Emily R. Klancher Merchant writes:

In the Operation Varsity Blues scandal of 2019, 50 wealthy parents were charged with trying to get their children into elite universities through fraudulent means. The story dramatically demonstrated the lengths to which some parents will go to ensure their children’s acceptance into places like Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and USC. Actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, bribed athletic coaches to recruit their children for sports they did not play. Actress Felicity Huffman and private equity mogul William E. McGlashan Jr. were among the parents who paid to falsify their children’s SAT and ACT test scores. Those who were caught faced criminal charges, yet the scandal also shed light on the perfectly legal tactics used by wealthy parents to get their children into elite institutions, such as endowing buildings or hiring expensive consultants.

The Pennsylvania couple Malcolm and Simone Collins have taken a different approach. For their two daughters, Titan Invictus and Industry Americus, the Collinses used eugenics. Titan and Industry are both under three years old, so it is too early to tell whether the experiment worked, but they were conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) using a process known as polygenic embryo screening (PES). Unlike preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which IVF clinics have long used to test embryos for chromosomal and single-gene disorders known to run in the families of prospective parents, PES examines single-nucleotide polymorphisms from across the genome to calculate lifetime risk of complex diseases and propensities for particular social outcomes, including expected educational attainment. A study published in 2023 found that 38 percent of Americans would strongly consider using PES to increase the chances of their child being admitted to a top-100 college or university if they were doing IVF anyway and if PES were available for free, which it currently is not: fees begin around $1,000, plus $400 per embryo (on top of the cost of IVF itself).

In addition to their four children (Titan and Industry have two older brothers, Octavian George and Torsten Savage), the Collinses have 34 embryos on ice. After selection through a similar PES process, they plan to implant one every two or three years until Simone’s uterus literally ruptures and needs to be removed. Malcolm and Simone are part of a new pronatalist movement that encourages elite couples to have as many children as possible to stave off what they and others—including, most prominently, Elon Musk—see as an impending population collapse. According to Musk, “If people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble,” going out “with a whimper in adult diapers.” Or, in the hyperbolic words of Malcolm Collins, “If [humanity] was an animal species it would be called endangered.” Yet pronatalists seem just as concerned about who is having babies. After all, birth rates are still high in some of the world’s poorer countries. For the Collinses, pronatalism is an alternative to immigration. Indeed, some of today’s most ardent pronatalists are also staunch anti-immigrationists.

While critics have paid considerable attention to the overt and covert racism of today’s pronatalism, they have focused much less on the growing enthusiasm for genetically engineered children, not just among pronatalists but among the tech elite more broadly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is an investor in Genomic Prediction, the PES company used by the Collinses. Noor Siddiqui, the founder and CEO of another PES company, Orchid Health, has boasted of her company’s numerous Silicon Valley clients. Many of them, including Siddiqui herself, use IVF not due to any fertility issues but in order to control the DNA of their future children.

Even among advocates of PES, debate rages about whether selecting a child on the basis of its predicted educational attainment is actually eugenics. According to Malcolm Collins, “it’s completely different.” He defines eugenics as “state-sponsored selective breeding to influence the dominance of certain genes,” in contrast to PES, which “us[es] technology to give parents the choice over which traits they value most.” Yet according to the evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman, a fierce advocate for PES who shared a stage with the Collinses at the 2023 Natal Conference in Austin, Texas, it’s all eugenics. Fleischman contends that selecting an embryo according to its predicted educational attainment is no different from selecting one according to its number of chromosomes. “We are all eugenicists,” she says, and we might as well embrace it.

Americans today typically conflate eugenics with racism, genocide, coercive sterilization, and ableism. This popular image, however, misses two key features of eugenics as it has existed in the United States since its importation from England at the turn of the 20th century. The first is that intelligence—not race—has always been at the center of American eugenics. Historically, eugenics and racism have operated in tandem, but neither is reducible to the other. Eugenics attributes socioeconomic inequality—both within and between racially defined groups—to varying levels of intelligence, which it defines as a biological quality shaped largely by our DNA. The second key feature is that, although the eugenics movement was responsible for the legalization of involuntary sterilization in a majority of US states, eugenics has depended primarily on individuals policing the gene pools of their own families, not on government intervention.

But eugenics does not work by breeding smarter humans. No genetic intervention, not even PES, has been shown to do this. Rather, eugenics works by naturalizing socioeconomic inequality and generating support for policies that enhance the life chances of those at the top of the social hierarchy and reducing the life chances of those at the bottom. [Continue reading…]