> Each genetic variant slightly increases or decreases cognitive ability. Because it is determined by many small additive effects, cognitive ability is normally distributed, following the familiar bell-shaped curve, with more people in the middle than in the tails.
How do we know these genes have an additive effect on IQ?
The causal relationship asserted by this quote is very strange. They claim: Because these effects are additive, IQ is normal distributed. What...? IQ is a test. It's normal distributed, like most tests are.
They're referring to the central limit theorem here, I assume[1], which not a bad insight. However it should be obvious that this normal distribution phenomenon arises out of such tests being scored additively from a number of relatively independent questions (whose answers can be thought of as independent random variables of unknown distribution).
In any case, I don't see how they can justify a causal link (in either direction) between some alleged additive effect of genes and the IQ test itself.
Personally, I'm mostly interested in this claim on additive intelligence genes, since I'm not an expert on this. It would be fascinating and exciting if there were additive "intelligence genes". However, as someone working on artificial neural network research as a hobby, I'm highly skeptical of this. It seems much more likely that human intelligence is a delicate balance of many interacting factors relating to the architecture and "algorithms" of the brain.
The question of additivity of genetic effects is discussed in more detail in reference [1] above (sections 3.1 and also 4): http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3421v2.pdf
In plant and animal genetics it is well established that the majority of phenotype variance in complex traits which is under genetic control is additive. (Linear models work well in species ranging from corn to cows; cattle breeding is now done using SNP genotypes and linear models to estimate phenotypes.) There are also direct estimates of the additive / non-additive components of variance for human height and IQ, from twin and sibling studies. Again, the conclusion is the majority of variance is due to additive effects.
There is a deep evolutionary reason behind additivity: nonlinear mechanisms are fragile and often "break" due to DNA recombination in sexual reproduction. Effects which are only controlled by a single locus are more robustly passed on to offspring. Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection says that the rate of change of fitness is controlled by additive variance in sexually reproducing species under relatively weak selection.
Many people confuse the following statements:
"The brain is complex and nonlinear and many genes interact in its construction and operation."
"Differences in brain performance between two individuals of the same species must be due to nonlinear effects of genes."
The first statement is true, but the second does not appear to be true across a range of species and quantitative traits.
Final technical comment: even the nonlinear part of the genetic architecture can be deduced using advanced methods in high dimensional statistics (see section 4.2 in [1] and also http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.6583).
... The preceding discussion is not intended to convey an overly simplistic view of genetics or systems biology. Complex nonlinear genetic systems certainly exist and are realized in every organism. However, quantitative differences between individuals within a species may be largely due to independent linear effects of specific genetic variants. As noted, linear effects are the most readily evolvable in response to selection, whereas nonlinear gadgets are more likely to be fragile to small changes. (Evolutionary adaptations requiring significant changes to nonlinear gadgets are improbable and therefore require exponentially more time than simple adjustment of frequencies of alleles of linear effect.) One might say that to first approximation, Biology = linear combinations of nonlinear gadgets, and most of the variation between individuals is in the (linear) way gadgets are combined, rather than in the realization of different gadgets in different individuals.
Linear models works well in practice, allowing, for example, SNP-based prediction of quantitative traits (milk yield, fat and protein content, productive life, etc.) in dairy cattle. ...
>> Each genetic variant slightly increases or decreases cognitive ability. Because it is determined by many small additive effects, cognitive ability is normally distributed, following the familiar bell-shaped curve, with more people in the middle than in the tails.
> How do we know these genes have an additive effect on IQ?
I came to post on the same topic. Some gene effects are additive but those are the simple ones and there isn't that many of them. In something complex like a human brain, there are going to be tons of interactions between genes, so that maybe genes A+B makes someone smarter and C+D also make someone smarter, but the combo A+C makes someone actually less smart. The interactions are likely to be insanely complex -- eventually solvable but it will be a while.
To use a computer metaphor, the optimization landscape is not smooth and it doesn't only have a single optimal peak, it is highly complex with lots of local hills (which are caused by the interactions.)
> The breeding of domesticated plants and animals has changed some populations by as much as 30 standard deviations. Broiler chickens, for example, have increased in size more than four times since 1957. A similar approach could be applied to human intelligence, leading to IQs greater than 1,000.
This chicken metaphor is very wrong in that that was achieved via artificial selection, not genetic engineering. Artificial selection can make directed fast movement through an optimization landscape, but it does this without actually trying to figure out the interactions at the gene level, rather it looks as the results and selectively breads for those. When you do this to human it is called eugenics, and, to put it mildly, it likely isn't going to come back into fashion:
"About 92% of pregnancies in Europe with a diagnosis of Down syndrome are terminated."
"About 1.4 per 1000 live births in the United States and 1.1 per 1000 live births in Norway are affected. In the 1950s, in the United States, it occurred in 2 per 1000 live births with the decrease since then due to prenatal screening and abortion"
I think the border between what is deemed acceptable and what isn't is moving towards more selection, and it wouldn't surprise me that, in a few centuries, we would be abhorred to learn how far it moved, and those who live then will look in horror at our primitive ways. Kids with Huntington's disease or genes that make it likely they will develop breast cancer still get born all the time, for example.
EDIT: Down syndrome, not being hereditary, isn't the best example, but the message still stands.
Down syndrome actually is hereditary. For some reason, some groups like to obfuscate this. Most cases are due to random mutation, but the cause is genetic, and can be passed on to children.
When you do this to human it is called eugenics, and, to put it mildly, it likely isn't going to come back into fashion.
Surprisingly we do it all the time, on animals, and we call it breeding. It is very successful and if applied to humans could produce real geniuses without any new tech or research in a handful of generations. Too bad the word has such negative association.
"Surprisingly we do it all the time, on animals, and we call it breeding. It is very successful"
Breeding is successful in some sense, but certainly not without its issues. For example, by breeding pedigree dogs we've left them with a number of genetic defects that are hard to remove due to the reduced gene pool, e.g. Dalmatian deafness, Bulldog respiration, King Charles Spaniel syringomyelia, etc...
Addressing the article, I find the idea of quantifiable intelligence to be one of the dumbest ideas we ever came up with. What does an IQ point mean, really? From my understanding, testing it basically boils down to using a specific subset of symbolic puzzles. Intelligence can be quantified numerically in the same way love can be quantified numerically, i.e. not at all, without losing the essence of what you're looking for.
Also, intelligence by itself is not a goal in its own right, it's the purpose to which it's applied that matters. If super intelligent people exist, what would we have them do? The same things we do but faster? No thanks.
Instead of wasting our time trying to group ourselves into categories, we should be looking to bring out the best of the talents we find in the people around us. That seems like a better goal than chasing a 1000 IQ person.
I think that to many people, the phenomena behind IQ is a suspected general mental ability. It may also be fitting to describe this as a general or arbitrary analogical or mapping ability. I think this definition also captures what people think of when they say "artificial", or non-organic intelligence.
When you say that IQ is just "a specific subset of symbolic puzzles", I believe you are criticizing IQ as ungeneralizable, or as having external validity issues.
I think the reason why IQ has remained as a widespread construct is because it is actually so useful in predicting performance across an array of situations, such as general job performance, of which IQ or g is often a top-tier or unmatched predictor, better than years of relevant work experience. And whenever someone accuses IQ of being inadequate, and they come out with their More Complete test, it turns out that their measurements and predictions are insufficiently distinctive from IQ, which even further supports the idea of a "general" mental ability.
"And whenever someone accuses IQ of being inadequate, and they come out with their More Complete test, it turns out that their measurements and predictions are insufficiently distinctive from IQ, which even further supports the idea of a "general" mental ability."
Here's the thing... I'm criticising IQ tests, but I'm not suggesting we create a more complete test, I'm suggesting the whole idea of measuring intelligence numerically is fundamentally flawed.
There are a few reasons I believe measuring intelligence numerically is flawed, but probably the central one is that I don't believe it exists as a fixed entity, I believe it's adaptive depending on the circumstances we find ourselves in.
As with any debate on human traits the tendency is to go back to the nature vs. nurture question. I believe you can have a natural aptitude for something, but the environment you live in is what helps your intelligence develop, and this is the largest differentiator in what we perceive as intelligence. Put simply, change the environment and you change the intelligence. Therefore scores like IQ do not measure someone's true potential, they only hint at what they've already been exposed to. That's why to me such tests are a waste of time.
> Therefore scores like IQ do not measure someone's true potential, they only hint at what they've already been exposed to. That's why to me such tests are a waste of time.
Hmmm. As far as I know you are allowed to retake IQ-tests if you want, still the differences are there. Some people will never pass 120 no matter how many times they take the test.
eitland, I'm sorry I was rude towards you, you didn't deserve it.
I'll try and make this constructive. Would you agree that human intelligence centres around pattern recognition? If so, which patterns would you class as hard to teach?
It appears reading comprehension isn't a prerequisite for a good IQ score, what I'm saying is those scores are irrelevant, do try and keep up. Oh and its very easy to train someone to get beyond your benchmark as long as they have a reasonable grasp on language, you just show them past exam questions and show the steps to take to get the answer, it's what passes for education in many subjects.
Just to go further into this, decided to remind myself what an IQ test question looked like. This is the first one that came up...
"1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11 - Which one doesn't belong in this series?"
Now the "correct" answer is 8, but that's only because we second guess what the examiner wants. Truthfully 11 is equally correct, as its the only 2 digit number, and the number series could be single digit numbers. But there's nowhere to explain your reasoning, so you better choose the "correct" answer anyway...
But you claimed the scores are based on what you're exposed to rather than your potential. If they don't change over time then that's a strong counter to your argument.
And not being potential was critical to your 'central' flaw with the approach. Perhaps you can name other flaws, but you haven't made them clear, and you haven't actually disagreed with threatofrain's assertion that IQ is the best correlation with general performance that we have.
>math
It's a series, not a set. 11 is not 'equally' correct.
"But you claimed the scores are based on what you're exposed to rather than your potential. If they don't change over time then that's a strong counter to your argument."
As I mentioned in another comment, I was rude because I was tired of explaining why it was pointless, but I did address that it's possible to teach better IQ scores by focusing on how to pass the tests.
"It's a series, not a set. 11 is not 'equally' correct"
Yep that's a definition. I'm not sure why you quoted it?
You can make all kinds of arguments to remove any number, but which one leaves a sequence with minimal kolmogorov complexity? Which one leaves a sequence where you can predict the next number?
"Which one leaves a sequence where you can predict the next number?"
Who said you had to predict the next number? If the question asked "Fill in the next number in this sequence" then I'd agree with you, but instead it asked which number didn't belong.
It's a heuristic. If you can't explain the series then you lose a lot of points in arguing that you interpreted it correctly.
Remember, the question isn't asking you to sort a bag of numbers into piles, it's giving them in a specific order and asking which list of n-1 numbers in that order is most coherent.
"is most coherent"
Of course it's clear which is most coherent, but what I'm trying to illustrate is how less obvious approaches may still demonstrate intelligence, I'll look up some more IQ test questions and find a different example to do this...
EDIT: Found one that should be better. What is your answer to this question... http://imgbox.com/a7vshE9u
Well there's one interpretation with three answers that doesn't use the info presented, and there's another interpretation with one answer that does use the info presented... 8
So I see your point about figuring out what the examiner wants and I think it makes the question better since you can't blindly run with a first interpretation and ignore half the question.
(Is that a real IQ test? I'm not trying to say it isn't, just that "internet IQ test" is not a trustworthy phrase.)
To be honest it now seems you are arrogant on top of your ignorance.
Two people try to explain to you and you go on talking without reading.
Regarding reading comprehension: what part of eitlands explanation that you are often free to take iq tests multiple times didn't you understand? And so on.
And, regarding your example: if you are going to be arrogant, make sure you are right.
"Regarding reading comprehension: what part of eitlands explanation that you are often free to take iq tests multiple times didn't you understand? And so on."
I was tired of having to explain why assigning a number to intelligence made little sense, so yes I was a little rude. Besides, I addressed eitlands' assertion that certain numbers are beyond reach, just like any formal test you can train people to become good at taking the test.
> I was tired of having to explain why assigning a number to intelligence made little sense
So stop explaing it. Assigning a number to intelligence makes a lot of sense.
As have been pointed out 1.) it seems those measurements can be reproduced with statistical significance so they measure something and 2.) whatever it measures it seems to be one of the best indicators we have of future job performance.
What they don't tell us is what a person is worth, if he is a good person etc.
"How much can these scores change over a person's lifetime, and how limiting are a person's scores for obtaining what they want out of life?
For groups of individuals, IQs are fairly stable between childhood and adulthood, but for specific individuals within a group, IQs can--and do--vary greatly over a lifetime. The IQs will vary as a result of specific interventions (such as preschool enrichment programs), quality education (or the lack of it), injuries that affect brain functioning, and other aspects of the environment that either enhance or diminish one's cognitive ability. In addition, errors of measurement are much larger than people tend to think, and, therefore, an individual's IQs will vary from time to time--sometimes substantially--simply due to the chance fluctuations that accompany any repeated measurement. And, there is more to life success than the ability to score high on IQ tests. People can be successful based on their creativity, street smarts, and personality variables."
Breeding is successful in some sense, but certainly not without its issues. For example, by breeding pedigree dogs we've left them with a number of genetic defects that are hard to remove due to the reduced gene pool, e.g. Dalmatian deafness, Bulldog respiration, King Charles Spaniel syringomyelia, etc...
I agree the research would have to be gradual and aware of those issues. I doubt dog breeders really care for those.
Addressing the article, I find the idea of quantifiable intelligence to be one of the dumbest ideas we ever came up with. What does an IQ point mean, really? From my understanding, testing it basically boils down to using a specific subset of symbolic puzzles. Intelligence can be quantified numerically in the same way love can be quantified numerically, i.e. not at all, without losing the essence of what you're looking for.
IQ can be measured, there are many tests that do so. More time you spend checking more accurate you can get. Not infinitely accurately but good enough.
Also, intelligence by itself is not a goal in its own right, it's the purpose to which it's applied that matters. If super intelligent people exist, what would we have them do? The same things we do but faster? No thanks.
That makes little sense. Speed is not a requirement for new research and discovery. Original though is. That is what we should strive for.
Instead of wasting our time trying to group ourselves into categories, we should be looking to bring out the best of the talents we find in the people around us. That seems like a better goal than chasing a 1000 IQ person.
"I agree the research would have to be gradual and aware of those issues. I doubt dog breeders really care for those."
Are you suggesting dog breeders don't care about dogs? From what I've seen they tend to be quite fond of them. The issue is we breed dogs for different traits, with the issues I mentioned before the dogs might've been bred for their looks, but other dogs that were at some point bred for work still have issues... Golden Retrievers are high risk for developing cancer, German Shepherds are high risk for hip dysplasia, Dachshunds are high risk for back problems, etc... It's not that dog breeders want to give dogs issues, it's a byproduct of selective breeding, as defects that do creep in are harder to remove.
"That makes little sense. Speed is not a requirement for new research and discovery. Original though is. That is what we should strive for."
The tests we are talking about do not measure creativity in any meaningful sense.
"Eugenics could do exactly that."
How could eugenics do exactly that? I'm talking about bringing out the talents of people around you, i.e. they already exist.
As humans, we reward those traits we collectively find most desirable with additional resources. Parents with additional resources may choose to grant them as seed capital for their children, to have more children themselves, or to promote traits they find desirable in other people's children.
Our species is currently directing its breeding efforts towards ruthless, unethical business managers and corrupt politicians.
If we wanted geniuses, we would be paying people just for being smarter than the median. Instead, tuition is rising faster than inflation, and our smartest folks are often tremendously burdened with debt during their prime reproductive years, to the point that any children they may have are bound by their available resources rather than by their potential.
We are selectively breeding ourselves. It just turns out that the rich assholes want humanity to be more like them. If smart people want to breed more geniuses, we're probably going to need to do it on a different planet, where intelligence will be more of a survival advantage.
Scholarships are also given out based on criteria unrelated to intelligence or aptitude. Do you happen to know what proportion of all scholarship funding is allocated purely on the basis of academic strength?
Don't know, but I've heard that the average scholarship at our local University is not applied for. There are many small ones, with very specific criterion. One of my son's friends was surprised to win a scholarship, because he hadn't applied - the dean had applied for him!
Breeding really isn't the panacea you make it out to be.
I skipped grades, have an advanced science degree, earn a lot in a job that requires above average intelligence, etc. My parents were both high-school dropouts, and my mother in particular was identified as being "slow" when she was younger (not below average in IQ, but on the very low end of it). On the other hand, I personally know very intelligent couples (one consisting of a pair who each individually are far more intelligent than I am) whose kids have also been "slow".
What you're describing is 'regression to the mean.' Francis Galton noticed this effect when he was studying the traits of various genetically influenced traits.
This doesn't invalidate the idea of eugenics. You can still modify the average of a trait over time in a given population in spite of any mean-regressing tendencies. It just happens a bit more slowly.
You are using the same mistake as most people when they associate the word eugenics with mass forced extermination of certain traits. Because of fear and certain individuals in the past.
The word can be used in a modern context, where eugenics is performed voluntarily, on a very small population, and under scientific supervision for causes that benefit the entire humanity. The rest can live and love whoever they want.
Genetic manipulation functionally falls in the same category, but it is better accepted because it doesn't have the negative history attached to it.
"Eugenics" is actually currently practiced, but described as pre-implantation diagnostics. This allows parents who are carriers of a deleterious mutation, such as that causing Tay Sachs Disease, to avoid having children with the condition.
It isn't voluntary for the offspring that are created through such efforts. Sure, that's not the case for procreation to begin with... but the difference is that these people would effectively be bred for a specific purpose. Then, to keep it voluntary, I guess we would lightly suggest to them at some tender age to consider going into field which requires high intelligence? Or do we not interfere at all, and just observe them from a distance (since you mention scientific supervision)?
Nobody has a voluntary choice in their birth and eugenics doesn't have to breed people for a certain position or job. It may be something as simple as egg/sperm analysis that calculates a favorable (in whatever way the technology designers determine that) gene sequence and then the child would be raised normally. Eugenics doesn't mean the decay of the moral fabric of society or the loss of basic ethics in research. Why is it so hard to imagine eugenics integrating into modern society?
It's not surprising at all. Eugenics on a large scale is also know as population control and it elicits negative visceral reactions for good reasons. Large undertakings usually require some kind of central control and the history of such control is not positive at all.
Now if the choice comes down to something between two individuals because technology makes it possible to make certain choices that's a different matter but even then you are treading in dangerous territory. Who gets access to the technology? How do you verify that the technology is safe? Is there a beta test period? Who gets to be a beta tester? Anyway the list is long and the technology is nowhere near where it needs to be for even these kinds of choices to be made between two individuals let alone at the population level.
I find the idea in general just intuitively unappealing. Humanity can't breed itself out of the problems it is in. Being smart is simply not enough. Anything worthwhile requires hard work. So are you going to breed for hard work as well now? I don't see these scientists looking for those genes though.
You also have to define "better". Here we are only talking about super intelligence. But what about creativity in music, film, writing, etc. Those things enrich our lives. Who is going to make the films and animes that I love?
What if the person does not fit your definition of a super intelligent person with a high IQ but instead is a genius in music. Also, how do we know that by focusing only on super intelligent people we won't be killing off the other traits that make life worthwhile, the arts, music, film. There are multiple perspectives that make a person a genius, high IQ is just one of them among many.
As somebody else mentioned, just like breeding dogs, you may be able to select for one trait at the expense of the others.
Frankly high IQ is overrated. It is probably biased anyway. i.e. Children that grow up in high income families have better IQ results than children living in poverty. It could simply mean that the differentiator is good education at an early age.
> [...] Children that grow up in high income families have better IQ results than children living in poverty.
Yes, because high IQ parents tend to make more money and tend to get high IQ children (even if those children got adopted away or orphaned early on). On the other hand, if high income families adopt children of low IQ parents those children end up with an IQ resembling that of their low IQ biological parents.
>>even if those children got adopted away or orphaned early on
Was race accounted for. i.e. Where there minorities and white kids in the group. If only white kids then that tells me that the problem is more systemic. i.e. racism.
By the way, I don't know if you have heard about these two papers before. They might interest you (or not).
Hopkins, Russell, Schaeffer, "Chimpanzee Intelligence is Heritable", Current Biology, 2014.
<way too many coauthors to list but the main guy seems to be P.M. Visscher>, "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic", Molecular Psychiatry, 2011.
The latter paper reports on a study (with N=3511) on unrelated people to see whether their genotype and their phenotype regarding intelligence had anything to do with each other. People were tested with DNA chip for SNPs and had their IQ measured. The interesting result was that people who had more similar DNA also had more similar IQs (and vice versa, of course).
I understand the urge to resist reducing humans to a single numerical measurement, but the fact is that "IQ" or "g" or general "cognitive ability" or whatever you want to call it is strongly positively correlated with almost every trait and life outcome that people value.
This child may even come to understand the difference between "it's" and "its".
Thanks to Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.
Is the corollary that one should not raise less "better" children? If this what we come to practice as a species, I would definitely hope that a superior one wipes us out soon.
If this is what we come to practice as a species, we are in fact replacing ourselves with something superior. And unless you hope for your children to never be as successful as you were, that's a good thing.
I notice your use of scare quotes. Is the state of the art advanced enough to make a judgement on whether or not a person is better at the genetic level than another person? I'm not just talking about some specific category or skill, but also as a well-rounded person. Because these people will have to live their own lives, and would be subject to whatever other traits that might arise when you try to optimize humans for some kind of skill. I at least don't think that the state of the art is so advanced that they can predict that optimizing for some specific trait might have some unforeseen consequences when it comes other, perhaps seemingly unrelated traits.
If country A makes and achieves its goal to give the next generation an average IQ of 130, and country B makes its goal to encourage the next generation to do something meaningful (to them), B will serve A before long.
I somewhat doubt it. Let's use something you're likely to be familiar with, smartphone apps... Now it's arguable that the skills required to develop a smartphone app implies a reasonable level of intelligence, yet look at any app store and you'll see huge numbers of uninspired, lowest common denominator shovelware. Does the world really need hundreds of todo apps? Do you really think people are driven to make those apps for anything greater than the "prestige" of being an app developer or a desperate attempt at making money?
Compare and contrast with a society that values the outcome of the work rather than how book smart you need to be able to do it. For example nature conservation is pretty easy to understand how to do right, and there's a tangible lasting benefit.
Guess it depends on what you view as a society worth having.
Maybe. Or lots of people from country B will get into country A as "refugees", bring along their families, and have taxpayers in country A pay for them while they do what they can to be racist and criminal against native people from country A.
It depends on the moral sensibilities of the A'ers.
There's no good reason for whatever downvotes you're getting. The fact is the comment underscored by your sarcasm is correct: that breeding, alone, is not necessarily going to produce any super-intelligent human. The biology of intelligence is one we haven't come close to a deep understanding of. To glibly throw out "selective breeding" as a scientific approach to generating super-intelligent humans is, frankly, not a very scientific thing to do.
Genetic Testing is well and growing. Leads to embryo selection implicitly, which is not so far from eugenics.
A good example is French Canadian region Lac St Jean where parents are allowed to select their embryo considering rare diseases present in the region :
One the one hand, I would be deeply stunned if an IQ of 1000 was available just by flipping all the genetic switches to "on". The result of doing such a thing that I would actually expect would be to create a non-viable embryo.
On the other hand, it is undeniable that genetic fiddling will someday be able to raise intelligence, and even if all it could do was reliably produce people of the 150-170 range, it could still radically change the world. And that's merely hypothesizing the reliable production of an effect that already exists and therefore can not be impossible. One can imagine that an IQ 1000 may be simply impossible on anything recognizably like the neural substrate we run on. We don't have enough information to know that right now. But we know we can get 150-170.
Meh, you also need the motivation component. IQ is a measure of capability, not a personality trait. It's perfectly easy to imagine tons of people with high IQs who either unmotivated (e.g. satisfy their itches by say gambling or playing video games) or destructive (criminals).
There are probably hundreds of thousands of people with greater IQ than Bill Gates, Larry Page, or Elon Musk. It doesn't mean they have the inclination to change the world.
This can't be overstated. In college, the smartest guy I knew was also the laziest. He used to tell me different ideas he had for how to be the laziest person imaginable while still living a comfortable life, which were always amusing. He could destroy anybody else on campus at chess without effort and not paying attention, focusing instead on EverQuest or some other videogame he was simultaneously playing.
> One the one hand, I would be deeply stunned if an IQ of 1000 was available just by flipping all the genetic switches to "on". The result of doing such a thing that I would actually expect would be to create a non-viable embryo.
That makes no sense. All these variants would have been obtained by comparing in the general (living) population people with differing copies. Why would these variants be completely harmless in normal people and suddenly lethal in conjunction? Is there any evidence at all for this idea? For example, do we see extremely intelligent people (who will be highly enriched in the relevant variants) dropping like flies in their teens?
"This means that there must be at least thousands of IQ alleles to account for the actual variation seen in the general population. A more sophisticated analysis (with large error bars) yields an estimate of perhaps 10,000 in total."
The odds that you can flip a few thousand genes without harm seem to me to approach 0 rapidly. None of these genes are, after all, coding for "intelligence"... they're doing some sort of chemical thing, after all. Heck even if it produces a viable embryo it seems more likely to produce insanity than superintelligence (assuming we could even distinguish the two).
That said, yeah, I'm just hypothesizing, but it seems far more likely to me that rather than some sort of monotonic increase in the "intelligence" factor that we can just pile on freely that there will be any number of incompatible additions, things that where adding either one or the other of some modification takes you to the optimal point but having both takes you beyond, and, well, all the other exciting and whacky things we see in the genetic world. In the arbitrarily-complicated n-dimensional space of "intelligence" just ramping all the available controls to "maximum" doesn't strike me as likely to produce an optimal result.
(I did, however, resist giving a8da6b0c91d's answer; a priori we can't tell whether the Ashekenazi Jews are made susceptible by their intelligence, or if they merely got something nasty co-selecting with their intelligence. Perhaps somebody somewhere has made that particular study, I don't know, but my point is merely that study would be required on a case-by-case basis. That can't be used as a general argument when we're discussing intelligently modifying genetics.)
> The odds that you can flip a few thousand genes without harm seem to me to approach 0 rapidly.
I have bad news for you, then: in the general populations, there's not merely thousands of SNPs, there are hundreds of thousands! I guess we're all going to die tomorrow now that we've realized this.
> In the arbitrarily-complicated n-dimensional space of "intelligence" just ramping all the available controls to "maximum" doesn't strike me as likely to produce an optimal result.
Yet, breeding works. Chickens and cows, for example, are scores of standard deviations away from their ancestors on some traits like weight or milk production, and while they may not be exactly as healthy or robust as their ancestors, they have hardly gone extinct.
"I have bad news for you, then: in the general populations, there's not merely thousands of SNPs, there are hundreds of thousands!"
Evolution isn't direct manipulation... part of what has evolved in the genome is the ability to be evolved in the first place. The genetic operations being proposed by this article bears no resemblance to the operations used by evolution.
While I've previously indicated my disagreement with the other sibling chain of discussion going on here, the car analogy isn't the worst. You can't take a sedan and just Push Everything To Eleven (individually, one criterion at a time, with no attention paid to integration) and expect a high-performance vehicle to result.
In math terms, we have a function f(x, y) -> IQ, and where we are now, we know going in the positive x direction will raise IQ and we know going in the positive y direction will increase IQ. We have no guarantee whatsoever that x + y will result in an increase in IQ. We certainly have even less guarantee when we start piling on the dimensions, and my comment about expecting a non-viable embryo is because in fact the xs and ys and zs and so on aren't just affecting IQ (since there aren't actually genes for that) but are having other effects as well. The odds of crossing into a nonviable regime somewhere, even from a starting position of known functionality, strike me as almost 1.
I sense I may be goring a bit of a sacred ox here, so let me remind you of my supreme confidence that genetic engineering can indeed raise IQ. It's just going to be harder than what this article proposes to produce a supermegagenius.
> Evolution isn't direct manipulation... part of what has evolved in the genome is the ability to be evolved in the first place.
What on earth do you think breeding does? It selects for increasing proportions of genetic variants in the phenotypically above-average members of the flock. What difference is there between creating a predictive score for an embryo and choosing to implant the highest-scoring one, with making the changes predicted to increase scores with something like CRISPR?
> You can't take a sedan and just Push Everything To Eleven (individually, one criterion at a time, with no attention paid to integration) and expect a high-performance vehicle to result.
Organisms are not cars. This is remarked upon by everyone how biology designs things in a very different fashion from humans, and yet this knowledge gets thrown out as soon as inconvenient...
> In math terms, we have a function f(x, y) -> IQ, and where we are now, we know going in the positive x direction will raise IQ and we know going in the positive y direction will increase IQ. We have no guarantee whatsoever that x + y will result in an increase in IQ.
Please, look up the twin and GCTA studies and what is meant by 'additive'. If there were those complex wiggly interactions, they would not show up as hits from the GWAS studies since they're not additive, and they would not contribute to the large additive fraction of heritability but the other parts.
"What on earth do you think breeding does? It selects for increasing proportions of genetic variants in the phenotypically above-average members of the flock."...
... using certain operators that are not arbitrarily recombining DNA. "Crossover" and such may be somewhat oversimplified versions of what real life does, but neither are the real life genetic operations anywhere near "completely free" recombinations.
Your arguments based on conventional evolutionary operations do not apply to cases where we are engineering freely, without regard to what appears where on chromosomes or any of the other myriad ways we've evolved the ability to safely evolve.
I do also feel like perhaps you are sneaking a step in where the intelligent manipulator double-checks whether the gene combinations make sense, which, if so, would be subtly begging the question as my point is precisely that we would have to check.
Besides, if I may flip the burden of proof around for a moment and appeal to something that may only be a heuristic rather than a solid logical argument, do you really think superintelligence is going to be this easy? "Just" look up all the thousands of genes that contribute to intelligence, assume they must all be doing it linearly (in the "linearly-combinable" sense of the term), and flip them to "smart" rather than "dumb"? Really? It's never that easy, even for things multiple orders of magnitude simpler than genetically engineering intelligence. It would boggle my mind if the path, or even a path, to human superintelligence could be so thoroughly expressed in so few bits.
It makes plenty of sense. You see random weird things like marfan syndrome linked to higher IQ. Among the high IQ ashekanazim there are a bunch of weird neurological diseases. Genes virtually never do one thing. Select for one trait and you're also going to get a bunch of other unexpected stuff, much of it probably unrelated to cognition.
> You see random weird things like marfan syndrome linked to higher IQ. Among the high IQ ashekanazim there are a bunch of weird neurological diseases.
In the small Ashkenazi population, yes, thanks to founder effects. In the general population, with no bottlenecks to force harmful variations to persist, why would there be large negative effects to any of the normal variation of IQ-affecting genes? They would have been selected against.
And you did not respond to any of my points about the general population or the observed lack of severe disease with higher IQs.
There are correlations to problems in the general population. For examples, homosexuality and narcotics usage. The thing to do is probably to ask a dog breeder.
I think inside two sigma, in well out-bred people, general health and IQ are highly correlated. Body temperature (resting metabolic rate) and IQ are correlated. Longevity and physical attractiveness are correlated. I don't think this bodes well for tweaking some menu of brain genes to good effect. Intelligence is mostly caught up in general health and mutational load, within normal bounds. I doubt these claimed IQ genes exist quite the way is being claimed. We're probably looking at an inextricably complex web of genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors.
As I think the genes are probably tied up in basic cellular metabolism and endocrinology more-so than some isolated brain design, I will lay money that monkeying with the lot of them is going to go badly. There's a reason genetic algorithms involve discarding the vast majority of each generation. We'll see won't we. If I could lay $500 that these efforts will completely fail with animals, I would.
> There are correlations to problems in the general population. For examples, homosexuality and narcotics usage.
The latter of which is not a problem - for those people. More generally: longevity is a accurate indicator of all net problems for people, ranging from social problems to suicide to schizophrenia to drug abuse to disease rates. Is longevity lower for the high-IQ? No, it is not. It is higher. So much for your 'inextricably complex web'.
> Longevity and physical attractiveness are correlated.
I believe this is mostly driven by the low-end, is it not? All those 'funny-looking kids'.
> If I could lay $500 that these efforts will completely fail with animals, I would.
You can't, of course, because that would be a waste of time; there are no measures of general intelligence nearly as well-validated with any animals as for humans (whether you want to specify cognitive functioning or life outcomes), and if there were, no one would bother to capture nearly enough genomes or genotypes to nail down the respective variants.
> Is longevity lower for the high-IQ? No, it is not. It is higher.
That's my whole point. I'm not sure you're following. It's mostly about health down to the cellular level. It's about a high performance immune system during gestation and development. It's about the absence of mutational load, not the existence of IQ boosting genes. Good luck if you think it's a simple matter of inserting genes a, b, and c. It's about how millions of pieces fit together exactly.
You seem to be saying we're going to be able to take a top notch, high end consumer car (person with IQ 120) and add a turbocharger, remove some body weight, and tighten up the tolerances and compression ratio to get more zoom. I'm saying that's just not going to work. The absolute best case will be you manage to make an F100 racer, which falls apart after 100 miles without extreme maintenance. But more likely the thing won't even run properly.
You have no idea and I have no idea how genetic engineering of mammals will play out. I am convinced that you are operating from flawed premises of the organism as a machine. Your focus on simple correlations belies the misunderstanding. In the organism we are talking about a chaotic, extremely complex system like the weather or an economy that will badly defy engineering attempts. Go read jurassic park, lol.
> It's mostly about health down to the cellular level. It's about a high performance immune system during gestation and development. It's about the absence of mutational load, not the existence of IQ boosting genes. Good luck if you think it's a simple matter of inserting genes a, b, and c. It's about how millions of pieces fit together exactly.
If it's about 'mutational load' (you do understand the difference between that term as usually used and the SNP strategy Hsu proposes, right?), then flipping them should work just fine: you're removing damage and friction.
> You seem to be saying we're going to be able to take a top notch, high end consumer car (person with IQ 120) and add a turbocharger, remove some body weight, and tighten up the tolerances and compression ratio to get more zoom.
No, I am not making a simplistic analogy to a machine.
> But more likely the thing won't even run properly.
Which is why high-IQ people drop like flies after 100 miles, right...
> In the organism we are talking about a chaotic, extremely complex system like the weather or an economy that will badly defy engineering attempts.
Yes, it's all so terribly terribly complex, whooo knooowwwsss what will happen.
> Go read jurassic park, lol.
Newsflash: _Jurassic Park_ was fiction. That is: made up, not real.
I would imagine that there are a number of different ways a particular brain could be more successful than another at performing a particular cognitive task. I do believe you are right in thinking that some of them are better thought of as algorithmic, but some of them are perhaps simple and independent (such as better memory recall). Neither algorithmic structures in the brain nor simple characteristics like recall/speed of language parsing can explain everything if we are to believe that the human brain is as complicated as evidence demonstrates.
It's also a huge mistake to think that this is the ONLY thing those genes do.
It's likely that many of them will increase depression, anxiety, ADD, schizophrenia, drug addiction, etc.
Evolution produces genomes within the constraint of the environment. I'm no luddite, but I'd be pretty concerned with genetic engineering without regard for the environment of the individual.
It actually doesn't matter if some of them cancel each other out. There still is the best combination of them, and statistically it's very likely to be better than anything evolution has come up with. Human population is just not large enough for the evolution to try many combinations.
Interesting article, but I feel it misses the simple fact that any individual with an IQ of 1000 is likely to be "insane" by any modern measure of the world - they certainly wouldn't have a world-view that has much in common with their "fellow men". As it stands, many of those who have exceptionally high IQs or high "intelligence" struggle to exist in a world that isn't geared for them. These "hyper-intelligent" individuals, should they ever exist, would likely be stoned by their fellow men, or would choose to be the other variety of stoned rather than suffer the stupid of the world.
I think this effect is significant even with IQs much lower than "super-intelligence". Socially, people organize into a hierarchy of authority. A significant rule of this structure is that should should never be smarter than your superiors - finding a better solution than your "betters" is akin to showing them to be wrong and is confused with a display of dominance. Persons of inferior social standing but superior intelligence are treated as a threat.
If there was a genetic component to "super-intelligence" then we would observe it. How many of those great minds listed had parents or children that also made the list: zero. Also, would any of these (suspiciously all European) super-geniuses have been as successful if there were born in a small backwater village? There are probably millions of people with Einstein-level intelligence around the world, but living in environments that are hardly conducive to the expression of their genius.
The breakthrough that we need to realize super-intelligence is not Eugenic or academic, it is social. The only way to allow the best minds in the world to blossom in potential is:
1. Grant access to intellectual resources and opportunities to everyone.
2. Stop the authoritarian practice of crushing dissent.
There absolutely are not millions of people with Einstein level intelligence around the world. That would imply that the probability of having Einstein level intelligence is on the order of one in a thousand, or as likely as having Down syndrome. This is manifestly not the case.
Supposedly 'Albert Einstein' had an IQ of around 160. My father's IQ was tested to be around 200. Yet you wouldn't know who the hell my father was even if I told you his name. It would place him as 1 in 4 billion according to these charts...
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx
However, Einstein would be 1 in 11,000. If the chart is to be believed, then people with an IQ of 160 or above would be about 655,000 (according to the current world population).
In any case, it doesn't matter so much anymore. My father is nearly broke, sick, and in poor health right now and lives with his parents. He was somewhat successful as a business man, but not overly so. He was well known within his community, and he certainly could do anything he wanted. He was a scuba diver, a pilot, an engineer, he speaks three languages, can play the piano and saxophone, he can program a computer and rebuild engines. Having super intelligent people will not make that much difference in the world, except in the cases where those people lead countries. Until we elect leaders who have such high intelligence, we won't see society change much at all. Intelligence does not equal money, and it doesn't equal power. It just means you can figure out things faster than others. With computers, an average person can solve complex mathematical problems faster than the highest IQ people could 100 years ago. IQ is far less relevant in today's world.
In any case, even if these high IQ people were elected, what happens when one of them has a stroke and all of a sudden their IQ is only half what it was (500)? Should we have a vote of no confidence and shun them from society? This just ends up as eugenics all over again. If you don't know what I am talking about, read about it here. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/science/haunted-files-the-...
From my experience, IQ results are very inflated. Your father was probably very bright, but an IQ of 200 is very very high, so high that it is unlikely that he was that smart. An IQ of 200 means he is one of the brightest in the world, and I've read here and there about people being tested on IQ of around 220. Statistically it's not possible.
I believe the word you mean is improbable. Nothing is impossible. And you may be using the later versions of the test. I'm not saying he was the smartest in the world, in fact, it may have been a flaw of the test. It was when the tests were being first developed. Regardless of what his intelligence was (it's far lower now thanks to a stroke he had a few years back) I'm just saying that it doesn't mean as much as it did.
> It was when the tests were being first developed.
So it was a ratio test, not a modern deviation test? (As makes sense since no accepted deviation test goes up to 200 in the first place...) A 200 would be nothing exceptional: it just meant he was substantially better than his year-bracket - a 4 year old acting like an 8 year old, a 5yo like 10yo, etc. Not that he was Einstein.
> If there was a genetic component to "super-intelligence" then we would observe it. How many of those great minds listed had parents or children that also made the list: zero.
High intelligence and other forms of talent certainly run in families. If you read bios of scientists and mathematicians (as I am doing now, actually, in reading the Albers compendiums of interviews with mathematicians, _Mathematical People_ and _Fascinating Mathematical People_), time and again you find that a great mathematician has mathematician relatives or family which were talented in other ways. Consider the Bachs, the Polgars, the Wieners, the Bernoullis, the Darwins... Remember one of the origins of research into intelligence: Galton researching English geniuses and noting they were often related. Such clustering is consistent both with environmental and genetic explanations, of course, but no one argues that there is no clustering at all!
> Also, would any of these (suspiciously all European) super-geniuses have been as successful if there were born in a small backwater village?
Many of them were. Murray in _Human Accomplishment_ notes that of his eminent figures, while they all tended to gravitate towards capital cities like London and Paris as young as possible and live and die there, they were often born in the countryside. (An extreme case of rural talent being discovered is Ramanujan.) This should be no surprise to you since urban populations have historically been a small fraction of total populations and so naturally a lot of great figures will hail from outside the cities.
> There are probably millions of people with Einstein-level intelligence around the world,
Maybe.
> but living in environments that are hardly conducive to the expression of their genius.
Yeah, no. Environments can't produce geniuses, but they can certainly prevent them. The mean IQs of places like India do not indicate many of their citizens are as far out on the tails as Einstein...
He was an ardent atheist who underwent a deathbed conversion. The person who administered the last sacraments to him - Father Anselm Strittmatter - said that he was so terrified of dying that he did his best to distract himself from that prospect. Even spending time reciting Goethe's Faust to his brother.
He was a brilliant man and he was understandably terrified of the very mortal fate that awaits all of us.
This is untrue. If it really were a universal, why would there be such high IQs in the first place? As well, it's not empirically obvious: some samples show dysgenics, others show eugenics. I'm sure you're familiar with Clark's claims about England and China, but you can also find eugenic samples in a number of modern samples (iirc, post-WWII Baby Boom was eugenic) collated in Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences, 2012; and some HBDers crunching the GSS claim that current trends are eugenic for men but dysgenic for women.
Deeply questionable, since there's no real way to check that the populations remained the same by SES or ethnicity, and the apparatus themselves are not necessarily identical: a recent comment on the topic I read observes that the entire small decline could be explained by shifts in the luminance of the devices (the brighter the light, the faster you can react).
This is true - otherwise we'd have consistently growing intelligence over the generations - and instead we find the inverse - dysgenic fertility rules the day.
I see many posts here asking about the genetics of intelligence. Here is the best review to date (it is open access) [1]. The authors have been studying the genetics of intelligence for over 30 years. The tl;dr is that we know if no single genetic switch that can increase intelligence, there seem to be many little switches that give rise to the normal IQ distribution.
As I commented on this interesting article when it was a submission to Hacker News, "Robert Plomin and Ian Deary are mainstream researchers on the behavior genetics of human intelligence, the authors of well regarded textbooks (Plomin), popular books (both), and primary research articles (both) on various related topics. Their joint point of view as expressed in the review article published today is not the exact point of view of all researchers in the field, but I thought it would do as a discussion-starter here on Hacker News.
"A crucial detail (Deary and Plomin would both agree about this, but it hasn't come up in the discussion here yet) is that heritablity has NOTHING to do with modifiability. It is quite possible in principle that a novel environmental intervention might be discovered that could boost most people's intelligence. It is even possible that the most effective intervention might have a gene-environment (G × E) interaction such that the intervention would most help people with lowest IQ, and least help people who already have high IQs. No such intervention that human beings can direct purposefully has yet been found, but it is clear from the Flynn effect[1] that something in the environment can have powerful effects in raising average IQ levels of whole countries, as has happened in the developed world throughout the last century (for as long as IQ tests have been around).
"It is correct that people marry and have children on bases other than just shared level of intelligence. (But living in the same town, and completing higher education at similar ages, and pursuing compatible occupations for marriage, etc. is correlated with IQ.) It is still far too early to say how rapidly human populations might see noticeable effects from assortative mating by IQ. It is reasonably clear that often-feared dysenic trends probably are NOT happening--the lowest-IQ people in the world population don't reproduce at all, and high-IQ people actually have reasonable numbers of children to replicate their genes. In any event, the favorable environmental trends have SWAMPED whatever genetic trends are going on for IQ in the whole human population, and people are getting smarter all over the world, according to the research on the Flynn effect.
"It is still a hard problem to identify anything at all meaningful and replicable about how gene differences influence IQ differences, even though it is now settled wisdom that they do. Human IQ, as the article says, is influenced by MANY genes, and many of those genes interact with one another in ways that are not understood at all yet."
Seems we are more likely to move into rather dark conjecture. For some reason, humans seems to be rather convinced of themselves, in spite of there really being no evidence for any kind of justification. We are facing a future that is being wholly underestimated where the USA is ushering in an existence that is dominated by control and oppression and abuse; how can that be any kind of indication that there are, let alone will be super intelligent humans. I think someone has been reading too many scifi novels and listening to bamboozlers.
There is no objective evidence that we are getting any more intelligent than past intellectuals even if we are simply just building on top of previous achievements. Just alone the notion that you would not realize that our "achievement" is just building upon achievements of the past is proof enough that there really has been little to no improvement. Call me when humanity has been able to wrestle itself away from the mental parasite that is religion. Then we can talk about the possibility of super intelligent humans. Let's the get the blatantly obvious mental health issues out of the way first.
Really? How about the part of the Flynn effect that is caused by improved (micro) nutrition? In other words, adding iodine to salt improved IQ scores (in areas where the soil was deficient) -- but it also improved real intelligence.
I consider it likely that some of the Flynn effect is an artefact due to schooling, newspapers, books, TV, computer games, etc, but some of it seems to be very real.
Religion a "mental parasite?" I doubt you've known very many intelligent people in your life. I know some very successful, top-of-the-bell-curve people who are religious. Get real.
"I have always thought that von Neumann's brain indicated that he was from another species, an evolution beyond man."
--Nobel laureate Hans E. Bethe
Yet we have no evidence that von Neumann's supergenius intelligence was due to any specific genetic traits that he inherited. And even if some of these could be genetically isolated, we have no basis at this point to believe that any of these (as of yet unspecified) traits can be "engineered", singly or collectively.
The article gets worse from there. Presumably the author is aware of the Fallacy of Linear Extrapolation, yet he boldly goes on to say:
Given that there are many thousands of potential positive variants, the implication is clear: If a human being could be engineered to have the positive version of each causal variant, they might exhibit cognitive ability which is roughly 100 standard deviations above average. This corresponds to more than 1,000 IQ points.
This aside from the fact that no one really what (high) IQ is, or what an IQ of 1,000 points (or even "100 standard deviations above average") could possibly mean (or even be measured).
This is totally false. Intelligence is strongly genetic. Traits are very often genetically additive. Although we won't be certain until do a huge survey of genetics, all the author is saying is that it might be possible. And if it is, then we do have the technology to "engineer" a child with the genes we want.
All the author is saying is that it might be possible.
No; he doesn't merely say that it "might be possible." He says that it will happen. In fact he's so sure it will happen that it's basically inevitable. So sure that he takes great pains to say so, in bold letters (hundreds of pixels wide):
Which is to say: he makes an outlandish claim in the title, in order to get us to read what he has to say; then meekly backpeddles away from that claim in the body of the article.
Generally the editor writes the title. Regardless, the title isn't very controversial; "superintelligence" isn't well defined and it's certainly possible we could have humans with greater than genius IQ. It was the "1,000 IQ" claim that isn't certain, since it's just a simple extrapolation we don't really know how all of those genes would interact.
> Therefore all traits are additive? And linearly so, in arbitrary combinations?
No, not all variation is additive, but things like twin studies and GCTAs let you estimate the additive part of the heritability. (I can't tell whether you're completely ignorant of this topic & wildly overestimating the cogency of your comments, or just being a Socratic dick, so it would be helpful if you could clarify.)
You can call me names, if you like. The guy above me seemed not to understand the implications of what he was saying, and I was doing my best to gently help him understand this fact.
The article assumes that if 1000 positive gene changes are responsible for increasing intelligence, you'll get 1000 increases of intelligence. It's much, much more likely that a lot of those gene changes overlap, meaning combined changes won't affect the IQ any more than either/or changes would.
> It's much, much more likely that a lot of those gene changes overlap, meaning combined changes won't affect the IQ any more than either/or changes would.
No, it's not. Please see Hsu's extended comments on the topic of interaction and non-additivity at the top of the page, and note the support from twin studies & GCTA. The point of his suggested strategy is that you're targeting the subset of gene changes in total heritability which don't do that.
It's even possible that some are mutually antagonistic/incompatible.
If gene A or gene B increase intelligence, A + B might cancel out or even lower it below baseline. It all depends on what mechanisms are responsible and how the genes alter those.
Possible to check this out. Society is polarizing and smart people are now tending to associate with other smart people to an extent that did not occur earlier. How are their progeny performing?
Isn't it true that children regress toward the norm? For example, two very tall people will more likely have a child that is shorter. Or, is that wrong?
> Isn't it true that children regress toward the norm?
There isn't perfect heritability of all traits because they are influenced by multiple genes. Two tall people likely have different genes that are making them tall, and there are likely interactions happening with other genes in their genome. When you get a child, they have some genes from each parent but they also get lot of novel interactions between the genes of tallness and the rest of their genome. This tends to reduce the heritability of traits that are modulated by complex interacting gene networks.
But it isn't a regression to some imaginary norm, it just means that that genes are not simply additive, they context dependent. But if you were to isolate 100 tall people from the population and had them breed for generations, and 100 short people and have them breed for generations, their offsprings likely will continue different in height still, they will never regress to the same "norm" because there are more tall genes or short genes in their respective populations.
It's been known since antiquity that sometimes geniuses sire idiots. The hyperfocus on genetics as the source of IQ is probably wrong. Let's remember that we are well educated apes and if not for the education we would still be looking at sticks and flint without realizing their combined value.
>> The hyperfocus on genetics as the source of IQ is probably wrong.
Substantiate this please because just the other day I read "We know from many decades of research in behavioral genetics that about half of the variation across people in IQ is due to genes." [0]
A lot of people want to believe that genetics doesn't play a big part in differentiation between human abilities but as science is not supporting that viewpoint it might be a good time to begin re-educating people on the limits of education.
Among twin-twin studies of the effects of nature/nuture, I recall mathematical ability as being the most highly heritable at something like 50%. Even eye color is not that high, and so it seems to be true that intelligence (at least in maths) is very heritable.
http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Eye_color
does have extremely high heritability, but the mechanism is more complex than what we were usually mistaught in schools, which I think is the origin of Shinkei's comment.
> All current associations are probably false positives.
Why do you say that? The recent results like Rietveld et al 2013 have used stringent false-positive rates precisely because of the early rash of false positives in the early '00s, and the hits seem to be replicating pretty well.
None of the reported snps (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266) have been mentioned in any other publication. So I don't yet see a basis for "the hits seem to be replicating pretty well".
I do not doubt that genetics plays a significant role in intelligence, but I expect that intelligence, and the proxy of educational attainment, is an overly broad phenotype. I also expect that epistatic effects may be important and would necessitate unrealistically massive sample size or a very different experimental design.
Yes, since people upped their game precisely because of that paper's findings...
> None of the reported snps (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266) have been mentioned in any other publication. So I don't yet see a basis for "the hits seem to be replicating pretty well".
What do you mean? As I recall, Rietveld et al 2013 used internal replication to test its hits, which worked out well. Your link is itself a another replication of Rietveld et al 2013, is it not? (What exactly did you think the abstract meant when it talked about "A recent genome-wide-association study" or "The study"?) And then there's "Genetic Variation Associated with Differential Educational Attainment in Adults Has Anticipated Associations with School Performance in Children" , Ward et al 2014; and I believe "Educational attainment-related loci identified by GWAS are associated with select personality traits and mathematics and language abilities", Zhu et al 2015 is also relevant.
> Rietveld replicating Rietveld doesn't do it for me in an area so lacking of success stories.
I think this is unreasonable. This is not a lone author working with a set he hand-collected and has had unlimited freedom to monkey with. This is the lead author on a project involving scores of authors analyzing vast datasets pooled together by like a dozen distinct organizations.
I appreciate the replies. I learned a lot just reading some of these sources posted. I think I misused heritability regarding eye color and my numbers are probably dated.
There's a very large gap between your first two sentences, especially since it's quite common for there to be large variations in intelligence among people raised/educated in similar environments.
I'm not maintaining there is no genetic effect. I see plenty of indicators around me pointing both ways. I think it's a mix of things. I wished someone would have pointed out Plato's writing to me when I was a kid. It would have accelerated my intellectual development tremendously.
At the same time, there's a tendency for people of similar environments to have higher intelligence of people in other environments (the achievement gap).
I did not mean that literally. Of course there are differences between apes and us. It's not a lot thou and the distinction between the species is not so old either.
The largest impact on our brains isn't our genetics. Our ability to recall information has become moot, I know I personally just store an index of all the information I lean in my brain. Then if I'm like, "Oh, this can be solved with <insert solution>" I just look it up, since I have all the worlds previous knowledge literally a few typed words and 2 - 3 clicks away.
Further, every gene we alter effects other genes, if we alter a large portion to increase our brain capacity we really have no idea what else will be effected.
Worse yet, we really don't have a "good" measurement of IQ to begin with. Is being able to do spacial tasks really intelligence, perhaps we should focus on memorization a bit more... it is really all arbitrary.
The only real genetic benefits to our brain come from improved wiring, i.e. able to complete concurrent tasks, storing memories more efficiently, etc. The only way I see any of this being improved are from significant advances in neuroscience and genetics, and we make the assumption that we can simulate all of this or experiment on humans (pretty large assumption here).
Everything is possible given enough time, but I do not think we are anywhere near close enough to do genetic modifications to improve the brain. Perhaps we could do some bio-machine hybridization, i.e. connect my brain to the internet or something, that's a bit closer, but still 20+ years out (if I had to guess).
FYI, I actually am trying to start a company to gather more accurate information and augment the brain: http://synaptitude.me/
> Further, every gene we alter effects other genes, if we alter a large portion to increase our brain capacity we really have no idea what else will be effected.
I agree completely. There are tons of interactions. It is a incredibly complex process to genetically engineer improved intelligence in any significant fashion.
> Worse yet, we really don't have a "good" measurement of IQ to begin with. Is being able to do spacial tasks really intelligence, perhaps we should focus on memorization a bit more... it is really all arbitrary.
> The only real genetic benefits to our brain come from improved wiring, i.e. able to complete concurrent tasks, storing memories more efficiently, etc
This is pretty simplistic and I think wrong. Our brains wiring is the only real difference between us and monkeys (and every other animal for that matter), but that different "wiring" (more and different structures) makes a massive difference. To dismiss "wiring" differences like this is insane.
> Perhaps we could do some bio-machine hybridization, i.e. connect my brain to the internet or something, that's a bit closer, but still 20+ years out (if I had to guess).
There are a lot of open questions with regards to intelligence manipulation, both scientific and ethical. We're like a child accessing the internet for the first time. We don't know what it is, how it works, and we've been told there are things we should never do.
Genetic engineering of humans is likely to be an extremely powerful tool, and we aren't going to understand it until we start playing around. We've already got some cognitive baselines for other species, perhaps we can start trying to manipulate their intelligence and see what happens.
And we can try to perform 'ethical eugenics' on ourselves. Imagine having 15 or 100 embryos, and picking your favorite. If you only intended on raising 1 child in the first place, I don't see how this is wrong. It's less grey than abortion. Having sets of 'chosen' babies will give us a ton of information about our genetics, even if we don't start manipulating their genes directly.
I'm within a decade of having children, and I really hope that I can 'optimize' at least one of the multiple children I intend to have. I feel like the potential scientific progress is worth the risk.
1. I'm skeptical that we can actually give a sensible definition of “intelligence” / “smartness”.
2. Even if we could do (1), I'm still skeptical we can inflate that intentionally.
3. Even if we can do (2), I'm extremely skeptical the outcome is desirable, for any definition of “desirable”, either from our own point of view or our augmented offspring's.
Other than that, the idea seems like a perfect example of stone-cold megalomania.
See how you might like this definition: intelligence, including artificial intelligence (which just means intelligence resting on non-organic materials), means general and arbitrary analogical ability. I think this definition fits what people mean when they say "general mental ability", which I think is what people mean to measure when they use IQ.
I think this is a really good definition of intelligence for communicating what we want to talk about here. And personally I think it's fine to accept a useful definition, even if it is not perfect, and even if its proliferation means some people get unjustly damaged, insofar that the pragmatism of the construct is adequately useful. From there, you have a community tool that can undergo refinement or challenge.
It seems very plausible that we could raise whatever people are trying to invoke when people say words like "intelligence", IQ, g, or arbitrary analogical ability. I'm surprised you are extremely skeptical that we could desirably raise intelligence. Even a noisy and brutish eugenic pressure in the environment would push a population towards a direction, and I'm convinced that this will happen with or without explicit policy.
Isn't that trading one number for one word? I've got to believe that intelligence is multi-dimensional. Its silly to correlate IQ points with genes. E.g. you can probably correlate genes with phone numbers too, but it doesn't mean anything about the individual. Its got more to do with the system that assigned them that IQ. E.g. taller people are perceived as smarter, for no good reason.
I think the general suspicion is that if you go out and develop a multidimensional test, it is quite reasonable to suspect that your test will end up similar to IQ in performance.
Also, I don't think I'm trading one word for another. IQ is a measurement construct that corresponds with a test. General mental ability is thought to be the factor behind performance on an IQ test.
But I think you also wanted a more specific definition to general mental ability, to which I offered "general and arbitrary analogical ability". Speaking speculatively and tangentially, I think such an ability would allow a computer to make causal inferences or write its own drivers for a novel sensory apparatus.
If 1000 genes have an impact on intelligence, "activating" them all is likely to result in illness.
We've seen something similar with Schizophrenia - get one related gene variant and you get someone with creative flair or good pattern recognition. Inherit 5 and they become paranoid and hear voices.
"Superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom is well worth the read on this topic. Thanks to Elon Musk for recommending it.
Roughly speaking, Nick suggests that human biology does have a limit, and AI will jump far ahead in the time that it does take to use eugenics to boost human intelligence.
> In the former case, parents choosing between 10 or so zygotes could improve the IQ of their child by 15 or more IQ points.
Well, yes—if you kill the bottom 90-93% of people ranked by intelligence, then the remainder are going to be quite smart.
Of course, that doesn't account for the possibility that there might be other good things about the children the parents never see.
And in fact, if it's true that there's a strong correlation between high intelligence and problems, then such an approach might lead to more problems than it solves.
Artificial selection also appears to work in unusual ways. We don't really understand the mechanics of it. Foxes were selectively bred in several experiments (and for the fur trade) for tameness. Basically breeding only foxes that don't bite or recoil from people.
The breed developed a whole range of dog like characteristic, behavioral and morphological. They whine and bark (which neither wolves or wild foxes do). They develop a diversity of coloration. I've even heard some had cute floppy ears. Obviously there is a corollary to dog evolution, which we don't really understand either.
Selecting for a trait or a family of traits in humans will probably have unexpected side effects.
Yeah, the domestication of the silver fox is one of those really cool stories but also—to someone as astute as you—is a bit of a cautionary tale about unintended consequences.
> s a bit of a cautionary tale about unintended consequences.
There was nothing unintended about it: the original hypothesis was to see if those changes were interconnected as they seemed to be in various domesticated animals.
The effect of domestication was large enough to be observed, one might say, with the naked eye. As I keep asking in this page in response to all the groundless fearmongering: do we observe, with the naked eye, huge increases in pathologies of various sorts with people of extremely high intelligence? Or do we observe only some small increases in some problems and also indications of net benefits like increased longevity?
The chicken analogy doesn't sit right with me because there are far more generations of chickens over a given period of time; and additionally the trait that you want to select for in a chicken is clear. You want the biggest chicken in the least amount of time.
Intelligence is only one trait out of many that you would like to select for. Attractiveness, strength, health, etc. all matter just as much. Balancing competing concerns is harder than just making a fat chicken.
The depth of control over raw genetic material that occurs within each living thing is complex to an order not yet close to a meaningful understanding. Gene methylation alone can render a gene meaningless for you, your children, and theirs.
It is the scope of the remaining unknowns in this field that allow us to project our speculative hopes onto them.
I normally balance on the relatively skeptical side on most things. But topics like this make me giddy.
No doubt consequences and roadblocks will abound. But if superhuman intelligence is coming in some form (and I think it is), I'm excited. Embarrassingly so.
The 'what will happen?' story is hard to pin down. What are the emotional impacts of owning a 100X better than Einstein brain? What are the social impacts? Does collaboration work better? Human intelligence enabled a step change in mammalian collaboration during the paleolithic revolution.
Genetic engineering is not the only potential path either. Technological access to information extends the human cognitive potential. The interface between mind and machine may reach revolutionary points. Our minds have different learning capabilities at 20 days, 20 months or 20 years old. Can that be hacked? Can we have all these capabilities at once, for extended periods?
I stopped reading the article about halfway through, because it didn't seem like anything radically new... but the one comment i'd make is that it's clear a combination of genetics and environmental factors affect intelligence, and frankly both are improving. The article seems to go on about how genes are improving, however the internet is having a pretty significant effect too.
A well built house can be renovated from something that looks terrible, to something people will pay loads of money for. A fully functional brain can be renovated too. People can learn how to think, and while there are parts that are quite degenerate, there are a greater number of parts that help people learn.
I am curious about the motivations for this kind of research. It seems to me that the assumption is that a super intelligent human being would be a saviour to humanity of some sort. I really just see that humans are all in competition with each other, which may be a good thing. So engineering a super human would actually be a form of outsourcing. So first there is the assumption that the superhuman would be better and second there is the problem of why people would want to bring about their own outsourcing.
What evidence is there that superhumans will lead to "improved quality of life"? Even though you are just dispensing snark, I am glad you used this example so I could show what I meant.
"we should never have invented that damn cotton gin" said the cotton pickers.
"we should never have invented those damn superhumans" said the humans. What is being outsourced is the entire spectrum of human ability by what is essentially another species and not just machines that we are fundamentally in control of or own.
Technically, wouldn't it be a strange thing for a Human (or any species) to help perpetuate DNA within their own species that is not their own?
I can see raising a child that is not one's own - because it's enjoyable and fulfilling to have a child. But, wouldn't the creation of 'Super-Anything' Humans be one step closer to the Human hive mind?
I think we don't acknowledge just how much of the Human Hive Mind we already have. I mean, there are individual humans: and then there is humanity. In between, many, many hives and collectives and corporations and aggregates, and so on.
This, I believe, points to a 'higher, greater good' which is the species itself. So to answer your question, no: its not strange at all to be perpetuating human DNA in spite of ownership. Its the species which owns you, not the other way around. None of us exist without others.
This is an interesting question. We have evolved, but evolution is so slow that we do not notice that our children are actually inching away from us genetically (hopefully for the "better"). However, if we inject large artificial changes, what will happen? Will we reject our children?
For a certain period in development, children reject their parents, naturally. But then we often come back (often when we are parents ourselves). But, if our children have large genetic changes from us, artificially done, how will our children look upon us? As pets, perhaps? Or mere caretakers?
An interesting (and scary) thing too, is whether higher intelligence - as measured by these metrics - leads to "colder" humans, who make more rational decisions, such as euthanizing the old and weak, which would then include the parents.
I remember from a documentary about IQs that it gives no advantage to hunters. At least hunters who use hunter gatherer technology.
It may be correlated to better brain quality or whatever, but it is an adaptation that gives an advantage only in the modern world. Some tasks are done better by a lesser mind.
More like: A new generation of humans who think in a way that a previous generation of humans who are considered subjectively 'less intelligent' consider to be 'super intelligent' is coming. Many lolz will be had as they all perish due to their objective stupidity.
Reading the article I could only think of the past failures with eugenics, like Nazi Germany, or even some stuff that happened in the US. I think we should be wary of the consequences.
As in Dungeons and Dragons, perhaps a distinction exists between man's wisdom and intelligence. If so, a novel genius might profitably be tempered by a common-sense practicality.
Only because the general public is so... average (pretty dumb).
If the average person had a 10 or 15 point higher IQ, I think people would put a higher value on intelligence in their elected officials.
I think that the world would look a lot different (better) if the average intelligence was raised by this much. So many things would change. A dawn of a new era.
Some US presidents have been really intelligent. It is easy to knock them, but recent presidents Bush Sr., Clinton and Obama are all extremely bright. Romney also is really smart given his work in the financial industry. Bush Jr., who wasn't that bright, is more of an exception than the rule I think for US presidents.
I am almost 100% certain Bush Jr. would be considered bright when compared with any cross section of say 1000 US citizens. People try to compare him with previous presidents, but it is all speculative. Even though I disagree with his presidential policies, I find the baseless, tiring insults on his intelligence to be more grating.
I somehow missed this thread at first. Reading through the comments here, I see several comments that express the correct idea, but without the key word, of "pleiotropy," that is a gene (or gene assemblage) having more than one effect on phenotype. Some of the breeding examples mentioned in other comments already provide the warning: if we select human gene assemblages to maximize IQ scores (or something that can link even more directly to what we call "intelligence" in the real world outside the testing room), we may or may not produce healthy human beings, depending on what the pleiotropic effects of those gene assemblages are. Right now we just don't know. An article in the Nature Scitable collection explains what pleiotropy is in more detail.[1]
I see that the author of the article kindly submitted here has just joined HN to join the discussion. I would respectfully suggest that the idea of "Crudely speaking, IQs of order 1,000, if the scale were to continue to have meaning," should be amended with a discussion of how IQ scores of 1,000 can't possibly exist, and surely wouldn't have meaning. That's because IQ scores are not derived from an interval scale, but rather an ordinal scale.[2]
I read the story "Flowers for Algernon" when I was a kid too, and it was a very moving story, and the author did a reasonably good job of researching theories of psychology for his era. But his account of a mentally retarded (today we would say "intellectually disabled") adult having some kind of treatment that raised his IQ immensely is, at bottom, a made-up story, and the author was actually more clever than many of his readers in suggesting what is uncertain about what IQ scores mean. (He has some of his characters debate with one another about that, as I noticed when I reread the story in the last year.)
We know Richard Feynman's IQ as a historical matter.[3] Feynman's IQ of 125 was above average, of course, but not astoundingly high. There are several Nobel Prize winners in physics with an IQ at a similar level, and plenty of physicists with higher IQs who never achieve as much in physics research as a Nobel laureate does. The uniform conclusion of ALL researchers who have looked at the relationship between IQ scores and scientific research achievement is that other personal qualities besides IQ matter a lot for research breakthroughs.
One personal quality that is too little tapped by IQ testing is the habit of mind called "rationality." Amazing, that does not correlate especially strongly with IQ.[4] Improving "mindware," the ways that people think and how they reality-check their own thinking, may have a more powerful effect for human progress than merely increasing IQ. James R. Flynn, the dean of living researchers on human intelligence, suggests some strategies for improving thinking.[5] Being old enough to remember many gee-whiz promises about human genetic investigations that didn't pan out, for the moment I will bet on Flynn's approach providing more long-term benefit for humankind than the approach of looking for genome-wide associations with IQ.[6]
> We know Richard Feynman's IQ as a historical matter.[3] Feynman's IQ of 125 was above average, of course, but not astoundingly high.
This IQ figure is deeply dubious, as I have pointed out several times on HN and elsewhere. Oddly, your WP link doesn't include the context on that score which is in Feynman's own article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Education
> for the moment I will bet on Flynn's approach providing more long-term benefit for humankind than the approach of looking for genome-wide associations with IQ.[6]
So you want to bet on a improvements of a trait which hasn't even been nailed down clearly (much less shown to be changeable at all) rather than a straightforward approach which after incorporating that methodological critique (problem: early papers had insufficient alpha control and threw up mostly false positives; solution: genome-wide multiple correction + sample sizes 100x larger) has already had several hits? I think you may want to read up on these topics a little more...
> The uniform conclusion of ALL researchers who have looked at the relationship between IQ scores and scientific research achievement is that other personal qualities besides IQ matter a lot for research breakthroughs.
Yes, but if you want to select for Openness and Conscientiousness, you're going to need fairly similar sample sizes and GWAS procedures: personality traits seem to be highly polygenic too.
> Improving "mindware," the ways that people think and how they reality-check their own thinking, may have a more powerful effect for human progress than merely increasing IQ.
Uh huh. Call me when any of Stanovich's work moves beyond exploratory towards showing real-world benefits. I've read his books and the results are still tentative. In the mean time, GWAS/IQ research is happening now.
How do we know these genes have an additive effect on IQ?
The causal relationship asserted by this quote is very strange. They claim: Because these effects are additive, IQ is normal distributed. What...? IQ is a test. It's normal distributed, like most tests are.
They're referring to the central limit theorem here, I assume[1], which not a bad insight. However it should be obvious that this normal distribution phenomenon arises out of such tests being scored additively from a number of relatively independent questions (whose answers can be thought of as independent random variables of unknown distribution).
In any case, I don't see how they can justify a causal link (in either direction) between some alleged additive effect of genes and the IQ test itself.
Personally, I'm mostly interested in this claim on additive intelligence genes, since I'm not an expert on this. It would be fascinating and exciting if there were additive "intelligence genes". However, as someone working on artificial neural network research as a hobby, I'm highly skeptical of this. It seems much more likely that human intelligence is a delicate balance of many interacting factors relating to the architecture and "algorithms" of the brain.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem