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15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that "having sex is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the next generation." But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words: "our genes." "The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site," Fisher observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself.
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16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited. Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious response is to attack the whole "prejudice" in favor of beauty. "The standards of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really genetics facts," says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, "we should think about" whether to "accept the existing prejudices and then try to eugenically manipulate them" or to transcend those prejudices.
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This critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start with the latter rather than the former?
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Second, Harris assumes that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian perfection. "Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state," he writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become more than material. At least, most of us have.
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