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Scanning Embryos For Super-Intelligent Kids Is On the Horizon
An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Hsu, a professor in theoretical physics at Michigan State University, has an article discussing the genetic underpinnings of intelligence, and how our understanding of it will eventually lead to smarter children. Researchers have detected genes that influence cognitive ability, but the effect of any one gene is very small — less than 1 IQ point at best. Genetically modifying such genes is unlikely to happen any time soon, but our ability to analyze an embryo's genome is becoming quick and cheap. As we isolate more and more genes that affect intelligence, this means prospective parents will soon be able to analyze a batch of zygotes and figure out which ones are likely to be the smartest. Hsu says a batch of 10 zygotes will probably have an IQ range of 15 points or more. As our understanding of intelligence genetics grows, that range will only expand. He adds, "The corresponding ethical issues are complex and deserve serious attention in what may be a relatively short interval before these capabilities become a reality."
So pretty soon society will contain 60% autists with serious psychological problems, 20% aspergers and other forms of high functioning autism, and 10% normal human beings? Yep. We must really select on IQ only ...
We can already ID future republican babies at 1 year with like 80% accuracy. That's not a crazy leap to find a partial genetic basis.
And this is true, not made up: it's the easily scared babies. Babies that show a faster, stronger fear response to scary images are more likely to be republicans as adults by a pretty substantial margin.
Sure, the first thought most people have, consciously or subconsciously, is "Would my parents have kept me if they'd had this option?" and the whole concept thus makes us very uncomfortable...
However, looking at humanity as a whole and taking into account that we pretty much switched natural selection off... can we actually afford not to do this?
I mean, billions of sperm and thousands of eggs never get to be a fertilized anything. Of the fertilized eggs, about a third or so actually manage to become a clump of cells trying to become an embryo and of the actual embryos, quite a few never make it any further. Choosing them for looks isn't very ethical, seeing as look are very much dependent on the current fashion, but physical fitness and intelligence aren't quite the same thing. Seeing as most 'potential' human beings never make it, I don't quite share the moral dilemma in choosing the best of the best.
Raising not only humanities average intelligence but much more importantly the lower end seems a phenomenal gain to me.
Gattaca was a cautionary tale, not a blueprint for future eugenics.
It was a cautionary tale to not focus too deeply on the genes one has rather than the potential one has. An invalid can best those with superior genes if they've got no fire, and a perfectly peaceful man can commit a horrible murder if everyone believes him to be perfectly peaceful.
Luckily, Einsteins brain has been sequenced. The results aren't publicly available, but that's not the sort of information that's going to disappear. If we can identify "creativity and genius", then all the better. Just like we can identify intelligence. And having the right set of genes isn't the end-all-be-all of who you are. Even if you were a clone of Einstein, or say, one of his kids, that doesn't guarantee you're going to go on to do great things.
You're right that IQ isn't everything. But GATTACA was most certainly a blueprint for future eugenics, and once it's available I really don't see an alternative.
Quantifying something as dubious as IQ ... and then linking to genes ... makes astrology look respectable.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
When the country is owned and operated by the stupid, does it really help to be smart? If you're full of a room of people where the "leader" says that 1+1 = 3, and everyone else says "yes sir, you are correct". If you're the smart one and say that 1+1 actually equals 2 - in some sense you're actually going to be wrong. We don't respect the thinkers. We elect the charismatic ones with the team mentality that don't have half a brain in their head. Those who get ahead are the ones who actually follow the rules the best - not the ones that buck the trend and show that things aren't necessarily as they seem. I have school aged children, and I can tell you that success in school has to do more with conformity than it does with intelligence. The teachers reward the kids that sit there and take notes (even if they're useless). You get rewarded for doing the problem on the test exactly as the teacher outlined. If you were to solve the problem with some brilliant and novel approach, you might be penalized. If Einstein were alive today, he wouldn't even be recognized. he'd be some bum working on a team just like the rest of us. We've modified the system so that "anyone can do it" - whatever "it" may be - and if you don't follow the procedure, then you're not doing your job well.
My son is classified as 'gifted', has a low 140's IQ; plenty of ambition, and an amazing inability to satiate his curiosity about pretty much everything. I love my son to bits, but there are more than just a few days where I would give anything for him to be a normal everyday shlub like the rest of the kids on the street... Having a high IQ child is not all upside.. There's a lot of downsides as well. At a young age you have someone who can read at an adult level, is bored by books for his age group, but is not emotionally mature enough to read books for his vocabulary and curiosity level. Sitting in a car with the kid is torture... He has an ability to generate interesting questions at a rate faster than he can verbalize them. After about 2 hours, you are mentally drained... On car trips, we limit his questions to one every 5 minutes and you can see him practically exploding, waiting for the clock to change... Even at 5 minute intervals, a 6 hour car trip is torture. In addition to his insatiable curiosity, and need to solve problems, he's also extremely sensitive, both physically and emotionally... A radio that I can hardly hear is too loud for him. He didn't like walking through tall grass due to the prickly feeling of it on his arms or legs... If he feels he has been dealt an injustice, he can jump right to violent anger instead of engaging in some self control.
It sounds like i'm describing someone on the Aspergers scale but he's been tested for that and on the first test, was marginally at the very bottom of the range, and the second test was just outside the range. He's in a school that is tailored towards gifted kids and he's thriving there, both academically and emotionally... He has a ton of friends and is slowly learning how to operate his brain...
Like I say, I love him to bits and so far the rewards probably outweigh the negatives, but if I knew then what I know now, I don't think I'd consciously elect to select for greater intelligence at the Zygot stage.
Gene detection means squat when it comes to intelligence or the positive impact it can have. Intelligence, even in a given area, means nothing without the ability to make use of it in a meaningful way.
My family would likely be ones that have the intelligence gene (there's no way to say that without it sounding like bragging/ego, it's really not meant that way). I believe that based on a number of factors, including the level of participation of extended family members in their respective fields, psycho-educational testing where scores are in the 90th+ percentiles, etc. What that intelligence gene wouldn't show is the impact it can have. Combined with the intelligence in my family comes issues with depression, ADHD, bipolar disorder, failure to recognize/interpret social indicators (partly related to ADHD), isolationist tendencies, etc. Those might be local to our genetics, however, the "absent minded professor", "genius idiot", "troubled genius", etc. stereotype exists for a reason.
For every major success in my family there's a major failure to launch, meaning they have a really hard time getting careers/life going despite what testing suggests. In my family I am one of the latter group. My Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale tests (professionally administered) showed exceptional PRI scores like 98th percentile matrix reasoning & 97th percentile visual working memory and some truly horrible WMI/PSI scores as low as the 9th percentile. For me this has resulted in problems in school, friction in social arenas, bankruptcy, and currently: driving a forklift for a living. I have diagnosed & fixed a code efficiency problem in code that had been under constant optimizations for over 3 years, in a language I've never used, without seeing more than an outline of the original code, in less than an hour. Unfortunately that ability means nothing when working memory doesn't allow me to keep method names/etc in my head. It's akin to having the latest greatest processor with a tiny amount of RAM - the OS takes up most of the RAM and everything that's left is dedicated to the problem at hand - every time something else needs that space something important gets pushed out. Sometimes that's remembering to sleep/eat, others it's any concept of time, and mostly it's the "unimportant" details like method names/attributes/outputs (information that I can look up any time and isn't essential to the abstract core of a thing).
Point is, just because you can identify a gene and manipulate it to get better scores on testing doesn't mean it's going to result in something "better".
I think you are conflating different things. Higher intelligence does not necessarily mean higher risk of Aspergers or other social disorders. Your son could easily have been of average intelligence and still had the other problems you've described. Do you think he would have had it easier by being less smart?
While our society tends to mistreat the very smart, even more it mistreats those with social disorders.
My daughter is also gifted and scored an IQ in the 140s. Also has insatiable curiosity. Certainly she could (and still can) ask far more questions than us and her teachers could ever answer. But, she never has had issues keeping her curiosity under her own control. She quickly learned how to do her own research. But not at the expensive of purely social activities. She certainly pushed our patience and made plenty of mistakes, but never did anything bad. She's a happy teen who is doing very, very well in university (studying electronics engineering and physics). She's been with her current boyfriend (who is equally gifted) for over 2 years. And she's truly beautiful (scouts from fashion agencies regularly try to recruit her for modeling; she politely declines).
Yes, in some respects my daughter is lucky. I don't think that her intelligence was a risk factor in inheriting any social disorders. And she's certainly using it in good ways.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr