The future obsolescence of kin selection?

The behavioural preference for kin is a consequence of the selective advantage for alleles which promote kin-cooperation, as manifested through innate drives. It emerges from the generate-and test model of (sexual) reproduction. Genetic variations in offspring (orchestrated by mutation, Mendelian segregation and recombination) are tested by the environment. Unsuccessful genotypes tend to vanish from the population as their bearers fail to reproduce.

Our emotionally-primed ethics are the reflection of these innate drives within consciousness.

What happens when we can engineer genomes freely? When generate-and-test is obsolete?

• We will fix mutational errors and sub-par alleles
• Optimise allele-sets for desired phenotypical traits (prosocial, smart, healthy)
• Construct genome tweaks for new, trans-human traits (e.g. bat-like sonar).

Such techniques permit (but do not mandate) a much larger space of human genetic variation. No more waiting for random mutations. As a consequence there may be no particular genetic relationship between parents and their tweaked children.

Your children are, in reality, genetically-enhanced adoptees.

The theory of kin selection suggests that parent-child emotional bonding might then be poor, depending on whether lack of innate kin-recognition trumps bonding in the context of limited and viscous dispersal effects. There are anecdotes of the 'switched at birth' variety.

However, those ties are also an artefact of the natural evolutionary process. Perhaps we should additionally engineer those genes coding our emotional responses to reinstate those essential bonds of love and nurture.

All these issues: morality, ethics, emotions and purposes are ultimately rooted in (evolutionary) population genetics. They codify what has worked. It's a revelation to consider the consequences of systematic and directed genetic engineering applied purposefully to the human genome. So many things which were constants suddenly become variables.

Historically, the reason we don't lie in bed all day, the reason we don't suicide at once, the reason we reject Nihilism is that all the genotypes which might have fostered a true commitment to such belief systems, by definition, did not survive in the population. Our genotypes are those of the survivors who clung tenaciously to life in all its adversity. Generate and test.

The future will be made by those who are there. I imagine that's the reason why those particular motivational allele-sets might be pretty much off-limits.

See also: Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. A continuing minority taste, population genetics assures us.