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BULLYING-
Stop Making Me Feel Guilty for Watching “Friends” Re-runs.
Personal Perspective: Entertainment is a reflection of current awareness.
Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster

Lately, a new favorite pastime of certain organizations, groups, and vocal critics seems to be directing their vitriol at the TV show Friends. And yet repeats of the show have never been more popular—even creating demand for a cast reunion special in 2021 and a current national touring exhibit of popular Friends sets, including Central Perk and Monica’s and Rachel’s apartment.

I acknowledge that during the show’s run from September 22, 1994, to May 6, 2004 (during which it eclipsed any kind of ratings that could be had today via streaming outlets), the series had some very vocal—and somewhat deserved—criticism. Just as most forms of art do. Whether today’s loudest critics want to admit it or not, the TV show Friends is a form of art. Actors. Writers. Directors. Costumers. Set decorators. Crew members. A group of creative people came together to produce (say it aloud with me) entertainment.

As a very overweight, closeted young gay man in the 90s, I sometimes bristled at fat jokes made at the expense of morbidly obese Monica during the show’s flashback sequences. Just as I would cower when seeing scenes depicting characters Joey and Ross losing their minds over being perceived as "gay" after mistakenly falling asleep next to one another.

But you know what? Even through my winces, I was laughing. Because I was seeing aspects of myself on screen. Whether anyone today wants to admit it or not, Ross being married to a lesbian (a storyline played out over the course of the series) was groundbreaking in those days and can even be credited with making the entertainment climate more receptive to shows like Will & Grace and others.

Was Friends’ depiction of certain ideas or situations perfect? No. Could the show have had more regular cast members of different ethnicities and identities? Definitely. But for the time frame, the show ran during, the creatives behind the series were likely doing the best they knew how to.

While it can be helpful, moving forward, to look back and find ways to evolve in all aspects of society, to lay criticism on artists and fans as if we should have been culturally aware of the standards in 2023 during the 1990s is not helpful. Aren’t we all doing the best we know how to—then and now? Instead of lambasting me and other devout fans of Friends or other shows, why not create something yourselves? Something we can love and applaud along with you.

No one has a time machine (trust me, I’d have used it several times by now for all sorts of reasons). We can’t go back and change anything. So to humiliate people for loving something from their past, something that might have given them solace and hope (say, for instance, someone like me—again, a very overweight, closeted young gay man who was told I could not “come out” at work unless I wanted to be fired, and that I would never find romance because of my size) doesn't manifest positive change. It often creates an atmosphere of guilt, shame, and toxicity.

Friends wasn’t perfect. No form of entertainment is (don’t get me started on the last few seasons of Game of Thrones). But we can celebrate effort. We can celebrate laughter. We can celebrate a weekly experience millions of people share on Thursday evenings. And yes, we can even celebrate creative missteps that might have been made now that we know better. But please, don’t shoot the messengers (in this case, the artists). Or the watchers (in this case, the fans). Your ideas about how things should have been (or, even more ideal, how things can be) might be better served by creating your own forms of art.

The End of Sex?
How technology will change the way we have children.
Reviewed by Tyler Woods

KEY POINTS-
Few people realize just how powerful embryo selection will become in the near future.
Over the past two decades, the human genome has been decoded, and genetic testing has become ubiquitous.
We will still have sex. And we will still have children. But the link between the two will grow more tenuous.

Sex is fun because people who found it boring died without descendants.

But the link between having sex and having kids has been severed since the sexual revolution of the late 1960s. Cheap contraception allowed women to decide when to have children. Social norms also changed—abortion became easier to access in case contraception failed.

Whatever you think of these developments, contraception and abortion have led many people see sex as an activity we do for pleasure (or for bonding between couples), and having kids as an active choice to create a life.

Not long after the pill enabled the sexual revolution, a new technology emerged that allowed gay and infertile couples, as well as single people, to have children: in vitro fertilization. IVF is a simple medical procedure that extracts eggs from women and combines them with sperm from men to create embryos. Couples can then decide which of the embryos to implant.

While IVF was considered controversial at first, as soon as it proved viable in England and the U.S., attitudes quickly changed from skepticism to acceptance. In Japan, for example, about 5 percent of all births now come from IVF. In Denmark, the number is 10 percent, though that is partly because Denmark is a popular destination for women seeking sperm donors and fertility treatments.

Since couples using IVF usually produce several embryos, and sometimes dozens, it is commonplace to use a simple genetic test to determine whether any of those embryos have “aneuploidy.” Aneuploidy occurs when an embryo has too few or too many chromosomes. The most common version of aneuploidy results in Down syndrome, and it is no surprise that couples will generally pick an embryo without chromosomal abnormalities when given the choice.

Polygenic prediction
Over the past two decades, the human genome has been decoded, and genetic testing has become ubiquitous. People get genetic tests to reveal their ancestry, to predict disease susceptibility, or to find out who the biological father of a child is in contested cases.

But a new kind of genetic testing has entered the fertility clinic. Preimplantation Genetic Testing (PGT) can now be done not only for aneuploidy, or for monogenic traits such as Tay-Sachs disease; it can also be done for polygenic traits which involve many genetic variants, each of which has a small effect. Most of the traits we care about—ranging from height and weight, to cancer or schizophrenia—are highly polygenic.

A few companies already offer polygenic risk scores that predict the likelihood that an embryo will develop a specific disease like diabetes. It is inevitable that some will apply these tests in ways that enable couples to select for aesthetic and cognitive traits. The more embryos couples can produce, the greater genetic variability there will be from which couples can choose. Mate choice will constrain the possibilities, but more embryos means more options.

It is important to distinguish embryo selection using polygenic risk scores from gene editing. Selecting one embryo from a set of embryos is as old as IVF. It can be done at random, or it can be guided using polygenic scores. Embryo selection using polygenic scores is very different from gene editing since it involves selecting among whole embryos.

Gene editing is still too dangerous to use on embryos, since it frequently produces off-target mutations that can have harmful effects on a developing fetus. It is possible that at some point in the future, CRISPR, the most common genetic editing techinique, will be used to “spell check” the genome, and maybe even rewrite it in fundamental ways, but we are a long way from that possibility. Few people realize, however, just how powerful embryo selection will become in the near future.

In vitro gametogenesis
IVF will become more potent as our understanding of genetics improves. And IVF will likely become more common as people around the world delay reproduction longer. Having children later raises the chances of infertility, but it also increases the risks to children since older parents pass along more de novo mutations. This means more couples will either need to use IVF to have children, or will use IVF electively in order to minimize disease risks to the children they have.

Polygenic risk scores will become more accurate as the data from genome-wide association studies accumulates. But the game-changer right around the corner is in vitro gametogenesis (IVG). IVG allows scientists to take an adult cell, such as blood or skin cell, and turn it into a pluripotent stem cell (the kind that can become any cell, including a sperm or egg cell).

When IVG becomes a reality for people (it’s already been done for animals), menopause and mutation accumulation will become less important, and couples will be able to create many embryos from which to select without the need for IVF. This means that the genetic variety of a couple’s embryos will be large enough that two short people could select a tall child, or two people at high risk of diabetes or schizophrenia will likely be able to select an embryo at low risk for both.

We will still have sex. And we will still have children. But the link between the two will grow more tenuous. The prospect of artificial wombs is likely to increase this gap even more. An obvious risk is that both sex and babies will be thought of in more instrumental and less romantic terms. An obvious benefit is that our children will have lower risks of disease.

In a series of forthcoming posts I’ll tackle some of the moral questions raised by these new technologies. I also hope to explore how these technologies will alter the way we live.

BIAS-
Accepting Evolution and Rejecting Racism.
A study links rejection of evolutionary theory to racial prejudice.
Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

KEY POINTS-
Research suggests that rejection of evolution is linked to social prejudices.
In the past, Darwinism was used to justify social hierarchies.
Today, belief in evolutionary theory may be connected to acceptance of groups other than one's own.
When Darwin proposed his theory that asserted that humans share a common ancestry with other animals through an evolutionary process, a common rebuttal claimed that there needed to be a creature who stood between humans and apes. No such fossil had yet been uncovered, they said, thereby disproving the theory of evolution.

"Missing Links"
Since the publication of Origin of the Species in 1859, many “missing links” in fact have been uncovered, including the early 21st-century discovery of Australothecus sediba and, more recently, the uncovering of the remains of an archaic human in Israel. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Svante Paabo, demonstrated by comparing the genomes of different human species "that modern humans split from the more archaic humans about 550,000 to 760,000 years ago, and the Neanderthals and Denisovans split into distinct groups 380,000 to 470,000 years ago."

Darwin’s theory has been refined over a century—he wrote before science understood the role of genetics in inheritance, for example. Yet, the essential insight of his theory remains: Human beings evolved over eons and share a common ancestry tree with apes, other now-distinct hominoids, and indeed with all of life on Earth.

However, there are many who reject evolution as a fact of nature. In a 2018 survey, 40 percent of Americans said they believed that Homo sapiens were created about 10,000 years ago in their present form.

Study of Evolutional Theory and Social Prejudice
In an article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Stylianos Syropoulos, at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and colleagues wanted to go beyond the profiles of respondents in the Gallup poll. They hypothesized that there was a correlation between those who reject evolutionary theory and social prejudice as well as intergroup hostility. Across samples from 45 countries involving tens of thousands of people, they found the following:

low belief in human evolution was associated with higher levels of prejudice, racist attitudes, and support for discriminatory behaviors against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ), Blacks, and immigrants in the United States [and] greater prejudice and militaristic attitudes toward political outgroups.

Syropoulos explains,
People who perceive themselves as more similar to animals are also people who tend to have more pro-social or positive attitudes toward outgroup members or people from stigmatized and marginalized backgrounds. In this investigation, we were interested in examining whether belief in evolution would also act in a similar way, because it would reinforce this belief that we are more similar to animals.

Interestingly, the findings are the reverse of what some feared when Darwin’s theories first gained popularity. Darwinism was misunderstood and abused by Social Darwinists who rationalized their own success no matter how ruthlessly gotten by saying it was the "survival of the fittest." Happily, today, instead of unleashing the worst in those who view humanity as continuous with other primates, a belief in evolution is correlated with compassion, acceptance of those outside one’s own group, and less violent resolutions to conflict.

Why the correlation exists is a complex question, and whether there is a cause and effect is equally difficult to determine. The rejection of evolution may be a proxy for other factors, although researchers did control for several, including gender and religion. Other factors not yet identified may turn out to be causal.

In any case, the evidence does point in a consistent direction: A more generous and kind view of others is linked to an acceptance of evolution and the interconnectedness of all humanity to the natural world.