Mutational Load is as Dangerous a Long-Term Threat as Climate Change. Why Can’t We Discuss it?

^{Carl J. Yeoman, Nicholas Chia, Suleyman Yildirim, Margret E. Berg Miller, Angela Kent, Rebecca Stumpf, Steven R. Leigh, Karen E. Nelson, Bryan A. White 1,6 and Brenda A. Wilson, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons}

There is no “winning” internet arguments. The closest thing to a win condition I’ve ever seen is that the other guy simply has nothing to say, and disappears. I confess, I have wasted far too much time honing this craft, but I’ve discovered some very curious expressions of human psychology in the course of that development.

From a young age, I found I had an unfortunate talent of asking just exactly the right subversive question to cause a meltdown. Like dropping mentos into pepsi, or finding just precisely the right hanging thread to tug on, which will unravel the entire sweater.

I’d like to think this is a product of aspergers giving me a relentlessly critical, analytic perspective, but that sounds far too grandiose for what amounts in practice to putting my foot in my mouth 100% of the time. I’m like the conversational equivalent of those rats they use to find unexploded land mines.

A large part of this was my education, which included three years in a private evangelical middle school (then, mercifully, another three years in a far more liberal Episcopalian highschool). They taught young earth creationism from the A.C.E. curriculum, pages from which you may have seen go viral on Reddit with captions expressing incredulity that anybody would teach such insane nonsense to children.

Asking the wrong questions in such an environment earned me a great many trips to the principal’s office. I quickly made a mental map of intellectual no-go zones, realizing in the process that if their beliefs were true, they wouldn’t have any intellectual no-go zones. Those only exist to protect lies.

The question which got me in the most hot water had to do with a lesson on “false Christs”. That is, what Christians call cult leaders who aren’t Jesus. It is a perspective on competitors framed in a way which deeply presupposes their correctness, designed to place Jesus beyond suspicion and exclude him from the same scrutiny & analysis they subject his competitors to.

It basically amounted to “What prevents Jesus from being one of those guys, except that the Bible was written by his followers, and not theirs?” Expressed more efficiently as I developed the necessary faculties with age as:

“Suppose there’s a group traveling about your area, led by a charismatic speaker who claims the world is ending soon. He promises he alone can save you, but you must sell your belongings, devote your life to him, and cut off family members who try to stop you.

He may also assign you a new name / identity, advise you to leave your home and job in order to follow him, and says that if you don’t love him more than your own family then you’re not worthy of him. His followers wrote a book about him in which he performs many miraculous feats, but no contemporaneous outside source corroborates these claims. What sort of group is that?”

This is the sort of question I was talking about. You get some very, very interesting reactions to this. Like showing a Mormon essays on their own church’s website affirming certain historical events which trusted figures in their lives once assured them were anti-Mormon lies. Or showing an MLM rep the financial details of Amway, LuLaRoe, etc. that the government forced them to make public.

If you do it right, something like a neurological short circuit happens. I think the fashionable term these days is “epistemological violence”, when you introduce information that is a threat to someone’s identity/feelings of validity.

Then, the fight or flight response kicks in. Either they get really hostile all of a sudden or they excuse themselves. You illuminated a weak point in an emotionally important belief they hold, which they are unwilling to reconsider. So, they “flip out”, if not always in a dramatic fashion.

This phenomenon is by no means exclusive to religion. Arguably today people feel more passionate about, and invested in, politics. Even the most popular religious movements are deeply political and in many respects serve as vehicles for certain political ideals. In the US, those ideals are mainly right wing, but this phenomena is also present on the left.

Critical theory underpins progressive positions on basically every issue, so much so as to be functionally invisible to practitioners who do not think of themselves as having a belief system. They characterize it simply as human decency, as though everyone else’s morality is relative, but their own is objective and timeless.

Critical theory has dominated western academia for many decades now, so progressives find their language and ideas reflected there. It inspires high confidence. Yet, they still have unexamined weak points, and they still react in the same way fundies do when you illuminate them. If anything their meltdowns are more spectacular as, believing their views to be affirmed by all of science (in fact only sociologists for the most part) the possibility that they’re wrong in any detail isn’t even on their radar.

So it is that, if you ask the right question, even people who pride themselves on open mindedness and conformity to science will unravel before your eyes. In this case, the question is as follows:

“What are some visible examples of mutational load increase in human populations?”
This usually requires some explanation. Somehow in the course of their expensive education, not one of their professors (unless they majored in biology) ever mentioned mutational load. That’s very curious, isn’t it? Sociology professors sure omit a great many important details of human biology from their curricula, it would seem.

Mutational load is, broadly, a quantification of the harmful mutations to our genome that have accumulated in humanity because we have removed pressures which select against them. It is, more specifically, the frequency of deleterious alleles observed in a species compared to a hypothetical genome of that same species that is optimally adapted to its environment.

“Deleterious” is defined here in opposition to evolutionary fitness, which is to say proficiency at survival, reproduction and child rearing. Deleterious alleles are therefore those genetic maladaptations that inhibit these functions.

It may or may not surprise you to learn that humanity’s mutational load is steadily increasing. That was a major missing piece of this puzzle until recently. It is, for reasons I’m sure are becoming clear, a very touchy subject. We do not like the microscope turned back on us. We agitate against, and attempt to subvert the authority of, any standard used to evaluate us.

For this reason, most of the examples one might give of visibly detectable mutational load increase would constitute hate speech. It’s a difficult question to get answered, because there’s no way to answer it without committing epistemological violence. This is what makes it one of those intellectual no-go zones I talked about earlier.

Yet, mutational load is real. Evolution, the standard against which alleles that fall under the umbrella of mutational load are deemed deleterious, is unassailable fact. And now, so is the fact that humanity’s mutational load is increasing.

It’s a very clear A->B->C, with that 2019 study and others affirming its conclusion removing the last of the wiggle room on the issue. There are many less defensible inferences we might make concerning causation, my own favorite hypothesis being that much of the increase is a product of the behavioral sink phenomenon (which you probably associate with the term “mouse universe experiment”) and possible causal connective tissue between mutational load increase in humans and the reversal of the Flynn effect (falling IQ scores).

But those are more tenuous. I can’t rigorously defend them so they remain personal suspicions, especially as studies exist which affirm environmental causation but reject evolutionary change resulting from a changing environment as an explanatory factor (for Flynn effect reversal, not mutational load increase). What I can defend, what is now rock solid, is the core contention that mutational load has been increasing in human populations.

This raises certain troubling possibilities. Barring the total collapse of modern, high tech industrial societies, the more that our material quality of life improves on average, the more insulated we become from selective pressures that would otherwise prune away deleterious mutations over time. That is, if the future continues to grow safer and more comfortable, in particular as medical science makes it possible to live with ever more serious hereditary maladies, we ought to expect mutational load to continue increasing.

The one plausible barrier against this process, CRISPR, has been dismantled by lawmakers who, at every level, have seemingly agreed that the genetic modification of humans should remain forever off the table. Again, we’re in love with our deleterious alleles. We like not having to be fit (not just in the athletic sense of the word). We like being soft and sloppy, we like removing dead-ends and pitfalls from the world so that life is easier.

The modern concept of compassion is to pull out all the stops, via the ingenuity of medical scientists, to make the lives of high mutational load individuals comfortable and dignified, treating the symptoms rather than fixing the cause. Which is to say, intentionally conserving and propagating deleterious alleles (plus social accommodation/sensitivity) rather than using that same medical science to simply correct the issue in future generations. Nurgle would be proud.

To me, that’s a small minded version of compassion which considers only immediate, individual harms. The greater compassion would be preventative. What complicates preventing mutational load is that humans build up culture around everything, including mutational load. The culture and community surrounding deafness for example has infamously produced a subset of deaf parents who also hope for deaf children, to better relate to them, and so they can share in deaf culture/community. They are protective of deafness, because for them it’s an important element of their identity. To propose that we eradicate deafness is, to them, a threat against their validity as a people.

So it goes with the fat acceptance movement, challenging the yardstick they are compared against, wanting their environment to adapt to them, so they do not need to adapt to their environment. I’m sure you can think of many more examples, but we’re in a minefield here, and we’ve already stepped on two. The rest of the examples we might point to are better left unsaid, hence why I can never seem to get that question answered, even by biologists.

Religious apologists go to great lengths to disguise their motivated reasoning. They know what credibility looks like, that truth should be concluded to dispassionately, so they strive to create that appearance and obfuscate emotional influences on their thinking. The same is true across the aisle, as it were.

In the case of progressives, the emotional influences on their reasoning, where this topic is concerned, include the long list of horrifying atrocities committed during the twentieth century in the name of “improving the breed”. The holocaust is the most infamous example, but even absent any racial bias, eugenics would have committed many of the same sins, such as the forcible sterilization of the mentally handicapped, where their condition was determined to be hereditary. In California, this practice continued until 1963(!)

This puts progressive mutational load deniers in a precarious position of being unable to use their strongest argument against the intentional mitigation of mutational load increase, because it’s an argument from emotion/morality, which they cannot do while also concealing their motivated reasoning.

For what it’s worth I find the history of eugenics every bit as deplorable. I myself am the sort of person who likely would have been targeted by such programs, pointed out by a friend who wrongly imagines my views are ego-driven. As if what is good or bad for me, personally, determines what I accept as real. I do not hesitate to admit that I am not the picture of evolutionary fitness. I am, myself, an example of human mutational load increase. I suppose I feel negatively about that.

Yet, mutational load increase remains a clear and extant danger to humanity on the whole, which I prioritize over myself. That mutational load increasing in human populations remains a fact, whether I like it or not. There is, necessarily, a threshold somewhere that it may yet reach, beyond which lie serious problems for our species. How I or anybody else might feel about that, in particular the immoral and ill conceived early attempts at mitigating the effect, won’t make the problem itself go away. Nor can we ignore it forever.

I compare it to climate change because both take place over sufficiently long timescales as to furnish us with a feeling of false security. Both seem possible to ignore, from our position in history, being that everybody reading this is likely to be dead before either problem could grow into serious threats to our survival as a species.

Both are politically charged as well. Strong feelings surround the topic, as well as denial that feeling has anything to do with forming our perspectives on these issues. But both processes march inexorably onward in the background, even as we quibble about whether or not it’s even happening.

We’re allowed to discuss reproductive dangers like microplastics, phytoestrogens and pharmaceutical contamination of drinking water via the sewer system because solving those problems poses no epistemic danger to anybody, it just entails stricter waste management, new industrial regulations and so on.

We’re allowed to discuss falling sperm counts and to speculate about possible causes (though more recent findings indicate the problem may not be that severe). Nobody gets in your face over it. They might think you’re weird for being personally invested in average human fertility, but they don’t try to get you fired.

Yet, when you start discussing the threat to our reproductive capacity posed by unchecked mutational load, suddenly the room gets real fucking quiet. Somebody might send your employer a “concerned email”. If you rely on sponsors, are an author or public speaker, opportunities begin drying up mysteriously.

Why? Because identity. Because there’s only one kind of sex that results in babies, innumerable kinds that don’t, and humans are very very fond of non-reproductive sex. We’ve built up identities, culture and community around it, so that members of those cultures react aggressively to critical examination. Even to the point that “there is only one kind of sex that results in babies” is triggering to a certain crowd.

Mutational load, its increase in humans, and the proposition that this may be a serious problem down the road is threatening to some of these groups. One might say, “how is this a problem in light of overpopulation?” Setting aside for a moment that there exist many popular misconceptions about overpopulation (developed countries are actually not reproducing at replacement rate and haven’t been for many years, 100% of our population increase comes from immigration) what happens afterwards? What happens after the population crashes, but most people still want to cum into fursuits, balloons, cartoon characters or whatever instead of fertilizing eggs?

If we ponder ye orb, imagining the future of the social trend to abstract reproduction from biology, it leads to some pretty strange places. Technology is a genie which grants wishes without asking questions, and humans are nothing but bundles of unhealthy wishes. I could paint you a picture of where developments like this may take us, but that’s a limb I don’t want to go out on, when the central thrust of my argument doesn’t require it.

That is, simply put: Human mutational load is increasing. We don’t know where the “safe limit” is, whether it’s an abrupt edge we’ll fall off or a gradient we’re already well into that will kill us by a thousand small cuts. But we know this process is happening. We know it’s getting worse, year on year, and we know it’s approaching an as yet undetermined threshold beyond which serious biological, existential dangers await our species.

So, can we talk about it? It’s politically contentious but so is climate change. That conversation happens despite the strong wishes of certain groups to sweep it under the rug. Can we not do the same here? Why the weird, squirrely, often hostile reactions to an academically and socially important question? Why the awkward silence, when it comes up?

I’ve posed this same question to the relevant subreddits three times, trying to get answers from qualified biologists. In all but one case I received zero replies. The only response I did get was guarded and accusatory, wanting to know about my motivations for asking.

But what purpose do obfuscation and burying our heads in the sand serve except to help the problem fester unobserved, when we could instead shine a light on it and investigate what forms of remediation (within modern ethical constraints) are available to us?