G: Unnatural Selection

**Diane Sawyer** (0:11)
Radiolab, from WNYC.

**Pat Walters** (0:19)
Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Pat Walters. And today we have the fifth episode of our mini-series. Last episode, we had a story from Lulu Miller about eugenics. It was all about scientists who were applying the Darwinian idea that species can be shaped by natural selection to humans, to us. Like instead of waiting for nature to choose which individuals of the human species were most quote unquote fit, they thought they could speed things along and in the process, create like a perfect human race, which as we got into last time was a disaster. And at a certain point, Lulu argued that these eugenicists in emphasizing like their one narrow idea of perfection over everything else, they sort of missed the point of Darwin.

**Lulu Miller** (1:12)
Darwin talks about one thing, this one ingredient that he marvels at, he doesn't understand why it's there, the thing to which we all owe our existence on Earth, variation.

**Pat Walters** (1:26)
Variation. Like what makes a species resilient is difference.

**Steve Hsu** (1:32)
But... That's a very selective reading of Darwin.

**Pat Walters** (1:36)
Turns out not everyone agrees with her.

**Steve Hsu** (1:38)
It is true, of course, that variation is really important to evolution, but it's variation coupled with selection that actually gives you success. So, you know, I disagree with her interpretation.

**Pat Walters** (1:49)
So not too long after we talked to Lulu, I did an interview with a scientist who takes a very different position on all this. And he's come into a bit of controversy. Some people argue that he's taking those old ideas, that certain people can decide which humans are fit enough to exist and which ones aren't.

**Steve Hsu** (2:12)
I think you have to be very careful because nobody here is trying to optimize one specific trait or number. What we're doing is identifying outcomes that I think most people agree maybe are not good.

**Pat Walters** (2:25)
And arguably, he's walking those ideas into the future. Hello? Okay, to back up a bit.

**Steve Hsu** (2:34)
Hello.

**Pat Walters** (2:35)
Hi, is this Steve?

**Steve Hsu** (2:37)
Yeah, this is Steve. Hi, Steve.

**Pat Walters** (2:39)
This is Pat.

**Steve Hsu** (2:40)
Hey, Pat.

**Pat Walters** (2:40)
How are you? This is Steve Hsu.

**Steve Hsu** (2:42)
I'm a theoretical physicist who also works in computational genomics.

**Pat Walters** (2:48)
Steve's in his early 50s, has short black hair, little wire room glasses, and he says he's been interested in genomics, the power of DNA, really since he was a kid.

**Steve Hsu** (2:59)
Yeah, actually, so when I was a kid, I watched too much TV.

**Pat Walters** (3:04)
Is that right?

**Steve Hsu** (3:04)
Yeah, this is the 70s. There was no parenting going on.

**Pat Walters** (3:07)
Okay.

**Steve Hsu** (3:08)
Things were so laissez-faire back then, and so when I went home in the afternoons, the very favorite thing I would watch was Star Trek, the original Star Trek. Captain DeBridge. With William Shatner as Kirk and Spock. And in the Star Trek universe, in the late 20th century, It's my genetically engineered intellect that allows us to survive. They had the so-called eugenics wars in which some genetic supermen were created.

**Lulu Miller** (3:36)
Check out who is this man.

**Steve Hsu** (3:39)
By technology.

**Lulu Miller** (3:40)
A product of late 20th century genetic engineering. What do you want with us?

**Steve Hsu** (3:45)
You know, they were smarter and more capable, and they almost took over the earth, and all of that was quite vivid in my mind when I was growing up.

**Pat Walters** (3:51)
And he says it also made him wonder. Steve, like lots of kids growing up in the 1970s, had to take an IQ test at some point. And he says he scored really high, like in the top 99th percentile. And he thought to himself, why is that?

**Steve Hsu** (4:08)
Am I getting better vitamins? Is it because my mom and dad, you know, make me go to bed early at night? Is it environmental causes that are making me different from my peers? Or is there something different about my DNA?

**Pat Walters** (4:19)
He says he at one point took this question to his local library.

**Steve Hsu** (4:23)
I found this whole section where they had book after book about studies done on identical twins, how they measure IQ, or how they measure cognitive ability. So I just, it was very stark in my mind that something about our DNA could influence the power or effectiveness of your brain.

**Pat Walters** (4:40)
This was still the late 1970s though. And at this point, science just wasn't quite ready to tackle those questions in a serious way.