Egg donation and gestational surrogacy: Pregnancy is riskier with an unrelated embryo.

Modern medicine has revolutionized family planning. Remarkably, women can carry to term embryos with whom they share no genetic connection, a feat made possible through egg donation and/or gestational surrogacy. Our reproductive systems evolved to accommodate embryos that are 50% related to the carrier, not 0% related.

Subjective and objective corruption of intuition and rational choice.

A societal shift has occurred toward making impactful decisions on the basis of objective metrics rather than subjective impressions. This shift is commonly justified by claims that we should not trust subjective intuitions. These are often unjust and thereby corrupt.

Germline ecology: Managed herds, tolerated flocks, and pest control.

Multicopy sequences evolve adaptations for increasing their copy number within nuclei. The activities of multicopy sequences under constraints imposed by cellular and organismal selection result in a rich intranuclear ecology in germline cells. Mitochondrial and ribosomal DNA are managed as domestic herds subject to selective breeding by the genes of the single-copy genome.