Nah, you'd never get 'lack of experience working with meat'. Med school is all about spending forever cutting up corpses. This is just supplementary to that.
...well, drawing a distinction. I'm technically a bioinformatician, and... actually no, that doesn't work. My classmates can't write for crap either. It's terrifying. Really.
what's the point in doing it if it is already being done better?
I think I have an answer here: doing it differently. One, a certain depth of understanding comes only from having walked the path of a field of knowledge. If has remote potential to be relevant to your work, having that understanding could, some day, give you a novel perspective on your favourite area that lets you make some critical innovation. The proverbial example (albeit not as deep as we're discussing) is Steve Jobs sitting in on typography (or was it calligraphy?) lectures—prior to the Lisa and Mac, no one had taken the idea of WYSIWYG typography on a computer seriously except the grad students he ended up hiring from Xerox... years after those lectures left their mark.
As for the brain rewiring itself, don't worry about it. Biologists usually make the mental abstraction that the sequence encoded in DNA is equivalent to 'nature', and the retrotransposon activity described by the journal article technically violates that assumption, though it still falls short of being passed on (the modifications are only in the brain, not the reproductive cells), and hence can't contribute to 'nature.'
I'm actually a really big Star Trek fan. I know a lot of people who are. Emotionally and conceptually it's extremely powerful, inspiring stuff, but as far as actual science content, it's very thin. It would be better to call it science propaganda: this is how the future could be if we work together on making things right. The actual science fiction is just a backdrop to the speculative view of what the human social world could be if we let go of our social prejudices and focus on the objective of living better lives.
The problem, and I'm getting pretty annoyed that I have to repeat myself, is that most Star Trek novels might as well be fan-fiction in terms of science content. They don't pay well to write, so the only strong authors who write them are usually just getting started in their careers, which means they're limited in what resources they have available to do real research. This is pretty much the same thing for any mass market paperback serial book, although Star Wars novels are generally much worse than the Trek novels.
By the way: just because something's popular doesn't mean it's good. Just look at politics.
I've watched GATTACA several times, incidentally, and I highly recommend it to pretty much anyone interested in the ethics of genetic engineering, but a word of caution before you take it too much to heart: I did a bunch of research on the legal status of what happens in the film, and it was actually made completely illegal in the United States a few years ago, and US courts have a very good track record in favouring the plaintiff in discriminatory hiring cases. Regardless of the icky, complicated ethical reality underlying the situation, it has very little chance of actually coming to pass.
I can't comment on Flowers for Algernon, having little time to read these days, but I'll put CHARLY on my to-watch list. I have heard great things about it, however, and I do respect it.
I want to live on your planet. Every piece of numerical computing code I've ever seen is... well, discouraging. (Then again, most of it is written by biologists.)
Look, dude: Star Trek books are poor science fiction. The people who write them are not generally experts in the themes they explore, and the entire canon has a long and colourful history of requiring consultants to fill in the actual science fiction for them. Even one of the show's writers has admitted this. The claim you made in your original post about superior intelligence necessarily breeding disregard for others is a gross oversimplification contrived for plot convenience. Hatred by and of the smart is a function of social alienation and mutual disrespect, just like any other discrimination.
If you want some more effective inspirational material, try looking for something that isn't anchored to a huge canon. Short story anthologies are really good at this, which is in part why they were the mainstay of the genre for most of its history.
Your behaviour and your preoccupation with credentials strongly suggest that you are emotionally vulnerable. It is probably not a good idea to keep getting worked up about Slashdot comments. No, I don't have additional accounts; most likely you were modded down by someone who thought you had stepped across the line by making a personal attack. I don't think it means much anyway, given that you're posting anonymously and I'd already read the post. I'd call it a waste of a mod point to make an obvious statement.
By the way: having letters after one's name doesn't confer ambition, reasoning skills, or anything in between. It makes for a pretty good cut-off to filter out unmotivated people, but I've met a lot of duds with PhDs. You really shouldn't imply that someone lacks inductive reasoning ability based on output. All that does is make it look like you hate young people.
If you really need to partake in this absurd contest, though, I have the skills you're asking for. I've been programming for over ten years, building CMSes, game engines, virtual machines, and interpreters from scratch. I have worked on some moderately-sized projects (about half a million lines of code) and laid architecture and solved design flaws in similar programs. Two years ago I designed, built, and exhaustively documented a toolkit of genetic components for teaching and enabling chemical engineers to genetically alter a species that normally requires a graduate degree in biology to understand, and presented that work at MIT. Today, I get more job offers than I know what to do with. I was accepted into the most prestigious graduate school in Canada alongside applicants from Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford as one of their strongest candidates.
But I didn't feel the need to wave all of that around, because intelligent, well-meaning people, no matter the level of age, education, or experience, let facts speak for themselves, and they respect others by default. I don't hate or disdain you, APK, I just think there's better reading material out there.
I haven't! The NY Times review is pretty gripping, though, and it sounds like it has a lot of great anecdotes buried in it. I'll see if I can pick it up some time.
Generally I try to avoid using the word 'environment' in these sorts of discussions, because it often brings to mind images of a static forest or workplace or something—I prefer 'experience,' since that can also encompass personal revelations. Undoubtedly your "genes * environment" formula is what I'd generally endorse. Genetic factors will always necessarily impact human intelligence; as a trivial proof of this, consider that the gene HAR1F is one of the major differences between humans and chimpanzees, and is expressed in the brain. Hereditary mental disorders also attest to this.
That being said, it's almost certain that because of assortative mating, at least some of our expectations about intelligence being tied directly to the influence of genes is rubbish; people in the dating pool segregate themselves according to intelligence much like they segregate themselves according to income (and possibly with some correlation), so right there you have many confounding factors about approaches to child-rearing, social environment, and so on. Go back to the middle ages, or even just the beginning of the century (all of the participants in this study were born in the UK or Norway in the 20s and 30s—nice work, guys) and the meaningless correlation is even more prominent. Wikipedia is quick to provide a citation for 'IQ scores have been shown to be associated with [...] parental social status'.
Sometimes I feel like bioinformatics is a really unintelligent field for this very reason: just as their biologist mentors once looked for a single gene that could explain everything about a chemical pathway, we now look for a set of genes that can explain everything about human behaviour. It's staggeringly irresponsible and a colossal waste of money, especially in the hands of behavioural psychologists.
...anyway.
Too little emphasis is placed on personal drive, ambition, and desire, and I'm happy to hear that Shenk focused on this. I found it a little shocking that the Times reviewer felt it was necessary to point out that many people lack the ability to motivate themselves to this extent. I think the major cause of this shortage of motivation might be a consequence of over-socialization in childhood: if you never have to think for yourself, it's going to be harder to learn how. Mob mentality seems like an easy enough scapegoat.
Another bit that's recently been ruffling things up is the discovery that the genome in brain cells is unstable. Were Shenk's book a couple of years newer, it undoubtedly would have mentioned this, at least in passing. In a strange way (that cheats the semantics of the question) the 'nature' of the brain itself may very well be able to change due to 'nurture.' The changes, however, can't be passed on, so it's not really the same thing.
I have no interest in facilitating an argument from authority. Facts speak for themselves, no matter who utters them or what they have done.
It's true that science fiction has a long history of important contributions to inspiring scientists in many fields. However, Star Trek novels are not the best example of this.
I don't really want to get into it now, but your understanding of history and your sources are utter rubbish. Here's a less imaginary perspective on Lebensborn. In short, the German understanding of biology in the 40s was too primitive to do anything more than selective breeding, and they never implemented selection for positive traits on a wide scale.
However, this is not the time or the place for such a discussion. If you want to talk about this further, I'd be happy to entertain you the next time I do a biology Q&A.
To be thorough, I said heavily, not exclusively or even predominantly—although I admit I'm biased toward nurture having a greater impact than nature. I'd argue that there are tons of examples already available to us through animal studies that show a sufficiently non-stimulating environment can destroy or at least severely delay a mind's potential for self-awareness and cognition, such as Harlow's experiments, what we see in animals that are kept in factory farms, and studies where primates and parrots have been taught language.
In short, if you never have to solve problems, you'll never be able to, regardless of your genetic potential; all genes can do is make improvement more efficient. I would argue that the impact this has on displayed intelligence is so great that no study of a natural human population could ever be controlled properly. (I also have a few specific problems with this study, if it helps any.)
It is my express promise to you that no scientifically significant remark has ever started with a link to an article on Memory Beta.
For the record, Mengele mostly just sewed people together, froze them, and infected them with diseases to test treatments. Unethical as a doctor, sure, but fairly small-time on the evil genius scale. He wasn't even the highest-ranking doctor at the camp.
(Remember, kids: you're not a bioinformatician unless you spend millions of dollars making perfectly sound inferences based from unverified premises using a score that no one understands.)
Honestly, that particular study does not convince me; do you have any others? All of the populations used in that one were from regions with very low ethnic diversity, in a society and time that didn't have very high class mobility. There are so many confounding factors that I'm actually compelled to pull out "correlation != causation" in this case.
I don't think you're parsing cause and effect very well. One, the 'dumb jock' stereotype only exists in the first place because of a frustration with intellectual inferiority. Remove that and they have no incentive to stuff you into lockers: they'd be fundamentally different people after such tinkering. Two, intelligence is heavily an acquired skill anyway; people who grow up outside of an effective social circle will always be better at problem-solving because their situation has forced them to learn how to be. If anything, this will be harder to achieve in the future, as the plethora of new communication technologies leave children with few excuses for avoiding contact with their peers.
Athletics is also still a personal choice, requiring a pretty deep motivation to facilitate. You can't really just decide to take off your pocket protector at age forty and run a marathon, after all. That demands a great deal of training over an extended period of time.
True as ever! I wonder how many more messy high-profile cases Java will cause before it dies... or if Oracle's schmoozing against Google might end up decimating their platform in industry, thereby preventing such cases.
That doesn't account for irregular population distribution, though. The population is not evenly distributed by age; this shows very clearly that the population has humps around the sixties (baby boomers), the forties (baby boomer echo), and teenagers (another echo), with people above 65 or so being both poorly represented and yet not evenly distributed. I don't think it's likely that ten percent of the population has died in the last ten years.
At any rate, a conflicting survey suggests that only 23% of Swedes believed in the supernatural in 2005.
I'm not an expert in human statistics, but I'm pretty sure a loss of 10% of the population in eight years exceeds the die-off rate for most Western European countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Who says it was after 20 comments? None of them appear to have RTFA. The article may never have existed!
Nah, you'd never get 'lack of experience working with meat'. Med school is all about spending forever cutting up corpses. This is just supplementary to that.
It brings me great joy to know that the first (legitimate) comment hit on exactly what I was thinking. Is it water on the knee?!
...well, drawing a distinction. I'm technically a bioinformatician, and... actually no, that doesn't work. My classmates can't write for crap either. It's terrifying. Really.
what's the point in doing it if it is already being done better?
I think I have an answer here: doing it differently. One, a certain depth of understanding comes only from having walked the path of a field of knowledge. If has remote potential to be relevant to your work, having that understanding could, some day, give you a novel perspective on your favourite area that lets you make some critical innovation. The proverbial example (albeit not as deep as we're discussing) is Steve Jobs sitting in on typography (or was it calligraphy?) lectures—prior to the Lisa and Mac, no one had taken the idea of WYSIWYG typography on a computer seriously except the grad students he ended up hiring from Xerox... years after those lectures left their mark.
As for the brain rewiring itself, don't worry about it. Biologists usually make the mental abstraction that the sequence encoded in DNA is equivalent to 'nature', and the retrotransposon activity described by the journal article technically violates that assumption, though it still falls short of being passed on (the modifications are only in the brain, not the reproductive cells), and hence can't contribute to 'nature.'
I'm actually a really big Star Trek fan. I know a lot of people who are. Emotionally and conceptually it's extremely powerful, inspiring stuff, but as far as actual science content, it's very thin. It would be better to call it science propaganda: this is how the future could be if we work together on making things right. The actual science fiction is just a backdrop to the speculative view of what the human social world could be if we let go of our social prejudices and focus on the objective of living better lives.
The problem, and I'm getting pretty annoyed that I have to repeat myself, is that most Star Trek novels might as well be fan-fiction in terms of science content. They don't pay well to write, so the only strong authors who write them are usually just getting started in their careers, which means they're limited in what resources they have available to do real research. This is pretty much the same thing for any mass market paperback serial book, although Star Wars novels are generally much worse than the Trek novels.
By the way: just because something's popular doesn't mean it's good. Just look at politics.
I've watched GATTACA several times, incidentally, and I highly recommend it to pretty much anyone interested in the ethics of genetic engineering, but a word of caution before you take it too much to heart: I did a bunch of research on the legal status of what happens in the film, and it was actually made completely illegal in the United States a few years ago, and US courts have a very good track record in favouring the plaintiff in discriminatory hiring cases. Regardless of the icky, complicated ethical reality underlying the situation, it has very little chance of actually coming to pass.
I can't comment on Flowers for Algernon, having little time to read these days, but I'll put CHARLY on my to-watch list. I have heard great things about it, however, and I do respect it.
That joke cuts too close to home for me to outright laugh, but it's painfully true. Sometimes I don't think they can even plan paragraphs...
I want to live on your planet. Every piece of numerical computing code I've ever seen is... well, discouraging. (Then again, most of it is written by biologists.)
You're funny. Both of these depend largely on the programmer writing the code.
You're funny. Maintainable, readable, etc. code is mutually exclusive with numerical computing.
Look, dude: Star Trek books are poor science fiction. The people who write them are not generally experts in the themes they explore, and the entire canon has a long and colourful history of requiring consultants to fill in the actual science fiction for them. Even one of the show's writers has admitted this. The claim you made in your original post about superior intelligence necessarily breeding disregard for others is a gross oversimplification contrived for plot convenience. Hatred by and of the smart is a function of social alienation and mutual disrespect, just like any other discrimination.
If you want some more effective inspirational material, try looking for something that isn't anchored to a huge canon. Short story anthologies are really good at this, which is in part why they were the mainstay of the genre for most of its history.
Your behaviour and your preoccupation with credentials strongly suggest that you are emotionally vulnerable. It is probably not a good idea to keep getting worked up about Slashdot comments. No, I don't have additional accounts; most likely you were modded down by someone who thought you had stepped across the line by making a personal attack. I don't think it means much anyway, given that you're posting anonymously and I'd already read the post. I'd call it a waste of a mod point to make an obvious statement.
By the way: having letters after one's name doesn't confer ambition, reasoning skills, or anything in between. It makes for a pretty good cut-off to filter out unmotivated people, but I've met a lot of duds with PhDs. You really shouldn't imply that someone lacks inductive reasoning ability based on output. All that does is make it look like you hate young people.
If you really need to partake in this absurd contest, though, I have the skills you're asking for. I've been programming for over ten years, building CMSes, game engines, virtual machines, and interpreters from scratch. I have worked on some moderately-sized projects (about half a million lines of code) and laid architecture and solved design flaws in similar programs. Two years ago I designed, built, and exhaustively documented a toolkit of genetic components for teaching and enabling chemical engineers to genetically alter a species that normally requires a graduate degree in biology to understand, and presented that work at MIT. Today, I get more job offers than I know what to do with. I was accepted into the most prestigious graduate school in Canada alongside applicants from Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford as one of their strongest candidates.
But I didn't feel the need to wave all of that around, because intelligent, well-meaning people, no matter the level of age, education, or experience, let facts speak for themselves, and they respect others by default. I don't hate or disdain you, APK, I just think there's better reading material out there.
I haven't! The NY Times review is pretty gripping, though, and it sounds like it has a lot of great anecdotes buried in it. I'll see if I can pick it up some time.
Generally I try to avoid using the word 'environment' in these sorts of discussions, because it often brings to mind images of a static forest or workplace or something—I prefer 'experience,' since that can also encompass personal revelations. Undoubtedly your "genes * environment" formula is what I'd generally endorse. Genetic factors will always necessarily impact human intelligence; as a trivial proof of this, consider that the gene HAR1F is one of the major differences between humans and chimpanzees, and is expressed in the brain. Hereditary mental disorders also attest to this.
That being said, it's almost certain that because of assortative mating, at least some of our expectations about intelligence being tied directly to the influence of genes is rubbish; people in the dating pool segregate themselves according to intelligence much like they segregate themselves according to income (and possibly with some correlation), so right there you have many confounding factors about approaches to child-rearing, social environment, and so on. Go back to the middle ages, or even just the beginning of the century (all of the participants in this study were born in the UK or Norway in the 20s and 30s—nice work, guys) and the meaningless correlation is even more prominent. Wikipedia is quick to provide a citation for 'IQ scores have been shown to be associated with [...] parental social status'.
Sometimes I feel like bioinformatics is a really unintelligent field for this very reason: just as their biologist mentors once looked for a single gene that could explain everything about a chemical pathway, we now look for a set of genes that can explain everything about human behaviour. It's staggeringly irresponsible and a colossal waste of money, especially in the hands of behavioural psychologists.
...anyway.
Too little emphasis is placed on personal drive, ambition, and desire, and I'm happy to hear that Shenk focused on this. I found it a little shocking that the Times reviewer felt it was necessary to point out that many people lack the ability to motivate themselves to this extent. I think the major cause of this shortage of motivation might be a consequence of over-socialization in childhood: if you never have to think for yourself, it's going to be harder to learn how. Mob mentality seems like an easy enough scapegoat.
Another bit that's recently been ruffling things up is the discovery that the genome in brain cells is unstable. Were Shenk's book a couple of years newer, it undoubtedly would have mentioned this, at least in passing. In a strange way (that cheats the semantics of the question) the 'nature' of the brain itself may very well be able to change due to 'nurture.' The changes, however, can't be passed on, so it's not really the same thing.
I have no interest in facilitating an argument from authority. Facts speak for themselves, no matter who utters them or what they have done.
It's true that science fiction has a long history of important contributions to inspiring scientists in many fields. However, Star Trek novels are not the best example of this.
I don't really want to get into it now, but your understanding of history and your sources are utter rubbish. Here's a less imaginary perspective on Lebensborn. In short, the German understanding of biology in the 40s was too primitive to do anything more than selective breeding, and they never implemented selection for positive traits on a wide scale.
However, this is not the time or the place for such a discussion. If you want to talk about this further, I'd be happy to entertain you the next time I do a biology Q&A.
To be thorough, I said heavily, not exclusively or even predominantly—although I admit I'm biased toward nurture having a greater impact than nature. I'd argue that there are tons of examples already available to us through animal studies that show a sufficiently non-stimulating environment can destroy or at least severely delay a mind's potential for self-awareness and cognition, such as Harlow's experiments, what we see in animals that are kept in factory farms, and studies where primates and parrots have been taught language.
In short, if you never have to solve problems, you'll never be able to, regardless of your genetic potential; all genes can do is make improvement more efficient. I would argue that the impact this has on displayed intelligence is so great that no study of a natural human population could ever be controlled properly. (I also have a few specific problems with this study, if it helps any.)
Pretty sure they're generally disinclined to pay for health services, too.
Hey, um... the intelligence quotient scale is non-linear. What does this research mean, again?
It is my express promise to you that no scientifically significant remark has ever started with a link to an article on Memory Beta.
For the record, Mengele mostly just sewed people together, froze them, and infected them with diseases to test treatments. Unethical as a doctor, sure, but fairly small-time on the evil genius scale. He wasn't even the highest-ranking doctor at the camp.
Y'know, they don't make that joke in countries that have actually gotten off their butts and given it a female leader a try.
(Remember, kids: you're not a bioinformatician unless you spend millions of dollars making perfectly sound inferences based from unverified premises using a score that no one understands.)
Honestly, that particular study does not convince me; do you have any others? All of the populations used in that one were from regions with very low ethnic diversity, in a society and time that didn't have very high class mobility. There are so many confounding factors that I'm actually compelled to pull out "correlation != causation" in this case.
I don't think you're parsing cause and effect very well. One, the 'dumb jock' stereotype only exists in the first place because of a frustration with intellectual inferiority. Remove that and they have no incentive to stuff you into lockers: they'd be fundamentally different people after such tinkering. Two, intelligence is heavily an acquired skill anyway; people who grow up outside of an effective social circle will always be better at problem-solving because their situation has forced them to learn how to be. If anything, this will be harder to achieve in the future, as the plethora of new communication technologies leave children with few excuses for avoiding contact with their peers.
Athletics is also still a personal choice, requiring a pretty deep motivation to facilitate. You can't really just decide to take off your pocket protector at age forty and run a marathon, after all. That demands a great deal of training over an extended period of time.
I think that if Oracle were to miraculously force Google to stop using Java entirely in Android, we'd see a few chilling effects.
True as ever! I wonder how many more messy high-profile cases Java will cause before it dies... or if Oracle's schmoozing against Google might end up decimating their platform in industry, thereby preventing such cases.
That doesn't account for irregular population distribution, though. The population is not evenly distributed by age; this shows very clearly that the population has humps around the sixties (baby boomers), the forties (baby boomer echo), and teenagers (another echo), with people above 65 or so being both poorly represented and yet not evenly distributed. I don't think it's likely that ten percent of the population has died in the last ten years.
At any rate, a conflicting survey suggests that only 23% of Swedes believed in the supernatural in 2005.
I'm not an expert in human statistics, but I'm pretty sure a loss of 10% of the population in eight years exceeds the die-off rate for most Western European countries.