Look at the intense selection on the Ashkenazi Jews over maybe 1500 years which has only produced an average IQ of 115 (there are alternate theories for their high IQs).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence
Selection of dog breeds for intelligence (German Shepherds, Jack Russell terriers, Poodles vs eg King Charles Cavaliers, Corgis) seems to have produced a large gap but it took a long time - dogs have been domesticated for ~5,000 years.
Generally selection works quickly at first, by filtering the population for the desired trait. Then it slows dramatically as the process is limited by new beneficial mutations which are rare.
It is noteworthy that genes for high IQ seem to come at a price. Read up about Einstein's son Eduard for example.
Final point: maybe parents will not want to select for IQ. Maybe they would prefer to select for beautiful daughters for example?
Dogs have been domesticated since the dawn of civilization (and probably before), but those specific breeds are relatively new. GSDs are just over a century old, Jack Russells slightly older, poodles several hundred years old and Corgis positively ancient at almost 1000. Note, too, that intelligence was not the sole quality they were bred for. The Russian Silver Fox is a great example of the massive changes that can occur in only a few generations if artificial selection for a single trait is performed.
That said, I agree with the gist of your argument: 15 pts of Iq per generation seems ludicrous.
This one is equivalent to picking the best one of 50 naturally occurring children, and raising them alone, every generation.
If Michael Jordan he had 50 children with a similarly elite mother, most of them would regress to the mean - but the best one could conceivably be near his level. If he had only one kid, it's very likely that the kid would regress significantly.
Also, of course there are negatives to high IQ but most of the time, this selection method wouldn't be done for that level. Two people of IQ 100 would be able to reliably have children of IQ 115, and those kids would have happier, longer, healthier lives, with no increased risks. [see the scottish IQ study; iq at age 11 was linked to a lifetime of better outcomes]
That is the real benefit of this technology - to give people the option of gradually bringing out the best of what's already inside themselves. I don't want to be forced to give my kids a random selection of my genes - I want to exercise some control. And of course there could be problems - perhaps +IQ genes might lie next to other, undetected bad genes. But that's random, and we're already completely subject to it.
That's way too low. It's somewhere in the 19-32k year range: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38279/...
I have read numerous different accounts. It appears that the selective breeding of different breeds is actually much shorter even than 5,000 years. Most breeds are less than 1,000 years old.
1. Author is arrogant, and by innuendo he is also sexist/racist.
2. ???
3. Author is wrong.
Step 2 is where I'm not following your logic.
1. I once knew a guy who agreed with the author. He also had a non-white manager at roughly the same time he agreed with the author.
2. ???
3. Therefore the author if this article is racist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion
Not all observations are extrapolations from a single observation.
No thank you. Free-speech also means speech you do not like, otherwise you don't actually have free-speech. But rather just, "state-approved speech".
That's a really sad world to live in, even more so with the state-sponsored and state-seeded social-ostracism we already have in place to control freedom of speech.
And I recognize your username, do / did you post on a forum dedicated to a certain music genre?
This bothered me more than the autopraise. He (and, if he is to be believed, China) are proceeding from the assumption that IQ can be reduced to a set of switches in the genome.
What if there are alleles that select for intelligence--but also select for a mixture of cancer, OCD, suicidal depression, and plain batshit crazy?
1.3 billion bald, cat cradling, evil geniuses, all saying "mbwah, ha ha" in eerie synchronicity?
I'm not saying it captures every element of our experience, but surely we can point to it and say it represents some subset of our understanding of the idea we point at when we say the word "intelligence". It really isn't competing with anything that's remotely as useful. IQ, although it has faults, seems to be a relatively cheap, standard, well understood metric, that also explains quite a few other phenomenon. If you give me two regression analyses, one of them using IQ and one not, I cannot imagine what understanding you would gain by refusing to acknowledge the former -- and that mistake seems like precisely the type of "foolish over assessment of our current collective understanding" that you deride.
I score very highly on IQ tests, but I've worked with a great many people who I would guess do not score more than slightly above average but nevertheless bring a lot to the table that I cannot.
I guess my point is that using IQ as an authoritative measure of "intelligence" is missing the forest for the trees (well I suppose to best fit the metaphor it would be 'tree').
Author manages to squeeze a topping of first semester Introduction to China with a thick crust of massive unsubstantiated overreach.
"hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications."
Nice autopraise, mildly disguised.
"After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness."
Seriously? There was an otherwise intelligent guy working for us who started spouting this kind of drivel. We noticed it all started after he got assigned a female manager and then subsequently a non-white manager. Some people have mild racial hangups, which they then externalize in odd ways like China peril.