One the one hand, I would be deeply stunned if an IQ of 1000 was available just by flipping all the genetic switches to "on". The result of doing such a thing that I would actually expect would be to create a non-viable embryo.
On the other hand, it is undeniable that genetic fiddling will someday be able to raise intelligence, and even if all it could do was reliably produce people of the 150-170 range, it could still radically change the world. And that's merely hypothesizing the reliable production of an effect that already exists and therefore can not be impossible. One can imagine that an IQ 1000 may be simply impossible on anything recognizably like the neural substrate we run on. We don't have enough information to know that right now. But we know we can get 150-170.
Meh, you also need the motivation component. IQ is a measure of capability, not a personality trait. It's perfectly easy to imagine tons of people with high IQs who either unmotivated (e.g. satisfy their itches by say gambling or playing video games) or destructive (criminals).
There are probably hundreds of thousands of people with greater IQ than Bill Gates, Larry Page, or Elon Musk. It doesn't mean they have the inclination to change the world.
This can't be overstated. In college, the smartest guy I knew was also the laziest. He used to tell me different ideas he had for how to be the laziest person imaginable while still living a comfortable life, which were always amusing. He could destroy anybody else on campus at chess without effort and not paying attention, focusing instead on EverQuest or some other videogame he was simultaneously playing.
> One the one hand, I would be deeply stunned if an IQ of 1000 was available just by flipping all the genetic switches to "on". The result of doing such a thing that I would actually expect would be to create a non-viable embryo.
That makes no sense. All these variants would have been obtained by comparing in the general (living) population people with differing copies. Why would these variants be completely harmless in normal people and suddenly lethal in conjunction? Is there any evidence at all for this idea? For example, do we see extremely intelligent people (who will be highly enriched in the relevant variants) dropping like flies in their teens?
"This means that there must be at least thousands of IQ alleles to account for the actual variation seen in the general population. A more sophisticated analysis (with large error bars) yields an estimate of perhaps 10,000 in total."
The odds that you can flip a few thousand genes without harm seem to me to approach 0 rapidly. None of these genes are, after all, coding for "intelligence"... they're doing some sort of chemical thing, after all. Heck even if it produces a viable embryo it seems more likely to produce insanity than superintelligence (assuming we could even distinguish the two).
That said, yeah, I'm just hypothesizing, but it seems far more likely to me that rather than some sort of monotonic increase in the "intelligence" factor that we can just pile on freely that there will be any number of incompatible additions, things that where adding either one or the other of some modification takes you to the optimal point but having both takes you beyond, and, well, all the other exciting and whacky things we see in the genetic world. In the arbitrarily-complicated n-dimensional space of "intelligence" just ramping all the available controls to "maximum" doesn't strike me as likely to produce an optimal result.
(I did, however, resist giving a8da6b0c91d's answer; a priori we can't tell whether the Ashekenazi Jews are made susceptible by their intelligence, or if they merely got something nasty co-selecting with their intelligence. Perhaps somebody somewhere has made that particular study, I don't know, but my point is merely that study would be required on a case-by-case basis. That can't be used as a general argument when we're discussing intelligently modifying genetics.)
> The odds that you can flip a few thousand genes without harm seem to me to approach 0 rapidly.
I have bad news for you, then: in the general populations, there's not merely thousands of SNPs, there are hundreds of thousands! I guess we're all going to die tomorrow now that we've realized this.
> In the arbitrarily-complicated n-dimensional space of "intelligence" just ramping all the available controls to "maximum" doesn't strike me as likely to produce an optimal result.
Yet, breeding works. Chickens and cows, for example, are scores of standard deviations away from their ancestors on some traits like weight or milk production, and while they may not be exactly as healthy or robust as their ancestors, they have hardly gone extinct.
"I have bad news for you, then: in the general populations, there's not merely thousands of SNPs, there are hundreds of thousands!"
Evolution isn't direct manipulation... part of what has evolved in the genome is the ability to be evolved in the first place. The genetic operations being proposed by this article bears no resemblance to the operations used by evolution.
While I've previously indicated my disagreement with the other sibling chain of discussion going on here, the car analogy isn't the worst. You can't take a sedan and just Push Everything To Eleven (individually, one criterion at a time, with no attention paid to integration) and expect a high-performance vehicle to result.
In math terms, we have a function f(x, y) -> IQ, and where we are now, we know going in the positive x direction will raise IQ and we know going in the positive y direction will increase IQ. We have no guarantee whatsoever that x + y will result in an increase in IQ. We certainly have even less guarantee when we start piling on the dimensions, and my comment about expecting a non-viable embryo is because in fact the xs and ys and zs and so on aren't just affecting IQ (since there aren't actually genes for that) but are having other effects as well. The odds of crossing into a nonviable regime somewhere, even from a starting position of known functionality, strike me as almost 1.
I sense I may be goring a bit of a sacred ox here, so let me remind you of my supreme confidence that genetic engineering can indeed raise IQ. It's just going to be harder than what this article proposes to produce a supermegagenius.
> Evolution isn't direct manipulation... part of what has evolved in the genome is the ability to be evolved in the first place.
What on earth do you think breeding does? It selects for increasing proportions of genetic variants in the phenotypically above-average members of the flock. What difference is there between creating a predictive score for an embryo and choosing to implant the highest-scoring one, with making the changes predicted to increase scores with something like CRISPR?
> You can't take a sedan and just Push Everything To Eleven (individually, one criterion at a time, with no attention paid to integration) and expect a high-performance vehicle to result.
Organisms are not cars. This is remarked upon by everyone how biology designs things in a very different fashion from humans, and yet this knowledge gets thrown out as soon as inconvenient...
> In math terms, we have a function f(x, y) -> IQ, and where we are now, we know going in the positive x direction will raise IQ and we know going in the positive y direction will increase IQ. We have no guarantee whatsoever that x + y will result in an increase in IQ.
Please, look up the twin and GCTA studies and what is meant by 'additive'. If there were those complex wiggly interactions, they would not show up as hits from the GWAS studies since they're not additive, and they would not contribute to the large additive fraction of heritability but the other parts.
"What on earth do you think breeding does? It selects for increasing proportions of genetic variants in the phenotypically above-average members of the flock."...
... using certain operators that are not arbitrarily recombining DNA. "Crossover" and such may be somewhat oversimplified versions of what real life does, but neither are the real life genetic operations anywhere near "completely free" recombinations.
Your arguments based on conventional evolutionary operations do not apply to cases where we are engineering freely, without regard to what appears where on chromosomes or any of the other myriad ways we've evolved the ability to safely evolve.
I do also feel like perhaps you are sneaking a step in where the intelligent manipulator double-checks whether the gene combinations make sense, which, if so, would be subtly begging the question as my point is precisely that we would have to check.
Besides, if I may flip the burden of proof around for a moment and appeal to something that may only be a heuristic rather than a solid logical argument, do you really think superintelligence is going to be this easy? "Just" look up all the thousands of genes that contribute to intelligence, assume they must all be doing it linearly (in the "linearly-combinable" sense of the term), and flip them to "smart" rather than "dumb"? Really? It's never that easy, even for things multiple orders of magnitude simpler than genetically engineering intelligence. It would boggle my mind if the path, or even a path, to human superintelligence could be so thoroughly expressed in so few bits.
It makes plenty of sense. You see random weird things like marfan syndrome linked to higher IQ. Among the high IQ ashekanazim there are a bunch of weird neurological diseases. Genes virtually never do one thing. Select for one trait and you're also going to get a bunch of other unexpected stuff, much of it probably unrelated to cognition.
> You see random weird things like marfan syndrome linked to higher IQ. Among the high IQ ashekanazim there are a bunch of weird neurological diseases.
In the small Ashkenazi population, yes, thanks to founder effects. In the general population, with no bottlenecks to force harmful variations to persist, why would there be large negative effects to any of the normal variation of IQ-affecting genes? They would have been selected against.
And you did not respond to any of my points about the general population or the observed lack of severe disease with higher IQs.
There are correlations to problems in the general population. For examples, homosexuality and narcotics usage. The thing to do is probably to ask a dog breeder.
I think inside two sigma, in well out-bred people, general health and IQ are highly correlated. Body temperature (resting metabolic rate) and IQ are correlated. Longevity and physical attractiveness are correlated. I don't think this bodes well for tweaking some menu of brain genes to good effect. Intelligence is mostly caught up in general health and mutational load, within normal bounds. I doubt these claimed IQ genes exist quite the way is being claimed. We're probably looking at an inextricably complex web of genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors.
As I think the genes are probably tied up in basic cellular metabolism and endocrinology more-so than some isolated brain design, I will lay money that monkeying with the lot of them is going to go badly. There's a reason genetic algorithms involve discarding the vast majority of each generation. We'll see won't we. If I could lay $500 that these efforts will completely fail with animals, I would.
> There are correlations to problems in the general population. For examples, homosexuality and narcotics usage.
The latter of which is not a problem - for those people. More generally: longevity is a accurate indicator of all net problems for people, ranging from social problems to suicide to schizophrenia to drug abuse to disease rates. Is longevity lower for the high-IQ? No, it is not. It is higher. So much for your 'inextricably complex web'.
> Longevity and physical attractiveness are correlated.
I believe this is mostly driven by the low-end, is it not? All those 'funny-looking kids'.
> If I could lay $500 that these efforts will completely fail with animals, I would.
You can't, of course, because that would be a waste of time; there are no measures of general intelligence nearly as well-validated with any animals as for humans (whether you want to specify cognitive functioning or life outcomes), and if there were, no one would bother to capture nearly enough genomes or genotypes to nail down the respective variants.
> Is longevity lower for the high-IQ? No, it is not. It is higher.
That's my whole point. I'm not sure you're following. It's mostly about health down to the cellular level. It's about a high performance immune system during gestation and development. It's about the absence of mutational load, not the existence of IQ boosting genes. Good luck if you think it's a simple matter of inserting genes a, b, and c. It's about how millions of pieces fit together exactly.
You seem to be saying we're going to be able to take a top notch, high end consumer car (person with IQ 120) and add a turbocharger, remove some body weight, and tighten up the tolerances and compression ratio to get more zoom. I'm saying that's just not going to work. The absolute best case will be you manage to make an F100 racer, which falls apart after 100 miles without extreme maintenance. But more likely the thing won't even run properly.
You have no idea and I have no idea how genetic engineering of mammals will play out. I am convinced that you are operating from flawed premises of the organism as a machine. Your focus on simple correlations belies the misunderstanding. In the organism we are talking about a chaotic, extremely complex system like the weather or an economy that will badly defy engineering attempts. Go read jurassic park, lol.
> It's mostly about health down to the cellular level. It's about a high performance immune system during gestation and development. It's about the absence of mutational load, not the existence of IQ boosting genes. Good luck if you think it's a simple matter of inserting genes a, b, and c. It's about how millions of pieces fit together exactly.
If it's about 'mutational load' (you do understand the difference between that term as usually used and the SNP strategy Hsu proposes, right?), then flipping them should work just fine: you're removing damage and friction.
> You seem to be saying we're going to be able to take a top notch, high end consumer car (person with IQ 120) and add a turbocharger, remove some body weight, and tighten up the tolerances and compression ratio to get more zoom.
No, I am not making a simplistic analogy to a machine.
> But more likely the thing won't even run properly.
Which is why high-IQ people drop like flies after 100 miles, right...
> In the organism we are talking about a chaotic, extremely complex system like the weather or an economy that will badly defy engineering attempts.
Yes, it's all so terribly terribly complex, whooo knooowwwsss what will happen.
> Go read jurassic park, lol.
Newsflash: _Jurassic Park_ was fiction. That is: made up, not real.
On the other hand, it is undeniable that genetic fiddling will someday be able to raise intelligence, and even if all it could do was reliably produce people of the 150-170 range, it could still radically change the world. And that's merely hypothesizing the reliable production of an effect that already exists and therefore can not be impossible. One can imagine that an IQ 1000 may be simply impossible on anything recognizably like the neural substrate we run on. We don't have enough information to know that right now. But we know we can get 150-170.