[ExI] dna ethics question

[Tara Maya]

On May 5, 2014, at 5:19 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> Maybe. If it becomes possible to ascertain paternity effectively, does it really turn into an effective social claim? There are many single mothers around who know perfectly well who the father of their children is (and he is certain too), yet that is not enough to keep the relationship. The biological patterns may be grooves we tend to move along, but culture and individual choices are pretty powerful too. 

Based on what I've seen of daytime television, a staple is the talk show or family court show where the woman and man are fighting about whether the baby is his or not. She comes out in black leather short-shorts, a gold lame bra and too much make-up and says the baby is his. He comes out in greasy jeans and a wife-beater and says she's a slut and besides, she slept with his best friend. She counters that he slept with his sister. Etc. The show drags out the fight until the end, when the DNA test results are shared…the final judgement that completely sways the audience to either his side or hers. So, anecdotally, I'd say the masses have already made this an effective social claim.

I see more resistance from intellectuals, clergy, law officiants, etc. For instance, a judge in Canada made some poor man pay child support to a woman for three children that were proven not to be his. I thought that was grossly unfair; the biological fathers should have been hunted down and made to pay, not the innocent victim. But obviously from the point of view of the State, it was easier to force the punishment on the bird in the hand rather than the birds in the bush. 

Then there was an article I read by a rabbi who said that the hospital shouldn't reveal to the "father" of a baby that it wasn't his, even when medical procedures revealed it. To the rabbi, this might cause the man to leave the woman and child, which would break up the marriage, so the man should be lied to. Again, this seemed to me to be grossly unfair. If he knew the truth and chose to be a good stepfather, good on him, but it should be his choice. He shouldn't be tricked. 

And then of course there's the whole privacy argument. It seems to me, an even more basic right is to know who your real parents are. And who your real children are. Again, if you chose to adopt, fine, but to be tricked or lied into it? That's wrong.

But actually, all of these anecdotes are unimportant, because the scale I was thinking of was much, much longer.  It's an interesting question about how quickly the change would be achieved. I'd say that the introduction of the Pill has had powerful social changes in just a few decades. But real, lasting change to the species is something that must take generations. After all, we are talking about something that is very, very basic, not just to the human species, but to all Mammals. Unlike fish, where (usually) the mother and father are equally ignorant (and therefore uncaring) about which fry are their offspring, in Mammals, the uterus has created an information asymmetry for the entire monphylum.

Tara Maya
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