
This is for PZ Myers - davidiach
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/04/this-is-for-pz-meyers.html
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dalke
This appears to be a blog argument with little relevance to HN.

I'll summarize it as: Physicist Hsu argues that there are techniques by which
it may be possible to genetically engineer hyper-intelligent humans. Biologist
Myers argues that it's hard to measure intelligence, it's not clear that
intelligence can easily be tweaked through the genes, and other biological
complications, as well as questions about ethics and the observation that
better "sociology and education and social services" is already known to lead
to more intelligent people, so why not focus on that instead of "mad
scientist" research.

Hsu responds by arguing that population genetics is more additive than
biologists - especially evo-devo biologists like Myers - believe, and since
chickens can be bred to be bigger and faster maturing, so can human be bred to
be more intelligent.

Hsu's response depends strongly on 1) being able to measure a correlation
between intelligence and SNPs, and 2) the assumption that these SNPs are
"roughly additive" in benefit. See his preprint at
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421](http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421) . I attempted
to read it, but Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" strongly affect my
understanding of the topic; and Hsu's preprint appears to accept what Gould
calls the two deep fallacies of reification and ranking. I do not not have the
knowledge to evaluate the abstract in its full context. I do think his
discussion of the Flynn effect reveals a severe misunderstanding of history
and people.

Hsu does not address the ethical and moral issues that Myers raised.

