Today, I’m briefly touching several topics. This time, I look at the near elimination of Down syndrome, some issues relating to COVID, a bit on Facebook’s hate speech policy, and a few other items which caught my interest.

On evolution, racism, eugenics and Down syndrome

This morning, I listened to James Hong’s next podcast episode, On Darwinian Evolution and Scientifically Validated Racism. He covers a lot of ground here, partly looking at the connections between Darwin’s original work and racism at the time, as well as subsequent movements in eugenics. Today I just wanted to hit on two really quick issues:

First, did you know that the actual title of Darwin’s work is “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. It’s visible on this title page shown on Wikipedia page, though the full title never occurs on the Wikipedia page for the book, probably in part because the racial aspect of Darwin’s work is something our culture likes to gloss over at present.

Second, while talking about how Darwin’s ideas fed into eugenics, Hong notes how these trends continue to this day, notably with the dramatic decrease in the number of children with Down syndrome. Why is this happening? As prenatal testing grows, more and more children with Down syndrome are aborted, to the point that in some countries, almost no children with Down syndrome are born anymore. The Atlantic recently noted that in Denmark, 95% of people choose to abort Down syndrome babies, and in 2019, only 18 children were born with Down syndrome in the entire country (and only seven to parents who knew their child would have Down syndrome). On this trend, the Atlantic notes, “Prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t. This is just the beginning.”

Down syndrome, the Atlantic noted:

… was one of the first genetic conditions to be routinely screened for in utero, and it remains the most morally troubling because it is among the least severe. It is very much compatible with life—even a long, happy life

The Atlantic article is long, and looks deeply at this troubling trend, which is particularly pronounced in Denmark but is really worldwide. It essentially amounts to a societal decision to eliminate Down syndrome by selective abortion. The society has the resources to support them, but individuals choose not to have these children. The article quotes one woman who aborted her baby and says she doesn’t regret it, but that it feels like “you’re doing something wrong.”

The article goes on to note this:

And when fewer people with disabilities are born, it becomes harder for the ones who are born to live a good life… Fewer people with disabilities means fewer services, fewer therapies, fewer resources…

The choice is difficult, it argues; parents feel there is no neutral ground.

In the US, differences in beliefs lead to dramatically different abortion rates for Down syndrome babies. Economics (related to screening) also play a role.

While Down syndrome sticks out, it’s only the beginning. The Atlantic notes:

Labs now offer testing for a menu of genetic conditions—most of them rare and severe conditions such as Tay-Sachs disease, cystic fibrosis, and phenylketonuria—allowing parents to select healthy embryos for implantation in the womb. Scientists have also started trying to understand more common conditions that are influenced by hundreds or even thousands of genes: diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, cancer, and—much more controversially—mental illness and autism. In late 2018, Genomic Prediction, a company in New Jersey, began offering to screen embryos for risk of hundreds of conditions, including schizophrenia and intellectual disability, though it has since quietly backtracked on the latter.

We’re approaching the world examined in the excellent movie Gattaca, which I remember wrestling with in a movie club when I was in grad school. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching.

In any case, I just wanted to flesh this out a bit, as Hong only mentioned Down syndrome in passing in his podcast, but these trends in testing mean we’re facing a type of modern eugenics – one which is not deliberate at a societal level, but eugenics nevertheless.

I should also note that Al Mohler looked at the same Atlantic article previously and it’s worth reading his analysis as well. He goes on to connect this to thinking in the Third Reich in Germany, where some lives were deemed unworthy of life.

We need to be aware of these issues, and wrestling with them.

Hate speech policies and discrimination

The other day, I stumbled across a blog post which suggested that Facebook may be discriminating in its hate speech policy. The post, from a popular legal blog, quotes reporting from the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. The Globe wrote:

In the first phase of the project, which was announced internally to a small group in October, engineers said they had changed the company’s systems to deprioritize policing contemptuous comments about “whites,” “men” and “Americans.” Facebook still considers such attacks to be hate speech, and users can still report it to the company. However, the company’s technology now treats them as “low-sensitivity”—or less likely to be harmful—so that they are no longer automatically deleted by the company’s algorithms. That means roughly 10,000 fewer posts are now being deleted each day, according to the documents.

The blog notes that this is discriminatory; what makes hate speech hateful, apparently, is not just what it says but who it’s directed at.

COVID and outdoor dining in California

Recently I’d seen a video from a California restaurant owner in the LA area, complaining that California shut down even outdoor dining at her restaurant but was allowing outdoor dining immediately adjacent for a non-restaurant event. This was pretty horrifying.

The Volokh Conspiracy legal blog looked at California’s recent restrictions and concluded that California bans on all indoor worship services (regardless of size) likely runs afoul of recent Supreme Court decisions. The blog also worried that these outdoor dining restrictions aren’t actually rational; spread via outdoor dining seems to be rare, and the ban on outdoor dining likely means that people will move indoors to private spaces which are far more dangerous. It notes:

If people cannot eat safely at outdoor restaurants, there is a greater chance people will eat unsafely in indoor homes. No matter how hard government tries, the state cannot eliminate the demand for communal gathering. They will simply force people to satisfy those demands in underground, illegal fashions.

The blog also quotes an infectious-disease expert, who notes:

When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, a harm-reduction approach would encourage masking and social distancing instead of demanding that people have no contact at all with friends or family they don’t live with.

I think that’s exactly right; we ought to be trying to encourage people to have as little contact as they can, but some are going to insist on it. If we ban them from outdoor spaces, we’ll drive them indoors in private residences, which will be worse.

Do Christians need to obey all laws?

A while back, Tim Challies linked to this article on whether Christians should obey all COVID-19 orders; essentially, this article analyzes the issue of submission to governing authorities. One of the take-aways is that Biblically, we are not obligated to comply with illegal orders (e.g. unconstitutional ones). The analysis is worth reading and considering, and touches many of the key issues.

A few other things: