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To be clear, I'm not denying that genius correlates with certain mental afflictions. I'm denying that this should be a major reason to be concerned about IQ enh

To be clear, I'm not denying that genius correlates with certain mental afflictions. I'm denying that this should be a major reason to be concerned about IQ enhancement through genetic modifications, and would add to my original point by suggesting that there are clearly also ways for people to attain exceptionally intelligent brains while not having these issues (since many examples exist), and it is not at all obvious that we couldn't purposefully aim for that space.

lanstin 7y ago
Safe to bet if our biology was easily tweaked to make us all super smart without cost evolution would have found it. Engineering is all about trade offs. And having people of differing abilities seems to make groups stronger and more likely to survive.
- Veedrac 7y ago
  This isn't a safe bet at all; we're the first arrivals, it would be a shock if we did everything right the first time.
  - lanstin 7y ago
    We didn't do anything. Evolution is a relatively efficient searcher but a very bad respector of modern systems design principals. Each chemical pathway has a tendency to be tied to multiple unrelated systems. The genome itself is only for a developmental system/architecture largely consistent across the vertebrates. We could try surpressing say visible agression traits and discover 50% of the folks die in their fifties due to some previously unknown liver metabolism or get super depressed when their kids grow up or get phantom limb pains. If some one gene swap would make people 10% smarter and not kill their groups off faster, odds are we have the better gene. Biology is just a lot more complex than code, or vaccines. I mean i might be wrong maybe increasing "fitness of mind" will be as easy as a smallpox vaccine. But i haven't read any genetic or proteomic stuff that makes me say, oh wow this is simpler than we thought. What i see is people building software to get a grip on the complexity of these systems.
    - Veedrac 7y ago
      We'd only likely see huge consequences like that if we went outside the normal range of human variation. I agree that evolution would find single gene swaps with huge effects, but most of the variation available to us is over hundreds or thousands of genes making incremental effects. This is why I think we're probably first going go be able to effect marginal shifts in the overall distribution of these traits, not large jumps.
      - lanstin 7y ago
        bearing in mind that large jumps have different causes than marginal improvements, I'd agree. And I'm putting my money on the Ship Minds anyways. Biology seems too complex for even top humans. : )
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  Depending on what you consider cost, I might take the other side of that bet. A huge cost of higher IQ is probably the higher caloric requirements for a more effective brain, but that cost is fairly incidental given our new environment. There may well be other, similar examples.
  - lanstin 7y ago
    Using C sections for 100% of births would be another example.
- jlawson 7y ago
  This is only true is you assume that higher IQ necessarily improves reproductive volume in ancestral scenarios. There's no reason to assume that. IQ just wasn't that useful until very recently in history and would have been detrimental in many ways. What is a genius going to do with all his smarts if he's born to illiterate medieval farmers or tribal hunters? It just means he'll ask questions that annoy people and get distracted by reproductively irrelevant thoughts. There's no math to do, no books to read, no machines to improve, no big complex systems to understand. IQ is not historically adaptive in the evolutionary sense. If it was, we'd all be a lot smarter. If you doubt this, just consider animals like chimps, dolphins, or elephants. They could have evolved higher intelligence, but it was more adaptive for them not to.

lanstin 7y ago

Safe to bet if our biology was easily tweaked to make us all super smart without cost evolution would have found it. Engineering is all about trade offs. And having people of differing abilities seems to make groups stronger and more likely to survive.

Veedrac 7y ago
This isn't a safe bet at all; we're the first arrivals, it would be a shock if we did everything right the first time.
- lanstin 7y ago
  We didn't do anything. Evolution is a relatively efficient searcher but a very bad respector of modern systems design principals. Each chemical pathway has a tendency to be tied to multiple unrelated systems. The genome itself is only for a developmental system/architecture largely consistent across the vertebrates. We could try surpressing say visible agression traits and discover 50% of the folks die in their fifties due to some previously unknown liver metabolism or get super depressed when their kids grow up or get phantom limb pains. If some one gene swap would make people 10% smarter and not kill their groups off faster, odds are we have the better gene. Biology is just a lot more complex than code, or vaccines. I mean i might be wrong maybe increasing "fitness of mind" will be as easy as a smallpox vaccine. But i haven't read any genetic or proteomic stuff that makes me say, oh wow this is simpler than we thought. What i see is people building software to get a grip on the complexity of these systems.
  - Veedrac 7y ago
    We'd only likely see huge consequences like that if we went outside the normal range of human variation. I agree that evolution would find single gene swaps with huge effects, but most of the variation available to us is over hundreds or thousands of genes making incremental effects. This is why I think we're probably first going go be able to effect marginal shifts in the overall distribution of these traits, not large jumps.
    - lanstin 7y ago
      bearing in mind that large jumps have different causes than marginal improvements, I'd agree. And I'm putting my money on the Ship Minds anyways. Biology seems too complex for even top humans. : )
SuoDuanDao 7y ago
Depending on what you consider cost, I might take the other side of that bet. A huge cost of higher IQ is probably the higher caloric requirements for a more effective brain, but that cost is fairly incidental given our new environment. There may well be other, similar examples.
- lanstin 7y ago
  Using C sections for 100% of births would be another example.
jlawson 7y ago
This is only true is you assume that higher IQ necessarily improves reproductive volume in ancestral scenarios. There's no reason to assume that. IQ just wasn't that useful until very recently in history and would have been detrimental in many ways. What is a genius going to do with all his smarts if he's born to illiterate medieval farmers or tribal hunters? It just means he'll ask questions that annoy people and get distracted by reproductively irrelevant thoughts. There's no math to do, no books to read, no machines to improve, no big complex systems to understand. IQ is not historically adaptive in the evolutionary sense. If it was, we'd all be a lot smarter. If you doubt this, just consider animals like chimps, dolphins, or elephants. They could have evolved higher intelligence, but it was more adaptive for them not to.