"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
- Jay Gould
"Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading."
He certainly misrepresented data in Mismeasure of Man:https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
I do find it amusing how people who claim intelligence is 100% environment are also terrified of letting others select for intelligence. It is almost like they know, deep down, that it will work. That intelligence, like almost every other trait we have measured, has a very large heritable component: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
>"That intelligence, like almost every other trait we have measured, has a very large heritable component"
The problem is what do you mean when you say "intelligence". We can easily measure physical traits like height, weight, strength, etc. But intelligence is practically impossible to measure and define in any meaningful way. IQ tests have been thoroughly debunked as highly dependent on cultural biases and assumptions of learned knowledge. There is no one single measure you can look at and determine the intelligence of an individual which could possibly be predicted by genetics alone.
See this letter to the editor if you want to see what the giants of evolutionary biology thought of Gould:
John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, recently summarized in the NYRB the sharply conflicting assessments of Stephen Jay Gould: "Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists." (NYRB, Nov. 30th 1995, p. 46). No one can take any pleasure in the evident pain Gould is experiencing now that his actual standing within the community of professional evolutionary biologists is finally becoming more widely known. If what was a stake was solely one man's self-regard, common decency would preclude comment.
But as Maynard Smith points out, more is at stake. Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory" -- or as Ernst Mayr says of Gould and his small group of allies -- they "quite conspicuously misrepresent the views of [biology's] leading spokesmen."[1] Indeed, although Gould characterizes his critics as "anonymous" and "a tiny coterie," nearly every major evolutionary biologist of our era has weighed in in a vain attempt to correct the tangle of confusions that the higher profile Gould has inundated the intellectual world with.[2] The point is not that Gould is the object of some criticism -- so properly are we all -- it is that his reputation as a credible and balanced authority about evolutionary biology is non-existent among those who are in a professional position to know: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html
>IQ tests have been thoroughly debunked as highly dependent on cultural biases and assumptions of learned knowledge.predicted by genetics alone.
They really, truly have not been debunked. If you are willing to read a short book on the topic, I would recommend this one which has an epub version here: https://archive.org/details/IntelligenceAllThatMatters/page/...
If you are interested in the truth, I ask you to approach this subject bloodlessly, as you would a programming problem. Read the book I linked to. Then re-read Measure of Man, if you must.
But before you do, allow yourself to consider that bio-determinism is allowed to be true. There is no god or law of physics that prevents this from being the case. Imagine that these were just brute facts. If they were, your actions may change but your normative commitments do not have to.
I think if you read the literature neutrally, you will find g-factor is basically coherent and well-motivated, and intelligence is heritable. But when reading on matters touched by ideology, I think it is important to allow yourself to believe you can be persuaded.
We'd sooner use gene editing to make people more empathetic, briefer in their words, less absolutist, less looking at things as "programmer problems," less engineery. Higher "EQ."
The fallacy is made clear if you look at something less charged like hight. Clearly, in your town, height variance is mostly due to genetics. However, in genetically similar groups over time, heights have been gradually increasing over the generations. This increase is not because heights are being genetically selected for but because the genome codes for an organism that can grow taller or shorter in different conditions, and these places (e.g. Europe) are providing the "grow tall" conditions. Places that aren't providing these conditions are not seeing their children grow them taller.
Now, height is a lot easier to measure than intelligence, and a lot less politically weighted by the various movements to promote racial inequality. But the conceptual fallacy is the same.
Note that Gould is explicitly attacking a "races are genetically different in some substantive intelligence fashion" movement of his time, using the oddly similar movements from prior times. This eugenics thru biotech argument is not currently racially motivated, but western cultures have suffered thru a number of "eugenics by positive means -> eugenics by racism" shifts in the near past, so we are a bit twichty about it.
tldr: No studies about individual variation will tell you about between non-random subgroup variation.
Can you explain how you know this? Taller people, in general, are often considered more desirable mates. Wouldn't this lead to such people having more children which would lead to, well, average increases in height?
It is a fact that I had a hard time accepting, considering that it flies in the face of my beliefs about merit, hard work and the importance of education. These things are important, but genes play a huge role too.
Given the tight coupling between culture and IQ tests, it's not necessarily proof of inheritability.
Twins raised in the same household have nearly identical cultural exposure.
(Unless the control is an adopted child of the same age, raised in the same household...)
It’s well understood that complex traits are polygenic (no single gene or sets of causal variants) but quite easy to predict such traits when looking at the full genome (I agree the resolution of prediction is still not there — but we are in the infancy of this field).
I recommend learning more about some of the polygenic risk scoring methodologies that are popping up in research: https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/giant-study-finds-rare-i...
We have DNA and (partly) heritable traits just like tomatos and wheat. The only reason modification (eg CRISPR) was done later in humans vs other organisms was due to ethical not technical reasons.
We have easily obtained metrics that work as a proxy for intelligence like IQ, educational attainment, elite professional success, number of patents, publications etc.
As for having many genes being responsible for a trait, Fisher showed in 1918 you can perform selection even if there were an infinite number of loci involved, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitesimal_model
None of these are meaningful measures of intelligence.
You can't just sequence people who have accomplished great things and are widely recognised as geniuses as there aren't enough of then and they're busy.
We need huge sample sizes. Ideally, you'd sequence a million people and have them sit rigorous tests, interviews etc. But it's way cheaper and faster to have them tick boxes on forms.
You're going to have to provide meaningful evidence to back up the assertion that numbers of patents (as well as the other criteria listed) actually correlate to higher intelligence.
This is how science works, humanity learns more and progresses. Just because something is complex to you today doesn't mean it will still be complex to you 50 years from now.
Despite the modest conclusion, these results are important because they falsify a claim often made by the critics of the “testing movement”: that the positive relationship between intelligence and success is just the effect of parental SES or academic performance influencing them both (see Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Fischer et al., 1996; McClelland, 1973). If the correlation between intelligence and success was a mere byproduct of the causal effect of parental SES or academic performance, then parental SES and academic performance should have outcompeted intelligence as predictors of success; but this was clearly not so. These results confirm that intelligence is an independent causal force among the determinants of success; in other words, the fact that intelligent people are successful is not completely explainable by the fact that intelligent people have wealthy parents and are doing better at school.
In other words, there are two models:
1) Your parents being rich makes you rich and also makes you good at IQ tests.
2) Heritable intelligence makes you rich and also made your parents rich.
The article says the first model is falsified in favor of the second. That's pretty much the opposite of what you say in your comment.
Some would say.
There are no discrete models for inheriting intelligence and wealth, and making such sweeping claims about this issue is just not warranted.
It has been shown that wealth improves children's intelligence and "success". It has also been shown that intelligence is one factor in success, but not the only one. Even academic success is "only" about 70% dependent on IQ.
Another problem is the difference in backgrounds for such studies among different countries. Sometimes wealth will have a big impact on childhood health (for example developing countries) and sometimes it doesn't (developed nations with proper medical systems, i.e. every one except US).
Where do you think socioeconomic status and educational attainment come from? Divine right?
A strong belief in "meritocracy" leads to a lot of cognitive biases.
I do not know if this is even true. But, I do not see the USA rushing to give good education to its population. The geniuses are already there in crowded classrooms and underfunded schools.
And, a good education pays off even for less gifted people. Their lives are better, they contribute more to the economy and less to crime.
If that race is one, the USA (and Europe also) are already trailing.
Regardless, 5 standard deviations is enormously huge. Every person born would be as smart as the most elite scientists today. The most elite scientists in the future will be far smarter than anyone who ever lived.
This has enormous military consequences, much larger than squeezing the dry rag of education.
This is a pretty bad analogy man. Education, starting with basic literacy & numeracy, improves virtually everyone who goes through it- which is why mandatory education is part of every society now. Literacy alone completely changes outcomes for say women in developing countries. Just mandating an extra 4 years of high school in agricultural countries that really could've used the teenage help in the fields was a huge step forward for humanity. Education is an improvement process more than a filtering process, no one is born knowing how to read, count, do algebra, code, etc. I agree it does contain a filtering element too, but societies where the construction workers & janitors can read are better than ones where they can't
Caplan makes a very compelling case that education, while inarguably teaching something, primarily serves to signal preexisting ability.
I find the core of his argument rests on the assertion that we all went through school and don't think we learned much of value/it didn't help us. What he's actually describing here is a form of the curse of expertise. Humans are incredibly bad at remembering what it was like to not know things, it's why people make such atrocious teachers without training. But educators are actually helping to build valuable skills and complex mental models that would not arise naturally.
If you interact with homeschooled children of deeply incompetent parents or certain alternative schooling systems (Scientology schools mess their kids up) you can see what the alternative provides, and it's not pretty.
Caplan actually goes through reams of evidence. As an extreme example, in 2008-9 there were 34000 new history graduates in the US. But there are only 3500 historians working in the whole country.
Now, are you trying to argue that history can actually measurably improve productivity in other fields, such as accounting, and it's just the curse of knowledge that prevents us from seeing this?
Also, incompetent homeschooling parents and Scientology schools are hardly the only alternatives to public schooling. One option that Caplan advocates strongly is vocational training. Instead of giving them history classes, let teenagers who chose to do so become apprentice carpenters, there are 900000 of those.
The US public school system is in need of wide reforms at all levels, I'm not going to defend it piecemeal because there are many pieces that are not defensible. None of that makes Caplan right though.
How much value is created through publicly funded education beyond basic literacy and numeracy, which Caplan cedes.
Whether Caplan's proposed changes to the education system are good ones.
As for the second point, I wouldn't bet my life on it. But I think the case is strong enough that experimental measures in that direction are warranted.
Then there is a bunch about how to build better schools. This seems reasonable in principle, since the way we teach especially in early years is still heavily influenced from by long ago times with different workforce needs and a different culture in general. But lets better not get into the actually mentioned proposals. And this still does hardly fit the "IQ unrelated from schools" narrative discussed in the comments here.
So back to those: If school has no impact, then were do those traits we aspire come from? Are here actually people who believe you can just dump an infant with perfect genes in front of a TV, feed (&co) it regularly, and then expect it to become a genius in adulthood? If not, then what makes the difference and why shouldn't some "school" help citizens apply whatever it is, supported by policy?
This isn't education's only function. Some learning undeniably still takes place. But in Caplan's estimation signalling is probably about 80% of the payoff.
This picture is supported by a large number of observations:
- Why do even top schools like Harvard make little to no effort to prevent non-students from attending lectures?
- Why do students cheer when class is canceled?
- Why does ratemyprofessor.com have the measures "overall quality" and "difficulty" but not an explicit "informativeness" measure and why is high difficulty considered bad?
- Why do students cheat on tests and why do teachers make such a large effort to prevent it?
- Why do employers rarely show concern that you might've forgotten what you learned?
- Why do statistics indicate that graduation year has a much greater effect on wages than all the other years?
All these points contradict the "education = learning" viewpoint but are straightforwardly explained with the signalling model.
And once you acknowledge the importance of signalling it puts statements such as
> And, a good education pays off even for less gifted people. Their lives are better, they contribute more to the economy and less to crime.
into a completely new perspective. As Caplan writes:
> The classic example: You want a better view at a concert. What can you do? Stand up. Individually, standing works. What happens, though, if everyone copies you? Can everyone see better by standing? No way. Popular support for education subsidies rests on the same fallacy. The person who gets more education, gets a better job. It works; you see it plainly. Yet it does not follow that if everyone gets more education, everyone gets a better job. In the signaling model, subsidizing everyone’s schooling to improve our jobs is like urging everyone to stand up at a concert to improve our views. Both are “smart for one, dumb for all.”
It seems that model doesn't even attempt to pretend anymore that our society gives equal opportunity to everyone? Now only the rich shall have the opportunity to signal? That's why I didn't want to go into the actual proposals in that critique... at best they seem to ignore all the complexity of the actual world we live in. Kinda reminded me of someone who just discovered Libertarianism and now thinks governments are totally unnecessary.
If his argument would be "we should reduce signaling", I'd totally love for that to be possible. But I'm not sure it actually is, when taking all the game-theoretic aspects of the real world into account. Maybe all he wants is to reset the out of control spiral of signaling for now? But if the only way we can do so is also a 0.1%er-capitalists wet dream, then I've little hope for the future. Signaling will always exist and be necessary as long as there is a competitive job market, and I don't see society working without.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to respond. I like the first observation, since it highlights how narrow the allowed path for effective signaling is. Just finishing the material isn't enough, you have to be accepted into the school through official ways. Some observations are kind of weak, though. Especially the second, since it boils down to many people preferring short term gratification over long term success. Students will cheer even if tests are standardized and those canceled classes thus will lead to worse grades => failure at signaling.
And also hyperbolic. There is no current science that suggests the ability to create such a difference in individuals by genetic engineering.
Complicated, polygenetic traits with virtually unlimited interactions between genes and environmental factors? Much more difficult.
Add in the serious consequences of mistakes. The limited supply of subjects. The difficulty of grading the success of any modification.
For intelligence, we don't even know what kinds of changes we would want to make, even if we could make them reliably.
No, complex traits too. Come on. Dog intelligence and personalities? The domesticated foxes? Any of the many mouse/rat selective breeding experiments like Tryon? Personality, intelligence, these sorts of traits are all highly heritable and about the only thing everyone can agree on that heritability means is that you can select on it. 'virtually unlimited interactions between genes and environmental factors'? Give me a break!
> Add in the serious consequences of mistakes. The limited supply of subjects. The difficulty of grading the success of any modification.
??? None of that is a real problem. You are wildly gesturing at hypotheticals and making stuff up. Being 'polygenetic' is not a problem, it's a blessing.
> For intelligence, we don't even know what kinds of changes we would want to make, even if we could make them reliably.
Yes, we do. The PGSes have identified hundreds of variants at genome-wide significance, and there are thousands at high posterior probability, with nontrivial cumulative predictive power in the general population.
The number of subjects absolutely does matter. Selecting mice for intelligence is all nice and well, but you have to breed thousands, and "discard" most of them. Both in traditional breeding as well as with genetic engineering, you have to have sufficient number of trials to conclude anything.
With Human subjects, given ethical and practical constraints (lifespan), that's going to be a lot tougher.
You can reliably quantify the intelligence of a mouse at a few weeks of age and breed it soon thereafter (though you would probably use that "IQ" to score its parents). You can't reliably quantify health and intelligence of a Human within years, especially if you are aiming for "multiple standard deviations" above average. At the very least the practical generational span is 20 years, and usually much longer if the subjects have any say in the matter.
Genome wide association studies... another thing people get terribly confused about. The mutations they screen for are virtually never causal, but merely markers associated with actually causal sequences. There may be occasional better-researched mutations here and there. But overall the individual contributions of any such marker are already extremely low and don't sum up to a significant portion of the suspected heritability. And heritability of intelligence in Humans is another problem where people don't seem to understand what the research is actually saying. Whenever people say things like "IQ in Humans has a heritability of 40-80%", they are at best summarizing in a misleading fashion if not outright lying.
To my knowledge there are virtually no candidate genes/mutations proposed for genetic improvement of intelligence in Humans. Especially not with the confidence you'd need to even attempt this. Even without ethical considerations.
The number of 'subjects' is elastic. If applied to IVF, that's everyone who uses IVF. In embryo selection, you are selecting out of available embryos, eg 1 out of 5. With other techniques like ovarian biopsy or gametogenesis, you are potentially selecting 1 out of 100+. Hence, plenty of subjects.
> You can reliably quantify the intelligence of a mouse at a few weeks of age and breed it soon thereafter (though you would probably use that "IQ" to score its parents). You can't reliably quantify health and intelligence of a Human within years, especially if you are aiming for "multiple standard deviations" above average. At the very least the practical generational span is 20 years, and usually much longer if the subjects have any say in the matter.
All irrelevant, since no one is suggesting phenotyping. That's the point of the polygenic scores.
> The mutations they screen for are virtually never causal, but merely markers associated with actually causal sequences.
Also irrelevant. When you are doing prediction for selection, all you need to do is predict the one with the highest scores. There is zero need to identify even a single causal variant. GWASes are so predictive because the SNPs are in LD with the causal variants, and the LD does not change abruptly in a single selection step.
However, since you think that none have been identified, you should go read the appendix to Lee et al 2018, among other IQ GWASes, where they do estimates, and turn up scores of SNPs which have causal probabilities >90%.
But the Bessemer process does create steel. I'll be the first to agree that education doesn't give much knowledge (apart from basic reading and arithmetic, which take a few months at most). But it gives you something else:
1) Ability to show up on time
2) Ability to sit still and do boring stuff for hours every day
3) Belief in importance of grades
Basically it's a forced personality change, turning children into worker bees. That's why it takes years and why it's so valuable to employers.
This doesn't necessarily follow. It assumes the variance on IQ will remain the same, but a (potentially large) part of the variance comes from genetic differences.
Teaching people to read and write and do basic arithmetic significantly improves their overall outcome by almost any measure you care to look at. How is this not enrichment?
And "dry rag" very seriously devalues people. Maybe doing that is the catch itself. One does wonder.
Good education is more than a filter.
Great people are a combination of nature and nurture.
How do we break the cycle?
More likely, it will be abused, come with some unforeseen consequences, and diverse.
Smarts will not be all that is attempted.
Augmentation by combining biotech with electromechanical will happen too.
There will be factions of various kinds.
Who says We will have any meaningful control over the really smart augmented people, for example? They may mature, look around at the mess and have very different ideas on how this all goes.
Should be a very interesting time.
A fallacious, inappropriate personal attack backed by implied, unjustified, blatantly wrong comparisons.
Make an actual argument please.
I just installed some advanced manufacturing equipment into a HIGH SCHOOL level facility.
That building has awesome tech in it. They've spared no expense.
Let's put it this way. I am a skilled manufacturer. Could prototype a ton of stuff in there. They are missing very little, and as I pointed out to them in a discussion, the very first projects should be to simply manufacture the fill in pieces of equipment. The facility is weak in some basic areas that are not hard to manufacture. We discussed the idea of having the students maintain and add to the capabilities over time.
Likely to happen.
There are pockets like this all over the place.
What we are missing is general political will. That's changing as we realize we've missed out on a whole generation of people. Didn't do these things, and the impact is profound.
1. Extremely expensive neighborhoods generally have good schools.
If you don't have tons of money:
2. A small towns with large a university.
3. Neighborhood schools where 90+% of students are in walking distance of the school rather than bussed in or driven in.
They constitutes all of top 7 in math and 6 of the top 10 (7 if Vietnam is included) in science for PISA 2015.
Vietnam, which is much poorer than Western Europe, shares a similar educational culture and performs much better than other countries at a similar income level.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_...
PISA does not measure everything but it seems to be a pretty good metric for what it measures.
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/roman-catholic-church-quickenin...
http://www.bpnews.net/44055/how-southern-baptists-became-pro...
Two other options though:
(i) states will realise that a global competition in human enhancement is collectively irrational, and proscribe it through a robust international convention, e.g. as they have with chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons through the non-proliferation treaty
(ii) states will sanction, pressure - and even attack - those who launch mass human enhancement programmes, e.g. as they sometimes do with countries breaking out of the non-proliferation regime
(ii) states will sanction, pressure - and even attack - those who launch mass human enhancement programmes, e.g. as they sometimes do with countries breaking out of the non-proliferation regime
Possible, but I think this will be very hard, as it is ultimately a knowledge problem. Biology is like software in a way.
In the limit, I think we will know the causal variants (which we don't know now it is not necessary for selection but is for genetic engineering) and then it will be difficult to contain such information or capabilities.
Regardless, China does not appear to be interested in playing that game. As long as this is the case, the point is moot.
But it is not the information that would be proscribed. The information by itself is harmless.
A state-sanctioned human enhancement programme would be a huge health and infrastructural commitment.
There is no way that a state could do this on a large scale and evade detection.
When genetic therapies allow underperforming kids at schools to increase their test scores, or small kids to grow taller and play basketball with their peers, you'll have parents rioting to get those therapies for their kids.
It's not even in the same ballpark as chemical weapons. Everyone can agree chemical weapons are bad. Nobody is protesting in the street demanding their legalization. People who can benefit from gene therapy will be highly motivated and politically active.
Speaking only for myself, if you want to leave your kids behind that's fine but I'll pay every penny I have for them to have every advantage possible.
Do you want to live in a world where some societies are genetically superior to others, or where there's a constant pressure to upgrade the human species as quickly and to the greatest advantage possible?
Let me ask you this. Universities and private schooling give a constant pressure for families to provide the best possible education for their kids, leading to constant competition for the best education since that gives a huge advantage in the job market over everyone else.
Why haven't we banned universities and private schooling then, since it gives just as much advantage as any hypothetical near term genetic engineering would?
1) education has been around for millennia, genetic engineering hasn't
2) there is a deep and wide-ranging taboo about modifying the human species, which there isn't about education
3) the gains from genetic engineering are potentially rapid and far in excess of what can be achieved through education
4) there is a potential for states to enter into a human enhancement arms races, and the possible consequences of this - unsafe testing, the complete transformation of the human species, gene-based weapons - are terrible
5) gene editing will amplify inequalities and create eugenic-racist politics, in a way that education doesn't
I think (4) and (5) are the most important reasons why we should be more careful about genetic engineering than education. Competition in education is harmless compared to a race to create the best superhumans.
Automation won’t be outlawed simply because it’s too economically advantageous. China is going all in on AI already.
However, as stated in a sibling comment, I think the advantages gained from IQ gene editing are quite exaggerated.
It's tragic, especially because the stakes are high and advance permanent and self-reinforcing. How likely do you think it'll be that countries are able to catch to the newly-140-IQ first movers establish a lead?
Not really, at least with the current state of knowledge. There are very few genes where one can predict that altering them will increase intelligence.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by...
https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTQ5Mzg4NTQ.MTIxMTA4MzE...
Changing the creations of God is still very much considered forbidden in the religion. Also many scholars would still consider e.g. abortion without valid reason before ensoulment as forbidden. Personally I think the Islamic world would wrestle much more with this than any other.
Wait, by this logic China and India should be currently producing the majority of genius-level intellects. Are there really 5 times more geniuses in China than in the US? If not it means education and infrastructure plays a part.
I have no idea if this is true or if it has a sensible impact.
The cost of wiping out depression could be a lack of creativity. Which will be more valuable in a society 30 years hence? Nobody has any idea of course; that's the value of evolution: it continually run a set of multivariate experiments.
Good luck to you and your kids; I honestly hope it works out well for you all. But based on centuries of fad "engineering" mostly at the environmental level (teaching, nutrition fads) it all below the noise floor.
This will have some interesting consequences for the future of our species. Greg Bear's "Sisters" (collected in "Just Over the Horizon") took a compelling angle on a world with ubiquitous genetic editing of embryos. He made a few predictions:
(1) People whose parents opt out of the process will, indeed, have worse social lives, worse careers, and worse lives overall -- they will get sicker, die younger, and be less prepared for exceptional performances. Bear uses the lens of high school where everyone feels like they don't fit in but convincingly suggests that non-edited people would feel worse.
(2) Most "pre-planned children" (those subject to embyronic editing) will get a combination of a handful of known safe "packages" which will probably be iterated annually by the companies who offer them. This means in practice that most people born in the same year will have many similar traits and quirks.
(3) People will not, by and large, physically resemble their parents; desirable traits will include appearance. They will, however, all kind of look like one another.
(4) People who opt out of the practice despite having enough money will be seen as quirky anachronisms from another era.
(5) Inevitably someone will mess up and some trait will enter the mainstream which causes widespread calamity -- for example, 50% of people aged 15-16 who was built in a certain batch will suddenly die from a previously undiscovered anomaly. This will be treatable with CRISPR-style technologies and folks will rush to build a treatment the first time it happens. These mass deaths will come as a surprise because, while in some sense we know we are doing something different by imposing relatively few features on a relatively large population and by bypassing tens of generations of random mutation, we don't really understand what we're "losing" by skipping the normal process that selects for viable individuals.
Bear theorizes that it's going to be important in a few decades to remember that everyone, both the pre-planned people and the unedited people, is human and deserves equal dignity as a person. He tries to end the story in an upbeat way when his protagonist addresses the surviving half of her graduating high school class:
"" "This has been a bad time for all of us," she began, voice high and scratchy. She cleared her throat. "I've lost a lot of friends, and so have you. Maybe you've lost sons and daughters. I think, even from there, looking at me, you can tell I'm not ... designed. I'm natural. I don't have to wonder about whether I'll get sick and die. But I ..." She cleared her throat again. It wasn't getting easier. "I thought someone like me could tell you something important."
"People have made mistakes, bad mistakes. But you are not a mistake. I mean ... they weren't mistaken to make you. I can only dream about doing some of the things you'll do. Some of you are made to live in space for a long time, and I can't do that. Some of you will think things I can't, and go places I won't ... travel to see the stars. We're different in a lot of ways, but I just thought it was important to tell you..." She wasn't following the prepared speech. She couldn't. "I love you. I don't care what the others say. We love you. You are very important. Please don't forget that." ""
Not really sure what the broader lesson is, but the story stuck with me and there are a couple of specific predictions in there that will be interesting to see tested out in the next few decades.
Appearance is influenced by millions of variants, which have little or nothing to do on average to do with the variants which influence traits like intelligence (the genetic correlation is ~0 - you don't see genetic correlations between intelligence and well-predicted traits like hair or eye color being reported in the literature).
Even if the same genetic variants which influence something superficial like facial bone structure also influence neurogenesis etc, any editing or selection making people more similar will just be a drop in the pond. Think about siblings: compared to 2 random people, siblings are more similar on what must be tens of millions of genetic variants, and yet, consider how completely different siblings often look, act, and turn out! (Jencks, I think, in _Inequality_ points out that there's almost as much 'inequality' in life outcomes like income within American families as there is across families.)
Further, let's say that all of that turns out to be wrong; nevertheless, parental relatedness to children is desperately desired by parents and this is a major reason why sperm/egg donation are profoundly unpopular and why parents have such stringent demands of donors from banks and why people will deliberately select embryos with Huntington's and other serious disorders if the healthy embryos fail to yield a live birth. It would be entirely possible to simply tilt the selection or editing to preserve relatedness to parents on visible attributes - 'relatedness to parents' is simply yet another metric to optimize for, thrown into the stew with the usual ones, and it is one that parents will put a high value on even at the cost of some potential gains on other metrics.
(#5 is also quite problematic as it assumes that completely novel edits will be done on a mass basis without any kind of testing. In reality, everyone will focus on variants that already are widespread in the population and which are already being tested in the real world. It's the rare variants which are harmful, not the common ones.)
There are two caveats:
1. Love could be seen as a 'weakness' and there might be a crop of super genius Designed who don't have the genes required. If it turns out that this does not impact viability for whatever reasons, natural or engineered (we design companies where we expect some geniuses to be Complete Jerks and be okay with that as long as the bottomline is improved), then the undesigned are doomed.
2. Love does not fix all problems. There are Homeless people in San Fransisco despite being surrounded by some of the smartest, richest people who also have Empathy and Love for people in their lives. But enough of these Smart Rich People would prefer the Homeless just go elsewhere rather than blot the landscape (instead of thinking about helping them) - that there's no political will to aggressively fix the problem. The Undesigned could just end up being the Homeless of the near future. Fun Times (I'm terrified).
The argument is not simply about "withholding" these technologies, but (as the article title explicitly says) restricting them to the rich.
These are complicated ethical issues (that judging by some of your comments in the thread you are very able to debate clearly, knowledgeabley and intelligently) that are not served in discussion by misdirecting the question.
Sure dude, go ahead and subject your kid to experimental genetic modification in Singapore to chase this compelling evidence.
Interesting way to put it. The same absolute increase will not be 5 standard deviations for long.
What is likely to happen is that somewhere like North Korea could start trying it. If they get far enough into it, they will probably realise super-intelligent people don't want to hang around in totalatarian regimes run by fools, or swallow propaganda. Either they will find a way to make super-intelligent psychopaths who are naturally gratified by participating in world-denomination skullduggery, or they will engineer them to be somehow dependent on the regime, perhaps introducing a disease that needs some hard to acquire maintenance therapy.
I hadn't heard of this guy before,
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-imprinted-brai...
but I still don't understand the relevance
Darwin won the body, Lysenko the mind.
Cognitive genomics is already heightening the contradictions of this view. Eventually it will collapse.
In terms of differences in individuals, empirically 60%-80% appears to be genetic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
How do you explain the rise in IQ scores over time ? Better genetics?
Depending on what you mean by 'genetic techniques', it sure does. Here's a genetic technique: Test everyone for IQ and only breed the top ten percent. Average IQ will obviously improve. This is just old fashioned selective breeding. It can be done, and in fact has been done (unintentionally) in places like Israel, where average IQ is notably higher.
Whether that would unbalance society in some sense ("lose the ability to do carpentry") is another question. I think society is actually unbalanced now; we have more stupid people than we need because new technologies have shifted the IQ demands upwards. There's no use for dumb brutes any more; we have machines to do the physical work they used to do. But we have tons of use for smarty-pants; so much that we can't get enough of them. Increasing average IQ wouldn't unbalance society; it would re-balance it to the new demands of the modern world.
however, the current picture of vertabrate development makes it seems like such a simple genetic model for mind skill traits is hopelessly unlikely. You have weird crap like receptors being used for different functions in different areas of the brain. And they migrate / gene activate at different times of development in response to genetic expression partially determined by environmental conditions. Its a big ugly undocumented hack. I tend to assume we are all SWE but if you are not, there is human created code so unmaintainable the cost to fix/understand is easily 10x the cost to create. Evolution i guess has no reason to make it easier on gene engineers. Unless you hope the human brain ends up being kike particle physics with a few elegant math laws that make the apparent complexity simple.
If you outlaw this, people like me (who think inflicting stupidly and ill-health on their children by withholding these technologies is morally wrong) will just fly to Singapore. Even if you could enforce this, not every country will. 5+ standard deviation increases in many traits is on the table: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#iterated-embryo-selec...
If we make this illegal here, we will be as children compared to those in China or Singapore.
The potential increase in IQ is so high that any country that defects from a global ban, even a smallish one like Iran say, would quickly be producing the vast majority of all genius-level intellects.
A global ban is just is not a stable equilibrium.
From a balance-of-power perspective, we would expect huge shifts in future power to those countries that embrace the technology. An absence of taboos against human enhancement may be a more important factor in this than current scientific achievement for predicting global leadership in the next couple generations.
In islamic culture, traditional scholarship places the point of ensoulment anywhere between 40 and 120 days after conception. Our western taboos around this topic, likely even our western secular taboos, derive from a belief in ensoulment at conception.
This simple doctrinal dispute may end up having huge consequences. And may allow islamic cultures to return to a position of scientific power, likely shared with China and other Asian countries who similarly do not share our taboos.