Re:Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
by mlyle on Thursday August 04, 2022 @02:36PM
(#32346649)
Heritability of intelligence is high, and there's a few genes already existing in the human population that are well correlated with intelligence.
You could just try turning a few known knobs and see what happens. The efficacy is probably moderate-- maybe 7 IQ points or so with the currently known genes. But a change of mean IQ by 7 is actually a pretty substantial advantage-- it's half a standard deviation, and predicts about $4k more income per year.
Yes, it's unethical and there's probably substantial human cost.
Or, there's even a shortcut of just testing for people with high IQs that also possess the best known genotypes (i.e. test both genotype and phenotype) and forcing them to breed.
You could just try turning a few known knobs and see what happens. The efficacy is probably moderate-- maybe 7 IQ points or so with the currently known genes. But a change of mean IQ by 7 is actually a pretty substantial advantage-- it's half a standard deviation, and predicts about $4k more income per year.
Yes, it's unethical and there's probably substantial human cost.
Or, there's even a shortcut of just testing for people with high IQs that also possess the best known genotypes (i.e. test both genotype and phenotype) and forcing them to breed.