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Thanks for that super weird article. The author's motivations for supporting China's eugenics efforts are puzzling for sure. Thankfully we might be safe for th

Thanks for that super weird article. The author's motivations for supporting China's eugenics efforts are puzzling for sure. Thankfully we might be safe for the time being. IIRC the BGI IQ sequencing initiative did not lead to any meaningful discoveries since it's not yet obvious or fully proven yet that IQ is that heritable. My 50c is that we as a population have currently stopped evolving regions of our genome that can keep resulting in progressively higher intelligence, for two possible reasons: 1. there's some evidence at least from my view that any further increase in intelligence will cause other side effects like depression and autism (or perhaps a more intelligent version of us cannot unsee the futility of our lives?); 2. It's not in the interests of the population as a whole to continue having a fight between individuals having heritably different IQs, i.e. we have evolved into a local minima so that all IQ differences are stochastic and it's really hard to leave this minima through mutations. I think the second possibility makes sense because intelligence is such a huge evolutionary advantage that a population with high instability in this trait might be doomed (more intelligent people can cheat more easily for short term personal benefit at the expense of long term population benefit). I really think that one of the first things modern humans evolved was the genetic ability to make sure that intelligence was completely randomized among the population, and I now hope that's true also because of all these efforts because if it's true none of these efforts would succeed for a long time.

nopinsight 8y ago
Thank you for the interesting hypotheses regarding the evolution of intelligence. I have a somewhat different take and would like to share: Some of the most intelligent people in history including renowned philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians did not seem to focus on using their intelligence to acquire as much power or wealth as possible. They seemed to enjoy contemplating more universal and deeper questions than immersing themselves too much on worldly matters. A majority of powerful people did seem to have above or well-above average intelligence but they were probably not in the same league, intelligence-wise, as those famous thinkers. Their other traits were also important to their rise to power. Environment and population intelligence likely have co-evolved and very high intelligence did not confer much advantage over an above average one for most common professions before the 21st century. The technology and level of economy-of-scale available in the past meant that social graciousness and other personality traits could have been better predictors of career and economic success than intelligence above a certain point. To have a great engineering or scientific career developing some of our increasingly advanced technologies, very high intelligence seems to present certain advantages over a more balanced group of traits. So a shift in global technological landscape could also mean that the optimal collection of population intelligence and other traits change as well. As concrete examples, the founders of the largest American tech empires all seem to have/had an IQ at least 3-4 SD above mean based on their academic records. PS. Your 1) seems possible in some cases and I would add that traits like non-extreme autism-spectrum condition may not be a handicap, but rather an advantage, in a certain environment and career path.
- ramraj07 8y ago
  While I used IQ as a proxy for intelligence, intelligence is obviously still poorly (or conveniently restrictively) defined. But surely some form of "being smarter" would have been advantageous at any point in time in a society? It's not just science and engineering that needs intelligence right? Oddly enough this reminds me of a clip from the show Young Sheldon where the twins display extremely different, yet equally admoyable manifestations of intelligence: https://youtu.be/nvQkKS75M2o https://youtu.be/nvQkKS75M2o
  - nopinsight 8y ago
    I agree that “being smarter” or above average intelligence helps with a whole host of stuff besides science and engineering, including business and social skills, all other things being equal. My point above was regarding the difference between say 2SD above mean vs 4SD. It did not help much and perhaps hurt in a few ways, like getting bored more easily, to have a +4SD IQ in the past. Most businesses and jobs were not very complicated. So having a +2SD intelligence could be optimal in the past in most parts of the world. Work at today’s multinationals and globe-spanning empires, in many fields, benefit a lot more from +4SD intelligence and the stimulation from complexity helps mitigate some of the drawbacks. The optimal level for career success in many regions/careers might have shifted to +3SD or even +4SD instead.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  Some of the most intelligent people in history including renowned philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians did not seem to focus on using their intelligence to acquire as much power or wealth as possible. More significantly, they tend to not have children. "Men of the highest genius who were childless include Newton, Faraday, and Mendel; Vivaldi, Handel, and Beethoven; Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle; Plato, Aquinas, Bacon, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and Mill. Anyone who thinks he can frame a list of comparable individuals who had on the average enough children to counter-balance the childlessness of these, is welcome to try; but he will not succeed. ...Just below the very highest level, and average number of children is again far below the average for people of no intellectual or artistic distinction. And it is, again, spectacularly depressed by the huge contribution of the childless: Copernicus, Swift, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Haydn, Dalton, Francis Galton himself - to mention a few examples at random." (David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales)
barry-cotter 8y ago
We know IQ is heritable the same way we know height is heritable. People resemble their relatives more as their shared inheritance grows. BGI found no common genes of large effect. That means intelligence is more like height than skin colour. There are lots of genes that have a small effect. We know there are rare genes of large effect because Ashkenazim have at least two, the ones that lead to torsion dystonia and Tay-Sachs disease lead to greater IQ in heterozygotes. We know evolution in intelligence has not stopped because human populations differ in intellectual productivity to absurd degrees of that wasn’t true. Evolution requires heritability, variation and selection and all those clearly exist.
- ramraj07 8y ago
  >We know evolution in intelligence has not stopped because human populations differ in intellectual productivity to absurd degrees of that wasn’t true. Evolution requires heritability, variation and selection and all those clearly exist. Do you have any references to it? I'd like to learn more...
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    If you’re asking about the degree of difference Ashkrnazim have ~25% of science Nobel prizes having never been more than 1% of global population. That’s one group that’s highly over represented in intellectual achievement. For a more prosaic example look at the list of US spelling bee finalists or national science foundation merit scholarship finalists. There will be a great deal more Asian names than their share of the US population. As to evolution and its necessary precursors it’s all in Darwin, or shorter on the Wikipedia page for evolution.
    - ramraj07 8y ago
      I hope that's not all you had in mind when you wrote your comment. All of that shows no proof that it's the genetics that propels the disproportionate level of intellectual achievement. Both of those cases can easily be explained by sociocultural influences within families of various races propelling more intellectual endeavors, and if you don't have peer reviewed references showing otherwise it's probably a good idea to stop thinking that way.
nradov 8y ago
Based on patterns in the past 2000 years of Chinese history, I suspect they're more likely to undergo a violent revolution before they have a chance to remake the world through eugenics or genetic engineering.
gwern 8y ago
> IIRC the BGI IQ sequencing initiative did not lead to any meaningful discoveries The BGI initiative led to no meaningful discoveries because of internal disarray & politics & strategic missteps meant that it was never completed; if it had, it probably wouldn't've reported much because they made a failed bet that common variation would be unimportant and it would be more efficient to look for rarer variants which boosted IQ a lot in a few thousand high-IQ participants rather than the 100,000+ that would be necessary using normal people. We now know that there appear to be no such variants. Common variants with n>100k yielded the first successful IQ GWAS with Rietveld et al 2013 (0.3% variance). GWASes kept getting bigger and better, and the latest one, Allegrini et al 2018 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/09/17/418210 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/09/17/418210), can now predict 11% of variance in IQ/16% EDU. > since it's not yet obvious or fully proven yet that IQ is that heritable. It is, and it says a lot that so many people have such a mistaken impression.
- ramraj07 8y ago
  Well I suppose my appraisal of the field is a few years old, thanks for the reference, will go through it.

nopinsight 8y ago

Thank you for the interesting hypotheses regarding the evolution of intelligence. I have a somewhat different take and would like to share: Some of the most intelligent people in history including renowned philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians did not seem to focus on using their intelligence to acquire as much power or wealth as possible. They seemed to enjoy contemplating more universal and deeper questions than immersing themselves too much on worldly matters. A majority of powerful people did seem to have above or well-above average intelligence but they were probably not in the same league, intelligence-wise, as those famous thinkers. Their other traits were also important to their rise to power. Environment and population intelligence likely have co-evolved and very high intelligence did not confer much advantage over an above average one for most common professions before the 21st century. The technology and level of economy-of-scale available in the past meant that social graciousness and other personality traits could have been better predictors of career and economic success than intelligence above a certain point. To have a great engineering or scientific career developing some of our increasingly advanced technologies, very high intelligence seems to present certain advantages over a more balanced group of traits. So a shift in global technological landscape could also mean that the optimal collection of population intelligence and other traits change as well. As concrete examples, the founders of the largest American tech empires all seem to have/had an IQ at least 3-4 SD above mean based on their academic records. PS. Your 1) seems possible in some cases and I would add that traits like non-extreme autism-spectrum condition may not be a handicap, but rather an advantage, in a certain environment and career path.

ramraj07 8y ago
While I used IQ as a proxy for intelligence, intelligence is obviously still poorly (or conveniently restrictively) defined. But surely some form of "being smarter" would have been advantageous at any point in time in a society? It's not just science and engineering that needs intelligence right? Oddly enough this reminds me of a clip from the show Young Sheldon where the twins display extremely different, yet equally admoyable manifestations of intelligence: https://youtu.be/nvQkKS75M2o https://youtu.be/nvQkKS75M2o
- nopinsight 8y ago
  I agree that “being smarter” or above average intelligence helps with a whole host of stuff besides science and engineering, including business and social skills, all other things being equal. My point above was regarding the difference between say 2SD above mean vs 4SD. It did not help much and perhaps hurt in a few ways, like getting bored more easily, to have a +4SD IQ in the past. Most businesses and jobs were not very complicated. So having a +2SD intelligence could be optimal in the past in most parts of the world. Work at today’s multinationals and globe-spanning empires, in many fields, benefit a lot more from +4SD intelligence and the stimulation from complexity helps mitigate some of the drawbacks. The optimal level for career success in many regions/careers might have shifted to +3SD or even +4SD instead.
yesenadam 8y ago
Some of the most intelligent people in history including renowned philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians did not seem to focus on using their intelligence to acquire as much power or wealth as possible. More significantly, they tend to not have children. "Men of the highest genius who were childless include Newton, Faraday, and Mendel; Vivaldi, Handel, and Beethoven; Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle; Plato, Aquinas, Bacon, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and Mill. Anyone who thinks he can frame a list of comparable individuals who had on the average enough children to counter-balance the childlessness of these, is welcome to try; but he will not succeed. ...Just below the very highest level, and average number of children is again far below the average for people of no intellectual or artistic distinction. And it is, again, spectacularly depressed by the huge contribution of the childless: Copernicus, Swift, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Haydn, Dalton, Francis Galton himself - to mention a few examples at random." (David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales)

barry-cotter 8y ago

We know IQ is heritable the same way we know height is heritable. People resemble their relatives more as their shared inheritance grows. BGI found no common genes of large effect. That means intelligence is more like height than skin colour. There are lots of genes that have a small effect. We know there are rare genes of large effect because Ashkenazim have at least two, the ones that lead to torsion dystonia and Tay-Sachs disease lead to greater IQ in heterozygotes. We know evolution in intelligence has not stopped because human populations differ in intellectual productivity to absurd degrees of that wasn’t true. Evolution requires heritability, variation and selection and all those clearly exist.

ramraj07 8y ago
>We know evolution in intelligence has not stopped because human populations differ in intellectual productivity to absurd degrees of that wasn’t true. Evolution requires heritability, variation and selection and all those clearly exist. Do you have any references to it? I'd like to learn more...
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  If you’re asking about the degree of difference Ashkrnazim have ~25% of science Nobel prizes having never been more than 1% of global population. That’s one group that’s highly over represented in intellectual achievement. For a more prosaic example look at the list of US spelling bee finalists or national science foundation merit scholarship finalists. There will be a great deal more Asian names than their share of the US population. As to evolution and its necessary precursors it’s all in Darwin, or shorter on the Wikipedia page for evolution.
  - ramraj07 8y ago
    I hope that's not all you had in mind when you wrote your comment. All of that shows no proof that it's the genetics that propels the disproportionate level of intellectual achievement. Both of those cases can easily be explained by sociocultural influences within families of various races propelling more intellectual endeavors, and if you don't have peer reviewed references showing otherwise it's probably a good idea to stop thinking that way.

nradov 8y ago

Based on patterns in the past 2000 years of Chinese history, I suspect they're more likely to undergo a violent revolution before they have a chance to remake the world through eugenics or genetic engineering.

gwern 8y ago

> IIRC the BGI IQ sequencing initiative did not lead to any meaningful discoveries The BGI initiative led to no meaningful discoveries because of internal disarray & politics & strategic missteps meant that it was never completed; if it had, it probably wouldn't've reported much because they made a failed bet that common variation would be unimportant and it would be more efficient to look for rarer variants which boosted IQ a lot in a few thousand high-IQ participants rather than the 100,000+ that would be necessary using normal people. We now know that there appear to be no such variants. Common variants with n>100k yielded the first successful IQ GWAS with Rietveld et al 2013 (0.3% variance). GWASes kept getting bigger and better, and the latest one, Allegrini et al 2018 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/09/17/418210 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/09/17/418210), can now predict 11% of variance in IQ/16% EDU. > since it's not yet obvious or fully proven yet that IQ is that heritable. It is, and it says a lot that so many people have such a mistaken impression.

ramraj07 8y ago
Well I suppose my appraisal of the field is a few years old, thanks for the reference, will go through it.