I found very interesting. I, I, I know a, the, the, the scientists will go out there and just be like, oh, there’s no correlation. I, I had a, like a blow up with Telemundo. I don’t know if the interview has gone live with tele the Mexican TV

Simone Collins: stations.

So this clip [00:16:00] actually did somehow go live, , yesterday, and it went viral on Twitter and, , some other platforms. It was crazy. I.

Speaker 2: You’ve said things like black women are biologically different than white women. They, they, they, yes. They have, uh, different fertility windows. They have a higher rate of fertility complications, 50%, but there’s no scientific evidence to prove that. A black woman and a white woman are genetically different, right?

This is like, what are you talking? No, they’re no, no. Like literally, there are genes that code for their skin color. There are genes that, again, this is, I mean this is like government data. This, this is Emmy, right? This is the National Institute of Health. This is an American medical association. Like there, there is no scientific evidence to prove that, and that’s a big problem, right?

Because there’s no scientific, and that’s why I asked like IQ differences. Black people are genetically different from other populations. Yeah. I’ll say that again. There’s it, it, there is at least there is no scientific evidence to prove that. Right. And as people that No, no, no. [00:17:00] I’m, I’m, I’m sorry. I’m stating Do you wanna ask an AI if there’s scientific evidence to prove that?

Speaker 3: No. I wanna ask on, on. Factually incorrect. It’s humans are genetically diverse. It’s not a bad thing that humans, I’m saying it’s No, no, I’m not saying it’s a bad or, or, or a good thing. I’m saying there is no scientific evidence and I’m saying that is a factual, he saying that there is scientific evidence, there is scientific evidence, there is overwhelming scientific evidence on in this basic.

No, no, no. This is like saying the sky’s not blue, like it is genes that code their skin color. Mm-hmm. Right. Those genes are obviously different in them than they are in us. How is that Not science. That’s just like a basic fact. The genes that code their skin color, their level of melanin production are different from my genes that melanin production.

And that’s precisely why I was asking this question. ‘cause I think for some people that do believe like you, that people are genetically different. That has historically been used to promote racial hierarchies. Right. And that’s why I am asking you because, but so what do.

Simone Collins: [00:18:00] Yeah. That’s funny. Yeah. Yeah. So

Malcolm Collins: I was talking with them and I was like, you know, of course I’m not saying you know, that, that any eth ethnic, like, like, that there was any sort of genetic correlation between esic groups tied to intelligence.

I’m just saying that there are obvious genetic differences between ES ethnic groups. And she goes, no, there isn’t. And I was like, wait, what do you mean? There’s no genetic difference between esic groups? And she’s like, well, you

Jonathan Anomaly: know, Malcolm, we can cite our own paper. Alex Young was on the definitive paper two months ago, along with Peter Cher, who’s one of the most famous people in the field in Oxford, and they published a paper using Mexican biobank data.

Showing that type one diabetes is almost entirely a genetic phenomenon, you know? Wow. And specifically the indigenous in the more indigenous components of the Mexican population. Are the ones that are most susceptible. Really. We already suspected that for years, but they proved it beyond, beyond any doubt.

So, wow, Mundo is just wrong and it’s, it’s demonstrably wrong. But

Malcolm Collins: yeah, that was, that was a very fun, I wish I hadn’t known that one off the top of my [00:19:00] head. I just got into like more blame stuff. I was like, wait, so do you think that like black people are taller because they’re less privileged? Like that sound like weird.

Like Joseph Smith’s logic there, right? Like

Jonathan Anomaly: totally forget cognitive traits. Just look around at physical traits. Surely it, the melanin is a

Simone Collins: reaction to systemic racism. Yes. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It floor up because of the racism and just melanin, fla. I like, this is like weird Lamar and evolution that I’m dealing with here.

Jonathan Anomaly: Yeah. It would be an interesting world. Well, you’ve got that, especially below the neck. They’re like that. But like you say, if you just point out traits like height or sprinting ability or whatever, and, and just look at Ethiopians versus Kenyans. I mean, as you know, there’s more ethnic or genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world combined.

Huge

genetic. And so what you find is Eastern Africans are really good at long distance and west at short distance and everyone else sucks, you know? Mm-hmm. And that’s, that’s the way it goes. You know,

Malcolm Collins: what I was, was, was unaware of, and we have a, a whole video on this this might be too controversial to even talk about here [00:20:00] because we talk about it in this video, but did you know that European populations are genetically closer to Neanderthals than we are to the cosign?

Jonathan Anomaly: Well, that makes sense. There’s more a neanderthal admixture in European population. No, no, I mean

Malcolm Collins: like, like not that we are, sorry, I I am not just the

Jonathan Anomaly: admixture you’re saying. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Not just the admixture. I mean in terms of I forget the word. It’s like IPI or something like total nucleotide arrangement.

They are a closer ethnic group to us than the co-sign are to us. Yeah. And I was shocked to learn that. I didn’t know that they split off before the co-sign did, but the co-sign had more genetic drift since the split than the Neanderthals had had because Neander Fascinating. I

Jonathan Anomaly: didn’t know that. It makes sense.

I mean, Neanderthals are a pretty relatively recent, you know, branch of, of our species, so. Yep. Makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Lots of fun stuff there, but let’s jump into intelligence related stuff. Go into the things that cross correlate with intelligence and in terms of like how it affects society as you are [00:21:00] messing with this stuff.

Jonathan Anomaly: Good. Yeah, I, let’s, let’s do it from two different directions. One is gonna, I’m gonna kind of harness the insights from people like Stuart Richie and Russell Warren and really kind of the history of, of intelligence research, at least in the last few decades. And on the other end, I wanna, I wanna address the plyo trophy question, which is, if you select for higher intelligence, along with other traits as well, do you get some unwanted side effects that are either good or bad for, for the kid?

I think both are, are pretty interesting and we found some, some, some cool stuff. So yeah, something that is not original to us, even though we are selecting, we’re offering the ability to select for intelligence, the kind of consensus of intelligence researchers show that, you know, as you move up the, or let’s just say to the right hand side of the bell curve for intelligence.

You get a lot of really interesting outcomes, and some of those outcomes are things like lower rates of addictive disorders, whether it’s smoking, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and there’s no reason to believe that smarter people [00:22:00] are any morally better or that they have more genes that predispose them to resist addiction per se.

It’s not that addictive genes are differentially distributed. It’s rather that, you know, intelligence is correlated with a bunch of interesting things like self-control and time discounting, and so smarter people on average. You know, when you go across a large number of people, they tend to think about the future.

They set goals and they tend to be a bit better at sticking to their goals. Not massively better, but better enough that systematically. For example, on average, you know, Steve Jobs is an exception. You know, he, he went to some quack doctor when he had cancer and died because of that probably. But generally, a brighter person will not only be able to.

Sift through the relevant information better, but they’ll keep their appointments. It’s really simple to think about that. I mean, why wouldn’t you keep your appointment? But the truth is, smarter people do, they, they tend to keep their appointments, pay their bills on time, set plans, and then, and then follow through on them.

And that may seem rudimentary, [00:23:00] but in, in, in the course of a life, that means better health and better outcomes, better jobs, and so on. On the other hand, there’s also the usual stuff, which is like slightly higher income, more scientific achievement. The maybe racier findings. And this is something that, you know, I first learned from Garrett Jones and then we published a paper together.

Maybe you can post it. It’s called cognitive enhancement and network effects. Why individual traits, or rather why individual welfare depends on group traits and

mm-hmm.

What Garrett Jones showed and we argued is when you take a group of, of bright people, they actually tend to be more cooperative. And the reason for that, again, is not that they have morally better motivations, but they can see the benefits of mutual cooperation in the short run for their own long-term gain.

And from a national level, from a company level, from from a neighborhood level, that means weird things like less corruption. Why? Because corruption is often like, look, I can get an immediate payoff now and f**k the whole [00:24:00] institution’s over in the long run. Mm-hmm. Because I’m just thinking about my short run payoff.

Or I can actually follow these short run rules for mutual gain in the long run. And that makes all of us better off, including myself. And so what we find is. It’s really amazing. I mean, there are very few bad things about being brighter. I can tell you one thing that might be the case. Okay. Yeah. And that is, let me find, let, let me first say something that’s been claimed but not replicated and that is Kapinsky in 2018, et l they argued that brighter people are a little bit more prone to depression and actually all, oh, I’ve seen that.

All the other findings have have said that’s wrong and all the findings both before and after. And it looks like that’s really a function of. A very small sample set of specific MENSA members in a specific chapter in la Oh, I imagine

Simone Collins: that like, yeah, if you live in LA and have joined Mensa also just seems like most Mensa members are just very depressing.

You’re already sad. Yeah, exactly.

Jonathan Anomaly: [00:25:00] There’s a selection. Don’t look at that. But all the other research suggests the opposite. The one thing that Oh, that’s so funny has not been settled is it may be the case and some within our company actually do think this is true and some don’t. It may be the case that when you go really far toward the right hand side of the bell curve, you select for Asperger’s.

Some have said there’s about a 0.2 correlation with that. Now that’s not bad in and of itself. If that corresponds with low functioning autism, then it would be bad. But actually you found, yeah, go ahead. And you’ve

Simone Collins: actually, you’ve looked at maybe how to like look at, you’ve looked at potentially including scores in heresy for autism, right?

Like I don’t know if you do yet or if you ever will, but my understanding was. The low functioning autism is just autism plus low iq. Am I wrong with that?

Jonathan Anomaly: Yeah, that’s probably wrong. And actually, one of the things that we screen for, first of all, autism is almost certainly multifactorial. Yeah. There’s, there’s definitely genetic components.

Yeah. There’s, and also autism’s

Simone Collins: a, a ad is a collection of [00:26:00] different things is probably Yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s a mess. We,

Jonathan Anomaly: we, we were probably better off when it was two separate things, like Asper. Yeah,

yeah. But

yeah, we do have a full-timer who’s working on this and mm-hmm. And we do now have a predictor that we just call neurodevelopmental disorders or neuro risk.

Mm-hmm. And the idea here, there are rare but sufficiently common variants and, you know, let’s call it 10, 20% of the population.

Mm-hmm.

That genetic variance that is, that correlate with low functioning autism, various other neurological disorders, including even dyslexia and so on. And so, yeah, we do have a predictor for that.

We’re still not really close to cracking the full story of autism. Mm-hmm. But we can select against some forms of low functioning autism. Having said that, to go back to the previous point too, and I’m, I’m glad you mentioned that, Simone. So we did a comprehensive study on plyo trpi and that’s this idea that sometimes one gene or a set of genes will encode for multiple phenotypic effects.

And you know, maybe one is good, but another one’s bad. So you’re selecting for I high iq, but maybe there’s some horrible [00:27:00] thing like, I don’t know, increased risk of breast cancer that you’re gonna get as a side effect.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Jonathan Anomaly: As it turns out, and this was Tobias who, who led this study, we looked at 31 traits that you might target for embryo selection.

Things like 31 traits that we have good scores for, like intelligence, breast cancer, height, and then we looked at the genetic associations with. Thousands of other known diseases, more than a thousand anyway. Wow. And what we found is pleiotropy, where it exists at all, is overwhelmingly positive or neutral.

Meaning that when you select against one disease, you actually get fewer of other diseases too. And when you select in favor of intelligence, you get better mental health overall. Wow.

There’s very few exceptions and I’ll, I’ll go through one. You know, one is an interesting one. And that is, high IQ is a bit associated with anorexia.

Why is, do you guys have a suspicion about why do, like

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: so

Malcolm Collins: you have

Simone Collins: I iq It’s, I think it’s about [00:28:00] exerting too much control.

Jonathan Anomaly: I suspect it. So like it’s where

Simone Collins: it goes far. Because you were also talking about the correlation. Between higher IQ and lower disease risk. ‘cause it like, you’re so conscientiously, like, I’m gonna go to my appointments, I’m gonna pay my bills.

And in this case it’s like I’m gonna control what I eat

Malcolm Collins: and every step on

Jonathan Anomaly: the treadmill I’m gonna count and absolute. Absolutely. Explain

Malcolm Collins: the the high IQ correlation with other forms of body dysmorphia, like gender dysphoria. Yeah, possibly. It’s also, if I remember from the research, it’s been shown to correlate,

Simone Collins: well, just anecdotally, you walk around Silicon Valley where all like the brilliant programmers are, and like, there’s so many, there’s so many like, I don’t know, you go to manifest and like half the chicks are dudes, so it’s, it’s kind of hard.

Yeah. Yeah. They’re also like Asians that they pass and they look great, so who cares? It’s all good, you know?

Jonathan Anomaly: I agree. And if you read the book NeuroTribes, that’s, that’s a big part of the story is like Silicon Valley, there’s a selection effect that attracts programmers who are obviously gonna be more likely to be, you know, Asperger than, than not, and so on.

And then they [00:29:00] pair up and have children. And so obviously through assortative mating, you’re gonna get higher rates of. Of at least Asperger’s, if not low functioning. And yeah, I mean, no doubt that’s true. You’re gonna find it in fields like math and so on. But yeah, I mean, back to that point, Simone, I think you’re entirely right.

I’m not a psychiatrist, so I don’t want to give a definitive statement. It sounds plausible, but that’s a case where, you know, it’s not that the genes that cause intelligence are causing you to have bulimia or whatever, it’s rather that again. They’re causing control, these general traits, which are basically great mm-hmm.

But do have some risks and some environments that they’ll, well, and that’s where parasite

Simone Collins: can be really helpful to parents. ‘cause if you know that that’s an, a risk, like yes, parasite and, and polygenic risk or selection with embryos is not just about choosing birth order and, and selecting which embryo to start with.

A, it’s also about understanding the risks that you should be screening for and preparing for. And because we know that, for example, things like autism and eating disorders are risks for our children. We, we prepare for them in ways where when you intervene early, you can make the difference between [00:30:00] someone having an eating disorder that manifests poorly versus one that’s manageable.

And like it took my parents too long to figure out how to make my anorexia manageable. Where like, it’s totally not a problem for me. Like so now there’s irreversible osteoporosis and fertility problems. But because we know now how to manage it and how that need for control can be exerted. We don’t have to worry about that in our own kids.

Yeah. And parents who are concerned about that and they know their kid has that risk, can just prepare to do that.

Malcolm Collins: I also wanted to point something out here for, for watchers of our show who are like, oh, this is, you know, choosing which embryos end up getting implanted and which ones don’t get implanted which is, you know, killing embryos, which is it, it was the current science factually we’re sort of past that part of history.

While some people will use it that way. We have now had successful germline gene editing used to resolve serious genetic conditions that were spotted through technology like this. Specifically, there was a [00:31:00] case where so far it’s healthy. A fetus that had been born, the conceived with an extra chromosome had the extra, this, this would’ve had down syndrome had the extra chromosome successfully removed.

Now, a, a human who would’ve lived their entire life with Down Syndrome will not live their life with Down syndrome because of this kind of technology, right. Which is scanning for this stuff. And as we get further with this technology, I, I’m not, I’m talking even a few years. Because a lot of our followers are younger.

If you are not using this kind of technology and one of your kids was faded to die at three of cancer and that could have been resolved through a, a germline intervention, which we’re also funding, right? That, that you are responsible for that, that that was sort of your moral vanity, spent the life of your child just as much as Jehovah’s witnessed it, refused a blood transfusion because it was unnatural, or it doesn’t work perfectly every time.

Or, you know, if God [00:32:00] wanted them to die. If you look at that person who refused a blood transfusion for their. And you look at them with moral revulsion, be aware that there are people in the future, maybe even your own children who will look at you that way as this technology continues to develop. So while we’re just at the beginning now, and even I agree, I see it as morally sketchy to say, which, which we are not saying we’re gonna use some of our embryos and not others.

We’re just using it for ordering. But we are entering an era very soon and we’ve already entered this era officially, where that’s not the only use case or potentially even the core use case of technology like this.

Jonathan Anomaly: Yeah. Good. Let me address both of those points. First I really like Simone’s point about, you know, in the rare cases where we do have negative or antagonistic pleiotropy, they’re, they’re very rare, but they’re gonna be there.

It, it may turn out that there is a, a really small correlation, for example, between intelligence and, and autism. And, and if that’s true, just like there is between height and heart conditions, when you [00:33:00] get really, really tall. You are more likely to have, you know, various kinds of cardiovascular problems.

And we can obviously understand why, right? The heart has to support a bigger body in cases like that. You know, the truth is like, maybe I would like an extra inch or two of height. But you know, our CEO and founder Michael, I mean he’s six seven,

Jonathan Anomaly: he wants to select for shorter kids. Why? ‘cause you know, when you’re, when you’re at the fertility clinic and not in the mating market, you’re thinking about the health of your kids.

Not just like how sexy they are or whatever, you know? Are they just taller than average? So, so the truth is like actually even in those rare cases of antagonistic ptro, it’s actually good for parents to know about it. Mm-hmm. So they can then select accordingly and optimize. And to your point, Malcolm.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, one point I like to make is natural sex, natural pregnancies. About half of ‘em result in spontaneous abortion. You guys know this, you’ve talked about it. Most of those aneuploidy cases are not mere downs. I mean, we [00:34:00] all recognize if you have down syndrome. You know, you should not only be respected, you should be honored.

You can live a good life with Down syndrome, but the vast majority are not downs. They’re actually completely incompatible with life. And so if you think that the body is flushing those out naturally, which it is in many, many cases, there’s no difference between separating out those embryos in the lab ahead of time and thereby increasing the chance that you’ll have a successful pregnancy.

Then, you know, having a bunch of miscarriages and then doing it the so-called natural way. So, you know, that’s, that’s my view of that situation. I mean, apart from the moral status of embryos, I’m gonna debate that on. Louise Perry’s show pretty soon here, but, oh, you are? Well, have you, have you heard

Malcolm Collins: my long debate on this?

Because I, I talk about it a lot on this show. But when I’m talking about it on the show, I’m often talking about it to a different audience than you’re used to me. Exactly. So the, the, the Yeah, exactly. The arguments I often use that I do not see used enough is first that if God if it was the case that in, in soul [00:35:00] happened at conception, then identical twins wouldn’t exist and human kyras wouldn’t exist because if that’s the case, then identical twins have the same soul.

They are humans sharing a soul. ‘cause

Jonathan Anomaly: embryos twin, in other words, like let’s say a week after you’ve created the embryo, the body has created. Sometimes by sheer accident, when they’re, when the cells are dividing, the embryo basically accidentally becomes a twin, and it’s like mm-hmm. At that stage, do you now have two souls or one or five?

Malcolm Collins: Right. It’s a weird idea. I’ve never seen a good, and, and human kyras are when two embryos combine into one embryo and a person might have parts of their brain,

Jonathan Anomaly: they ole, right? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They have, how does this work? Right? Yeah. So I think that, that, that if, and what’s important to note is animals, mammals have children that are kyras or identical twins at different rates.

Some mammals have no identical twins or human kyras. In some mammals it’s like 40% of them are human, are, are chimes. This is in some primate species. If God had wanted humans to not have [00:36:00] chimes or identical twins, he could have made that the case. If God had wanted to say, I knew you. When you were conceived in your mother’s womb instead of before you were conceived in your mother’s womb, he could have had that written as well.

And yet the Bible very clearly says before, which is why many of the early, even Catholic thinkers so Augustus of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, I remember one was pretty concretely and Soloman happened seven days after an embryo begins to develop. And the other just didn’t have an opinion on this yet.

And I will note here that people say, well, you know, the church has always been against the killing of children. However, a child is defined even loosely, and I completely agree with this,, the, or even forms of abortion, right? Which I also agree with the church has, has historically looked down on that.

, However, the problem , is that depending on when insolvement happens, you are killing a child by not using this technology potentially because it also finds things like cancer [00:37:00] risk and stuff like that, you can potentially kill a child by not using it.

If it turns out that in installment happens after conception, , and if you told these early thinkers that a child could die because this is not used, I think that that’s where this becomes a more morally tricky argument, even within the context of the early church.

But I, when, when they begin to develop opinions on this the opinions that the church developed didn’t really get solidified into PO pious the Knights.

And this was only about 200 years ago. And if you go to the early Catholic thinkers and you’re like, yeah, so, you know, we could, through using this technology prevent a child from dying at like two or, or have a healthy child instead, I don’t think any of them would be like, oh yeah, you, you should, you should sacrifice the life of the, the sickly child.

Jonathan Anomaly: They simply, they simply didn’t know a lot of this biology too. I mean, obviously, and you know, the truth is. You know, I, I, I have great respect for, for Catholicism and, and Christianity, and [00:38:00] many of my friends are Catholic. But the truth is, as you guys know, I mean, a lot of ‘em will call the current pope like a commie, you know?

Like they don’t listen to him, actually. Right. It’s true.

Simone Collins: We were just talking about that. And they

Jonathan Anomaly: know, they know, as we all do too, you know. God may be perfect, but his representatives on Earth are imperfect and they’re partly political appointments. Right. Bishops elect them through a Democratic election and you know, apply your Curtis Jarvin analysis to that.

So, I mean, you know, it’s not clear like. What one Pope says in a particular moment. Time

Malcolm Collins: is, what’s that? The pope who solidified the life begins at conception thing. Yeah. And he’s the pope who ripped the penises off of all the statues. He’s the pope who wrote the syllabus of errors that called for a Catholic caliphate.

You know, he, he wasn’t exactly you know, I, I think a, a, a, from my perspective, he sort of represented Catholicism to drift towards Islamism as, as like a, and by the way,

Jonathan Anomaly: Islam recognizes IVF as completely fine. So [00:39:00] interestingly. To the extent that we, you know, we, we

Malcolm Collins: mention this all the time when we’re on news shows.

So we do news in Italy and France and Germany and in all of those countries, you basically cannot do IVF because you can only do live transfers. And I always tell them, I go, I don’t mind that you’re gonna be Muslim majority soon, because I would be legally allowed to have kids under Sharia law. And I am not legally allowed to have kids in your country as it’s structured right now.

We had one listener write us angrily and they go, they’re, you know, what was it, infertility’s not permanent. And I’m like, no, some forms of infertility are pretty permanent.

Jonathan Anomaly: Yeah. And, and another, another argument on that front, on the infertility front, you know, are you gonna blame a generation of men for having lower sperm counts and testosterone?

They didn’t deserve that, and it’s not. You know, it can’t be just genetic change that, you know, our grandparents had. However, 40% higher rates, clearly it’s the environment, and clearly if that can do it in one generation, it’s reversible. So if you’re infertile now, you should still be having [00:40:00] children, right?

Yeah. Unless you’re passing along some horrific. You know, life-ending disease. Yeah. But

Simone Collins: it’s probably more that you’re like, mom microwaved all your food in plastic bags. Yeah.

Jonathan Anomaly: Yeah. Microplastics, who knows what it is.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So there, there was a study done on this that showed that by 2060, 50% of men in the developed world are gonna be in fertile.

So, cultural groups that refuse to use fertility assisted technology are going to really struggle. Exactly. Genes

Jonathan Anomaly: and cultures co-evolve. And I always like to say like, look guys, first of all, we all know that China will be using this technology, so will Singapore. You know, right now it’s still new. They haven’t heard of it necessarily, but they already subsidize IVF to boost their birth rates.

Israel does the same thing. Mm-hmm. Israel and the Emirates also subsidize genetic testing for people who are doing IVF. Yeah. Or forming a, a, a union in the UAE. And so this is just the next step and the idea that the moral landscape just is gonna be as it is right now and not evolve. You know, I mean, it just ignores [00:41:00] history.

Like the Catholic church’s position will absolutely evolve on this issue. Mm-hmm. It did in our lifetime, or our grandparents’ lifetimes. Remember initially they were against, for example, adding respirators because what were you doing? Like if you were dying, you know, that was God’s will. Oh, so respirators were playing

Simone Collins: God, oh

Jonathan Anomaly: no.

Now it’s mandatory. Now you’re playing God if you remove a respirator. And so like these things evolve and I’m not mocking the Pope or the Catholic church. I’m just saying. We all recognize these things evolve and you know, it’s not clear that what the stance is right now is just sort of God’s word, or he would’ve put it in the Bible.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That makes, anyway, I didn’t mean this to be a

Jonathan Anomaly: from any of us, but yeah,

Malcolm Collins: it would’ve been easy to put something in the Bible other than I knew you before you were in your mother’s womb, right? Yeah. Like, it, it would’ve been incredibly easy. That’s like a huge oversight to not, and by that he

Jonathan Anomaly: means the soul, whatever the soul is, he doesn’t mean a specific sperm cell or embryo or something like that.

Exactly. Embryos are being created and destroyed all the time, naturally. So yeah, we, we

Malcolm Collins: [00:42:00] go deep on this in some of our stuff, but yeah,

Simone Collins: no. So, one I might have to run to get the, the kids for their a i therapy, speaking of early interventions, so I might, I did, I’m just warning that I might bounce, but Malcolm’s gonna stay on in case I have to leave early.

We wanna get also to, to the, the global element of this where if you’re outside the US and you can’t necessarily have your embryo sequenced, how can you still get polygenic scores for your embryos?

Jonathan Anomaly: Yeah. So our big innovation, one of the reasons that we stayed in stealth a bit longer than it originally planned is we have a, a patent pending on this.

Who knows if it’ll be honored, but I think it will. And that is this idea that we can take data from a common genetic task that’s offered at every IVF clinic in the world. You could be in Italy, you could be in the us, you could be in China, and we’re, we don’t serve every country in the world. We’ll get into that, but you could technically do it from anywhere in the world.

And the idea is you can get this pre-implantation genetic test for aneuploidy, this test for chromosomal problems like down [00:43:00] anywhere in the world. And what we can do is ask you to request your raw genetic data from that test, which it’s your HIPAA right here, it’s GDPR rights in Europe. And other countries have similar, have similar laws where you own your genetic data and the data of your, your embryos.

And since that test is offered anywhere, but it’s very low coverage, genetic data, what we do is we patented this, this algorithm thanks to Alex Young and, and others on our team where we, we do short and long read sequencing on the parents. So we get a really deep genomic sequence of the parents, and then we can put that together with the PGTA data to get an idea of the whole genome of each discrete embryo, which of course are different from each other.

And in and of itself, that’s just kind of a, a cool mathematical puzzle. And the way it works is basically you’re inheriting large chunks of DNA from mom and dad. And if, if you know something about the start and stop points for those blocks and then a little bit in between, then you can sequence the parents and fill those in those,

it’s so cool.[00:44:00]

It turns out it’s a lot harder to do mathematically than it is to describe the way I am. And you know, that’s why I’m not on the science team. Yeah. I’m, you know, I’m sort of on the comms team and, and doing some of the other things in the company. But, but anyway that allows

people, I’ll give you an example.

Somehow someone heard about our X thread when we, when we launched in Mongolia on the radio, people were local influencers were doing tiktoks or whatever it was, and they called us up and they’re like, Hey, can you service in Mongolia? And no other company can do that because they need to have a, a partnership with a clinic and then maybe hold genome, sequence the embryo, or do some other method.

But we can just be like, yeah, no, no problem. Like as long as, as long as the laws there allow you to select an embryo of your choice, we can serve you. Now, I will say a caveat here, as usual, Europe is way behind. And so we don’t serve Europeans directly. Like if they wanna fly, that’s fine. They can come to California, they can go to Cyprus, and it’s all legal there.

But even though [00:45:00] we technically could serve Europeans very easily through this process I just mentioned, we don’t right now because we don’t wanna get in trouble with, with European governments. We do, however, urge your followers, wherever you are in the world to assert your rights and make sure your governments are saying like, look, there’s a choice here.

Either we get to select our embryos, either we own our genetic data, or the government does. And you guys have heard as much as I do the word eugenics thrown around here, who’s engaged in coercive government-sponsored eugenics. Is it seriously? Is it? Well, no. So what we point out is the data. Let you use the data to make your decision?

Or is it rather the government who’s saying, no, we’re gonna, by force of law, prevent you from accessing your own data? The coercive EU genesis, not, not us. Right. So, well, I

Malcolm Collins: think a, I think a better way to make this argument is, is to point out that, you know, where this technology is going is journaling, gene editing, right?

And it’s clearer who the eugenics is [00:46:00] when we are talking about the legality of germline gene editing, because that is a government saying that people with specific genetic patterns do not have a right to exist, and they will co coercively prevent those human beings existence because of what their gene said.

Mm-hmm. That is just plainly eugenics. And these are people who your kids will know and interact with, and they’ll be like, yeah, I’m not allowed to exist in France or Germany, or whatever. And my favorite point on this is everybody oh, oh, oh. Do you really Like when I, when I talked to, you know, I, I was like, the problem, ‘cause I was talking to a German reporter about this.

Do you think we were mad at the Nazis? ‘cause they wanted to make people healthier. We were mad at the Nazis because they were controlling who could have kids and how, and she responded to and

Jonathan Anomaly: murdering people. She like, do you really think including Germans? Yeah. Do

Malcolm Collins: you really think like 1950s Americans were, were fighting in World War II with the hope of like, scientists being able to genetically augment a human to be stronger.

And I said the very face of anti-Nazi propaganda was Captain [00:47:00] America, a human whose scientists augmented to be better. This is, this has always been what this side of the fight has been about against the, the opposite side of the fight. It’s

Jonathan Anomaly: silly. And I, you know, I I I make that point as a rhetorical one.

Yours is partly rhetorical too about your, yeah. But of course, you know, in my academic career, I mean, as a philosopher, I mean, I was asked for example, to participate in a debate and I wrote a paper called Defending Eugenics. But of course. What I meant by that, and I was absolutely clear by it, is, of course, individual eugenics where you can make choices to improve the welfare of your children.

Mm-hmm. You know, I always use Leonard Darwin’s definition of eugenics. He, he was the president of the Eugenics Society and Son of Leonard, of Charles Darwin, and he said, eugenics is the study of heredity as it may be used to improve the mental and physical wellbeing of humanity. And it’s like, well, if that’s how you define it, great.

And then the only question is who gets to decide? So, you know, I don’t have like, an interest in like, oh, this, this is or [00:48:00] isn’t eugenics, who cares? That’s just a word. It’s like, it’s like settling or trying to settle the abortion debate by just saying, well, I’m pro-choice. And like, are you against choice?

Well, that, okay, now you’re just using rhetoric. Like obviously the question is what’s the moral status of the fetus? And is this, you know, is the mother in the best position to decide, or the state. Same thing here. So I don’t really like, you know, engaging these debates about eugenics, but again, if they’re gonna levy that charge against us and then just drop the mic.

It’s like, hold on here, dude. We’re the ones who are arguing that individuals and parents have the Right, right. You guys are the ones arguing for restrictions, so don’t take the f*****g moral high ground on us.

Simone Collins: Exactly. Yeah. Okay, I’m gonna, umm, Malcolm, if you can wrap this up with I, I’ll wrap it up with Johnny.

I’ll wrap it up. Hey, you don’t have to wrap it up fast. I’m just, I have to run to get the kids.

Malcolm Collins: Simone. I, I would like to try to do beef orange beef tonight and I will bring back the ingredients for the sauce. It’s just cooked the way we’ve been doing the beef every other night. Pan frying, except the sauce uses an orange and a bit of orange wines that I’m gonna [00:49:00] pick up from the grocery store when I get some beer.

We have

Simone Collins: Clementines Orange. Can I use that? We have orange. I mix in the show, by

Malcolm Collins: the way, but

Simone Collins: we have Clementines. Sorry, we always Oh, clementines. Yeah, you can use Clementines. That’s fine. Then you don’t need to go to the store. Anyway, I’m, I’m jumping and you guys can wrap up here and Yes. Order received.

Malcolm, I sent

Malcolm Collins: the ingredient, the, the list on WhatsApp, or you can look up a recipe.

Simone Collins: Okay, perfect. And Johnny, thank you so much. I’m sorry for bouncing early but I’m so glad you’re on the show and we were really excited to run this. So yeah, thank you. Carry on.

Malcolm Collins: Great to see you. Thanks. Yeah. Great. Okay, so, any, any final things you wanted to go over?

Neil, I don’t really have any particular agenda. What are you, what are you thinking about with Elise Perry show? Is this your first time doing it?

Jonathan Anomaly: No, it was on a couple years ago, but yeah, I mean, she wanted, she just had Diana Fleischman and Lineman Stone, two people that I know you know as well. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Anomaly: Debate eugenics, which is of course partly a semantic debate, partly a substantive one. Then she wanted someone to do specifically PGTP pre-implantation genetic testing for polygenic [00:50:00] traits. I’m obviously the face of that in, in a sense, even though I’m not, you know, the, the best scientist on our team. But I’ve been kind of the spokesman, so I’m the obvious choice and we’re looking for an opponent and you know, have a really healthy debate.

So, yeah, we’ll see.

Malcolm Collins: Well, do you, do you guys have an opponent? Our audience can

Jonathan Anomaly: yeah. I mean, she’s looking, she’s asked someone, so we’ll see. We’ll see what they say. But yeah, I mean, what I’m excited for, like, for our company in the space, ‘cause I’m not necessarily here to show us. Of course we always like customers.

It’s great, you know, you can go to parasite.com, but I’m, I’m actually much more excited just about the whole space. I think the idea of, you know, reducing disease in the world that, that’s bad is ridiculous. Like, all of us spend so much time worrying about health. Going to the gym and whatever, eating, right?

And so like, I just think this is a really f*****g great tool. Like we’re gonna increase health, marginally increase intelligence. And obviously there’s a bridge technology, like you said. I mean, I’ve written about it in my book, like I’m super excited about the [00:51:00] future. I think this is one of the few things we should be excited about.

Like there’s been so many great inventions, you know, basic plumbing, you know, reduced disease risk, antibiotics, et cetera. And to me, biotechnology when it’s done right and genetics when it’s done right, this is gonna be the biggest boon to human welfare. And personally, you know, just to, just to add another thought on that, I’m not personally a transhumanist.

I’m not someone who wants to upload my brain into the cloud. I know some people who do and that’s fine. But at the very least, surely we can agree that it’s better if we can live like longer, healthier lives, be a bit brighter, a bit more creative, et cetera. And I just think this is step one to doing this and.

You know, you might worry about, yeah, go ahead.

Malcolm Collins: It’s an interesting technology to think about because it’s not a technology that is going to be used by the next generation and the way it was used by this generation, because germline gene editing will presumably be mainstream and inexpensive by the time we have the next generation, in which case this technology will move to a [00:52:00] preventative and associative technology to germline gene editing.

Jonathan Anomaly: Actually we’ll probably be combining the two of ‘em because I think you’re still gonna have, like if you do the equivalent of IVF or rather IVG, which I’m sure you’ve talked about, you know, you take an adult cell, turn it into a whatever you know, you’re still gonna have a range of different outcomes and a basic sort of, you know, you might call it a genetic deck, and then you stack it by first selecting one of the embryos and then secondly.

Touching it up with editing. I actually think like it may be a little ways longer than many people think. I don’t have strong views, but I talk to people at the church lab and, and the Broad Institute and I think massive multiplex editing, which is what you would really need, like hundreds or thousands of genes to really get big effects.

That may be a ways away, but you know what’s, what’s also coming very soon after that and maybe even before, and that is creating entire chromosomes from scratch. I mean, that may sound science fictiony, but there are many people working on this now, and when you think about it, gene editing is a really delicate thing.

You’ve got billions of base pairs and to like edit [00:53:00] one by one and not have off-target effects, it’s harder than you might think. It might actually end up being easier in the long run to just create entire genomes from scratch. Think as crazy as that sounds. Well, I think AI

Malcolm Collins: changes a lot of the probabilities in this space.

Yep. Where historically I would’ve agreed with you, but now I’m sort of, of the perspective as AI continues to develop AI’s ability. It turned out there’s been some research on this that AI is just very good at predicting genetic effects and modeling genomes. And so, it turns out that we’re probably gonna get, you know, five, 10 years from now, the AI will probably be fairly accurate at this stuff,

Jonathan Anomaly: but we still need a good editing system.

So the problem with CRISPR and also all of its descendants is off target mutations. And again, if you’re, even if you had like a 3% probability of that, okay, it would be good to fix a single broken gene. Right. But not, not hundreds or thousands. And so, you know, there’s gonna be some stuff that has to be worked out and whatever, but I’m, I’m all hopeful for it.

I know you are too. I, I thought I would say one more thing. I mean, if we’re, if we’re closing, I mean. A lot of people worry about [00:54:00] egalitarian objections and, you know, I’m not an egalitarian, so I’ll just say that. And, you know, I, I agree more with Nietzsche that mankind is judged by its highest specimens.

You know, not, not just mere life. You know, that’s not what, that’s not what is what’s important. But, you know, even from an egalitarian standpoint, and I am sympathetic to some extent, you know, when you think about what really impedes people’s ability to, to really flourish in life, I mean, one of the main things is just having a poorly functioning immune system.

My, my grandmother had a bunch of autoimmune diseases and she couldn’t leave the house, and yet she was the smartest person in our family by far. So the idea is, look, to the extent that we have inequalities, a lot of ‘em, not all of ‘em are genetic. And who’s gonna benefit the most from this technology in the long run?

It’s actually those people who have the worst genetic luck. I mean, in a sense, they’re not gonna be born instead of sibling. That’s a lot like them would be born. When we’re talking about the distant future or future people, you don’t just have [00:55:00] some abstract right to be born. I mean, there’s a trillion potential combinations of eggs and sperm, right?

Yeah. The idea is to create future people that are basically on average gonna be healthy and thrive. And, and I mean, to me, like that’s just really great. And if we have a few more Von Neumanns in the population, we have more inequality, but we also have more cool s**t in the world and in the, and then in the end, we also are gonna get, in some ways less inequality.

Not that that’s the only thing I care about, simply because a lot of these, this low hanging fruit, you know, really low intelligence or really bad diseases are simply gonna be cured. And so, like, I just see that as a, as a win-win, it’s gonna be a better world. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, I, I I mean, I’m ex I’m excited for, for the technology that’s coming down the pipeline right now.

It’s really cool. And I, and I, it’s, it’s funny the people who are mortified by this technology. They always assume that everyone else on the right is gonna be mortified by this technology. And I think they’re often [00:56:00] quite surprised that no, most people just do not care. Especially in their

Jonathan Anomaly: private lives.

People want the best for their children, whatever they publicly say. Yeah. Like,

Malcolm Collins: To my knowledge, Nick Fuce was born via IVF,

Jonathan Anomaly: you know, FAIC

Malcolm Collins: Pro Catholic, anti IVF guy, right? Yeah.

Jonathan Anomaly: I don’t, I don’t wanna be on Nick Fuentes team, but, okay. That’s true. By the way, can I, can I say something? You know, I don’t know if you were gonna mention Tism.

I, I know this doesn’t have much to do with it, but the truth is, you know, I, I agree with you. I’m really worried about birth rates. I think any reasonable person would be, if you, if you love humanity, you, you want us to survive. And, and, you know, we’ve, we’ve had many customers already, by the way, and, and many are religious or on the right as well, who are going to have a kid that they wouldn’t have had if it weren’t so for polygenic selection.

And the reason is they have a family history of disease or they were infertile, especially the, the former. You know, we’ve had real people worry like, look, I don’t wanna have a kid if it means that they’re gonna have these horrible diseases, but if I can embryo [00:57:00] select, they’re much less likely to, so we’re gonna have more kids.

Like this is actually a prenatal pro-family technology. And I know not everyone’s gonna agree with us on that, but like, it it is, it’s objectively, I mean, it creates

Malcolm Collins: more humans and healthier ones. So yeah. More, more adult humans, people can say, well, do you consider an embryo human? But it creates more adult humans.

And I, and I would note I do consider most embryos, humans just not at the exact, like, I consider potential

Jonathan Anomaly: humans myself, but like yeah, we can parse words. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But, but in terms of like living adults, which is the thing that Tism is concerned about, obviously this is, we get more of them.

Jonathan Anomaly: Yeah, exactly.

Malcolm Collins: But yeah, it’s been great to have you on. Great. To catch up. Yeah. Any, any new projects you’re working on yourself?

Jonathan Anomaly: Well, no, basically we’re trying to spread this to, to the world and, and find ways of doing this. But obviously I’m always writing, we, we just put on our website an ethics of embryo screening paper.

And what we really wanna do next is in addition to offering more and better traits, we’re, we’re always trying to do that, including potentially personality [00:58:00] or severe depression that you could select against.

Yeah, we’re

especially interested in doing more of these plyo tr studies. My worry always was as an academic, like, look, this is probably gonna be net good, but maybe there’s all this hidden plyo tr where we’re gonna get all these bad unexpected effects.

But the more we learn about it, the more we learn. That’s not true. And, and, yeah, I wanna dig into this because I think it’s really good news and it’s really important for people, you know, doctors. A lot of people in the industry, the fertility industry, they just don’t keep up with genetics. And so the more we discover about it and the more we publish in mainstream journals, the more attention they’re gonna have to pay and just change their views.

So I really wanna be on my soapbox and like make the arguments and kind of be part of the epistemic change in the world that makes us more acceptable.

Malcolm Collins: Well, great. Great to have you on.

Jonathan Anomaly: Thanks for having me. Great to catch up.

Speaker: That. What do you think Indy? What do you think? [00:59:00] Is this Indy’s first time seeing snow? Yeah, I think so. Oh, are you guys thinking snow angels get up Octavia and look at the angel. You did a really good job actually. What do you think, girl?

Is it kind of cold?

It is just for professor. Girl. You’re okay. Hey Professor. It’s so snowy out today. Yeah, it’s, Hey, you want me to get the chickens today so you don’t freeze? Um,

snow.

Oh, see, that’s the yellow snow. That’s what I say. Yeah. We should not eat that. Yeah, don’t, don’t eat the yellow snow. Right guys, you Andy, let’s as house. Wow. That is so beautiful. [01:00:00] You’re all good. Girl

pack Dad. No, not right now, buddy.

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#296 Science of Luck & 2025 Year End | Adam Dorsay, PsyD Solo Episode