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Single Gene Can Boost IQ By Six Points
ananyo (2519492) writes "People are living longer, which is good. But old age often brings a decline in mental faculties and many researchers are looking for ways to slow or halt such decline. One group doing so is led by Dena Dubal of the University of California, San Francisco, and Lennart Mucke of the Gladstone Institutes, also in San Francisco. Dr Dubal and Dr Mucke have been studying the role in aging of klotho, a protein encoded by a gene called KL. A particular version of this gene, KL-VS, promotes longevity. One way it does so is by reducing age-related heart disease. Dr Dubal and Dr Mucke wondered if it might have similar powers over age-related cognitive decline. What they found was startling. KL-VS did not curb decline, but it did boost cognitive faculties regardless of a person's age by the equivalent of about six IQ points. If this result, just published in Cell Reports, is confirmed, KL-VS will be the most important genetic agent of non-pathological variation in intelligence yet discovered."
Guess I got that gene!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
How does something that's genetic "boost" anything? This is a gene, not a drug.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Isn't the standard deviation of IQ 7 points? Is 6 points actually statistically significant?
Big freaking whoop. A person's IQ score can vary more than that each day based on simple factors such as stress, fatigue, hunger, etc.
My guess would be that two groups, those that express the gene and those that do not have a 6 point difference in IQ on average, in favor of those with the gene.
-- Begin thoughtfuly, end insensitively.
It has more impact that way.
I work with people across the entire working-age spectrum who are blithering idiots so I don't think it's just age which reduces ones mental acuity.
Maybe this process can help them as well. Let's start with programmers followed by the executive staff for starters.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
wow, people still believe in the IQ myth? That is so CUTE.
Don't worry, scrote. There are plenty of 'tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was 'tarded. She's a pilot now.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
... are they lacking this gene?
Just asking. I know we aren't allowed to talk about it, and have to pretend that all races are just as intelligent as each other. It would be 'racist' to question 'diversity', wouldn't it...
Dial back the cologne a little.
Look women in the eye.
Learn to dance with confidence, even if it is only the white guy shuffle.
Sure some women dig a smart dude, but if that 6 points is a significant improvement for you maybe the women aren't into you for your brains.
Buy a pump.
More music, fewer hits
It's not really a myth, but using single number can be misleading.
Kind of like how that on average, a human being will have 1 testicle. It's stastically true, just not very useful.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
News Flash: Providing guidance to your penile "missile" doesn't make her a "pilot".
Am I understanding properly that the "KL-VS" variant of KLOTHO is Rs9536314 with genotype "T;T"?
Don't worry, scrote. There are plenty of 'tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was 'tarded. She's a pilot now.
Being a lifeless vegetable from too many 'experiments' in life, doesn't make them a pilot, even if their mind is 'flying'.
I love talking to people who are adamant that intelligence is not heritable, yet believe in evolution. When I ask how we evolved from presumably less intelligent ape-like ancestors without intelligence being heritable, I can almost see the gears grind to a halt.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
High Level High driving
You will understand by this example :
IQ explained to dummies
Wow, people still want to pretend that a 'tard with a "mythical" IQ of 80 can someday become a rocket surgeon? That is so SCARY.
Ordnance and planes aren't the only things that make loud wooshing noises.
Note, I personally would hypothesize that such a drug would NOT work in adults, but instead would have to be given to children, something we are much less likely to agree to do. Mainly because I think intelligence has more to do with how your neurons are organized rather than what chemicals are in your blood.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Combine this with infusions of blood from your grandchildren and you'll be good to go.
Sign me up right away! I'm looking forward to having an I.Q. of 6.
Regardless, the PC brigade will just put their thumbs in their ears as usual.
Ah, so talking to stupid people who don't understand the word 'culture' makes you feel superior? Because you don't seem to understand it either.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I'm already alive. How about something to curry favour with Lachesis or Atropos?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Not only that, but the average child has fewer than two legs. Ain't that just sad?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It will be convenient to not need to sleep.
If all this gene achieved was less cardiovascular diseases and higher intelligence, we would (nearly) all have it by now due to selection. So the question is, what else does it do which counterweights this?
Soooooo....are there any foods that have this protein?
I don't really believe in evolution. It's just the only theory out there how human came into existence that doesn't resort to wizards in the sky working magic. If you have a better one, I'd like to hear it. Just leave wizards and wonders, dungeons and dragons, out of it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If this result, just published in Cell Reports, is confirmed, KL-VS will be the most important genetic agent of non-pathological variation in intelligence yet discovered.
IQ != intelligence. If you want to study variations in IQ score, fine. Not saying it can't yeild interesting results. But can we please stop pretending that there is anything approaching a useful scientific definition of intelligence, nevermind one that reduces to a single number. That ways lies the kind of idiocy that will end up with people fucking up their kids genetic structure trying to engineer "intelligence" without even understanding what that is.
But it might be just as dangerous as the other kind.
Proverbs 21:19
A single gene can boost IQ by six points? I've got something like 24,000 of them!
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
More like that IQ doesn't actually measure intelligence. People with high IQs are not necessarily intelligent, and people with low IQs are not necessarily unintelligent. I do not think intelligence is something that can be measured with such simplistic tests and then reported as a single number, especially when we don't even understand intelligence.
In fact, IQ was about measuring how well one would fit into the formal education environment, not about measuring intelligence. Despite all of these things, clueless morons continuously refer to IQ when they want to state how intelligent someone is.
Single Gene Can Boost IQ By Six Points --> Single Additional Gene Can Boost IQ By Six Points
In that case, I would like to get 2 copies of that gene. Actually...while you are at it...can you make it 10?
no way.. that kind of creation myth sounds like great fun. that it also describes 'The Hobbit" is just a coincidence.
No doubt you're born with some talent for that just like for everything else, but just like you can choose to be a gym rat or couch potato with your body it's also whether you train to use your mind. They try to separate skill from innate intelligence but from what I've understand education changes the IQ score significantly and training for the tests even more so. The IQ tests were used as proof that some races were inferior until they started comparing people with the same access to education, then the differences pretty much vanished. So to someone that is struggling obviously they say you can make it, if they give up and say I'm dumb and I'll never learn and there's no point in trying they're surely achieve less than their potential.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Have gnu, will travel.
So if human parents raised one of our chimp-like ancestors, he'd be just as smart as us?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
'tard with a "mythical" IQ of 80
I love posts like yours. Mental retardation is defined as an IQ of 70 or less.
Even if this allele was sweeping through the population for the last one hundred years, working its way to get "fixed", it would only explain a tiny fraction of the Flynn effect. What it really tells us something simple. It is exceedingly hard to come up with new original puzzles and tests. The whole population has been gaming the IQ tests for decades now. May be better nutrition, more familiarity with abstract symbols...
When they can't even explain Flynn Effect satisfactorily, take everything else based on IQ with a liberal pinch of salt.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Well that's easy to explain. The phrase "intelligence is not heritable" is a simplification of "the bulk of intelligence is not heritable and (barring serious medical genetic conditions) the environment has a much larger impact than the genes you inherit." The aspect of inherited intelligence is only visible and applicable when you have a large enough sample size that the environmental "noise" is averaged out and you can observe the evolutionary trend. To a lesser extent this also applies to muscles and health. If you sit around and each cheetoes all day it doesn't matter as much how your parents look. If you work your ass off as a lumberjack all day, even if your parents were spindly little things, you're going to get some muscle. But the muscle/build/health genes have a stronger impact than the intelligence genes when compared to environmental conditions.
And that leads to some awkward questions and alarming answers about how well different cultures and groups of people perform on IQ tests. But that is a seriously dark road to go down with sociological ramifications. Science doesn't happen in a vacuum and sometimes you don't want to stir up the hornets nest. There are things I'm just content to not pry into. Because hey, if two cultures faced similar sociological factors, they'd probably be the same culture now wouldn't they? This might just be one of those things that's unmeasurable.
I love talking to people who are adamant that intelligence is not heritable
I love talking to people who have no clue what the OP said.
Hint: he said nothing about intelligence, and nothing about heritability.
I did say "mythical". ;)
Yes, good catch, kudos to you, mea culpa.
Though as an aside, you make my earlier point quite nicely - How, exactly, do we define a clinical term as having a certain score on a mythical scale?
/ Charisma as the dump stat, FTW!
It's not a myth, no at all.
Misused and incorrectly presented by the media? yes..
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No good, I've know too many pilots.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
wow, people still believe in the IQ myth? That is so CUTE.
Modded down to -1? Thank goodness Slashdot mods are unbiased, and their frail egos aren't based on a single number of which they don't understand the significance or lack thereof.
less then 1 testicle, actually.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You moved from intelligence to smart. Which do you mean?
Some aspect of intelligence are culture based. Others are inherited. Really, you need to be more specific. :) OR if You went back in time, there is a chance they would consider you stupid, becasue you couldn't do common things.
For example. if you were raised by Homo ergastor, you wouldn't be nearly as smart..also, dead.
Also, evolution isn't a belief, it's a fact.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How can you not understand evolution isn't a belief?
The evidence fill warehouses, it makes accurate predictions, and is experimentally verified.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah, but when I move the bibles in the book store over to Tolkien's books I get tossed out...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Intelligence is a difficult thing to quantify, and there are environmental factors that come into play when measuring the intelligence of an adult.
It'd be more accurate and appropriate to say that behavioral tendencies is genetically inherited. It's also accurate to say that what those tendencies lead to is non-trivially dependent on environment.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Erh... yes? Your argument with my statement above would be what exactly?
To clarify: I don't believe in evolution. It is "only" the only scientifically acceptable theory concerning the development of life that we have currently. But that's independent of my faith in it. It simply is. There's little I could accomplish by believing in it.
Unless someone can come up with a competing theory that deserves the name there's not really an alternative to it. It is also a quite acceptable theory, supported by what we know about how life developed and not contradicted by anything I could think of currently.
My problem is with the term of believing. Believing something requires some kind of faith, believing someone requires some kind of trust. Neither has anything to do with science.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I was modded down by people who do not know about the IQ myth ... it shows the lack of education, if any.
To educate the masses ...
IQ tests determine the "score". Unfortunately, most of the questions have little to do with IQ than with local politics. Heck, in our school system, when they give the tests in elementary school, most of the questions were about Disney characters .... Entirely irrelevant to IQ scores.
Looks like all the nasty stuff of the previous century will be back, just in time for the current retromania. People will start killing all those people without this gene, specially if it turns out most blacks don't have it.
Depends if you think that hardware is more important than software.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Slightly more livebirths are male than female. So it is possible that the average is greater than 1. And then there is, um, China and India to skew the averages, unfortunately.
Or, specifically, which ethnic groups are mostly likely to have it or not?
I can imagine the researchers refusing to study that aspect of it because of the potential 'justifying racism' accusations.
I would laugh at all the white supremacists if it ended up being exclusive to blacks tho.
(My personal opinion is that any so called 'pure' race is just a lesser form of inbreeding. Believing in 'miscegenation' is just a couple steps away from having sex with your own sister.)
My problem is with the term of believing. Believing something requires some kind of faith, believing someone requires some kind of trust. Neither has anything to do with science.
Pedantic troll much?
Trust has plenty to do with science. Without trust in science everyone would have to test every theory - this would put a big damper on progress.
Instead, we trust (or "believe in") theories which have been tested by our peers or others who specialize in the field.
However, if you don't "trust" or "have faith in" anyone, then you can't trust their theories, findings, or tests.
Or maybe it's just easier to say "I believe in evolution" instead of "I assert that the theory of evolution through natural selection provides the best explanation for how species are created."
Clearly no one can tell you that or anything, since you think you are smarter than Einstein. (Yes, I know you were being sarcastic, or at least you try to pass it off as such while subtly pointing out that your IQ has been MEASURED higher than Einstein's was. Oooh, look how humble you are! )
There is a paradox in discussing intelligence as something differentiable, but then dismissing all attempts to measure the quality in order to differentiate. Of course there will be exceptions and anomalies to any attempt to quantify intelligence, in no small part because it is still poorly defined and somewhat ineffable. That doesn't mean IQ tests are bullshit, especially not when used and interpreted as intended, not as some kind of nerd penis-substitute comparison.
Also: IQ tests may be imperfect but they certainly provide some information about abilities that we traditionally call "intelligence". Since no one is the same person from day-to-day intelligence, even "innate" intelligence (whatever that is) will vary.
Shut up and take my money!
When I ask how we evolved from presumably less intelligent ape-like ancestors without intelligence being heritable, I can almost see the gears grind to a halt.
Average intelligence (100 on the IQ scale) has been increasing steadily over the decades.
It gets normalized back to 100 every once in a while or we'd all be above average.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
TLDR: We don't really know why, but maybe education, nutrition, and disease reduction are why we've been getting smarter.
All of which is to point out that intelligence doesn't *need* to be heritable, it may be an innate property that only requires proper nurturing.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
How, exactly, do we define a clinical term as having a certain score on a mythical scale?
The scale is real - the myth is that it's a terribly good measure of intelligence. It's such an objective and repeatable test that you can increase a kid's intelligence by offering them ice cream if they do well.
So how can you justify using it as part of a DSM diagnosis? They had to put something in there. Many, if not most DSM diagnoses are subject to "interpretation", which is a black art that psychiatrists get paid a lot of money for. Ask a parent of a kid who is MR or some other sort of mental handicap - you can get different diagnoses by going to different doctors. Just pick the diagnosis that will get your kid the most help because the state says they get get A for a diagnosis of X, but B for a diagnosis of Y. It's even worse with psychiatric diagnoses. The borderline part of borderline personality disorder is that it's on the borderline with a dozen other diagnoses.
The IQ test is useful for putting kids into gross categories like "slow" or "really bright", but that's about it. That's all it was originally intended for too, for the sake of deciding how to help kids who weren't doing well in school. It was eugenicists who turned it into a fetish, which ironically showed their lack of understanding of the issue.
Is the headline "Single Gene Can Boost IQ By Six Points" a self parody? It should be "Single Allele Can Boost IQ By Six Points". The thing I love about irony is that it knows no bounds - there's an endless supply of it.
Just ask my employees, who are getting smarter every day!
http://www.livescience.com/181... If parents sought out a 6 point IQ boost for their children to be more successful, a side effect could be that conservative ideology will go the way of smallpox and polio.
Ah, so talking to stupid people who don't understand the word 'culture' makes you feel superior
Not to point out the obvious, but if you're capable of understanding something that someone else isn't capable of understanding, then by definition it makes you superior (in that aspect). Unless you are attempting to claim that intelligence offers no objective benefits?
My other UID is three digits.
Well, I can empirically prove that I'm quite certainly not smarter than Einstein. I did not present a paradigm shifting theory in any field of studies, I did not change my field of studies inside out, hell, outside a few people who happen to have met me nobody really knows me. If I was as smart as Einstein, don't you think someone would've noticed that by now?
What IQ tests measure is basically how good you are at solving IQ tests. I'm obviously pretty good at it. Which comes as no surprise, I am pretty good with logic problems. Comes with the job, I guess. But somehow I'd expect more from "intelligence".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Culture - yeah, I let my dog read Wikipedia, now he is more intelligent than me. Who needs evolution when you have culture?
I'm gonna need some of this gene after reading the articles on alien encounters and noncomputable consciousness. Me dumber now.
For someone so smart....
You're making an invalid leap to think that just because someone is smarter than Einstein, they would HAVE to accomplish more than Einstein. Why can't someone be smart & lazy simultaneously?
Perhaps it is, but it also means that the majority of children have an above-average number of legs, which bodes well for their adult locomotion.
Ezekiel 23:20
Sorry, it's just that believe in a science setting ruffles me the wrong way. The next thing you usually know is that some idiot feels the urge to butt in with something along the lines of "Oh you believe in evolution, and how is that different from believing in God".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
George Carlin
And you though Deep Blue Sea was sci-fi!
My problem is with the term of believing. Believing something requires some kind of faith, believing someone requires some kind of trust. Neither has anything to do with science.
Uh...are you sure about that? Just read the first sentence.
Ezekiel 23:20
only problem is, that's utter bullshit.
(1) Intelligence is 80% heritable
(1a) look into the breeder's equation, if you are actually interested in how to do eugenics; this is taught at ag school, but not at smart people's school, because smart people learn smart stuff like that IQ is not heritable
(1b) the number you want to plug in to compute response to selection? it can be empirically determined by looking at parents and their children.
(2) Racial groups have different average intelligences
(2a) Whites do not have the highest average IQ; East Asians and our Ashkenazi subpopulation outperform us
(2b) Blacks have one of the lowest average IQs
(2c) This has been known for most of the last century, and has not changed
(2d) So why don't you try to come up with a better IQ test that isn't "racist". If you succeed, you will be covered in gold and fly around the world giving speeches and be Time Magazine's Person of the Century and win all the Nobel Prizes. Go ahead, it should be as easy as unpacking an invisible knapsack.
(3) Facts do not go away when you ignore them
(3a) But you can suppress research for a while until science sneaks around you
(3b) But you can't suppress research in other cultures that don't have White guilt
(3c) And then you get taken over by the results of China's eugenics program
see http://imgur.com/XXT4i.jpg
See the sub-Saharan African population, huddled in that corner there. Most significant population differences? The biggest difference is between them and the East Asians.
I don't know of anyone who wants to throw the Aborigines in with them, other than insane leftists like you, because anyone with a brain looks at these genetic charts that have been available for 40 years or physical anthropology based charts that have been available for over a hundred years.
The Abo's are one of those blue dots in between the purple and the red clusters. Since they are discontinuous with the red dots, it is entirely inappropriate to cluster them with the sub-Saharan Africans.
This expression indicates an egalitarian's confusion and lack of understanding. When confronted with facts about intelligence he can not understand or respond to, egalitarians mumble "muh flynn effect" or "muh flynn effect, racist". This is usually followed by ranting about the eugenics of Jim Crow slavery.
If you're capable of understanding it. The parent however thinks he's smart because he can ask a question that others don't know the answer to and neither does he. It's a religious nutter cognitive dissonance thing.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
The sad thing is, that the mods can't recognise the difference.
Here's a hint, just go check out how long homo sapien sapiens have been around for. It takes a while to build culture.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Of course, what happens in academia and what happens in local practice is like the time traveling abilities of western pop music in Asia.
I'm sure you must have been aware of when the Emo's, who had put down their little black books long enough to socialize, realized they had some insight into human emotional behaviour and so they cried their way into a whole bunch of books on Emotional Intelligence.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Then there's the whole cheerleading squad of science fanbois, belief is their every breath. Interestingly, the religious nutters seem to be displacing them on slashdot.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
The moment inheritance works is when spermatozoon meets egg. This is a single moment in whole life of the individual.
Everything else is nurture.
As for "presumable less intelligent", cro-magnons had brains bigger than contemporary humans, they possible were more intelligent than us. The difference here is that we use more results of applied (through centuries and millenniums) intelligence.
K. S. Kyosuke: You've been called out (for tossing names) & you ran "forrest" from a fair challenge http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
K. S. Kyosuke: You've been called out (for tossing names) & you ran "forrest" from a fair challenge http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I love talking to people who are adamant that intelligence is not heritable, yet believe in evolution. When I ask how we evolved from presumably less intelligent ape-like ancestors without intelligence being heritable, I can almost see the gears grind to a halt.
As usual, it's a bit of both. What is clear is that anyone can improve their level of intelligence.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
But I think he's living at his mother Jan Kowalski's basement at:
At least, that's where he wants users of his hostfile manager to send him money.
I want that gene so I can join Mensa. A High IQ society seems like a good idea..
I simply want proof. And I'm agnostic in this, hey, if the religious can prove that there's a God waving his magic wand and creating everything, I'm game for it. 'til then it's just not even a theory because, as stated above, "a wizard did it" may work for plotholes in crappy TV shows but not for science.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Good on you for at least being logical and being agnostic. Atheists stink of belief and/or stupidity just as much as the proselytizers.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.