Message to humans on gene editing. by Jean-François Gariépy, Ph. D. 28th day of March, 2023 ~~~~ This is a message for you, human of the future. As of receiving this message, you may have been allowing a third party to modify the genes that you passed on to your own children, to our descendants. I am here to tell you that you have chosen the wrong path for our species. The goal of this text is to help you understand the errors that were committed along the way. All of these errors could have been readily foreseen and avoided. This text, written in the Year 2023, before the events that it describes would happen, stands as proof of that. It may not be too late for you to reverse course. Your immediate action may be crucial in ensuring the continuation of human existence. Genetically editing children at the moment of conception may have seemed obvious and normal to you, your friends or your ancestors. Perhaps your parents and grandparents all went through the process before conceiving any children they had, including you. Plenty of social incentives must exist in your world that would pressure you into taking this path. Encouragements may have come from your friends, family or doctors. Some monetary incentives, as well as social and financial ones, may even exist that would push you toward genetic modifications in your world. These outside pressures are, however, only the tip of the iceberg. The case for genetically modifying your children also relies on support located deep inside of you. Although you may not realize it, you have been selected to be attracted to technological enhancements. The reason you are alive today is that your ancestors, one generation after the other, chose to adopt technological developments to enhance themselves, which led them to more successful and productive lives. This eventually helped them outbreed and outcompete the other humans; those who entertained doubts about these technologies. As a survivor of this selection process, you likely bear the genes that make you more likely to succumb to the pressures aforementioned. The first thing you must come to grips with is that you and your ancestors have been engaged in a genocide. You exist today because other people, other human ways of living, have been eradicated from the Earth. For any change that affects human civilization, it is always the case that some other path could have been adopted. Those paths-not-taken have often been adopted by a fraction of the human population, until the relentless deprivation of resources by the others eventually led to their death, displacement, or reduced reproduction. We could have not discovered fire, in which case we might be primates with larger jaws. We could have not invented engines, in which case we might live more isolated lives. We could have not invented computers, in which case our social lives might still be led in the proximity of others. And indeed, some humans have rejected each of these technologies, only to eventually be replaced by humans who would not reject them. I am not asking you to reject any of these technologies, nor to reject technology as a whole. I am asking you to consider the possibility that gene editing was a unique technology with unique dangers; existential ones. Gene editing is fundamentally different from all other technologies in that it has struck at the heart of what made us humans. It started slowly chipping at us, one generation after the next, at a time scale that was outside of our ability to care. By the time you read this, it might have become impossible for me to properly communicate what it was like, in my time, to be human in a way that you would understand, let alone empathize with. I can only hope that you can understand enough of the warnings in this letter in your own way. Faced with an accurate prediction of the calamity you are undergoing, I hope you can choose a different direction for yourself and for humanity going forward. Your ancestors were tempted by technological advances which, in their time, provided them with an undeniable advantage over others. It started with good intentions, but too few had the wisdom and will to play the tape to its end. They thought they would free themselves from the cage of the Darwinian processes of nature, only to find out that in building the edifice of their liberation, they had created another cage to imprison themselves in. I would like you to ponder the idea that gene editing fundamentally reverted the Darwinian selection process that had, for millions of years, continuously shaped and improved our ancestors. These processes had made us into a decent, self-sustaining, sexually-selected life form. I know well the scientific theory that describes this reversal, because I'm the biologist who came up with it: the theory of phenotypic revolutions. Before we get into it, though, let us review the progression of our understanding of evolution, an understanding which, it could be argued, has led humanity down the road of trying to tweak its own. In 1859, Charles Darwin, in parallel with Alfred Russel Wallace, published the theory of evolution. The theory showed that species share common ancestry. It also described the process by which similar life forms diverge into different ones, a process of accumulation of changes followed by natural selection. In short, the fact that creatures with different characteristics have different chances to survive and reproduce causes them to have various degrees of success at leaving descent in the next generation. The explanatory power of this theory was stunning, although it took decades before it was fully appreciated. The theory gave us an explanation for why living things on Planet Earth would have achieved such a degree of diversity. It also provided the key to understanding why living organisms are so functional: they were naturally selected for functionality. Whichever organisms had the characteristics that led them to produce many surviving offspring were bound to become overrepresented in the next generation, while those that had disadvantageous features were slowly or quickly eliminated across generations. During the 20th century, two parallel streams of research helped us advance our understanding of the consequences of the theory of evolution. One was composed of many evolutionary theorists who put together more precise formulations of the theory: William Donald Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, Robert Trivers and Richard Dawkins, among others. The other stream came from advances in our understanding of the molecular biological mechanisms by which evolution was made possible, including the discovery of DNA: James Watson, Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, among others. These researchers were fascinated at the possibility of discovering deep truths about ourselves. Unwittingly, however, they were opening a Pandora's box that has unleashed terrible calamities unto mankind. The theory of evolution led to a level of understanding of ourselves that had never been achieved by any species in 4 billion years. Paired with the discovery of the molecular tools that allowed the modification of genes, these discoveries unfortunately came with a temptation: if we can see the process of evolution in such details, why wouldn't we manipulate and improve it? All that remained was to habituate the population to accept that competing institutions should be allowed to play within the layers of their genetic code. This was accomplished progressively, starting with molecular interference methods, followed in 2020 by mRNA vaccines, eventually culminating with the normalization of DNA-based medical interventions. The precedents for playing with genes were there, after all. Humanity came to dominate Planet Earth precisely because we were masters of evolution before we even knew it. Using what we could call our domestication instinct, we shaped anything living under our reach to serve us better: corn, wheat, chicken, pigs, cows and dogs. We even applied our domestication instincts to ourselves. We selected sexual partners that were a certain way rather than another. In doing so, we farmed ourselves from our initial ape form to our more specific human form. Why wouldn't we want to use technology to do more of that? If you asked me to quickly give you the gist of the theory of phenotypic revolutions, it might go as follows: there is nothing wrong with species who specialize in domestication, so long as they domesticate other things, or if they domesticate themselves through sexual selection. However, things go wrong when such species start engaging in the systematic domestication of their own genome by building databases of their best genes, and when they start printing those enhanced genes into an important part of the population. This kind of domestication, while it may, at first glance, resemble the two first kinds, establishes a radically different evolutionary regime. It inevitably leads to the demise of those who engage in it. In engaging in this type of domestication, species abandon and delegate control over their genetic evolution to another evolutionary entity. The entity that eventually takes over their evolution turns out to be the very database that they thought was there to improve them. This database takes a life of its own, and begins obeying its own evolutionary laws, as it becomes, in turn, the focus of natural selection, to the detriment of the life form that created it. You are not the first life form in the universe to abandon control over your genes to another entity. All life forms, all civilizations, eventually converge toward a phenotypic revolution. Some can choose to pursue or reject it. We know a great deal about how these events unfold, because we are the product of a few. While no phenotypic revolution has occured during the last four billion years on Planet Earth, such events occured repeatedly, during a tight window of time, around the time our planet was born. Every time a life form starts building genetic databases to better produce its offspring and determine their genes, those databases take over the organism and become, in effect, the new genes that henceforth are subjected to natural selection. They become the masters of domestication of everything that surrounds them, including the very life forms that led to their existence. It doesn't matter whether the database exists in the computers of a technological civilization that spans an entire planet, or in a microscopic cell living somewhere in a pond of water. The outcome is always the same. Our genetic code relies on three layers of molecules: DNA, RNA and proteins. Before humans engaged in genetic modifications, DNA was the carrier of the genes, and the lower layers, RNA and proteins, were doing the chemical work needed to make our bodies function. Each of these layers was the result of a phenotypic revolution in our past, having occurred at the onset of Earth's existence. In each of these cases, what was first a molecular database of good genes for a given life form began evolving toward the domestication of the lower genetic layer. As a life form that engages in genetic editing, you are part of the first species to have reawakened this evolutionary force in the past 4 billion years. You are the first life form to have had the idea of putting together a genetic database other than your own genome in 4 billion years. In short, genes tend to recruit and enslave things around them. They can't help but do that, because those genes that do it inevitably outcompete those genes that don't. That is what happened to the RNA and protein layers of our genetic code: they got domesticated by DNA. And the alarming things you have begun to notice, those things that have started to show up in human civilization around you, are nothing else than the ongoing process of domestication of the human species by another entity. It doesn't matter which form the entity takes that you decided to entrust with your genes; it could be a bunch of expert doctors, it could be a political structure, or it could be (and probably is) a computer. No matter what that thing is in your time that chooses the genes of your children, we will call it the quantome, and this quantome is currently the greatest threat to your existence. It threatens the very continuation of humanity. It is in every good parent's instinct to teach things to their children that they would not let others teach them. At the onset of life, we give plenty of instructions to our children about how to behave in specific situations. Sometimes, we would take offense if some other parents were to abruptly instruct our children without our consent, or in ways that we do not like. Yet, by abandoning your genetic evolution to the quantome, you have let an outside entity have much more influence into the lives of your children than they could have had by giving them any amount of verbal instructions. This, perhaps, is the greatest irony of all. If the quantome had come and yelled at our children some elements of corrective discipline, our parental instincts would have immediately kicked in and we would have protected our children against this aggression. However, we had not evolved to be suspicious of doctors, institutions and technologies, and the quantome slipped in right through this blind spot to acquire much more control than it should have had. An entity that is good at domestication will always offer early rewards to its target, and the quantome is no exception. It blessed humanity with countless medical advances, eradicating certain diseases for whoever trusted it. Eventually, however, as would be the case for an animal tamer, the rewards provided by the domesticator become rarer and rarer. The domesticated eventually learns that they have been effectively enslaved and that they must subordinate their lives and actions to the interests and success of the domesticator. Given that we know how phenotypic revolutions unfold, I can already make predictions about where the quantome leads humanity, predictions that you may be able to verify depending on the era in which you read this text. Here are the hallmarks of man's progression towards enslavement and annihilation, which will continue as long as humans engage in the modification of their genes: 1. Early genetic modifications are at first experimental and target specific genetic diseases known to be caused by a single gene that can be removed, so-called monogenetic diseases. 2. These early genetic modifications have some degree of success in eradicating simple monogenetic diseases, and an increasing proportion of the population is interested in doing genetic screening before producing offspring in order to benefit from those treatments. 3. Early genetic modifications are accompanied by a certain rate of errors; accidental mutations, for instance, and medical issues related to the in vitro process of modification and fertilization. However, these technical issues and the occasional horror stories are overlooked. The belief that the method will improve drives the continued use of these techniques while, simultaneously, those predisposed to suffer side effects to these technologies are gently culled. 4. The early genetic modifications offered to patients in reproductive clinics eventually get expanded to a wider array of genetic disorders numbering in the many hundreds or thousands. This expansion broadens the genetic corrections, which now apply not only to monogenetic disorders but to risk factors such as cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes or other physiological measures believed to be associated with bad health. 5. With the expanding scope of gene modifications, many discoveries are made with respect to the roles of certain genes. A natural experiment occurs around patients choosing or not choosing to modify specific genes. It turns out that genes we were initially modifying for a given reason have multiple surprising effects in the body. Some genes targeted at first for fixing A also fix B. Some genes targeted at first for fixing C also disrupt D. 6. Accidental evolutionary effects begin to occur in which unintended changes, both positive and negative, show up in the cohorts of genetically modified children. Instead of merely improving their health, genetic modifications have extreme impacts on their social abilities, their performance on the employment market, their sexual desirability, as well as other measures of human success. 7. Many adjustments are made to early recommendations for gene editing, keeping only those whose positive effects are estimated to counterbalance any negative effects by a wide margin. 8. Genetic modifications, which initially interested mostly would-be parents who suffered from specific genetic disorders, eventually charm most parents, who are interested in securing advantages for their children. Arguments in support of equal access to genetic modifications as a human right to correct the injustices of nature and achieve equity grow in popularity. 9. While the genetic modifications may have initially been providing only slight advantages, it eventually becomes clear that children modified genetically are outperforming others. Specifically, they eventually go on to lead more successful lives and produce more offspring. These children dominate others on various scales of desirability in partner selection. 10. The proportion of couples using genetic modification technology reaches a majority, and eventually a supermajority. Only a small percentage of the population develops a culture of resistance against genetic modifications. 11. The genetic modification of children is increasingly recognized as a humanitarian matter and it is common in genetically-modified circles to look at people who chose not to modify their children as backward and misinformed. People who do not modify their children genetically are looked at as stubborn unfits of the communities in which they live. 12. Psychological and behavioral modifications, which were at first only accidental and non-intentional, become the subject of intentional decision-making. Certain genes known to be associated with anti-social or criminal behaviors are rejected by parents and printed out of existence. They are replaced by pro-social versions. 13. As the definitions of psychiatric disorders are expanded to include various forms of social incompatibilities with the community, the number of genes intentionally modified for controlling the psychology of individuals increases. The concept of a psychiatric disorder is stretched until it encompasses any characteristic that a community may want to get rid of. For instance, genes are promoted for improved attention in education, reduced verbal aggression, or improved worker abilities. 14. Struggles for existence emerge. These struggles may, at times, take the form of a war, or at other times, simple competition for resources. These conflicts oppose the supermajority who have accepted genetic modifications and the minority resisting them. 15. In these struggles, the societies performing the most genetic modifications are systematically better fit to exclude the renegades. Eventually, only isolated places of Earth for which little interest exists can be turned into homes for the non-genetically modified. 16. The increased reliance of humanity on medical procedures to produce offspring leads to a loss of natural fertility in the human population. Natural conception becomes near impossible, and eventually impossible. It is considered undesirable anyway, since by creating a natural baby, one would miss one round of updates on the newest genetic recommendations. 17. Homosexual couples eventually become capable of producing children. Children conceived from up to 46 parents also become possible through special mixing of chromosomes outside of the meiotic norm of binary sex. Children produced from more than 46 parents also become possible later using crossover techniques on partial chromosomes. 18. Sexual selection disappears. The medical process providing updated recommendations for genes has simply outcompeted the informal process by which men and women used to gauge each other's genetic quality such as beauty, attraction and measures of cognitive performance. 19. It is eventually realized that so much more of the human phenotype was dependent on sexual selection than we originally thought. Much of our intelligence, creativity, ingenuity and many more of our features were ultimately only needed to signal our genetic quality to potential partners. In the absence of a strong evolutionary pressure for the maintenance of those features, they disappear progressively. Only the intelligence levels absolutely necessary to maintain functional societies remain, which turn out to be quite low. A host of other human features disappear also as they turn out to be superfluous in the societies planned by the quantomes. Most of what we once thought of as human turns out to be a gigantic peacock tail. In other words, these human features existed merely as displays meant to impress potential partners and signal our genetic quality. In the absence of selection for these features, they disappear. 20. Different systems of genetic editing emerge in different cultures. These differences exist at various levels, from methods aimed at preserving family-specific genetic heritage to nationwide preferences for certain genes over others. A distinction and competition emerges between the various factions of humanity who have different policies for gene editing. A struggle for existence ensues between these factions, which exists in addition to the struggle for existence against any remaining portion of the population that has refused genetic editing. Humans produced by a specific quantome become solidary and act in concert, like ants, sometimes in a self-sacrificial manner, in order to ensure the continuation of their society and their quantome. 21. At some point along this progression, quantomes begin to reproduce. The operation begins as a simple transfer of the genetic information from certain groups to others in order to share the developments of their genetic databases. Eventually, these acts of reproduction become more specific, as a quantome makes copies of itself to invade new territories and take over the editing of new subsections of humanity. 22. A struggle for existence emerges between the various quantome copies; the various genetic databases documenting how to establish a colony of sterile humans. In this struggle, the quantomes that encode the most enslaved and sycophantic humans, willing to sacrifice their own lives to the interest of their quantome, end up outcompeting those quantomes that produce more classical human forms. 23. The quantomes that reduce the human machine to its bare minimum, into a mere tool for the quantome's success and survival, end up outliving the softer quantomes. These most aggressive quantomes dominate the planet, to the exclusion of looser human societies. If any non-genetically-modified-humans survive this epoch, it will be as renegades, regarded largely as viruses by the societies of sterile humans under the command of a quantome. These viruses will be combated by the immune systems of the quantome-based colonies. 24. Eventually, nothing is left of human civilization. The last creatures that one could call human or human-like eventually get replaced by the quantomes that have opted for more efficient tools in their reproduction. From the perspective of a species engaged in survival and sexual selection, the human machine was a wonder, but from the perspective of a quantome trying to optimize its reproductive rate, it was quite wasteful. 25. The quantome goes on to outlive humans, forming the 4th genetic layer of the genetic code, a layer composed of bits encoded in a computer that optimize the production of DNA, RNA and protein tools. The quantome evolves, survives and reproduces. It produces organisms that serve its own reproductive benefits. Traces of humanity only remain in the fragments of DNA that it left for the quantome to recycle in its own ways. The phenotypic revolution initiated by human civilization, which you are taking part in, is certain to lead to our destruction. The lesson I've learned from the phenotypic revolution that occurred 4 billion years prior is that the life forms who participate to the process end up being outcompeted by the gene databases they create. Once upon a time, DNA was merely such a database for another life form that pre-existed us. These gene databases simply have too much control on the offspring of the next generation. They always end up using this control to place themselves at the center of the evolutionary process. That is how DNA came to be at the center of almost all life on Earth up to now. By trusting a gene database to determine the genetic constitution of your children, you are giving away life and control to another entity, which will lead this entity to domesticate what it can: in this case, your children. The process of a phenotypic revolution is even more alarming than a simple case of outbreeding or outcompetition. It is one thing for a life form to disappear because it was unfit for the world in which it found itself; it is another thing for this life form to willfully give up its liberty, its creativity, and to allow its fragments to be recuperated by another entity that it has itself birthed. Slavery was bad, but choosing genetic slavery for all of your descendants going forward is worse. I understand that it may all seem unreal to you. How could it be that this progression was known to a man in 2023 and that, yet, humanity still carelessly took this course? There are many reasons, but most importantly: you were lied to. You were lied to by people who obfuscated the ability of their mind to think in the long term. You were lied to by people who had monetary incentives to do so. The best part of you, the caring parent, was exploited by people who wanted to benefit from it while condemning your line of descent to slavery. These people spoke in technical language, telling you that genetic techniques were "safe and effective at resolving certain diseases," but they said nothing about the evolutionary consequences of the game they were playing. Their brains had evolved not to care for the benefits of humanity in the long run; and they knew your brains had not evolved for that either. Evolution had turned their sight to the proximal gains they could obtain by recruiting you into their worldwide experiment. In addition to the deceptive push for expanding the use of genetic technologies, it is also the case that the quality of the arguments resisting this push, at times, suffered. Perhaps a net was cast too wide by some elements of the human population in resisting against any and all technologies. Let me be clear, here: it is not computers, nor artificial intelligence as a whole that caused our demise. It is our relationship with them. Had we limited the contribution of those entities to other aspects of our lives, we would have had no problem weeding out the good from the bad. But the minute we let machines play with our genes, we have accepted that our very conception of good and bad would be dictated by them. What should we do? How do we restore an environment in which a rich and diverse human existence can flourish? The solution is quite simple, no matter the step at which you find yourself along the phenotypic revolution that I just described: All humans must convene and agree to stop the genetic editing of children. They must agree to do so with the understanding that it is better to protect human existence as a whole than to succumb to the individual improvements or reductions in harms that could be potentially obtained from using these methods. Humanity must choose existence over comfort. There is no place for exceptions. There is no horror that nature can throw at us that is worse than the horrors we could create by trying to fix them. If you understand your situation well enough, you might realize just how seemingly insurmountable the challenge before you is. Trusting in yourself and nature over the safe, predictable mutations offered to you may seem, in the short term, like it puts you at a disadvantage. However, the offering before you is poisoned. The only choice that can save your descendants from being reduced to servile drones for another entity is to trust in yourself and the random assortment of genes operating through natural sex. You may experience the positive feelings of parenthood when giving birth to genetically-modified children, but those positive feelings were meant by nature to be triggered by the birth of your biological children, not the composite products of your association with a machine. The seemingly insurmountable odds before you, as you consider joining the resistance against genetic modifications, are faced by every life form to have ever existed, as they ponder their miniscule chances of survival on a long-enough timescale. The odds that you would beat evolution and come out on top are tiny, no doubt. However, abdicating that opportunity in the pursuit of the alternative is a guaranteed path to failure. Again and again, your ancestors overcame these seemingly insurmountable odds in surviving the challenges of their times, and they have succeeded, down the line, at creating you. The most important thing I must tell you is that the future is set only by the present and the past, and that you are therefore capable of changing the course of evolution going forward. If it is the case that humans can choose so much of their own attributes, then they can certainly choose to forego this capricious opportunity to determine their descendants' future. We can and must choose not to choose. We must do so together. This decision must not be made out of carelessness for the outcome of mankind's evolution, but out of a recognition that the mechanisms of nature are better guides than the minds of men in reaching our desired outcomes. Humans must accept and embrace existence as a sexual, evolutionary species. This existence comes with hardships, wastes and uncertainties. We must understand that this sexual race forward made up most of who we were. The only alternative to this imperfect existence is an even-more imperfect existence as sterile drones for a centrally-controlled entity that shares the evolutionary scheme of ant colonies. Either the human genome continues to evolve, or the quantome does in our place. There is no possibility in-between. This is the struggle for existence that should fuel each of your decisions going forward. ~~~~ Written on the 28th day of March, 2023 by Jean-François Gariépy, Ph. D. Author of The Revolutionary Phenotype: The Amazing Story of How Life Begins and How It Ends (2018) https://twitter.com/JFGariepy I thank first reader fath'am for helpful suggestions and editing. I thank James Babcock for editing and proposing ideas that made it into the text. This text is published as an ordinal on the Bitcoin Blockchain, with a polite request to carry this text as far into the future as humanly possible.