Robert Plomin, Sophie von Stumm
2018 · Nature Reviews Genetics
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> There are no well-established genetic predictors of IQ Common misconception, sadly untrue. There are known genetic predictors of intelligence, they're just not simple genes that the layman can wrap his head around. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104
> if it was determined tomorrow...that intelligence (and rewards for the sake of this thread) is totally inherited or even 80% inherited IQ is 50 to 80% inherited [1]. (We can only predict about 10% of it with genetics [2].) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104
That's not how intelligence manifests. "Geniuses" are usually products of opportunity as much as anything. Indeed I am minded of a "where are they now" on british television of some University Challenge winners and despite being believed to be geniuses most of them had not done anything remarkable. Intelligence definitely does have a genetic component - but again that isn't how genetics works. The "UN Man" Tabula Rasa doctrine is ideology, not science. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104
You don't even need modern ML to find a set of candidate SNPs for introduction, GWAS studies of educational attainment[1] give you these SNPs with weights as parameters of the statistical polygenic risk score (PRS/PGS). The problem is, intelligence is a massively polygenic trait which necessitates introduction of many SNPs (into the embryo, mind you, because most of these are likely active only during the early stages of development) to achieve life-changing effect for the person in question. Given this knowledge, the realistic way to improve human cognition would be widely available (perhaps state-sponsored) voluntary embryo selection[2] for intelligence. Embryo…
selection via PGS is already being applied[3][4][5] as an optional procedure in IVF, so there is no technical risk, the only impediment for now is simply social inertia, politics and lack of large-scale investment. Compared to this possibility cognitive enhancement in healthy adult individuals is a much harder problem: no solution is known as of now. Still, it would be interesting to speculate about realistic procedure of such type. It is unlikely that with sufficient effort we couldn't find some way to toggle[6] the correct genes and developmental processes in an adult, and deliver it via a gene therapy. Or maybe a cell therapy[7] could impart necessary neural progenitors into the mature tissue. Given such problems at the frontiers of the known science, it is natural to think that strong ML systems operating over large -omics datasets could offer human scientists valuable help, but the progress here looks more funding-limited than technology-limited right now. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104 2. https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection 3. https://www.ivfbabble.com/on-the-40th-anniversary-of-the-fir... 4. https://www.orchidhealth.com/ 5. https://www.lifeview.com/ 6. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2018.0046... 7. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0808488105
intelligence being a highly genetic trait was known for a long while. Recently they even discovered the genes responsible for a large part of it https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104
Yes, there is surely evidence that intelligence is heritable, but it's worth giving the research on this a close reading. Current approaches can only explain 10% of the variance in intelligence (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104), plus the effects from the environment. My main issue with the article though was the assumption that a "best" set of genes exists without futher discussion (in addition to obvious ethical concerns)
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