
Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence - ilamont
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/science/52-genes-human-intelligence.html?mabReward=CTM4&recp=6&_r=0
======
sbierwagen
For the curious, this is known as a Genome-wide association study. There's
been something of an explosion of these studies done, as cheap genotyping has
given us datasets big enough to detect small effects. Wikipedia has an
(excruciatingly technical) (edit: not really) overview here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-
wide_association_study](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-
wide_association_study)

Wikipedia has a fun list of effect sizes here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-
wide_complex_trait_anal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-
wide_complex_trait_analysis#Traits)

Unsurprisingly, height is 0.40-0.60 heritable, but did you know that "nostril
area" is 0.657 heritable, while cilantro tasting is only 0.087?

The NYT article seems to imply this is the first study of its kind to be done,
which is absolutely not the case. The GCTA article linked above cites 18
GWASes on general intelligence, starting in 2011. The abstract on the Nature
article focuses on the 15 _new_ SNPs found that affect intelligence, in
addition to the 336 already known. It's an incremental advance, not a stunning
breakthrough.

HN user gwern has covered this field extensively. Shouldn't be surprised to
see him show up in this thread and gently correct some of the confused
thinking in the light gray comments.

~~~
Snackchez
Could you help explain how to interpret the list of effect sizes? I'm having
trouble understanding what the numbers mean. For example, black hair is 0.00
heritable. Does that mean one cannot inherit black hair? (Is this black in the
sense of asiatic hair?)

~~~
bagacrap
> However, if the GCTA estimate was ~0%, then that would imply one of three
> things: a) there is no genetic contribution, b) the genetic contribution is
> entirely in the form of genetic variants not included, or c) the genetic
> contribution is entirely in the form of non-additive effects such as
> epistasis/dominance

------
cperciva
_The genetic variants that raise intelligence also tend to pop up more
frequently in people who have never smoked. Some of them also are found more
often in people who take up smoking but quit successfully._

The more we look, the more we're likely to find confounding genes like this.
Sure, it might be that those genes directly raise intelligence... but it might
also be that those genes make the parents less likely to smoke, and the
measured difference in intellect is entirely due to exposure to parental
smoking.

If there's a gene for "less likely to drop babies on their heads", it will
probably show up as being correlated with higher intellect -- even if it has
no direct effect on intellect and instead acts solely though yielding improved
parenting.

~~~
sbierwagen
I feel like this is a distinction without a difference. We don't care about
the anatomical structure of the brain, we care _about_ measured intelligence,
which correlates well with performance on a bunch of important things. You can
hypothesize a gene that doubles your IQ, but also deletes your spinal cord,
making it impossible to interact with the outside world/take IQ tests. Sure,
your IQ is higher, but is it _more useful?_

If your goal is to select for greater intelligence, then genes which prevent
the carrier from smoking and dropping their offspring will increase
intelligence, which is the point!

~~~
Sharlin
I don't think selection by Mendelian breeding is very relevant here. Direct
autosomal genetic engineering is. Your designer baby is not going to get an
intelligence boost if the gene you modify actually has an indirect confounding
effect via a parent's phenotype.

~~~
adrianN
If we were to embrace genetic engineering as a society, such changes would
still be beneficial, it would just take another generation for the effects to
become visible.

------
tokenadult
"But all of these genes together account for just a small percentage of the
variation in intelligence test scores, the researchers found; each variant
raises or lowers I.Q. by only a small fraction of a point.

'It means there’s a long way to go, and there are going to be a lot of other
genes that are going to be important,' Dr. Posthuma said."

Indeed. This result is fully predictable from the several previous GWAS
studies on IQ that have been done. Any gene that influences IQ in the general
population has at most a small effect, and the variance among human
individuals in IQ is the result of interaction of hundreds of genes and the
environment the individual lives in.

Here's a link to a lot of good writings by one of the leading researchers on
human behavior genetics, for more details. I especially like one particular
article I'll link just below the link to his collected writings.

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm)

Turkheimer, E. (2000). Three laws of behavior genetics and what they mean.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 160-164.

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/\(45\)%20Turkheimer%20\(2000\).pdf)

~~~
tptacek
More of Turkheimer's writing here, recently, in Vox:

[https://www.vox.com/the-big-
idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-...](https://www.vox.com/the-big-
idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech)

I assume the authors (all three of them professors of some renown) did _not_
write this headline, because the piece is far better, more careful, and more
comprehensive than the title would suggest (I'm no fan of Murray but this is
not a typical Vox hot-take).

~~~
maroonblazer
As a response to the podcast the Vox piece is slipshod. One reads the article
wondering if they even bothered to listen to the podcast.

Here's a good takedown of the Vox article:
[https://medium.com/@houstoneuler/the-cherry-picked-
science-i...](https://medium.com/@houstoneuler/the-cherry-picked-science-in-
voxs-charles-murray-article-bd534a9c4476)

~~~
tptacek
This rebuttal is pretty unimpressive:

* It doesn't refute the scientific claims of the authors, but rather takes them to task for disagreeing with points Murray didn't make --- that's fair rhetorically, but fails to address the central thesis of the Vox piece, which is that popular race/IQ ideas are largely junk science.

* It asserts the authority of Charles Murray (for instance, citing him as having written an article rebutting one of Turkheimer's findings), _despite Murray not being an expert on the subject_ \--- his scientist coauthor on The Bell Curve is deceased. At one point, in this very takedown, its author even cites Murray observing that he doesn't understand the science.

* It attempts to dismiss the authors by citing James Flynn's critique of black culture, which is ironic on two levels: first, _that itself_ is an argument that Turkheimer and Nisbett didn't make, so the pot is complaining about the kettle, and second because Nisbett himself has gotten into some trouble for making similar critiques of black culture. Memetics isn't genetics.

* It makes seemingly well-grounded arguments about the statistical validity of interventions Turkheimer talked about which, on a second reading, dissipate into handwaving --- what we're left with is a Medium blogger's conjecture against a working scientist's published results.

Turkheimer and Nisbett are at pains to point out that their views aren't
uniformly shared by everyone in the field. Rather, they take Murray (and, by
implication, Sam Harris) to task for summarizing a contentious scientific
debate as if it were settled, but for hysteria in leftist academia. The Vox
piece is far more persuasive and credible in this argument than the "takedown"
you cite is in its own argument.

~~~
HoustonEuler
1) Re-read Vox piece again, and you will see that aside from the 100%
objectively false claim that "no self-respecting statistical geneticist would
undertake a study based only on self-identified racial category as a proxy for
genetic ancestry measured from DNA", the entire basis of their objection to
group differences in IQ are the 5 facts that I spent most of the article
responding to.

2) Never said Murray was an authority. I wrote he rebutted _Dickens and Flynn_
on the non-narrowing of the gap in the last 25 years, which is correct,
regardless of whether he's an "authority." Also, I didn't say he "doesn't
understand the science," I said he doesn't understand the details of the
mathematical techniques in a paper regarding the nature of the Flynn effect.
This seems unimportant because Wicherts's conclusion -- that the Flynn effect
gains have a different structure than the B-W IQ gap -- is uncontroversial.

3) Not really. I was citing Flynn for making the same point as Wicherts's
above re: structure of FE gains, a demonstration that it's not just Wicherts's
theory. I quoted him saying un-PC things about black culture just to
demonstrate that in order to rebut Murray's unPC claims many scientists come
up with different unPC hypotheses.

4) Talk about "handwaving": it would be helpful for you to elaborate what
arguments you think actually "dissipate" on a second reading but I doubt you
will.

And I would care more about your ad-hominem attack were it not for the
Rindermann survey. Which brings me to my final point: you have it completely
backwards when you say "Turkheimer and Nisbett are at pains to point out that
their views aren't uniformly shared by everyone in the field. Rather, they
take Murray (and, by implication, Sam Harris) to task for summarizing a
contentious scientific debate as if it were settled." The scientists at Vox
rather explicitly say that no credible scientists attribute some group IQ
differences to genetics, while the survey I cite in the Medium article is
convincing that is an inaccurate assessment of the views of researchers in
this field. Moreover it's pretty clear that Harris does not believe the
science is settled, and Murray also thinks that we should wait for direct DNA
evidence to say that it's settled.

------
theprop
The most impactful technology that will ever exist is "engineering human
beings". This becomes possible as we identify genes for things like
intelligence and with CRISPR.

Intelligence is of course huge. Trustworthiness is huge. Probably 20% of GDP
is related to trust whether it's paying for security, police, the military,
$100s of billions of excess health care spending from over-billing and over-
testing.

I think engineered human super-intelligence will have inestimably more impact
than AI...but it enables AI because in a world of a few billion Leonardos,
everyone will have figured out ways to solve repetitive work.

~~~
Joeri
We don't need smarter people, we need better ethics. Many of the monsters from
history were highly intelligent. Many of the world's problems have ready
solutions which are not applied because people are being clever. Think of
intelligence as a force multiplier, if you apply it to a bad person they
become a terrible person. It would be disastrous to start genetic engineering
for intelligence prior to tackling the ethics problem.

The biggest issue with better ethics is that we can't define them, so we
couldn't optimize for them. Nobody agrees on what a good person is because
nobody agrees on the meaning of good. But meanwhile the real world outcomes
are decidedly not good.

~~~
mr_overalls
This is a false choice. Society would almost certainly benefit from a larger
proportion of highly intelligent people, and doubly so if they were also
engineered with a genetic predisposition toward cooperation and prosocial
behavior.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Almost certainly not. That gives us 'politically correct police states'. Put
everybody in a rubber room and make sure they are nice to one another. A
recipe for the downfall of society, collapse of the economy, end of social
evolution.

Its complicated to nation-build. Any that work now, do so because of
competition and selection. Remove that with 'intelligent design' and all
adaptation stops. Fitness plummets.

~~~
mr_overalls
I suppose the devil is in the details. I'm not thinking of something like the
genetically engineered humans of Brave New World, where docility is hard-wired
into the lower classes.

I'm thinking more along the lines of attenuating certain (hypothetical)
genetic contributors to antisocial personality disorder, violent psychosis,
etc.

Not engineering docile perfection, just less of the obviously really bad
stuff.

Edit: I do share your concerns about stopping Darwinian selection, though.
Choosing local optima for cooperation might come back to bite us in the coming
TransNeptunian War of 2217, e.g., when psychopathic, ruthless strategy is all
that saves the human race from the conflict of first alien contact.

~~~
ansible
_...in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217..._

If we don't achieve a technological singularity in the next couple decades, I
doubt that an alien invasion will be a worry a couple centuries from now. I
say this because of impending ecological collapse, which will end human
civilization as we know it... if not humanity in total.

And I'll save for another time a rant about how expensive it is for anything
to cross interstellar distances. At most we'll see a self-replicating probe
that tries to subsume all matter in the solar system, the "invaders" won't
physically travel here.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
...unless the probes reconstitute them upon arrival?

~~~
ansible
That could happen, but I judge it more likely they'd just live as software
instead of physically instantiating into something you'd see on a SF TV show.

And even as software, I predict that new colonists would likely arrive by
communications laser, well after the local infrastructure has been built. Why
bother coming over during the boring building phase?

------
rdl
I hope nothing bad happens to the scientists for pursuing this line of
inquiry. Charles Murray basically got excommunicated for work in the general
area of intelligence and populations; this is different, but could be viewed
as worse by some people too.

~~~
Houshalter
James Watson lost his job just for making an offhanded remark about this
subject. He had to sell his nobel prize to stay afloat. And still gets a ton
of shit for it whenever his name comes up. Even on this website. It's
dangerous to have opinions about this.

~~~
alextheparrot
Come now, Watson, when selling his medal, said he wanted to buy a painting and
donate some of the money to charity [0], saying he needed it to stay afloat is
disengenuous. If you can find support for Watson's statements, which he
apologized for, regarding Africa's progress being correlated largely to their
lower intelligence [1], I would love to explore it more.

[0] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11261872/James-
Watso...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11261872/James-Watson-
selling-Nobel-prize-because-no-one-wants-to-admit-I-exist.html)

[1] [http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2007/10/watson-loses-cold-
spr...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2007/10/watson-loses-cold-spring-
harbor-post)

~~~
Houshalter
I read that he said he was selling it because of his severely diminished
income, which is true. But I guess he had enough saved and it was just for
charity.

------
crusso
_Their combined influence is minuscule, the researchers said_ ...

Keep in mind that all they were likely doing was correlating the presence of
certain genes with intelligence.

They couldn't begin to start determining combinations of those genes 50.

It will certainly be the case that the combination of the genes matters. What
if gene A gives you a little boost by itself and gene B gives you a little
boost by itself, but genes A & B together actually lower your IQ?

With just 50 genes (assuming no mutual exclusions), you'd have 1.1258999e+15
different combinations of them.

Then as the article mentions, they think that there may be many more
intelligence genes to find.

~~~
rjeli
> What if gene A gives you a little boost by itself and gene B gives you a
> little boost by itself, but genes A & B together actually lower your IQ?

Seems like a good application for NNs?

~~~
nwah1
Unless you could produce identical clones that only differed in terms of the
relevant genes in question, and raised them in very similar environments, then
neural nets will have extreme difficulty factoring out all the confounding
variables. Even with large sample sets, given all rarity of the genetic
combinations etc.

Given the vast complexity of all this, really the only low hanging fruit could
come from determining modal genes, and eliminating all the many mutants since
the overwhelming majority will be deleterious.

If you could run such a spellcheck on a person's entire genome, the results
could be very impressive. Although, I admit that if done at large scales you'd
essentially be creating a monoculture species. Of course, people are unlikely
to all voluntarily opt for having the same genes, so under a voluntary gene
therapy system this is an unlikely outcome... stratification is more likely.

[http://squid314.livejournal.com/345414.html](http://squid314.livejournal.com/345414.html)

------
hackernewsacct
IQ test results are not completely valid in all cases. Feynman was tested at
125. He wouldn't qualify for MENSA. It is thought by some Feynman may have
done exceptionally well in the areas that deal with numbers, logic, pattern
matching but poorly in the verbal areas of the test, thus suppressing his
overall score. How many people here have a tested IQ higher than 125 want to
say they're smarter than Feynman?

IQ test are also not completely accurate for those that are gifted and have a
learning disability. Kids that are gifted + LD'd may not even be put in gifted
programs because their IQ scores are too low, but too high to put in an LD
program, so they are stuck in normal class rooms where it isn't a good fit for
them. Imagine being just as intelligent, if not more so, as the students in
the gifted classes but denied access. That's what IQ scores do for some of
those kids.

IQ test tend to work for gifted people that answer questions quickly and those
without lopsided talent. If you are gifted + LD, or gifted but have really
slow processing speed, then IQ test will not identify you as really that
gifted, despite being so.

~~~
Will_Parker
Feynman at 125 on an IQ test is bullshit. You know this if you've ever taken a
test and read his books.

Douglas Hofstadter describes Feynman as acting out a sort of deliberate
"village idiot" in a lecture on intelligence and patterns, by giving
deliberately simplistic answers. With no proof, I think this is what Feynman
must have been doing on the IQ tests, being deliberately but defensibly
pedantic. I know that scoring 125 on an IQ test requires no skill that Feynman
wasn't near the limits of human capability at.

The passage I'm talking about, from Hofstadter's amazing "Metamagical Themas":
[https://books.google.ca/books?id=NSpMDQAAQBAJ&q=feynman+sat](https://books.google.ca/books?id=NSpMDQAAQBAJ&q=feynman+sat)

------
neom
I suspect you're simply lucky if your brain is wired in a manner that is
particularly relevant to the period of societal time. In that, I mean "IQ" is
related/tied to a period of time. For example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSy685vNqYk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSy685vNqYk)

------
skybrian
This is about what you'd expect based on how behavioral geneticists are
thinking these days:

"A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic
variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral
variability."

[http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/096372141558043...](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721415580430)

------
logicallee
Imagine if you could choose exactly how smart you want your son or daughter to
be - but only via a set of genes that also directly correspond to laziness.

This sounds silly, doesn't it? But you can't deny that this article is a firm
step in that direction. It's not crazy to think that parents may make gene
choices in the future.

This would be not just a new stage, but a new kind of evolution. (Not too
scary in the form we're reading about, and close to everyday sexual selection
of mates anyway.)

------
nocoder
I am curious, what is the definition of human intelligence? Blanket statements
like A being more intelligent than B don't mean much outside of specific
context. It is likely that certain kind of genes influence certain specific
ability like math or soccer more than others. The idea of blanket intelligence
does not provide much room for us to optimise for specific areas of
intelligence.

~~~
madiathomas
That's why I prefer using the context of that intelligence as a prefix. Like
Messi is a "soccer" genius. Messi will probably score less than average in
general intelligence tests.

~~~
kilotaras
> Messi will probably score less than average in general intelligence tests.

Why? Without support it looks like a "just world fallacy." He's good at
physical activities so he must be bad at thinking.

~~~
madiathomas
Never said he is bad at thinking. All I said is there is a chance he can score
less than average in IQ test. Even way less if the test is in English, which
he can't communicate wih. I am against IQ as a single measure of intelligence
and will never call someone dumb for scoring less than average. IQ tests
aptitude of a person.

------
hprotagonist
The phrase that determines the total pain of basically all systems biology is
"combinatorial explosion".

------
lngnmn
The gap between genes and intelligence is the same as between individual
characters and poetry, or even bits of UTF-8 encoding. But it is fun to watch
these "0.40 heritable" meaningless statements.

This is the same as to claim that a particular tech-process of a CPU and its
particular instruction set _defines_ what kind of porn would be watched on a
laptop. While there are few statistical correlations, say, between the cost of
a CPU and statistically significant preference to, say, MILFs, a direct
causality is still rather difficult to establish, at least for people of some
intelligence.

------
ekns
I recall seeing this Google Tech Talk by Steve Hsu on how they are in the
process of finding out basically all the additive genes that contribute to
intelligence in China at the BGI research institute:
[https://youtu.be/62jZENi1ed8](https://youtu.be/62jZENi1ed8)

They would take roughly a thousand people who are >=3 standard deviations
smarter than average and compare their full genomes against people who are of
average intelligence. This way they expect to find out all the "easy" genetic
determinants of intelligence.

------
RichardHeart
Kinetic ability vs potential ability (should reduce the fear/hatred of
differences in IQ): People overestimate the value of Intelligence in
comparison to motivation, delayed gratification. How many people do you living
up to their potential? Is it because they don't know what to do, or because
they won't do what they should? If the difference in results is traction, not
horsepower, then don't worry so much about someones bigger or smaller motor.

Cascading advantage: People underestimate the value of small changes in some
types of intelligence. They cascade. If you learn how to learn faster, or
better, it cascades across all the new learning. Imagine a bookshelf vs a
stack of books. Some people develop tricks early on that are the the shelves.
Hit a golf ball a little crooked and see how crooked it ends up 100 yards
away.

Different is better: This social programming to search for equality amongst
men ignores the value of evolution, competition, meritocracy, and the
resultant emergent fitness and excellence that results. Different, sometimes
better, sometimes worse, is a requirement for robustness and progress.

See higher resolution: Measure mental ability more like physical ability. Look
at the detail measured in the nfl combine:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFL_Scouting_Combine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFL_Scouting_Combine)

When you create an IQ test, you use specific stratagies to avoid cultural
bias, and measure useful traits, like memory, speed, visualization, rotating
objects in ones mind, etc. Why not just declare the results by category. The
test maker knew what he was measuring. There's no reason to mush it all
together.

~~~
cousin_it
In Vernor Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky", the villains use a kind of mind
enhancement called Focus which isn't really mind enhancement at all, it just
makes you obsessively focused on whatever task they give you. I've long
thought that the first "mind enhancement" tech to appear would be like that,
because it seems easier than hacking g.

~~~
arethuza
In "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow", the sequel to Sapiens, the author
describes a "focus helmet" being developed by the US armed forces that
provides a degree of Vinge-like focus.

------
Brendinooo
Last week I read an [article][0] critiquing Charles Murray's work, largely in
response to a [podcast][1] he did with Sam Harris. One of the assertions in
the article was:

> There are no “genes for” IQ in any but the very weakest sense.

I'm not super knowledgeable about this stuff. I'm not trying to kick a
hornet's nest; just trying to point out how I found this news to be
particularly relevant in light of what I'd been reading recently. I'd be
interested in seeing the Vox article's authors would fit this news into their
thesis.

[0]: [https://www.vox.com/the-big-
idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-...](https://www.vox.com/the-big-
idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech)
[1]: [https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/forbidden-
knowledge](https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/forbidden-knowledge)

~~~
rlanday
The idea that there are no genes for IQ is completely ludicrous. Humans are
clearly smarter than every other animal; this is entirely because we have
different genetics. Additionally, the only possible way humans could've become
smarter than other animals is that natural selection operated over time so as
to increase the frequency of human genetic variants responsible for increased
intelligence. This means there must also be genetic variants within our
species that affect how smart we are relative to other humans, or this could
not have happened.

The fact that intelligence is highly genetic in origin is extremely obvious.
But the implications this fact has on how people interact with each other are
extremely disturbing.

~~~
backpropaganda
How is it disturbing? Almost every aspect of human individuals is a random
variable. What's wrong with intelligence being a random variable too, which
could depend on some other aspect of the individual? I think making this a
scary fact is what promotes the problems in discourse we see on this topic.

~~~
rlanday
Intelligence is essentially what separates humans from other animals, and why
we believe human lives to be more morally significant than the lives of other
animals. To acknowledge that some people are smarter than others is
essentially to acknowledge that their lives are worth more under humanity's
current moral system.

~~~
Magnusmaster
Not only that, it also means people will likely try to "solve" poverty in
Africa and elsewhere by getting rid of the natives and populate it with higher
IQ people, as eugenecists were proposing right after Darwin came up with his
theory of evolution.

------
calebm
Anyone know if the SNP list is publicly available? I'd love check my numbers
against my raw 23andMe data to see if I'm smart :)

~~~
gwern
The summary statistics are in fact available on the CTG website, but I'm not
sure why you would want to bother. The performance of the polygenic score is
about the same as the SSGAC polygenic score for Okbay/Selzam et al 2016, so
Sniekers et al 2017 isn't all that helpful in that regard. (And in any case
SSGAC is expected to come out with a paper this year with n=1m (!)
[http://programme.exordo.com/bga17/delegates/presentation/214...](http://programme.exordo.com/bga17/delegates/presentation/214/)
which is expected to at least double the polygenic score performance, so it'll
be obsolete soon. And I hear there may be a second group with as large a
sample size...)

~~~
ralfd
Could you explain this like I'm fifteen?

~~~
StavrosK
There's this dude whose results are already about as good as this new dude's
plus this other dude is gonna come out with a totally rad new set of results
so you should just wait for those bro.

------
phkahler
It's nice to identify genes that have influence, but I wouldn't cal it an
"Enormous Success" by any means. Given the following:

[https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-
insel/blog/2...](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-
insel/blog/2014/celebrating-science.shtml)

It turns out that one genetic variant has caused two different mental
illnesses and they still don't know why. The treatment for them is the same
though. Of course they are not twins, so there may be other genes in play that
may account for the difference in manifestation.

For me the bottom line is that evolution is still hard at work changing the
human brain to work the way we need it to in modern times.

------
e0m
"…they had identified 52 genes linked to intelligence in nearly 80,000 people.
These genes do not determine intelligence, however."

------
KKKKkkkk1
Is human intelligence really a thing? Sure, we can all tell the difference
between a mathematics savant and a mentally challenged person. But is there
really a reason to think that a single number can capture with any degree of
accuracy some property of the connection structure of 10^11 brain neurons?

~~~
jessriedel
The best analogy is with general athletic ability. Yes of course, athletic
ability is a multi-faceted thing; yes you can be good in different ways; yes,
being the very best as baseball does not make the you very best at football;
etc. Nonetheless, athletic-ness is a robust, _real_ concept, which is very
heritable, predictive of athletic success. Importantly, it encodes the
empirical fact that if you are good at X compared to the general population,
you are _more_ likely to be good at Y, where X and Y can be almost any
athletic activity.

~~~
therealdrag0
To tie your analogy back in: There is correlation in intellectual capacity
between categories of intelligence (linguistic, mathematic, spacial, etc.).
Individuals capabilities vary, but on average individuals high in one area are
rarely below average in other area.

(Anecdote: I found it no problem to get degrees in both Computer Science AND
English with minors in French and Philosophy. Some people find it strange that
someone could do both types of things, but I just like learning everything!)

~~~
rimliu
My friend, a math teacher, had this saying: only 5% are good at math, but
those 5% are good at anything.

~~~
andai
I was told this was the reason people study math, and companies hire those
people:

"If you can get a degree in math, you prove yourself to be intelligent and
hard working. Companies like those kind of people."

~~~
therealdrag0
Same with philosophy. My schools philosophy department had stats showing their
students had higher writing scores than English students and didn't have
significant unemployment (I forget what they compared employment to).

------
madiathomas
I usually score higher when taking intelligent tests, but I dismiss all the
intelligent tests I have taken. I know people who are more intelligent than me
who can score higher if they are tested in their own indigenous languages and
on subjects that are important to their cultural backgrounds.

For someone who lives in a remote area and survives on hunting wild animals,
being able to tell where game is situated, is more valuable than matching some
geometrical figures or knowing capital city of a country he will never visit.
Such tests that take into account language and cultural differences don't
exist.

Not knowing something you are not interested in, doesn't make one dumb. It is
just not important to that person. I also noticed that the older I grow, the
higher my IQ due to voraciously reading technical books and articles.

~~~
Sharlin
Proper well-designed IQ tests have nothing to do with language; they are
purely visual pattern recognition challenges. These tests are highly culture-
independent and correlate highly with practically any other reasonable measure
of intelligence.

Being able to tell where the game is situated is not intelligence. It's a
domain-specific skill. Intelligence is a _general_ ability that makes one
better at learning _any_ domain-specific skill that utilizes cognitive
capabilities.

~~~
arethuza
What I do find puzzling is why people seem so emotionally attached to the idea
of general intelligence measured as a single number. Is there some
political/educational aspect that I'm missing out on - I'm from the UK where
IQ tests seem to be generally regarded with a high degree of healthy
scepticism.

~~~
Sharlin
No, it's just the opposite. There is emotional attachment to the idea that
intelligence _cannot_ be measured with a single number - the idea that
everybody is "good at something" with regard to cognitive skills; that there
are different kinds of intelligence that are mostly orthogonal or even
mutually exclusive. A mathematically highly skilled individual must be
socially awkward or have poor language skills and so on. It would be unfair
otherwise, after all.

On the other hand, the idea that there _is_ a single number that correlates
highly with most other definitions or aspects of "intelligence" has strong
experimental backing, like it or not.

~~~
arethuza
So what do you _do_ with this number? I'm genuinely puzzled as I've never
encountered a situation where IQ was used for anything.

------
jlebrech
So we'll be able to assign jobs at birth?
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/)

------
MawNicker
How do they control for environmental influence and correlations between
environments and particular genes? Can someone elaborate on the "new
statistical methods" briefly mentioned in the article.

~~~
mattmcknight
"All association studies were performed on individuals of European descent;
standard quality control procedures included correcting for population
stratification and filtering on minor allele frequency"

------
z3t4
a pill that increase intelligence is a wet dream. but imagine the placebo
effect - it should not be underestimated.

------
oh_sigh
Lord help us if intelligent is correlated some how with neanderthal,
denisovan, etc genes.

~~~
gwern
Don't worry, they're probably not. Denisovan admixture is minimal, and the
more substantial admixture with Neanderthal genes appear to be evolutionarily
selected against, and the genetic correlations people have computed so far
have generally been bad ones. I haven't seen a specific education-
IQ/Neanderthal correlation reported yet, but no one has reported noting the
education-IQ PGSes as being oddly enriched in Neanderthal variants, and the
Neanderthal genetic correlation papers haven't said anything about education-
IQ despite the PGSes being publicly available & on LD Hub etc, so arguing from
silence, I think there's probably either no correlation or it's negative.

There's an interesting debate about why this is the case: were Neanderthals
sufficiently distant from humans that their genetic variants tend to be
incompatible, or was it because the smaller Neanderthal population made it
harder to purge bad mutations so more of their variants were simply bad in
general, or something else entirely?

------
zouhair
Define intelligence.

------
newtem0
Ive known people who were related to certain very famous physicists and their
intelligence was obviously much higher than most people. As in very
conspicuous. There is no doubt thay intelligence is purely genetic. The
difference between an ape, me amd my friend is genetic. Yes, environment
counts but if you give everyone their own personal most ideal environment,
they will all taper off at an intelligence level that is determined by their
genetics. There is a popular myth that genetics arent everything when it comes
to intelligence because it makes people uncomfortable. They dont want to
believe that their own intelligence is deterministic. I think it has to do
with the tendency of americans to never tell amyone how much money they make
or anything else directly tied to their sense of self-worth. What a massive
waste of time.

~~~
imron
> because it makes people uncomfortable. They dont want to believe that their
> own intelligence is deterministic.

It's not about my own intelligence.

If genetics can be conclusively shown to determine intelligence how long
before someone tries again to build a 'master race'?

That's what makes me uncomfortable.

~~~
newtem0
In the us and many places, you have to take tests to have a good life. Only
smart or priviledged people pass them. Whats the difference between a master
class and a master race

~~~
imron
> Whats the difference between a master class and a master race

In the US and many places, with hard work and determination you can change
your class. You can't however change your race.

That's the difference.

~~~
gragas
I think newtem0's point is exactly the opposite: regardless of how hard you
work or how determined you are, your maximum intelligence comes down to
genetics, which is something that you can't change currently.

~~~
imron
Maximum intelligence yes. But you don't need maximum intelligence to improve
your station in life.

------
jjawssd
Are the people with higher concentrations of these genes equally distributed
geographically or do they tend to be more concentrated in some areas?

~~~
defen
You're not even allowed to ask that question, let alone attempt to answer it,
if you want to get the funding to perform these studies.

~~~
jjawssd
Why is this a taboo topic?

~~~
brobinson
It would completely upend the belief that "all men are created equal"

~~~
backpropaganda
Is it okay to ask if people in certain geography are better athletes than
others?

~~~
metaphorm
the taboo seems to be primarily centered around psychological traits rather
than bodily ones.

------
throwaway91111
> Their combined influence is minuscule, the researchers said, suggesting that
> thousands more are likely to be involved and still await discovery.

I don't follow. How does that suggest anything? Perhaps intelligence is
largely environmental.

In fact, all this suggests is that the genetic influence is likely non-zero.

~~~
FullMtlAlcoholc
>Perhaps intelligence is largely environmental

How does this correlate with identical twin studies which show that over time
their IQ converges, even in the case of separate upbringings, adoption, etc?

~~~
openasocket
Source? Last I checked the literature identical twin studies showed a variance
of as much as 20-30 points.

~~~
mikekchar
Would you mind giving a source as well? I've been doing some googling and
every paper that references this seems to describe correlations to IQ scores
rather than variance of IQ scores. For example Bouchard & McGue (1981)
reported a correlation of twin's IQ of 0.86 if living together and 0.71 if
living apart. That particular paper doesn't fill me with confidence (it seems
to have a sample size of 111 and it's a meta-study), but it appears to be the
most cited paper I've seen.

I haven't seen anything that discusses a variance of IQ score, nor do I really
understand what that means (what's the standard deviation of correlated
multivariate distributions?) It would be interesting to see the analysis.

------
erikpukinskis
Intelligence is like TNT. It's not a virtue... it can just destroy things very
quickly, for good or for ill.

~~~
steanne
I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being -- forgive me -- rather
cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.

\--Albus Dumbledore

~~~
arethuza
I have to say that the really truly awful mistakes I've seen people make in my
career in computing were actually _extremely_ bright people acting with sheer
hubris.

------
Chathamization
> But all of these genes together account for just a small percentage of the
> variation in intelligence test scores, the researchers found; each variant
> raises or lowers I.Q. by only a small fraction of a point.

OK. Even if you believe there's an objective measure of intelligence and that
IQ tests do a good job at measuring this (both very questionable premises),
it's worth keeping in mind that slight monetary motivation can boost IQ scores
by 10 points[1], and the general population's scores go up about 3 points
every 10 years[2]. Much more of an impact than the genes here that correlate
with "only a small fraction of a point" difference.

[1] [https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-
matters/motivat...](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-
matters/motivation-may-influence-iq-scores) [2]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4152423/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4152423/)

~~~
MagnumOpus
You are 40 years out of date. The Flynn effect disappeared in the 1970s once
everyone had compulsory secondary education and access to decent nutrition.
Scores have been flat since then.[1]

To your other point: just like money, a lot of other variables can influence
test scores. As long as everyone in the study group gets the same monetary
motivation or lack thereof, results will be robust.

[1]
[https://image.slidesharecdn.com/intelligence-150210083926-co...](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/intelligence-150210083926-conversion-
gate01/95/intelligence-47-638.jpg?cb=1423579241)

~~~
Chathamization
> You are 40 years out of date. The Flynn effect disappeared in the 1970s once
> everyone had compulsory secondary education and access to decent nutrition.
> Scores have been flat since then

That's addressed in my second link (published 2014):

The mean effect size for 53 comparisons (N = 3,951) (excluding three atypical
studies that inflate the estimates) involving modern (since 1972) Stanford-
Binet and Wechsler IQ tests (2.93, 95% CI [2.3, 3.5], IQ points per decade)
was comparable to previous estimates of about 3 points per decade, but not
consistent with the hypothesis that the Flynn effect is diminishing.

As for your other point, the results of that study suggest that at least a
large part of what's being tested is motivation. If people have motivations
besides money (as most people do), or if monetary motivations aren't uniform
across the population, this is going to influence the test. This is also a
relatively recent study. It's likely that there are many other factors that
have a large influence on the test that haven't been studied yet.

At the very least, being able to significantly alter the test scores by giving
someone a small monetary incentive shows that the scores aren't simply
capturing innate ability.

