"Q: What does that mean in human language? A: Any given couple could potentially have several eggs fertilized in the lab with the dad’s sperm and the mom’s eggs. Then you can test multiple embryos and analyze which one’s going to be the smartest. That kid would belong to that couple as if they had it naturally, but it would be the smartest a couple would be able to produce if they had 100 kids. It’s not genetic engineering or adding new genes, it’s the genes that couples already have.

Q: And over the course of several generations you’re able to exponentially multiply the population’s intelligence. A: Right. Even if it only boosts the average kid by five IQ points, that’s a huge difference in terms of economic productivity, the competitiveness of the country, how many patents they get, how their businesses are run, and how innovative their economy is.

Q: How does Western research in genetics compare to China’s? A: We’re pretty far behind. We have the same technical capabilities, the same statistical capabilities to analyze the data, but they’re collecting the data on a much larger scale and seem to be capable of transforming the scientific findings into government policy and consumer genetic testing much more easily than we are. Technically and scientifically we could be doing this, but we’re not.

Q: Why not? A: We have ideological biases that say, “Well, this could be troubling, we shouldn’t be meddling with nature, we shouldn’t be meddling with God.” I just attended a debate in New York a few weeks ago about whether or not we should outlaw genetic engineering in babies and the audience was pretty split. In China, 95 percent of an audience would say, “Obviously you should make babies genetically healthier, happier, and brighter!” There’s a big cultural difference.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gw8vn/chinas-taking-over...

"This child is still you, just the best of you."

I don't know if the "economic competitiveness" part will be a comforting argument if this ever comes to pass. What I mean is, it won't been seen as "look at how our economy could grow if we do this." That economy would just be viewed as the new standard. This technology will be seen as "do this or you will be left behind." I fear it will be coercive and alienating.

If someone's children will likely have a lower than this minimum intelligence, which you can infer from parent's IQ and other measures, will you encourage or prohibit them to use either embryo selection or genetic engineering? What are the impact on the child's life for each option? Is the 'distaste' more important than giving a better opportunity for the newborns?

Also, what can you do? You cannot put regulations on China or other countries. On this issue, they will not agree on international agreement either. And there will be rich people who fly to other countries to have the procedures done. This will cause even more inequality than allowing it domestically.

Jordan Peterson IQ and Job Market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0

Can it really be inferred? Not including conditions or syndromes of course. The parents' environment may have affected their intelligence and the child may turn out entirely different.

Getting parent's DNAs sequenced might be needed but it's affordable now. See gwern's answers and link for more info.

1) life isn't about being smart, far from that (that's national emergent feedback, and I often despise nations as a concept)

2) being smart isn't even needed, a culture of sharing and listening would be enough to uplift life by many points. A culture of recognizing ego and letting him shut down then appreciate everything as a whole. Most brains can do this, if people can pass this down.

I regularly remember how everything was beautiful before, even with flaws and limits.. a race for optimization, especially driven by national interest isn't something I'd like to see.

ps: I'd even say, "intelligence" is an emergency mode for our brains, and cultivating it was a normal response, but it's not supposed to be our main mode

Even assuming that this works, when you do that, you immediately run into the same problem as every other eugenics program: you are reducing the diversity of the population to seek a local maximum. In the analogy for optimization problems of the cows in the field standing on hills and in valleys, you're having all the cows stand on a single hill. You improve the current fitness of the population, according to your metrics, at the cost of the future fitness - you'll never find higher hills to stand upon, and if the fitness function changes, your population will be less equipped to handle it.

I'm not denying science, and how it improves the human condition. But this is the point when it stops improving the human condition, and improves the controlled human condition. not the same thing.

IQ points? Hasn't IQ long ago been discredited as a measure of intelligence?

Long answer:

The g form of IQ is still valid. Based on context in which a test is taken, there may be some type 2 error (people scoring lower than actual IQ), but relatively little type 1 error (people scoring higher than actual IQ).

That said, many researchers have asked if g is the be all and end all of intelligence. Research suggests that g tends to focus on the analytic and verbal parts of our brains. Howard Gardner found through research on aphasia patients that there are areas of our brain that function largely outside of what g measures. Others have found that while IQ floors may exist for certain professions (e.g., 120 for lawyers), IQ is not always the strongest predictor for success -- things like EQ often have stronger predictive value.

Note that some of the derivative works of multiple intelligences, EQ, etc. are twisted interpretations of the original ideas, so be careful when reading the non-seminal works. Some people have co-opted the term "intelligence" in their derivative works in an effort to support a political agenda that may not necessarily be true to the original idea or even constructive.

- Optimizing EQ is probably far more valuable for society.

- I am not sure that EQ can be optimized for in genetics as easily as IQ can.

- On an individual level, putting a child on the right side of their potential IQ curve will probably make their lives easier or better assuming that relatively few of their peers have this same advantage.

- If every child is on the right side of their potential IQ curve, then optimizing IQ will largely just be a different state for society rather than a noticeable improvement. Most (all?) improvements would likely be seen on the high end in terms of theoretical developments.

- Note that if this switch is somehow flipped in a society, I personally believe that there will be a huge EQ intergenerational crisis such that EQ will be valued even more.

A: That same research does open up the door potentially to genetic engineering in the future. But that would take a lot longer to make practical.

===

Q: When do you think the embryo analysis might be implemented on a large scale?

A: Actual use of the technology to do embryo screening might take five to ten years, but it could be just a few years. It depends on how motivated they are.

......"

Specifically, modern humans have, on average, less than 0.1% of differences in their DNA amongst each other: "How diverse are we? Perhaps the most widely cited statistic about human genetic diversity is that any two humans differ, on average, at about 1 in 1,000 DNA base pairs (0.1%). Human genetic diversity is substantially lower than that of many other species, including our nearest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Genetic diversity is a function of a population's "age" (i.e., the amount of time during which mutations accumulate to generate diversity) and its size. Our genetic homogeneity implies that anatomically modern humans arose relatively recently (perhaps 200,000 years ago) and that our population size was quite small at one time (perhaps 10,000 breeding individuals). To put the 0.1% genetic diversity estimate into perspective, it is useful to remember that humans have approximately 3 billion base pairs in a haploid cell. Thus, any pair of humans differs by approximately 3 million base pairs. These differences contain much useful information about the evolutionary history of our species. In addition, the small proportion of differences that occur within genes can lead to critical inferences about the effects of natural selection. "

Natural selection will be out the window. It will be replaced entirely by intentional selection. We will certainly see new diseases rooted in human vanity and hubris, and they will become business opportunities for surgeons and pharmacists, just as our natural and lifestyle ailments have become moneymaking industries.

So the great-grandchildren of people that were gifted by their parents with then-fashionable gene mutations will have all new reasons to pay for health care.

And Sylvester McMonkey McBean simply unveils his star-off machine.

Evolution does not vet for anything except population-level viability. Once upon a time, our population bottlenecked. The return of large-scale genetic diversity is normal for an animal species, especially one that has spread to practically every environment on the planet.

Also, evolution is not a prescriptive standard. Oy.

You haven't talked with my knees recently, have you.

-Another strongly supported hypothesis is that there was an near-extinction event that wiped out all but a pocket of human settlements from which we descended. - The diversity in other species that are about as old as ours is significantly far greater than ours suggesting that it is more likely an event like an unusually strong ice-age period that could've worsened our genetic diversity.

-It's unlikely that the Toba catastrophe was the root cause of the bottleneck as reasoned in this investigation:

https://www.livescience.com/29130-toba-supervolcano-effects....

- I wonder if the hypothesis of leaving Africa in small groups could be effectively tested.

Perhaps the first changes would be to our dietary track to absorb more energy, so we can change more things!

I always imagined it's a bit like the old Mage vs Warrior vs Ninja (or whatever) selections in fantasy games - you can maximize total area under the curve, or you can specialize in certain areas at the cost of others.

Edit/add - A convergence would also indicate there is global agreement on the "gold standard". Sure, maximizing intellect and longevity/health is easy. But, physical appearance?

Canonically it's Thief/Rogue, analogous to the MMO trinity of "healing, tank, damage" aka "wisdom, strength, agility".

Those can also translate into a holistic way: You gotta have the wisdom to know when to retreat/heal, the strength to endure and the agility to hit/get to where it matters. They don't necessarily exclude each other.

Also, as someone else pointed out, it would be more likely we edit different lines of humans. Two people having the best genes for a soldier and having the best genes for a scientist are likely to be better off than a single individual who has the best possible maximum of the two together. Optimizing multiple lines of humans each on a smaller set of traits is likely to produce far better result than optimizing one line on all traits.

There are some genes that I expect to be edited out. I'd give a lot to have the gene causing my high cholesterol edited out, as would my insurance company - the drugs I'm taking are not cheap. There are a number of other conditions that are genetic (and still more that science believes are genetic even though the genes haven't been found). This convergence is good though as these are genes that if you have are known bad - just not bad enough to prevent reproduction.

I think reading plays a more important role than writing.