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.