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Researchers Find Dozens of Genes Associated With Measures of Intelligence (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We don't know a lot about the biological basis of our mental abilities -- we can't even consistently agree on how best to test them -- but a few things seem clear. One is that performance on a number of standardized tests that purport to measure intelligence tends to correlate with outcomes we'd associate with intelligence, like educational achievement. A second is that this performance seems to have a large genetic component. But initial studies clearly indicated that the effect of any individual gene on intelligence is small. As a result, the first genetics studies found very little, since you needed to look at a large number of people in order to see these small effects. Now, a new study has combined much of the previous work and has turned up 40 new genetic regions associated with intelligence test scores. But again, the effect of any individual gene is pretty minor. The team behind the new work took advantage of open data to pull together information from 13 different studies, which cumulatively looked through the genomes of over 78,000 individuals. While those individuals had been given a variety of tests, the authors focused on measures of general intelligence or fluid intelligence (the two seem to measure similar things). The genomes of these individuals had been scanned for single base pair differences, allowing the authors to look for correlations between regions of the genome and test scores. Two separate analyses were done. The first simply looked at each base difference individually. That turned up 336 individual bases, which clustered into 22 different genes. Half of these had not been associated with intelligence previously. To provide a separate validation of these results, the authors did a similar analysis with educational achievement. They found that nearly all of the sites they identified also correlated with that. In a second analysis, the authors tracked base differences that cluster in a single gene. Since there are more markers for each gene, this tends to be a more sensitive way of looking for effects. And in fact, it produced 47 genes associated with the intelligence test scores. Seventeen of those had been identified in the earlier analysis, which brought the total genes identified to 52, only 12 of which had been previously associated with intelligence test scores.
When I was born, I was the poster child for mongolism (the proper term in the 1970's) and promptly mentally declared retarded to because I had a speech impediment in kindergarten. You could say I was slow on the uptake. I also had an undiagnosed hearing loss in one ear that wasn't diagnosed until much later. Each year I had the annual evaluation. Each time I scored on the genius side of the scale. Each time the tester noted it was statistical fluke and reconfirmed that I was mentally retarded. That the school got extra funding for having a well behaved idiot in Special Ed classes wasn't a factor. I graduated the eighth grade with a college-level reading comprehension and fifth grade skills in everything else. School officials couldn't explain how that happened and they were also disturbed that my skinny parents had a fat kid. A half-dozen blood tests revealed nothing. No one knows how genes played a role in my intelligence.
statistical evidence that certain ethnic groups display on average higher intelligence than others (such as whites as compared to blacks).
IQ is not the same as intelligence, although it is almost certainly highly correlated.
Whites are not on top. Both Jews and East Asians score higher on average.
In America, blacks have mean IQ scores about 0.7 SD, or about 10 points, lower than whites.
Black children have, on average, twice the blood lead levels of white children.
The first large scale IQ testing in America was of recruits during the First World War, in 1917.
In those 1917 tests, the average score was 15 points below today's average.
A century ago, there was a 15 point gap in IQ scores between Protestant and Catholics in Ireland.
Today there is no gap.
So is the "IQ gap" caused by genetics? Maybe, but similar gaps in the past were not.
It's very possible. The effect found by each of these genes was very small, a fraction of an IQ point. At that small size, I would doubt that I had accounted for all confounding variables. Something as simple as hair color might be a confounding factor, and height certainly would be.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
ALL the genes put together had a total of 5% impact on Intelligence. That means an IQ of 105 vs 100. That is a minor effect.
Worst of all, minor effects like this, are typical of false positives. That is, most scientific tests use a significance threshold of no more than 4%, which is one in 25. That means if you test 25 different random alcoholic drinks, one of them, by random chance, will be shown to cause a minor increase in intelligence. This would be a false positive.)
And they did over 300 tests. So if they are using a 4% significance, that would be 4*3= 12 false positives.
This article looks like the worst kind of fake science news. You know, the kind that a President would quote (Pick Trump/Obama, whichever your personal bias thinks would do that).
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
That doesn't seem like a good enough reason to put the kibosh on the study of intelligence. The racial angle is weak. Everyone that matters knows racial differences are small. But what we have to gain by learning about intelligence is huge. We can learn about learning disorders. We can try to ameliorate the damage of dementia. Granted that this also opens up a can of worms regarding what interventions are ethical, but that's not a racial issue.
The fact that something could--if you bend over backwards by ignoring the actual numbers--be used to promote racism shouldn't be a reason not to discuss it candidly when the context is bettering everybody's lives.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
IQ test is an aggregate, a lot of questions testing different aspects of logical thinking and pattern spotting. Trying to find a single gene for IQ is a bit like trying to find which single screw makes a car engine work.
Instead, try correlating the genes against results from distinct questions from the IQ test. That way you can get genes responsible for specific aspects of IQ. Otherwise... found any singular gene that makes people perform well at chess-boxing?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Apparently iodine is the reason people today are marginally more intelligent than the were before.
http://blogs.discovermagazine....
That doesn't mean that genetics doesn't make a difference.
I sometimes think it would be more useful to discover the genes for common sense because I know quite a few highly-intelligent people who could do with having a bit more of it.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
However showing that there are dozen of genes. It would make sense racial factors would be a minor aspect. Also many of our racial distinctions have less to do about genetics and more about culture.
Intelligence is complex, while we may measure it in terms of IQ but there are many variations of it and a lot of it is also based environment.
You could have genes that would make you the strongest person in the world, but you never exercised so they are genetically inferior people who are stronger than you because they maximize their potential while you didn't. The same with intelagance you can have the won the genetic lottery in terms of intelligence. But you may not have worked it out, so if you take that IQ test your score wouldn't reflect your full potential.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.