The Y Chromosome is Dysgenic

Score one for the feminists

If you’re a high school senior or recent graduate, please take five minutes to fill out this survey. I want another dozen responses or so before I write the post based on it…

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1.

The New York Times is in the middle of a three-part series on the ethics of embryo screening and selection.

A friend sent me a screenshot from the second part yesterday:

Interesting, huh?

That first link points to an article in Human Reproduction called “Polygenic risk score for embryo selection—not ready for prime time.” Alex Polyakov et al. write:

There are conditions that affect only one gender, such as cervical, uterine, ovarian and prostate cancer. There are conditions that are much more prevalent in one sex, such as breast cancer. Most of the conditions which can be assessed using PRS [polygenic risk scores] have a significant gender association. This implies that by selecting one sex over the other, a prospective parent can influence the risk of all the conditions in question. Furthermore, sex-based risk is likely to be more significant compared to PRS-ES [“for embryo selection”] calculated risk. … Therefore, by choosing a female embryo, one can substantially reduce the overall risk of developing most diseases included in [a PRS-ES provider’s] list. Conversely, by choosing an embryo with a lower PRS, one is more likely to select a female embryo.¹

The authors go on to argue that this constitutes a major moral shortcoming for the genetic screening of embryos. First, they claim that because selecting on sex has some beneficial effect on disease risk, it’s probably fine to just ignore polygenic risk scores:

To consider the social implications of PRS-ES, one must assume that implementation of this technology will result in a meaningful decrease in the risk of developing polygenic conditions compared to embryo selection based on an alternative criterion. As we argued above, this cannot be easily demonstrated and considering the insurmountable uncertainties and demonstratable [sic] logical limitations, such as the impact of embryo sex on the PRS-ES results, overall benefit is uncertain at best.

I- what?

You just told me that selecting based on sex made sense because it helped reduce polygenic risk scores—and now the claim is that this undermines the utility of… polygenic risk scores? Isn’t a better inference that PRS-ES can go even further than sex-selection in reducing the risk of genetic disease for embryos?

The authors continue, granting for the sake of argument that PRS-ES might, maybe, possibly have a positive effect on individual outcomes.

Of course, if we use PRS-ES religiously, most children will probably be female! And that’s Bad For Some Reason too:

There remain significant concerns in relation to possible effects of this technology on society. … [normal “attractive, smart, and wealthy people are bad” handwaving] … Widespread adoption of this technology may also inadvertently alter the sex ratio at birth owing to recognized gender differences in the prevalence of most polygenic conditions. Human sex ratios have remained remarkably consistent through time (1 to 1), and there is concern that skewing the sex ratio would lead to unpredictable social consequences and have a negative effect on the birth rate (Hesketh and Xing, 2006).

Hesketh and Xing, 2006, you say?

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2.

“Abnormal sex ratios in human populations: Causes and consequences” is a 2006 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America authored by Pete Therese Hesketh and Zhu Wei Xing.

Hesketh and Xing write in their abstract:

Differential gender mortality has been a documented problem for decades and led to reports in the early 1990s of 100 million “missing women” across the developing world. Since that time, improved health care and conditions for women have resulted in reductions in female mortality, but these advances have now been offset by a huge increase in the use of sex-selective abortion, which became available in the mid-1980s. Largely as a result of this practice, there are now an estimated 80 million missing females in India and China alone. The large cohorts of “surplus” males now reaching adulthood are predominantly of low socioeconomic class, and concerns have been expressed that their lack of marriageability, and consequent marginalization in society, may lead to antisocial behavior and violence, threatening societal stability and security

“Missing women.”

This article is entirely about the social harms caused by having more men than women, not the other way around!²

Here’s a typical passage:

[I]n China, 94% of all unmarried people age 28–49 are male and 97% of them have not completed high school. So, in many communities today there are growing numbers of young men in the lower echelons of society who are marginalized because of lack of family prospects and who have little outlet for sexual energy. A number of commentators predict that this situation will lead to increased levels of antisocial behavior and violence and will ultimately present a threat to the stability and security of society.

The problems derived from a skewed sex ratio have to do with excess “sexual energy” casing “antisocial behavior and violence.”

Has there ever been a more male-coded sentence?

Men commit aggravated assault and murder about nine times as often as women, and rape around a hundred times as often.³ This is maybe the single most robust criminological truism: men are more violent than women! When men are mad about things in their lives, they smash and they bash—often, they smash and bash one another, or their wives, or their children.

The link between violent crime and sexual frustration is probably pretty direct, too. In “A sexual frustration theory of aggression, violence, and crime,” a 2021 article in the Journal of Criminal Justice, Adam Lankford points out that “there are clear examples in which sex offenders, serial killers, mass murderers, and terrorists have specifically cited sexual frustration as a reason for their actions.”

He goes further, arguing that because it’s a reaction to a fundamental, primal, reproductive insufficiency,

It seems unlikely that sexual frustration only influences sex offending and extreme violence, but not more commonplace crimes that similarly involve anger, jealousy, risk-taking, low self-control, or lack of empathy for one's victims.

Now, because males generally have much higher sex drives than females,⁴ a sexual-frustration view of violent criminality easily explains the robustly-observed and otherwise-mysterious sex difference in offense rates.

Men are horny, men are violent, and they’re violent because they’re horny.

So why, exactly, would a society with fewer men be such a bad thing?

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3.

Look, I’m really not a “kill all men” kind of guy.

But I think I am a “conduct widespread genetic screening that selects against men” kind of guy!

Men are simply more violent, more frustrated, more prone to various polygenic diseases and disorders, and shorter-living than women. The Y-chromosome is obviously dysgenic, and a world with a smaller ratio of men to women is probably a good one for everyone.

I mean, really, imagine a world with fewer men than women—where only the male embryos that score extremely high on their polygenic screenings are born. This is a world where a small group of particularly-high-achieving men are free to pair off with a much larger group of women.

More women would be able to satisfy their generally-hypergamous yearnings, men would have a much easier time satisfying their greater sex drive, and incels would be virtually unheard of.

Fine, maybe this picture is a little too utopian.

More likely, we’d find ourselves in a world where a minority of wealthy people are able to conduct polygenic screening and start having more female children. This might be net harmful to society in the short term—it’d create more upper-class women who are forced to settle for less-desirable men, or to turn to celibacy or bisexuality, and birth rates would fall a bit.

But, over time, costs fall too. The poor would eventually start to do their own polygenic screening, stemming the tide of incels, and society would lurch toward its ultimate form as a majority-female utopia.

Any eugenicist worth his salt should obviously also be a radical feminist.

A woman would never.

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Lukethoughts

(Ladies and gentlemen, Lucas is back!)

• “READERS! I. AM. BACK.” (Ed. note: Yeah, dude, I just said that.)

• “It is time for Ari’s viewership to go up and subscriber count to go down.” (Ed. note: Luke’s talking about this pair of graphs, check it out.)

  

  Seems like I should expect to stop gaining subscribers, but also not actually get any more views. Sorry, Lucas, you’re bad for business.

• “Ari could you please breakdown to the readers why PPE is the best choice of study in college? Thank you.” (Ed. note: It’s ‘philosophy, politics, and economics,’ which are all cool. But, more importantly, when you say it out loud, you end up saying ‘peepee.’ Heh.)

1. No idea why they’re alternating between “sex” and “gender” in this paragraph—to piss everyone off equally, I guess?

2. Let me be clear: this is outrageously dishonest science on the part of Polyakov et al. Anyone who follows the authors’ own citation will see that their claim is just total bunk.

It’s also outrageous that The New York Times would link to the Polyakov et al. article favorably! I suppose it’s asking way too much for their fact-checkers to go more than one layer deep when verifying a specific, empirical claim with direct bearing on the argument made in the article.

3. Darrell Steffensmeier, Hua Zhong, Jeff Ackerman, Jennifer Schwartz, Suzanne Agha. "Gender Gap Trends for Violent Crimes, 1980 to 2003: A UCR-NCVS Comparison". Feminist Criminology 1. 1(2006): 72-98.

4. Lippa, Richard A. ‘Sex Differences in Sex Drive, Sociosexuality, and Height across 53 Nations: Testing Evolutionary and Social Structural Theories’. Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 38, no. 5, Oct. 2009, pp. 631–651, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-007-9242-8.