6. Investigating the Societal Impacts of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing, and its Relationship to Mortality Salience, Attraction to Legacy and Attraction to Leisure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Homo sapiens are the only species that are aware that one’s life is impermanent, and that responds to that awareness with anxiety. Adaptive anxiety buffers include delusion through ‘legacy drive’ and ‘leisure drive’, which have been proposed as fundamental components in defining the evolutionary roots of human nature and sociocultural evolution. This study evaluates how legacy and leisure drive are impacted by mortality salience and ideas of genetic testing, and analyzes advancements in genomic technology and its societal implications. In this project, indicators of variation in legacy drive and leisure drive, due to mortality salience and genetic testing priming, were assessed based on participant responses (n=1449) from faculty and students at Queen’s University in an online survey. Direct-to-consumer personal genome testing is poised to usher in a new era of medicine through empowering individuals to learn and understand their own genetic make-up. Behavioural changes between sexes were evaluated in terms of Darwinian theory. This was assessed in conjunction with domains of legacy and connected with participant responses to recent and expanding opportunities for genomic testing—including in the context of so-called ‘designer babies—with potential for playing a role in modulating the evolution of humans both biologically and culturally. Results will be used to test for relationships between variation in demographic/gender traits and preferences associated with mortality awareness, and domains of legacy and leisure. Preliminary investigation reveals that mortality salience is positively correlated with both leisure and legacy drive. Further analysis of results will be presented at the conference.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".