4 ms·
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
by crusso 9y ago
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 9y ago> 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 9y agoUnless 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
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rlanday 9y agoThere's reason to believe that the combined effect from all these different gene variants is approximately linear. Effects caused by multiple variants interacting are difficult for natural selection to operate on because of the way sexual reproduction works. See section 3.1 of this paper, "On the genetic architecture of intelligence and other quantitative traits": https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421 https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421
- improbable22 9y agoBTW the author of this article, Stephen Hsu, has a blog which frequently has interesting comments on such things (and AI, and much else): http://infoproc.blogspot.com/ http://infoproc.blogspot.com/
- pdog 9y agoThe effect is usually compounding because of how evolution by natural selection works. For example, if gene A gives a tiny 0.1% boost and gene B gives a tiny 0.1% boost, the combined effect is a 0.2001% boost (slightly greater than the sum).
- riffraff 9y agoWhy would natural selection imply compounding?
- pdog 9y agoThe combined effect from multiple genes is either linear (assuming no interaction) or superlinear (assuming some interaction) because other nonlinear effects are difficult for natural selection to operate on. Natural selection is the only process known to cause adaptations.
- riffraff 9y agobut my question was, why should it be superlinear? Genes with linear interactions would still grant evolutionary advantages.
- phreeza 9y agoSure, considering all combinations is impossible, but the second order expansion, ie the interaction matrix, should only require 1225 values to be estimated. You could reduce that even further if you restrict the rank of the matrix.