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Massive Study Searching For Genes Behind Intelligence Finds Little
An anonymous reader writes: It's been taken for granted that science would, one day, figure out what parts of our DNA make us smart (or not). But a huge new study done by a group of almost 60 researchers using genome data on over 100,000 people has come up empty-handed. The scientists first looked for differences in the genome that correlated with academic achievement. After narrowing it down to 69 individual sites, they gave cognitive tests to separate group of 24,000 people and looked for evidence of difference at those same locations (abstract). Most of the sites weren't significantly different from chance — the (already weak) genetic influence of genes on height has an effect 20 times greater. On top of that, the three gene locations that did seem to have a stronger correlation weren't involved in development of the nervous system.
GATTACA becomes a little less plausible!
But what of this story?
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You start with the framework, but beyond that intelligence is simply acquired after birth.
the researchers were coincidentally all missing a particular gene and none of them could figure out what its purpose was.
what? Little evidence of the gene, or (more plausibly IMHO) little evidence of intelligence?
Apparently you can lose >80% and still function:
http://sciencenordic.com/can-we-blame-brain
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4042161/pdf/fnhum-08-00397.pdf
My parents are both dumber than dirt but I'm way smarter than them.
the (already weak) genetic influence of genes on height has an effect 20 times greater
Wait... did I just read that genes only have a weak influence on height?????
Googling "genes for height"
Height clearly has a lot to do with genetics - shorter parents tend to have shorter children, and taller parents tend to have taller children...
Okay, phew! I must have misinterpreted the meaning of "already weak genetic influence." Also, each of those articles do go on to explain that nutrition, including fetal nutrition, have a significant impact as well.
Did they look at the CVs of those 100,000 people? How many of them were PhDs? How many were prolific inventors? How many where self-made *gasp* one-percenters?
...the brain really is just for cooling the blood after all.
That choice of proxy needs some support, lest they end up accidentally gathering evidence that earning a 5.5 GPA in basketweaving does not correlate with unusual genes.
Thinking back to high school, the people who didn't do well usually didn't want to do well. Learning wasn't cool, you see, and they wanted to hang with the cool crowd.
It (usually) wasn't because they weren't smart enough. They were plenty smart enough. It was cultural, not genetic.
Now, many of them believe in a lot of pseudoscience like the power lines in their walls are giving them cancer, or vaccine causing autism.
The summary is incorrect, please read the abstract to form your own opinion. Specifically:
"Convergent evidence from a set of bioinformatics analyses implicates four specific genes (KNCMA1, NRXN1, POU2F3, and SCRT). All of these genes are associated with a particular neurotransmitter pathway involved in synaptic plasticity, the main cellular mechanism for learning and memory. "
Intelligence is highly heritable, but there is no single 'genius' gene and often there are multiple genetic markers that have similar positive or negative effects. This study looked for common genetic variants that correlated with memory and learning and found them!
Their sample did not include truly intelligent people. How do I know? Simple. I was not part of the sample.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The genes are obviously smart enough to hide from researchers.
... the basis of "Idiocracy" has been disproven? (BTW, the CAPTCHA I was given is "rejoice"; poetic)
And as we know, the hardware is only half the battle. The "software", or in case of intelligence, the actual processes and the way the brain actually works and develops during the life time, is still mostly unknown to us. It's a bit like studying the processor chips from any give age, and trying to "sort" them, or find a way to "classify" them by performance, without actually knowing how or what software then can run.
As with some other things in life, the genes might give you a "framework", or a starting playfield but the rest of the environment plays a huge part in how things will turn out. I believe it makes much more sense, in terms of evolution, that intelligence is something more "organic", adaptable, than a simple, specific gene (or group of genes) that are vulnerable to mutation, etc. Look at the way we are programing AI. Instead of giving it billions and billions of rules and instructions to make it "super smart", we instead try to program it in a way that it can learn by themselves. More or less the way we also learn and develop as we grow up.
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
The irony. The smart people couldn't figure out what makes someone smart... perhaps because they were using the wrong parameters.
if you equate academic success with intelligence, you're doing it wrong. i know plenty of stupid people with masters degrees, and plenty of brilliant people who either never went to, or never finished college. what an asinine bias. if you're looking for intelligence genes, you should be using a meter of intelligence(like an IQ test or similarly dependable measurement), not a meter of dedication, and focus like graduating college with solid scores.
So they were wrong in their hypothesis that these 69 sites on the genome are related to intelligence. This does not mean that other sites on the genome aren't related to intelligence.
On top of that, the three gene locations that did seem to have a stronger correlation weren't involved in development of the nervous system.
So they really don't have complete knowledge of this extremely complex system. Not surprising. Time to review their assumptions, and come up with a new hypothesis to test. They still gained knowledge (what doesn't work), it's just not the knowledge they were hoping for.
With "smart" people ranging from type-A personalities, to high-functioning autistics, it's not surprising they wouldn't find one specific set of genes for intelligence. There is extreme variation in "smart", and even more for "academic achievement", where a complete idiot (for lack of a better term) willing to put in substantial effort, can perform just as well as a highly intelligent person without such motivation.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
My first thought, exactly. Who would have thought that academics would equate intelligence (and other admirable traits, as well?) with academic achievement? Are there other ways in which this innate component of intelligence can manifest? Might cultural and socioeconomic factors - among other things - muddy the association?
Is environment. Awesome. Surely not genetics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ-e5XjlmZA
Intelligence may be a factor in achievement (if it exists), but achievement has many other factors - most of them social and contextual.
semantics are everything!
No, I'm not.
I mean, of the predictive utility of what they have discovered is presumably real. But the point I'm contesting is your central thesis that "intelligence is highly heritable". Which is not what this study found. Correlations of intelligence to (these) genetics, even on multivariate examinations, is weak. Thus your "intelligence is highly heritable" comes of as reductionism.
From the original paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...
We identify several common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance using a two-stage approach: we conduct a genome-wide association study of educational attainment to generate a set of candidates, and then we estimate the association of these variants with cognitive performance. In older Americans, we find that these variants are jointly associated with cognitive health. Bioinformatics analyses implicate a set of genes that is associated with a particular neurotransmitter pathway involved in synaptic plasticity, the main cellular mechanism for learning and memory. In addition to the substantive contribution, this work also serves to show a proxy-phenotype approach to discovering common genetic variants that is likely to be useful for many phenotypes of interest to social scientists (such as personality traits).
How the hell does the article now writes that "The scientists first looked for differences in the genome that correlated with academic achievement"? No, they looked for "educational attainment". Then the abstract goes on "Three SNPs (rs1487441, rs7923609, and rs2721173) are significantly associated with cognitive performance after correction for multiple hypothesis testing." SNPs are different alleles of the same gene.
Then, "Convergent evidence from a set of bioinformatics analyses implicates four specific genes (KNCMA1, NRXN1, POU2F3, and SCRT). All of these genes are associated with a particular neurotransmitter pathway involved in synaptic plasticity, the main cellular mechanism for learning and memory." But the article states that " On top of that, the three gene locations that did seem to have a stronger correlation weren't involved in development of the nervous system."
What the hell??
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Massive Study Searching For Genes Behind Intelligence Finds Little
?
You are technically correct on one point, this study did not look into broad question of heritability of intelligence. They only looked into specific genes linked to specific traits associated with some aspects of intelligence. From the general body of knowledge we also know that these genes would be heritable.
Since we are nitpicking, you are also incorrect by stating that "the predictive utility of what they have discovered" - they have not performed exhaustive search for all genes that would positively and negatively impact memory and learning, as such it is still only a correlation.
1 Million monkeys at typewriters don't finish writing Shakespeare either!
*** Don't be dull.***
...but we do know that intelligence has a fair bit to do with the physical organization of an individual's brain.
Wouldn't it make sense if that was largely epigenetic and developmental?
Sounds like maybe they put the cart before the horse. "Intelligence," of the kind that can be scored on academic tests, is a combination of raw potential, opportunity and effort. You can have amazing potential for intellect, but never get off the family farm - get "home schooled" and told that the earth is flat and math is a tool of the devil - you will then fail any external metric of "intelligence" that requires you to know and apply facts. Likewise, someone who has barely average potential can, given adequate opportunity and effort, develop the skills and abilities to do well on academic tests or external measures of "intelligence."
"Intelligence" as measured by academic performance would thus not correlate well with raw genetic markers (i.e. raw potential). First they'd need to define what capacity of the person they want to deem "intelligence" e.g. - are we talking logical deductive capacity, ability with mathematical computation, the ability to communicate effectively, problem solving skills - what is "intelligence?" Second, they would need to find some way to test that capacity that isn't commonly understood and used outside the study, so, for example, not asking participants to take a math test because then the opportunity and effort elements interfere with the measure of raw capacity - you'd need a test that challenged the ability to learn and comprehend without falling back on existent structures; this would be very difficult to formulate well, and any test taker could only use that test once. Third, they'd need to look for common physical markers in the developed body / brain for those that demonstrate whatever capacity they've defined as intelligence - e.g. nerve density, size of the brain cavity, etc. Only then can you look for a genetic source for that physical marker.
"Intelligence" isn't height or weight or eye color - it is too subjective a quality to seek out before defining your term very narrowly.
For the most part nature gives us the wetware to form connections. It's the white matter that matters after all. It forms the interconnecting network between the neurons.
So nurture has something to do with it too, so too education.
Gene Expression drives a lot of things and that is not captured when just the DNA is investigated.
My quick read of the headline was little intelligence was found.
Now that is moving the goalposts. But that's okay, I understand the point you're trying to make, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expand to such a search. Just don't expect me to grant you the premise that it's a likely explanation.
They weren't trying to correlate intelligence with genes. They were trying to correlate educational attainment with genes. That is not the same thing. People don't always apply their full intelligence towards school. Also, doing well and going far in school doesn't prove much about one's intelligence. It proves one can remember facts long enough to regurgitate them in a test. I suppose that is a kind of intelligence but there is much more to it than that! I think that having an analytical mind and actually thinking about those facts can get in the way of the study, regurgitate, forget, repeat process and is therefore detrimental to one's grades.
Where did the Neanderthal go? Absorbed. How did our brains evolve over apes? Dietary change from our migration no doubt. Hell maybe the sun altered some DNA passed down through the ages. Let's hope it doesn't reverse the trend. We haven't seen everything the sun is capable of. yet.
Did political correctness trump real science in the study? Or were they just looking in all the wrong places? If autism and Asperger's can be transmitted by genes, then why not intelligence? I believe this study is bunk!
Finds little what?!
They were looking for "academic achievement", not necessarily intelligence, per se.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Perhaps you need the gene to find the gene?
happy trials
Great they did this. Don't know how well the study is designed. But if it is a good design, then maybe they should look for traits that High IQ people do not have.
If it is a bad design, do it again, better.
They just aren't very good at finding things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Start with that bit and then Google the genetic studies in Israel, read the papers and you too will see it is clearly genetic.
At least some of the smartest people in the World think so.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
so what i get from the article.
1) they start by using a measure that's not at all even correlated with what they're interested in.
2) they then completely switch the measure, so then you have two completely unrelated filters on the data - and the data (dna) is very high dimensional, so your final result set is of course going to be miniscule and effectively random. and woe and behold, that's what they got.
3) on top of that they looked at the correlation between the first filter and the second and found woe and behold their method has no chance at all of telling them what they want to know - which we already knew in step 1.
so... uh... do they see what's wrong with their methodology? could it be more obvious? this was botched really badly.
If genes did not matter we would not see a few children born with IQs so low that they can not breath without mechanical aids. I suspect that genetics are less varied when the samples come from a population that is out and about and functioning as the low end of the generic pool is absent for those not housed in institutions. There is also the point that the way each ethnic group behaves has an effect on the unborn in the womb. For example one ethnic group might display social skills or musical skills which imply some genetic selection of values. Another group might display a gift for areas such as chemistry which require a very narrow and deep focus. We simply do not have all of the tools to make good measurements and conclusions yet.
The AT article seems to try to put a spin on it, but the actual abstract sounds quite different:
It's clear from twin studies that IQ has a strong genetic component, about as strong as height: both have a heritability of around 0.8 (on a scale from 0 to 1, with 1 being variability being entirely genetically determined). Here's a bit more info on heritability from Nature: http://www.nature.com/scitable...
Failing to find the genes responsible in this study means nothing since the current SNPs we test for are quite limited. Ultimately, these questions can only be resolved by full genome sequencing of large numbers of people. Until then, we may get lucky in identifying genes in these kinds of studies, but failure to find something means little. And, actually, they did find something interesting.
Academic achievement? You've got to be kidding me. Let's see, there's difference between schools, crooked grading, not so smart students trying harder, cultural upbringing, etc. At least use IQ if not something more direct like the average voltage of a person's nervous system. It's theorized that smart people's nerves operate at a higher voltage.
They're all a bunch of idiots.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
It may not seem like a big deal to anyone and it shouldn't be. this is stuff we already know but racists are still spitting this nonsense out. They're still sucking at the teat of Watson and Shockley as proof that some people are genetically more intelligent than others. Shockley: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... Watson: http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
Just another second banana
...that common sense is scarce!!!
She was born with.
Or maybe it's maybelline.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man#Statistical_correlation_and_heritability
Gould pointed out that if the genetic heritability of IQ were demonstrable within a given racial or ethnic group, it would not explain the causes of IQ differences among the people of a group, or if said IQ differences can be attributed to the environment. For example, the height of a person is genetically determined, but there exist height differences within a given social group that can be attributed to environmental factors (e.g. the quality of nutrition) and to genetic inheritance. The evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, a colleague of Gould’s, is a proponent of this argument in relation to IQ tests. An example of the intellectual confusion about what heritability is and is not, is the statement: "If all environments were to become equal for everyone, heritability would rise to 100 percent because all remaining differences in IQ would necessarily be genetic in origin",[6] which Gould said is misleading, at best, and false, at worst. First, it is very difficult to conceive of a world wherein every man, woman, and child grew up in the same environment, because their spatial and temporal dispersion upon the planet Earth makes it impossible. Second, were people to grow up in the same environment, not every difference would be genetic in origin because of the randomness of molecular and genetic development. Therefore, heritability is not a measure of phenotypic (physiognomy and physique) differences among racial and ethnic groups, but of differences between genotype and phenotype in a given population.
Furthermore, he dismissed the proposition that an IQ score measures the general intelligence (g factor) of a person, because cognitive ability tests (IQ tests) present different types of questions, and the responses tend to form clusters of intellectual acumen. That is, different questions, and the answers to them, yield different scores — which indicate that an IQ test is a combination method of different examinations of different things. As such, Gould proposed that IQ-test proponents assume the existence of "general intelligence" as a discrete quality within the human mind, and thus they analyze the IQ-test data to produce an IQ number that establishes the definitive general intelligence of each man and of each woman. Hence, Gould dismissed the IQ number as an erroneous artifact of the statistical mathematics applied to the raw IQ-test data, especially because psychometric data can be variously analyzed to produce multiple IQ scores.
thank goodness. maybe this biological elitism kick will die out soon. Give us a couple decades of peace anyway.
I was wondering about epigentics myself. If I had points I'd mod the anonymous coward up.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The idiots who conducted the study had a conflict of interest. /humor
So what you're telling me is that a bunch of scientists have scoured our gene pool to find identifiers for the quality of a person that, thus far, the scientific community has yet to decide on a concise qualitative measurement for?
You can read for days on the internet about the problems with IQ, theory of multiple intelligences, et al and still get the gist that we can determine what makes us "smarter" than goats because of obvious physiological traits, but have little to compare us to each other on intelligence.
Personally, I don't know why they expected anything more than these unimpressive results. The biases where ripe for deconstruction.
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
It's pretty clear that intelligence is a heritable meme - a cultural phenomenon, that can be very granular. Yes, you can make anyone, group, class, stupid - or intelligent. It's what drives Social Darwinism.
"So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth. And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If we define intelligence as the ability to adapt faster than genetic evolution can, then it should not heavily rely on genes.
That is does not seem to be genetically just adds to the mystery. But there are other failures: While intelligence can be described by its effects, there is no theory at all how it works. The only existing model (automated theorem proving) is severely limited both by the nature of what it can do (construct mathematical theory) and by its inherently exponential effort which means it will never be able to do in practice hat smart human beings can do routinely. Then there is this little problem that intelligence has only been observed coupled with self-awareness and may also be tied to "free will", another two things that are not understood at all. Granted, most people are not really adept at using what intelligence they have (which routinely is also not that much), but it is still a defining quality for being a human being. It is really surprising that this quality proves intractable time and again.
Now, there is a branch of religious fanatics called "physicalists" that insist everything is just "chemistry" or "physics". These people routinely vastly overestimate what is known scientifically and seem to be completely unable to deal with some rather fundamental things being unknown at this time. All typical characteristics of the religious fanatic. It is rather ironic that there people usually claim to be anti-religion and pro-science, when they have in fact invented their own disconnected-from-reality fantasy. These people usually neither understand the scientific process, nor what is known to science at this time. My take is they are people that sort-of understand that religion is bogus, but actually cannot be without it end hence invented this surrogate.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If you know ANYTHING about biological systems and especial genomics, expecting a "gene for intelligence" is as stupid as "looking for the rivet of flying" in a Boeing 777!! It's idiocy.
These are systems that only achieve the specific trait by means of being a complex ensemble component where no one piece is responsible for much yet all are needed in toto to achieve the trait.
These was demonstrated by the human genome when "1 gene, 1 phenotype" was utterly negated and destroyed as a model. Basically the number of genes discovered was "too small" for that be the primary operating model. That was in 2000. NO ONE with a brain should still be hanging on to that model as default assumption.