Why My Children Will Not Be Mine
At least, I hope
I would like to have kids. I’m quite set on this. I feel that I would be very happy raising them. I think that I would find joy and purpose in helping them grow and learn and do great things. I am filled with a great yearning that is not entirely in my control, the same yearning which I imagine must affect the salmon as they travel up the river or the goose to fly south for the winter. I also have a sense in which it is my duty to procreate – the world becomes richer as there are more people in it, and having more children would therefore make the world better. There is one thing, though – they will not be genetically mine.
This does not mean that I would adopt. Rather, I would have someone else, who I consider to be genetically better than me, be the father of the child. I have thought about this a great deal, and not only do I think it is the right thing to do, but it is something which everyone should do. Here is why.
To start, I think we can agree that it is bad to harm your children. It is good for you to do things which will lead them to have a better, happier, healthier life. If you could choose to do something which would make them better off, at no cost to yourself, you would of course choose to do it; and even if it did cost you something, it is right and proper to do things which involve some sacrifice on your part for the sake of your children.
We also know that genes matter. They affect life outcomes. A substantial part of the variation in people’s outcomes is due to their genes. I cite Plomin and Deary (2015) here, but this is at a level of certainty akin to gravity. Given this, there must exist changes in your child’s genes which would make them better off. Surely, you would take those? If you could cure their cystic fibrosis, that would surely be good for them, and you would do it. The same thing applies to improvements to one’s qualities. Would you not wish to be smarter? Some people will deny this, but it is of course absurd motivated reasoning to avoid accepting a philosophical argument – intelligence is nothing more than the ability to do things, and being capable of doing more things must make you better off. One should treat not being smart as an unfortunate disability to be cured.
If you would take actions which would definitely change your children’s genes for the better, you should also take them for actions which change them for the better in expectation. You would accept smearing around the genes, if it leads them to be better off on average. The single biggest way that you can do this is in selecting a high-quality mate. Having someone else take your own place is simply an extension of the same principle.
They would still yet be your own children. Or else is an adopted child not your own? If someone is left an orphan as a baby, and then is brought up by a family who loves them, whose child are they? Would you love them less for not being your own? Or suppose that you learned that the person who you believed to be your son, whom you raised, was in fact conceived by another man. Would you cast the child out of your life? I would hope you do not. If you are unable to do this because you would only love your children if they were conceived by you, we should regard that as an unadmirable failing, not right and normal.
You might say that my genes are perfectly adequate. I have heard this a lot. I agree entirely – if I am unable to convince my partner of this scheme, I would still have kids the old-fashioned way. I would also be perfectly happy to be the donor for somebody else, even as somebody is the donor for me. However, I am not the best possible. Only one person is the best possible.
Further, your child’s outcomes are correlated not only with direct genetic father, but also with their parents. Outcomes are not a first-order Markov variable. If your family is mediocre, then your child will also be more likely to be mediocre. Even if two people’s phenotypes are the same, you should choose the one whose family phenotype is better.
You might also think that I will relate to them better if they are more like me. I disagree with this. I would expect them to be like my family. I do not particularly care about my family. I do care quite a lot about other people, including those who I have asked. I would rather my children be more like them than like my family.
I came to think of this because I have dated a man before. If we were to have children – and to actually create new children, not simply rearrange who has them – it would have to be through a surrogate. Only one of us could be genetically the father. We would have to choose who. The choice was obvious, though – it should of course be him. The children to come would have a better life if they were more like him, than if they were more like me.
I saw this idea in one of your writings, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I respect and admire you and your ideas enough that I think it's very important I share how wrong I think you are here.
1. Not Lindy
This is the least Lindy idea ever. Evolution has operated for billions of years under the force of having your own children. You are going against all these years of a proven mechanic.
2. Evidence
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Usually, in your other essays, you bring it to the table. Here, for a decision that's so important, your essay is just a series of a few arguments, with no data to back many of the assertions.
3. Extremely high stakes
Evolution has operated to give you fulfillment out of having children. The more you have, the more fulfillment you get. If you get this idea wrong, you will jeopardize one of the biggest sources of fulfillment you could ever have.
4. It's better for your children if they're yours
One key way to optimize the happiness of your children is by loving them more, so if you love them even a bit less, they're likely to be less happy.
Your argument against this is weak: "I like some people more than I like my family" is logical, because you're a young adult, programmed to actually not love your family as much, so you can go and explore the world. Then you have children, and they are by far the thing you love most in the world. Your parents, siblings, aunts, etc pale in comparison. Of course, that's what evolution would do.
Evidence suggests that if the children are not genetically yours, you'll love them less. You've probably seen data on how the less related a child's parents are, the more the child is likely to suffer from abuse (physical and sexual). Children from 2 biological parents are 2x less likely to get physical and educational neglect, and 4x less likely to get emotional neglect. (Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS–4), I think it's chart 5-3. There was a better one but I can't find it).
You won't abuse your children I assume, but this is very strong evidence that you'll like them less if they're not biologically yours. So they'll be less happy.
5. Variance vs Expected Value
A "better person genetically" than you might have a better expected value in the "quality of your child", but the variance is so high in the children you get that odds are still high your child is worse off with somebody else's child. Eg, if you get a donor that is 5 IQ points higher than yours, what are the odds that his children would be more intelligent than yours? I'm going to guess it's closer to 50% than to 100%.
6. High bar
You are already quite intelligent and bright. Odds are your gene quality is quite good already. Some examples of that include your essays (your thinking is good), your precociousness, your ability to come up with many new ideas (including this one), your success at finding a fitting community, your ability to communicate complex ideas well...
Trying to further "improve the pool" has dramatically less potential impact than if other people did it; much less impact than you think it would.
7. Multidimensionality of a better parent
How are you going to measure if somebody else is a better parent than you? An IQ test is one measure of many. For example, many high IQ people are worse than you at communication or at being able to rethink what society takes as a given. Will you measure all the candidates across all the dimensions of "good gene quality" that exist? Are you then going to do a weighted average of their quality score? How are you sure you'll take into account all the dimensions that matter? That you can properly measure the relative importance of each factor?
I believe you would have no reliable way to tell whether somebody is actually better than you, so your confidence that you can get somebody better than you to father your children is very low.
8. Pool diversity
Along these lines, I don't think all genetic diversity is equally valuable, but some is. By choosing somebody else, you'd be weighing some factors as more important than others, but how do you know the factors you weigh less are really less important? Maybe in the future they become more important? It's like a parent optimizing their children for STEM in a world where AI solves science but not taste.
There’s value in genetic and idea and diversity pool. Your diversity is unlikely to be the type we want to waste.
9. Adverse Selection
If you were able to find a person that looks so good on paper, and that would accept to be the father of your children, this person would potentially show 2 huge flaws that make him worse than you:
- This person would be substantially less humble and more arrogant than you (he would think he's strictly better than you across all the dimensions that matter)
- This person is much less honest than you, as he's faking his markers of market value to sear more children
Therefore, you should be especially skeptical of any potential father than might want to sear your children. This is like Groucho saying he wouldn't join a club that accepts him as a member.
10. Danger of Subbconscious Virtue Signaling
It might be that your brain is tricking you to say this because it sounds like the most EA thing to say, which gives you standing in your community. This is very common in young adults as you probably know, and becomes much less true in other settings (different peer group, different age, different brain chemistry...). To be clear, I don't think you're being facetious, I think you believe what you say. But this sounds like the type of situation where your brain might have an incentive to lie to you in a way you don't realize.
11. Additional points
a. The only way in which I think this could make sense is if your essay is geared towards convincing normies to do this with your gene pool, in which case you'd be maximizing your offspring (although making each less happy because they are not hanging out with their biological father). Pretty machiavellan, I don't think this is true
b. Timing: By the time you have to make this decision, science might be good enough that you can edit your future child's genome to optimize IQ and whatever other measure of quality you want.
Takeaways:
Your idea sounds laudable, but it's not lindy, it doesn't have enough evidence, it's unlikely to be actionable, you'd likely make you and your children (both biological and non-biological) less happy and fulfilled, it'd be optimizing for the wrong reasons, the upside is lower than you think, the downside is higher than you think, there are high probabilities of this going awry, and you're possibly lying to yourself.
I'm not 100% on the same page - I feel like if we just used the same two genetic parents for everyone you'd wind up losing out on useful variation - but I'm also kind of living this life.
My wife and I both had fertility issues (and I had more autism and Down syndrome in my family than I was comfortable with), so we used both an egg and sperm donor and, to the extent we could, tried to pick traits in the donors that would be good for the kid and would fit with us.
My daughter is now 10, and the lack of shared DNA hasn't been an impediment in the least. I remember going to see an ultrasound of my daughter, and even though I didn't share any genetics with her and had never directly interacted with her, my heart nonetheless melted at the seeing her bounce around on the screen. Your limbic system doesn't understand IVF.
People, particularly on the right, have gotten way too up in their heads about passing on their genetics. I could see being upset if your wife cheated on you and you later found out that you weren't the genetic father, but I hope that upset would be targeted at your wife, and you can focus on the fact that you were the one who raised your kid. And if you're getting upset about "microchimerism," or the idea that you will share more DNA with your kid if you are the same race/ethnicity as your spouse, you need to get help. Don't be a slave to your genes. The Selfish Gene was not intended to be a commandment.