Designer genes

The author Conn Iggulden (who incidentally has written about the creative benefits of role-playing, but that’s a detail) was talking recently about the effects being able to buy genetic upgrades for your children.

I'd be happy allowing parents to buy mutations: say, height, to pass on forever. All would benefit in the end. http://t.co/aAmoieeweV

— Conn Iggulden (@Conn_Iggulden) April 24, 2015

"This generation, all I can afford is 'resistance to cancer' gene therapy, but will be passed to all descendants. Next generation: height."

— Conn Iggulden (@Conn_Iggulden) April 24, 2015

"You have extraordinary balance!" "My great-grandfather paid for the mod, after being clumsy all his life. He thought it was worth it.

— Conn Iggulden (@Conn_Iggulden) April 24, 2015

@MirabilisDave In time, sure, but if I could first choose 'cancer resistance' or 'increased telomere lifespan' for my kids, I would.

— Conn Iggulden (@Conn_Iggulden) April 24, 2015

Let’s not oversimplify. (I’ll get this out of the way first.) Genes don’t code for attributes directly, they code for structure. And the genome is a big mess of software patches going back millions of years, so typically it’s not easy to point to one gene and say it does X and X only. Even so, my family has some genetic kinks I’d like ironed out. Migraines. Sinus trouble. Short sight. Wonky knees. If it doesn’t mean turning into the Brundlefly, I’d pay for some changes there.

Some people have reacted by saying, “Oh great. So the rich will buy genes that give them a competitive advantage.” And my first thought was, sure, all genes that are worth keeping must give you a competitive advantage. Actually getting in there and tweaking them could get us out of a saddle point on Mount Improbable. So – other than the qubit-melting complexity of the entire interdependent H. sap genetic program – where’s the harm?

But on second thoughts, consider the Klingons. They’ll fight at the drop of a pin, and prehistoric Klingons must have been even worse. In the course of ordinary evolution, presumably a mutation arose that made early Klingons slightly less aggressive. Thus a family of brothers and sisters with that trait cooperated and thrived. And so the gene spread to other families within the village, then the tribe, then the entire Klingon race.

The point is that the cooperative trait I’m describing is an advantage in situations which allow a win-win solution – that is, where everybody does better by cooperating than by competing. Reverting to the real world and guessing now: maybe conditions in the Ice Age were so perilous that the human race had to become less selfish in order to survive. Thus we modern humans are able to understand a concept like pooling our resources via taxation in order to create a more comfortable society than we could enjoy if we were all living like backwoods survivalists.

But what if you were a Klingon buying a trait rather than having it sprung on your bloodline by mutation? Now there isn’t much point in buying the cooperation gene. (Yeah, yeah – see oversimplification disclaimer above). Little Worf is going to do much better in life if you make him more grasping and combative. Screw those jerks who’d share a fish they caught, right?

A common misunderstanding of Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene concept is that it must imply a selfish organism. How can we have altruism? Simple. If the world doesn’t consist solely of zero-sum games, the problems the genes are trying to solve will sometimes throw up cooperative solutions and hence social animals. Sadly, in the case of humanity, we could add: just social enough for the circumstances of a hunter-gather community of a few hundred individuals. Yet we are a species so in thrall to amour-propre that most of us would opt for being higher status than our neighbour even if that meant dragging everybody’s living standards down including our own.

And that’s the best we’ve got from evolution, which can chug on trying to find a joined-up solution. Biohacking is a whole other environment, one that doesn’t have to see problems in aggregate. There, you start by wanting your son to be a couple of inches taller than the other fellow, and next thing you know it’s the towers of San Gimignano all over again.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I’m an evangelist for the post-human future. We’re not going to inherit the cosmos with monkey brains, and once Humanity 2.0 is out there among the stars, the old primates can grow their hair long again – and spiny, and blue, and luminous, or whatever they like. But in the meantime, let’s try not to allow rivalrous gene wars to pull us off into a future of futile hardwired fashion accessories.

Image at top by Kate Andrews and shared under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence.

Mean genes - part 1

“It’s harnessing nerd power to create television content!” said the guy at the BBC.

Inward sigh of relief. At last, I thought. Pitching anything to the BBC can involve so many meetings you feel like you’re trapped in the afterlife arrivals hall from A Matter of Life and Death. That’s what the first BBC exec I encountered had told me: “You’ll go to a lot of meetings.” He said it like his spirit was broken. More than a dozen meetings later, I was getting to know how he felt. I’d tried explaining this particular concept (Conquerors, by the way – be patient, we’re coming to it) two or three times to an assistant producer. But this new guy was the Big Swinger, just back from his hols with a tan and a breezy attitude, and he got it right out of the gate.

“This is so refreshing,” I may have said. At which point the soundtrack would have carried a portentous note, the kind of musical sting Hans Zimmer loves to write.

Conquerors was the main reason I’d drifted across from games into television. I had the idea originally about five years earlier, while working at Eidos on Warrior Kings. After reading Richard Dawkins’s book Climbing Mount Improbable, I told Ian Livingstone my idea: “You create a stable of gladiatorial monsters. You have to breed, feed and train them, then you pick teams to go up against other players’ teams. What we’ll do, we’ll put the monster creation part free on all Eidos game disks – ”

Ah, you spotted the blunder. It was 1996 and I said “free”. Short of matching wits with a Sicilian, what could be worse?

As I thought about Conquerors, I realized it was more than a game. See, in order to render the battles nicely (quite an issue on mid-nineties PCs) I planned it that you wouldn’t control your team online. The training part was like a regular hands-on game, but once you herded your team off to fight some monsters from Argentina you just had to sit back and wait – and hope they’d learned the tactical lessons you’d taught them. Yes, they only had simple AI and would sometimes do some dumb things, but so would the other guy’s monsters.

Then it struck me. You didn’t have to have a monster in the fight to enjoy this game. It was also a spectator sport. And, because the battles were run on our servers and rendered out in rich 3D, we could edit that into broadcast-quality TV minutes.

It had to be teams, of course. If you pitted single monsters against each other it just became virtual Robot Wars. The qualities required for victory would then become trivial. Kind of like modern heavyweight boxing. The tactical element is needed because physical attributes plus behaviour is what makes for interesting outcomes.

I don’t think I ever got around to explaining that part. If you’re familiar with BBC pitching, you’ll know that the pattern is, first, those endless meetings I mentioned, the long hell of trying to break through indifference, incomprehension and bureaucracy. Then the moment it catches – the guy in the room who gets it, who likes it, who asks you to send over all the details of design, development and costs.

And it's about this time they lose your phone number...

Oh well, Conquerors is still there waiting. Not only could I do it better now, I could bypass the broadcasters and games publishers and BBC Worldwide and just take the whole thing to market via the App Store.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the design document. It’s over fifteen years old, remember, so I’d make some changes if I did it now. Still looks pretty innovative, though, if I do say so myself.