Is The Human Genome Failing?

 

In one of his latest books, The Frozen Gene, Vox Day makes some quite controversial but also well backed up claims about the human genome. According to Day it is degenerating, the human genome is actually failing. This goes against the general consensus of modern science and also the general consensus amongst popular culture. It is just assumed by virtually everybody that the human genome is evolving. Some believe we can even speed this evolution along and create the Superman that philosophers have dreamed of since the 19^th century. But this is not the case, as Vox argues,  

“The Prophet of the Genome

Yuval Noah Harari is not a geneticist. He is a historian, trained in medieval military history, who parlayed a talent for sweeping narrative into one of the most successful publishing careers of the century. Sapiens has sold over twenty-five million copies. Homo Deus sits on the bookshelves of virtually every tech executive in Silicon Valley. His ideas—about the "Cognitive Revolution," about humans as "algorithms," about the coming merger of biology and technology—have become the default framework through which the educated public understands human evolution and its future.

This influence would be unremarkable if Harari confined himself to history and philosophy, where narrative sweep is a virtue and quantitative precision is optional. But Harari does not confine himself. He makes specific, falsifiable claims about biology. And when those claims are subjected to the mathematical scrutiny he consistently avoids, they collapse.

The central promise of Homo Deus is that humanity stands on the threshold of self-directed evolution. Through genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces, and AI integration, we will "upgrade" ourselves into something beyond human. The key passage bears examination:

"Iterate this procedure for a few generations, and you could easily end up with superhumans (or a creepy dystopia)."

This sentence contains a claim about how genetics works. Harari believes that genetic modifications can be "iterated"—that each generation builds upon the last, accumulating improvements the way software accumulates features across versions. Edit a child with enhanced genes; that child grows up and has children who inherit the enhancements; their children inherit even more; and so on, generation after generation, ascending toward godhood.

It is a beautiful vision. It is also biologically illiterate.

Harari treats genetics like software versioning. But genetics is not software. Genes do not copy perfectly from parent to child. They segregate, recombine, and dilute according to laws discovered by Gregor Mendel in the nineteenth century. Laws that Harari never mentions because, one suspects, he has never done the math.

Let us do the math he refused to do…”[1]

Vox then goes on to demonstrate that even if you genetically engineered superior human beings, within four generations their genetic advantage would be diluted, even if you selectively breed them with other genetically engineered human beings. We don’t have the power to fix superior genetics into the population as we would like, because it takes too many generations to fix a gene in a total population. Especially one as large as the human population is today. So, the idea of a genetically superior humans over taking the gene pool in our generation is just not possible,

“The Cognitive Revolution

That Cannot Repeat Harari’s futurism rests on a claim about the past: that the cognitive revolution of 70,000 years ago resulted from "a few small changes in the Sapiens DNA, and a slight rewiring of the Sapiens brain." If small genetic changes produced such dramatic results before, surely we can engineer similar changes now?

Set aside the question of whether the Cognitive Revolution actually occurred as Harari describes it. Grant him the premise. What would be required to repeat it?

If the Cognitive Revolution required one thousand beneficial genetic changes—a modest estimate for a transformation that allegedly produced language, abstract thought, and cumulative culture—then the fixation throughput math from earlier chapters applies.

Under ancestral conditions:

-        Available time: 70,000 years = 3,500 generations at 20 years per generation

-        Ancestral d ≈ 0.55: effective generations = 1,925

-        Maximum throughput: approximately 0.5 fixations per generation

-        Required rate: 1,000 / 1,925 = 0.52 fixations per generation

The numbers barely work. The Cognitive Revolution, if it occurred through accumulated beneficial mutations, operated at the ragged edge of what population genetics permits.

Under modern conditions:

-         d ≈ 0.015: effective generations per 1,000 years = 52

-        Time required for 1,000 fixations at 0.5 fixations per effective generation: 40,000 years minimum

-         But the Bernoulli Barrier makes parallel fixation self-defeating at any reasonable scale

We cannot engineer a second Cognitive Revolution because we no longer have the demographic conditions that made the first one possible. The door is closed. CRISPR cannot reopen it, because CRISPR edits individuals, not populations, and populations no longer experience the selective turnover that converts individual variation into population change. Harari promises a future that requires a past we have left behind.”[2]

But the situation is even worse that that. Not only will our manipulation of the gene pool not breed superhumans, the negative mutation load is increasing in the current human population. It is trending towards degeneration, and therefore failure,

“The Death of the Superman

We have spent the first half of this chapter demolishing Harari’s optimism. The genetic math does not support his vision. Enhancement edits dilute across generations. CRISPR cannot modify populations or species. The Cognitive Revolution cannot repeat under modern demographic conditions. The techno-futurist dream is exactly that—a dream, unsupported by the mathematics of inheritance.

But in demolishing Harari’s optimism, we have uncovered something far more disturbing.

The frozen gene pool is not merely frozen. It may be failing.

Recall the core insight of this book: selection requires differential reproduction, differential reproduction requires some individuals to fail to reproduce, and modern demographics have reduced reproductive failure to negligible levels. With d ≈ 0.015, natural selection has lost ninety-seven percent of its power compared to ancestral conditions. The gene pool is frozen because selection can no longer drive allele frequency change.

But there is an asymmetry we have not yet confronted.

Mutation continues.

Every human generation, every individual accumulates approximately seventy new mutations. These arise from DNA replication errors, oxidative damage, radiation, and other physical and chemical processes that do not care about demographic conditions. Of these seventy mutations, approximately fifty are deleterious—harmful to the organism in some way, whether dramatically or subtly.

Under ancestral conditions, this was not a problem. The same selective pressure that drove beneficial alleles to fixation also purged deleterious ones. Individuals with more mutations were more likely to die before reproducing or to have fewer offspring. Mutation and selection were in balance: new errors entered the population at approximately the same rate they were removed.

Under modern conditions, this balance is broken.

New mutations still enter at the rate of fifty per generation. But selection no longer removes them at that rate. With d ≈ 0.015, the mechanism that purged deleterious alleles is operating at three percent of its ancestral capacity.

The input is running. The filter is off.”[3]

This is not the first time I have heard about the failing human gene pool. I remember reading about it in a Creation Ministries journal some years ago. And from a biblical perspective it makes sense. Adam was essentially the perfectly crafted human being, and even after the fall he had a supremely long life. Eve as well. But as we go down Adam’s lineage in the book of Genesis we see that long life declining. By the time we get to the days of the Exodus of Israel out of Egypt the human lifespan had settled at a similar age as we have today, around 80 years (Ps. 90:10). But even this age is remarkable, when you think about it, because the ancient Israelites did not have indoor plumbing and modern medicine. So, considering the age of 70 or 80 years to be relatively normal back then is remarkable. It declined even more in the more recent millennia, only picking up again recently because of modern hygiene and medicine.

In effect Adam was an Numenorean compared to modern human beings. In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Numenoreans are the long-lived great men of the north, who have lifespans much longer than the average mortal. But over time their lineage fails and their life spans come down to the norm of other humans.

If you believe the Bible to be telling the truth about the long life-spans of Adam and his near kin, then it stands to reason that the human genome has been degrading over time. It also stands to reason, and appears to be demonstrated by the data, that different social conditions can either hasten this degradation or slow it down. In our day it appears to be degrading at a higher-than-average rate, ironically because of modern society’s ability to reduce infant mortality and extend life, through the aforementioned hygiene and medicine.

This is fascinating to consider and deserves more scientific inquiry. As Vox notes in The Frozen Gene the numbers point to this reality, but it is not fully confirmed. Also the rate at which mutations are building in the human genome is not exactly known. More research should be done.

But what should concern us is that the scientific majority, and society in general, have a worldview that says this should not be happening. So, while there may be scientific means of addressing this, the blinkers of modern science are hampering our ability to face what is very likely actually happening to our species right now.

As a historian I cannot speak to the science with any expertise. But I can note that historically many societies have collapsed because of ideological blind spots. This is a consistent civilisational trend, or should I say dyscivilisational trend. And what is worse is that we may be causing this by the very means that we have used to extend our lifestyle, improve our lifestyles, and build shared prosperity. This is fascinating to consider, and a little horrible as well.

This is a good example of how bad science is not just bad science, it can also be dangerous to human health and progress. All civilisations have blind spots. Many bring great troubles on themselves because of these blind spots. Hopefully, scientists with the ability to address this are paying attention to this matter.

List of References

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[1] Day, Vox. The Frozen Gene: The End of Human Evolution (The Mathematics of Evolution Book 2) (pp. 369-370). Castalia House. Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid (pp. 377-378)

[3] Ibid (pp. 378-380).