So welcome to this and cross ethics lectures. We have two of these per term for those of you who haven't been before.
And I'm actually filling in for Matthew Hussey, the love guru who was supposed to talk tonight,
but instead you've got genetic enhancement or extinction.
And I'm particularly interested in this talk on the nature,
our human nature and our biology and how it contributes to cooperation and various forms of moral behaviour,
but more importantly, the limitations that are inherent in our biology and what these represent in a modern world.
About a decade, I'm sorry, about a year or so ago, Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist from Cambridge,
ran a poll on the Internet and he asked, How can the human race survive the next hundred years?
And at the end of the poll, they asked him, What do you think the biggest risk to humanity continuing to exist are?
And he said, Well, the traditional risks still exist of asteroid strikes or radical epidemics from naturally evolved viruses.
But now we have the possibility of the intentional engineering of viruses, climate change and still nuclear war.
And he finished his interview with this statement.
He said, there's a sick joke that the reason we haven't been visited by aliens is that when a civilisation reaches our stage of development,
it becomes unstable and destroys itself the long term survival of the human race in many centuries.
We'll be safe only if we spread out into space because that planet has a limited lifespan.
And then to other stars, this won't happen for at least 100 years. So we have to be very careful.
Perhaps we must hope that genetic engineering will make us wise and less aggressive.
Now, this seems fantastic to claim that genetic engineering could make us wiser and less aggressive,
and that somehow the fate of humanity lies, at least in substantial part, within our own biology.
But I want to talk up the plausibility of Stephen Hawking's claim.
And in fact, I argue that it's one of the most pressing, practical, ethical problems that we face today that is,
our own nature represents the greatest threat to humanity this century.
So I'm going to talk about whether we're fit for the future.
And by fit, I mean the fit between our nature, which I take to be dispositions, to act and to be in various ways.
And the external world, whether it's the social world or the natural world, to realise some valuable outcome.
But in this talk it's going to be just be a survival.
Traditionally people have talked about biologists and evolutionary biologists have talked about evolutionary fit,
the fit between our nature and our survival and reproduction.
I'm going to argue that this century we are about to enter a Bermuda Triangle of extinction.
On one corner is a radical technological power.
Another corner is liberal democracy. In the last corner as our own moral nature.
Now the first corner, our radically enhanced technological power.
We have newfound abilities to destroy ourselves this century.
Indeed. Martin Rees, the astronomer royal and president of the Royal Society, former president,
said that we stand a roughly 50% chance of annihilating ourselves this century.
And various people have written books on this, including Richard Posner,
and those who have looked at it in a scholarly way have put the risk of us destroying ourselves at between 20 and 50% this century.
Last century, only a handful of people could have brought about this kind of destruction during the Cold War.
Only a small number of people had the power to launch a nuclear attack.
However, today, many more people have that power.
And indeed, I'll argue in perhaps a decade or two, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people,
will have the capacity to, if not destroy the world, create enormous devastation.
It only takes one of those people to realise that potential for there to be an unimaginable disaster.
Indeed, technology continues to exponentially advance Moore's Law.
The computing power doubles every two years. It's probably also true for genetic technology and indeed all forms of advanced technology.
So we're really on the beginning of the very steep part of the exponential technological curve.
And some people have predicted the so-called singularity halfway through the
century where artificial intelligence will radically outstrip human capacities.
Whether or not that's true. It's certainly going to be true that we will have much enhanced powers of self-destruction.
So you're all familiar with the ease in which we can harm people.
A couple of years ago, a student in Virginia Tech killed 32 people in a matter of minutes with two handguns.
However, today, it's possible that many countries could have access to poorly secured stockpiles of enriched uranium.
Richard Posner, a Supreme Court judge in the US,
says there's enough plutonium outside secure military installations to furnish the raw material for 20,000 atomic bombs.
It's only a matter of time before a terrorist organisation or rogue individuals access that material and detonate a nuclear device.
Even more scary, however, a biological weapons because these are much cheaper and easier to produce.
The mass on the top there is infected by mouse pox. About five or six years ago, researchers in Canberra,
in Australia were looking at ways of creating a new strain of mouse pox to control the mouse plague, thereby rendering mice infertile.
A very laudable aim. They didn't want to kill the mice. They just wanted to become infertile and control the plague that way.
However, they unexpectedly produced a super strain of mouse pox that was 100% lethal, much, much more devastating than the natural version.
They published the findings on the internet.
It was realised that the modification in the interleukin gene could easily be done on human smallpox that was eradicated in the 1970s.
So at its peak, human smallpox was the most deadly disease and it has killed more people throughout human history than any other disease.
At its peak it was 20 to 30% lethal.
And this is the sort of picture that was routine and common last century before it was eradicated.
But you could easily engineer a super lethal strain of 100% lethality using the sort of genetic modification that the scientists in Canberra produced.
Down the bottom is this is an image of polio virus.
Now this was artificially synthesised recently from small units of DNA that are easily available and in fact could be ordered over the Internet.
So in the matter of a decade or so, it won't be beyond the realms of imagination.
Indeed, pretty simple possibility for an individual to order components across the Internet
and in a small laboratory construct a smallpox virus that would be 100% lethal.
Now, I don't know if any of you have seen the film 12 Monkeys, where this scenario unfolds to destroy humanity.
But it wouldn't be very difficult to release smallpox, a number of major international airports.
And because it takes two weeks for the science to become apparent and it's rapidly spread by aerosol,
you would have a major pandemic that would be very difficult to control.
Okay. So that's our potential. So let's now move on.
What are people like in virtue of that power? Well, you're all familiar with sociopaths and psychopaths.
This is the extreme end of human moral limitation. He's just one story.
But you'd be familiar with lots of these stories, Ted Bundy and so on.
So in 1993, two bodies were found on a road in Texas.
One was a boy, age 14, who'd been shot. But the 13 year old girl had been stripped, raped and dismembered.
Her head and hands were missing. The killer was a Jason Massey, 20, decided he was going to be the worst serial killer Texas had ever seen.
He tortured animals and revered other killers. He was nine years old when he killed his first cat.
He had thousands more over the years and even six cows.
He had a long list of potential victims, and his diaries revealed fantasies of rape, torture and cannibalism.
When you look at some of the quotations from parents of psychopaths such as Massey, you find these sorts of things.
I've had to work so very hard to distance myself from my daughter emotionally.
I would have done anything to make it right. My husband and I have done everything in our power to help her.
We can do no more.
I still love her, but I know that she is who she is and that just about kills me and other parents that I also have a son aged 18 years of age.
He's exhibited problems since childhood. He's now off to a very good college and is extremely bright, which actually makes it more lethal.
And that's typical of psychopaths are often very intelligent and very personable.
He just hasn't been right since birth. My therapist said I did everything I possibly could for him, including therapy since the age of three.
When you look at the biology of this, there is at least some genetic contribution to antisocial personality disorder and psychopathic
personality disorder five times more common amongst first degree biological relatives of male males,
ten times more common in first degree relatives of females with that condition.
And twin studies have revealed a significant shared contribution.
These are not genetic disorders, but genes and biology will play a role as they'll go on to argue what's likely to be.
The cases of people who have a genetic disposition to these sorts of personality disorders,
given the right environmental circumstance, are highly likely to develop them.
75% of inmates in English and American prisons have antisocial personality disorder.
25% of inmates are psychopaths, and psychopaths are highly likely to be recidivist criminals.
Okay, so that's the extreme end of the spectrum, but it's even worse than that when you in many ways when you consider ordinary folk.
Now, here, I'm going to go on and talk about ordinary morality, what I called evolved moral psychology of morality.
I don't mean moral theories or justified morality that philosophers talk about high minded
theoretical ideals like Kant's two formulas of humanity or utilitarianism or virtue ethics.
I mean, to talk about the sorts of moral disposition,
moral concepts and behaviour that characterise ordinary people in their ordinary lives, their sense of justice and fairness and dessert.
And for example, many people ordinarily believe that there's some morally relevant distinction between what they do and what they fail to do.
I'm not going to talk about whether there really is a distinction. I don't believe there is.
That's what I call justified morality. I want to hear look at what the folk believe and how they act.
Now our evolved moral psychology is a feature of our evolutionary history.
So essentially we have a set of dispositions that haven't changed over the past couple of hundred thousand years.
We essentially have a biology and a psychology of a hunter gatherer, a Pleistocene man.
And during that time, humans had to compete for resources.
By the time of adulthood, they were fit to survive on their own resources.
It was easier to hum than to benefit, and morality evolved to facilitate cooperation.
The promoted, inclusive fitness, the ability of that tribe or that group to pass on its genes to the next generation.
We have very limited morality and moral dispositions at this folk level.
We have, first of all, a bias towards the near future.
So tools and other means at our disposal in our long pre scientific history enabled solely to affect our immediate environment in the immediate term.
So we're much more focussed in bias towards the near future.
We have biases towards small numbers of people and indeed we're involved.
Russell Powell and Steve Clarke on a potential project with Robin Dunbar, who's famous for the Dunbar number.
Yes, a number of numbers, but the Dunbar number of 150 is meant to be the basic unit of human cooperation.
If you look at societies across the world and even today on Facebook and modern human networks, we tend to cooperate with a maximum of 150 people.
We have about five very close people, 15, who we're moderately close with.
We recognise I think about 50 names or 50 faces and we cooperate with 150.
That's how humans have evolved and that's how we continue to behave.
So we have limited abilities to cooperate with each other inherently when we're on.
Zoom has a famous example of a rowboat that if one person on the boat fails tomorrow,
the boat will go in circles, will be obvious that the person isn't cooperating.
But when humans are in larger boats or in larger groups where their contribution is not obvious to all,
they tend to free ride, they tend to not contribute and to draw the benefits of the other's efforts.
Indeed, distrust of strangers is typical of our reaction to free riding and xenophobia.
Xenophobia and distrust of strangers protect protected protected us from being exploited through other free riding human beings.
So humans have a capacity to be altruistic, but they also have a capacity to free ride.
Our altruism extends to our family, friends, to individuals who we personally know,
grow to like and are concerned about all those who it's beneficial to cooperate with.
And as I said, there's an evolutionary reason for this.
A disposition to do favours indiscriminately to strangers would expose us to too great a risk of being exploited by free riders.
So suspicion of strangers has protected humanity or human beings in small groups from being exploited.
So here are some basic features of our history.
It's been easy to harm people, much easier to harm them, to benefit them.
So what's morally most important at a folk level are proscriptions against harming.
So we have very strong rules against harming.
We have no strong rights to aid in any form of folk morality.
We believe also that we're primarily responsible for what we cause in proportion to our cause of contribution.
And this grounds the belief in ordinary morality that acts are more important than omissions.
Even if there is no justifiable defence for that, we've had a limited capacity to affect the distant future.
So we're psychologically myopic, disposed to care more about what happens to us in the near future,
in excess of the probabilistic uncertainty of the future.
We live in small groups and we're capable of empathising and sympathising with only single individuals.
It's very difficult to empathise and sympathise with collectives in proportion to their numbers.
These are all features of our psychology. Now, maybe you don't believe that we're, you know, we're much better than you were suggesting.
We're not psychopaths and we cooperate all the time. And, you know, man is made in the image of God.
He's really he's really a great thing. Well, here are some some evidence that we're pretty limited.
And what I'm going to argue is there's no reason to be optimistic based on our evolutionary history that in our inherent biology, in psychology.
So let's look at aid, first of all.
In 2008, only five countries had reached the very modest UN quota set decades ago of of donating 0.7% of GDP to aid those countries Sweden,
Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, all northern European countries.
The average for all OECD countries was only 0.4 7%, and the two largest economies did the worst.
Japan in the US only giving point 2% of their of their budget to aid.
One staggering figure, which Dara drew to my attention from Toby's website is that the.
I think this is correct us do this from memory.
The US has spent $3 trillion already in its war on terror and it spent over the last 50 years, 2.1 trillion on aid.
So we're much more we're much more prepared to go to war and obliterate innocent enemies
and cause vast amounts of collateral damage and instability than we are to provide aid.
I mean, that's a staggering figure. And I think just, you know, is objective evidence of what humanity is like.
So the fact is, for our unwillingness to aid other countries,
despite having enormous amounts of ability to improve things in the developing world, are the inherent acts of mission doctrine,
the belief that we all have inherently that there is something more important about what we do and we're not responsible for what we fail to do now.
Limited altruism. So Americans value a non-American life in the poorer nations at 1/2000,
the value they put on an American life figure from Cass Sunstein and the sheer numbers of
people in the developing world to whom we would have to respond can also present an obstacle.
As I mentioned, we're only capable of empathising and being compassionate with a small number of people.
We're unable to vividly imagine the suffering of 100 people, even if they're in sight, let alone a thousand, let alone a million people.
This insensitivity to numbers of sufferers cause a vast moral underestimate is
underestimation in our own imagination of the amount of suffering in the world.
And it's getting worse. Inequality is not reducing. It's increasing in 3 to 1.
The difference between the per capita incomes of the richest and poorest countries is only
3 to 1 united in 2011 to 1 in 1913 35 to 1 in 1950 44 to 1 in 1973 and 72 to 1 in 1999.
And I'm sure it's doubled since then. In 2000, the wealthiest fifth of the world's population stood for 86% of the world's gross domestic product.
The poorest fifth stood for only 1%. The richest three single individuals in the world owned as much as 600 million people in the poorest countries.
So these are just facts that express our moral nature.
Another crisis that is going to continue and has been caused and won't be resolved
as the recent Copenhagen summit vividly demonstrated in the environmental crisis.
It's an example of a familiar problem of the tragedy of the commons, where herdsmen, for example, have a small area of pasture,
and if they don't restrain their grazing, they'll over graze the pasture, eventually exhausting it and all suffering starvation as a result.
Under such circumstances of limited resources and the need for restraint,
people stop consuming only if they have good reason to believe that a sufficient number of other people will do so as well,
and especially if this number will not be sufficient without their own contribution.
So when you've got a small number of people and an observable commons,
people are more likely to know each other personally and have concern and trust for each other.
It's easy for them to keep an eye on each other and to take free riders.
However, this is not the situation with the tragedy of the commons of the environmental crisis,
which is a global problem caused by huge states which are which have millions of citizens,
which are anonymous to each other, have little reason to trust each other.
And it's easy for free riders and defectors to escape notice.
There's little disposition to cooperate as the number of agents involved in a cooperation problem grows.
The stage is reached when contribution of each agent to the total outcome becomes negligible or imperceptible.
Then an agent can have no altruistic or even stronger, no self-interested reason to contribute.
Nothing that you do will ever affect the environment.
That's why many people don't engage in restraint.
The contribution of each of us to the environmental degradation is virtually negligible, but it is negligible.
And the prohibition of common sense morality that governs most of our moral actions against causing harm directly doesn't kick in.
What could make us cooperative,
some sense of fairness or justice that it would be unfair to free ride on the efforts of others to restrain themselves.
But this feeling of unfairness is going to be much weaker when many of the other parties are anonymous,
and there is no concern for them because their strategies.
So the reasons why we fail to address the global problem of climate change and global warming is the uncertainty.
It's the effects are going to happen in the distant future. And we have a bias to the near future.
The effects will be borne by people mainly in Africa and Southeast Asia.
And we don't have strong altruistic dispositions to strangers.
And the sustainable level of welfare that we could sustain as a as a global community is considerably lower than the one that we currently enjoy.
If all 6 billion people were to reach the current standard of living in countries such as the UK,
the consumption of resources and the release of waste products would be 12 times higher than it is today,
which is clearly impossible for the world to sustain. So if we were really serious about sustainable lifestyles, we would have to cut down.
Are people going to cut down? Evidence says no.
When you do a survey of Americans, the 52% wouldn't even spend $50 an extra month per household to conform to Kyoto.
And if you ask them to spend $100 more per month, only 11% would do that.
So people are selfish. They don't care about strangers.
And it's unlikely that we're going to address the climate the climate problem through voluntary cooperation.
Inherent biases and psychological states places at great risk prevent acceptance of
any justified morality and interfere with the motivating force of any accepted,
justified morality. So controversial that we should protect the planet.
So controversial that we should improve the lives of people who are starving.
But we don't because of our biology and our psychology.
Now this is going to be increasingly more significant as our technological power increases for two reasons.
First of all, the capacity directly Hamas cells will vastly increase.
And secondly, the capacity to do good in parts of the globe that we failed to do will also significantly increase liberal democracy.
The third point on the Bermuda Triangle. So we've discussed our nature.
We've discussed our technological power. The third point that creates a triangle of heightened risk of extinction is liberal democracy.
Liberal democracies is characterised by tolerance and liberal neutrality two different conceptions of the good and different ways of living.
It maximises the freedom of individuals. It's tolerant to multiple cultures and provides a poor basis for coordination,
such as necessary to deal with the environmental crisis in China more rapidly.
Remove lead from its petrol vastly more rapidly than any Western country.
It's it's a poor base of coordination, especially when you have small,
overdetermined causal contributions that affect small strangers in the distant future.
It's also obviously tolerant of minorities.
So at the moment, things are fairly stable with liberal democracy.
But you could expect that these kinds of problems will increase as we continue to maintain a neutrality of different conceptions of the good,
different values and so on. So how could we address this problem of the risk of extinction?
We can either change the natural world. We can change society through enhanced surveillance.
Encroaching in privacy and confidentiality occurred in the US following September 11.
We could change our psychology through moral education by inculcating a form of justified morality, attempting to persuade people.
But we could also attempt to understand and use our knowledge of biology to influence our biology.
Biology. I'm going to tell you a little story now that it might be possible to do that.
And while it might not be the most effective means at the moment,
it may in the future be a very important means, and it should be a means that we shouldn't exclude.
So. We have a basic set of dispositions for sense of justice or fairness that we actually also share with other primates.
The most basic of these is the so-called [INAUDIBLE] for tat strategy. And the idea here is that someone does you a favour out of altruism.
You should respond with gratitude and and a desire to return the favour.
If someone harms you, the proper response is to retaliate with anger and a desire for retaliation.
More sophisticated, emotional responses are possible.
Remorse and feelings of guilt if you act wrongly by harming someone without good reason.
Shame if you're less successful than others in returning favours or retaliating in wrongs.
Pride. If you're more successful in these respects. Admiration and contempt for others who are successful and unsuccessful in these respects.
And forgiveness. When you realise that someone is not responsible for something wrong or shows remorse.
These are primitive versions of the [INAUDIBLE] for tat strategy.
That's why we feel these emotions and that's why we express them.
These emotions which make up [INAUDIBLE] for tat behaviour, are very bound up with concepts, inherent and innate concepts of dessert and of justice.
When you feel gratitude to someone, you, this individual deserves a good turn and it's just that she has a good turn when you're angry at somebody.
This individual is thought to be deserving of punishment or harmed.
And the treatment is thought to be just.
Now we can test the effect of these senses of fairness and how written they are into our biology through various games,
economic games and cooperative games. One game is called the Ultimatum Game, and this game shows, I believe,
that our moral dispositions not only have an evolutionary origin, but as we would expect, a biological basis.
Now, the basic idea of this game, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it,
is there is a proposer and a responder, and the proposer divides a reward.
So when this is done with chimps, you might have ten raisins and there'll be two pots distributed in different ways.
So for example, one set will have five and five and the set will have eight and two.
And the proposer chooses which of these two distributions to have for himself and the responder
by pulling it halfway to his cage so the proposal can pull the I raisins towards himself.
And so he's the responder will get the two raisins. The responder then can respond either by rejecting the offer altogether.
So not getting any raisins or by accepting their share.
When you do this with chimps, they'll accept up to 28228 distributions without any sign of dissatisfaction.
So chimps chimps are quite prepared to accept unequal office, and this is thought to be a reflection of their sharing of food in the wild.
Human responders, however, typically reject offers that deviate much from five and five.
So they reject reject the offer even if they even if that entails rejecting some kind of as a way of punishing the proposer for unfairness.
Now, what's most interesting about this is not the fact that humans have an inherent bias towards greater degrees of fairness,
but that they do deviate from each other. So while you might only accept five and five, I might accept six and four.
Somebody else might even accept seven and three of some reward.
But when you do this without any twins, the twins except identical twins separated at birth,
the twins accept the same distributions with a much higher statistical likelihood than fraternal twins or people who are unrelated.
So if one twin will accept six and four, the other twin is highly likely to accept six and four.
So this is led these researchers to estimate that the rejection of unfair offers,
the sense of fairness that people have is about 40% or more than 40% genetically determined.
So whether you're a person who responds in a certain way to an offer is going to be largely at least significant,
not the kind of person you are, which is pretty obvious.
And that's going to be genetic. So there are other there's other good research which shows that we're inherently racist,
as you would expect from our evolutionary history, even when we consciously claim not to be.
There's various studies that showed that, you know,
even people with very anti racial tendency or anti racial kind of beliefs still have inherent racial biases when showed.
Implicit Association tests. Okay, so could we change this?
Could we enhance human beings? Could we change their moral nature?
Now I'm going to just sketch a story that might be possible at some point to actually change our nature,
or at least select the sorts of people we bring into the world.
Okay. And I've called this in other places by liberation. Hawking's claim that we should make humans wiser and less aggressive.
We could do this in two ways. One, by cognitively enhancing people,
by making them more better able to see the consequences of their decisions to make more rational choices or directly by moral enhancement.
Now, cognitive enhancement is an area where there's a lot of progress being made there, being drugs such as Modafinil, Ritalin,
Adderall that have been shown to improve cognitive performance as we develop drugs which improve concentration,
memory for diseases like Alzheimer's disease.
These are likely to improve cognitive performance. So cognitive enhancement, I think, is not going to be something difficult to achieve.
I think that we will develop very powerful cognitive enhancers.
These, however, would also increase the capacity of people to act badly.
You know, if you're smarter as that parents said, not you, you can be even more lethal.
So, in fact, in another paper that I've argued, we think in my person, if we do go down the route of cognitive enhancement,
which we're likely to, we also need to enhance ourselves morally to deploy this increased power more safely.
So genetics may hold the key to influencing behaviour.
Crude genetic experiments been run for 10,000 years.
The selection of dogs by breeding the 300 different dogs that you see today are the result simply of genetic selection.
Now those dogs have very different character. Some are placid, some a vicious.
That's all genetic. It's the result of genetics, of selective breeding.
We could do this in humans now, not through a project that takes 10,000 years, but in a single generation by genetic manipulation.
The rabbit on the left is a fluorescent rabbit created by introducing a gene from a jellyfish into a rabbit.
On the right is an embryo which fluoresce in the dark. It's a human embryo created by transferring gene from a jellyfish into a human embryo.
So we are understanding the basis of various phenotypic qualities and being able to intervene at a genetic level.
I'm sure lots of you have seen this before, but I'll quickly show it.
This is the power of genetic modification. The back is a normal mouse.
On the front is a mouse that's been genetically modified, running at 20 metres per minute.
They both fall off the treadmill periodically for a matter of minutes.
There goes the genetically modified mouse off after 200 metres.
The normal mouse's exhausted. Can't continue. He doesn't get back on at all.
That's 200 metres. 6 hours later, the genetically modified mouse collapses with exhaustion after five kilometres.
So that's the power of biological modification.
We've done, we've changed the behaviour of non-human animals.
We've made voles monogamous rather than polygamous.
We've made monkeys work harder. We've also produced various other physical improvements, but we've also produced a massive bit of memory.
So there is no reason in principle why human moral behaviour or its biological underpinnings couldn't likewise be altered.
So we could do this today through by a prediction.
We could use genetic testing once we identified the various genes or the
collection of genes that increase the risk of sociopathic personality disorder.
You could test embryos for these and select out those embryos which don't have the disposition.
This is relatively possible.
If we understand the genetic basis of these conditions.
You could target social psychological interventions for people at higher risk of sociopathic personality disorder.
You could increase surveillance. Or you could segregate. You could also modify behaviour biologically.
This is done in a very crude way already. When paedophiles are given female hormones to reduce their sex drive as an alternative to imprisonment,
now this is simply a modification of their behaviour.
Biologically, we'll be able to do that in a more fine grained way once we understand the biology.
Just an example of how we could do it by a prediction in the 1980s.
There was a famous Dutch family identifier brought forward by the grandmother to a geneticist called Bruna,
where half of the males in the family were criminals in jail, guilty of violent crimes like arson and assault and rape.
And when they looked at this family, they found that this clearly was an X-linked genetic disorder.
So half of the males would be would be affected.
They looked at the X chromosome. They found a mutation in a gene that coded for the metabolism of a neurotransmitter in the brain.
I mean, oxidised type I. And this was highly, essentially perfectly correlated with the males who were in prison.
There was no other family found to have this mutation in this way.
But when a large group of New Zealand males were studied by Caspi,
he found that people who had this mutation and social deprivation very early in life were much more likely to exhibit antisocial behaviour and to
be imprisoned than people who either were mistreated but lacked the genetic change or people who had the genetic change but weren't mistreated.
So the combination of of social deprivation plus the no, I mean oxidase II mutation was highly linked to criminal behaviour.
This raised the possibility of manipulating that level of neurotransmitter.
But you could easily use preimplantation diagnosis to have children without this mutation or prenatal diagnosis.
You could identify people early and increase social support, or more controversially, you could segregate at the time.
Offenders with this kind of genetic mutation are the substance of have also been associated with moral behaviour or dispositions to cooperate.
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter. When it's lower in the brain, people tend to behave more aggressively.
When you deplete it, you get more aggressive behaviour and when you increase its level through drugs like Prozac,
you increase cooperation and reduce aggression.
Oxytocin is another natural hormone women release when they're breastfeeding, but all people have it to a degree.
It's been shown to influence the ability to infer other people's mental states.
So oxytocin increases the willingness to trust other people and it prevents decrease in trust after betrayal.
So this is obviously not the solution to global warming or psychopathy,
but it shows that we can understand the biological bases and influence the ways in which people cooperate and behave morally.
Many of the world's problems, such as poverty and climate change,
will require cooperation and a change in behaviour that has not so far occurred through human history at a global level.
There's no reason to believe that we will be able to overcome those biases to the degree that is necessary to address these problems.
So in this talk, I've I've described what I've called the Bermuda Triangle of Extinction with at one corner,
radical technological power, unprecedented through human history, liberal democracy and human nature.
We need science to understand our own moral limitations and the ways to overcome them.
We need ethics to decide whether and how we should reshape our own nature.
We could, of course, take political steps to address these problems.
We could reduce our commitment to liberalism. We could restrict privacy and increase surveillance, as has happened in the US.
We could promote certain values. We could give up political neutrality. We could attempt to inculcate morality and address the problem in that way.
We could attempt to restrict consumerism and lower standard of living.
And we could potentially restrain or segregate people at greatest risk to the community.
This is the century where humanity will become the greatest threat to humanity at an individual level through sociopaths,
psychopaths or fanatics gaining access to technologies with the immense power of destruction,
but more generally through global collective action problems,
inability to cooperate to address problems like climate change or the plight of developing countries.
The answer to these problems may lie partly in ourselves, in the human condition.
What can practical ethics learn from human nature?
We've been very interested in our nature as animals, not as man made in the image of God, the man as the animal and the product of evolution.
When you look around at the world's problems,
they are predicted and increasingly understood as products of our own evolutionary history, our own nature.
I believe we should acknowledge our vast human imperfection and identify our moral limitations and take steps to reduce these.
As I said, this is not to exclude other psychosocial responses.
We could reduce our commitment to liberal neutrality, use moral education to correct or to inculcate certain behaviours.
But we could also change our moral nature. So when Hawking said, perhaps we must hope that genetic engineering will make us wise and less aggressive.
I hope that doesn't sound as implausible as it might have seemed.
Thank you.