A Pronatalist Vision of Humanity’s Future

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A recent undercover investigation by the UK organization Hope not Hate initially focused on far-right “race science” movements in Europe and the US. But following an intriguing set of ideological and financial connections, the Hope not Hate infiltrator unexpectedly found himself face to face with a newer phenomenon: Simone and Malcolm Collins, an American couple who, along with Elon Musk, are the most visible members of the new pronatalist movement that advocates for the “smartest people” on the planet to make more babies.

The Collinses’ musings about eugenics, the details of their own reproductive project, and their use of dubious embryo selection techniques to realize it, have received significant media attention (1, 2, 3, 4). This piece asks a different question: What kind of world are these pronatalists advocating for and building?

Demographic collapse and dysgenics

The Collinses’ diagnosis of what is wrong with society and their plan to respond are well explained in their podcast response to the Hope not Hate investigation, which is titled “We Were CAUGHT! An Undercover Reporter Recorded Our Private Conversations and Meetings.” They see Western civilization as currently facing two dramatic threats. First is the “demographic collapse” of a certain part of the population – those like themselves, the smartest ones with the highest IQs. The second threat explains the first: the fertility of high-IQ people is plummeting, while that of low-IQ people remains high. 

The result, they say, is a decreasing average IQ in Western populations, or “dysgenics.” As Malcolm explains in another podcast, “Is Idiocracy Coming? Genetics, IQ, & Realistic Outcomes” (at 14:50): 

Well, the problem is that we live in democracies. And these people … the dumb ones are going to be more and more of the general population as time goes on. And so they will be electing and building bureaucracies that make it harder and harder for the geniuses to do their jobs. 

Simone succinctly summarizes the core belief that undergirds the pronatalist project: “We’re elitist and we believe in genes” (see here at 36:54). This is presented very matter-of-factly, because one should be open about one’s “vices.”

According to the Collinses, there are only two solutions to this civilizational threat: eugenics or “polygenics.” Malcolm concedes that both are “offensive and evil,” but argues that eugenics is worse because it is a state-led coercive solution. In the past, the Collinses explain, civilizations made sure that the weakest traits in the population were weeded out (mostly by babies’ and children’s deaths). But modernity interrupted this process, so other “medical treatments” are called for. 

This is where what the Collinses call polygenics come in. Malcolm explains that they use that term to mean the practice of selecting the embryos that are most likely to produce the smartest people. Their vision also involves creating an “opt-in community … to practice genetic hygiene” (see here at 24:00), one that will need to isolate reproductively from the rest of the population in order to counter the global drop of IQ.

The best embryos for the best people

The technical basis for “high-IQ breeding” is a procedure called polygenic risk scores or PRS (hence the Collinses’ adoption of the term “polygenics”). PRS estimate the risk that an individual may possess or develop a certain trait or medical condition. These are not diagnostic tools, but probabilistic estimates based on algorithmic analyses of genetic testing, and their clinical validity/utility is widely questioned (1, 2).

But some companies in the US and China are nonetheless offering polygenic scoring for IVF embryos: that is, they analyze batches of IVF embryos and rank them according to their risks for both medical and other traits. Parents can then choose the “best” embryo to implant. This technology is not scientifically sound (1, 2) and is obviously eugenic. (This application of PRS is often called “preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders” (PGT-P), or “polygenic embryo screening.”)

Despite the fact that selecting for IQ is in itself highly improbable, if not impossible, the Collinses are all in. They take their dubious faith even further, contending that polygenic risk scores reveal a positive correlation among desired traits such as IQ, educational attainment and economic achievement (and even general health, good nature, pro-sociality, and sense of humor). Thus, they believe that selecting for one sought-after trait means selecting for the others. 

On the flip side, they assert that dysgenics (the general decrease of IQ) leads to lower education and financial success in the population. And as people get dumber, government will become “even dumber than it is now.” 

Pronatalist visions of the human future

The Collinses suggest several reasons to avoid that fate. Average IQ levels need to stay high, they say, because we will “need to go interplanetary” (presumably because we are destroying our current planet) and the smartest people will have to be in charge in order to accomplish that. 

Another important reason is our relationship to AI. On the one hand, the Collinses see AI as a threat that we will not be able to control if we become dumber. On the other hand, AI will multiply the productivity and creativity of the smartest people, accelerating the stratification of society. 

The Collinses’ vision of the future includes the establishment of “city states” (to replace dysfunctional nation-states), where regulations and limits to biomedical research are extremely minimal so as to achieve “mass production of genetically selected humans.”

Alongside the use of PGT-P and the reproductive isolation of high-IQ people, this AI-led stratification will most likely result, the Collinses predict, to speciation in humans. In other words, the pronatalist “coalition of the willing” will become a new human species. 

There is little use in pointing out the obvious similarities between the world promised by the Collinses and far-right ideologies, as well as the dreams of past and present eugenicists to shape populations biologically through the control of reproduction. This has been done by Hope not Hate and others before them, and the Collinses regularly respond to these critics. Nor will shock, surprise, and outrage shame or stop the pronatalist movement. They are open about their raison d’être and their plans. 

The time for worrying about a slippery slope to eugenics is gone: we are well down the slope already. The pronatalist movement is organized and well-resourced, and will likely get a push forward with the election of Donald Trump. Now is the time to get organized to confront these ideas and the policies that promote them.

Shrese is a social scientist in training, ex-woodworker and ex-evolutionary biologist. Based in Barcelona, Spain, he is interested in the critique of genetics and biotechnologies. His blog can be found here. Contact him at shrese at riseup dot net.