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Notes -
Building off the embryo selection discussion below:
What do you think IQ is exactly?
I’ve always thought about a general factor of intelligence as very similar to a general factor of athleticism. In this context, IQ is a measure of the former much like a triathlon time can be a measure of the latter.
In every sport, triathlon time is going to be positively correlated with ability across the whole population. However, the absolute best performers on specific tasks will not be the ones that do the best in triathlon, because each task has room for optimization that has negative tradeoffs for triathlon performance ("no free lunch"). If you single-mindedly select for triathlon performance, you’ll get a generally more athletic population. On the other hand, you’ll funnel away from getting a Bolt, a Phelps, a Messi, a Jordan, a Federer, etc. Contributions to athleticism aren’t necessarily linear. Individually sub-optimal parameters can align just right to produce optimal results.
There are potential unforeseen consequences of restricting available gene-space by widespread adoption of IQ optimization. Traits are notoriously polygenic (each trait is affected by many genes), and virtually every gene is pleiotropic (each gene affects many traits). Our understanding of both intelligence and genetics is rife with unknown unknowns. Would we still get von Neumann, Einstein, etc.? Supposing the technology became widely available and affordable, is that a fence you’d be willing to tear down?
Edit: It seems I didn't communicate my main concern particularly well. There are two issues with a myopic optimization on IQ: one is negative health effects due to pleiotropy of the associated genes. The other, which I am more concerned with here, is the potential for "lost opportunities". This is what I was trying to illustrate with the triathlon analogy. You can get a narrowing of the variations in intelligence types and a potential restriction on the very upper end of ability. We don't know if Newton, Gauss, Einstein, von Neumann, Ramanujan, and Tao all had a similar combination of traits that led to their exceptional abilities, or if they all had different pieces that fit together in unique ways to produce a unique form of genius (what I meant by "not summing linearly"). Analogous to the way that Phelps, Bolt, and Messi have very different body compositions that produce their unique athletic excellence. A population of excellent triathletes would be more athletic, much like a population of people with 115 IQ would be more intelligent, but that kind of optimization may come at the expense of the variation needed to produce those truly exceptional at related but slightly orthogonal tasks.
This is well put. What we don't understand as well, when it comes to different forms of intelligence, is what the trade offs are. Whereas it's very easy to see that the weight reduction that helps you cycle faster can hinder your sumo wrestling prowess.
What do you think the trade-offs are? I think you mentioned below how spending time with Cambridge math students led you to believe that high-IQ people are defective in other ways.
I have seen statistics showing that high IQ is highly correlated with many other factors of success, such as marriage stability, high incomes, mental health, physical health, and lifespan. People who have high IQs do not go senile as early.
Furthermore, it seems to me people with above-average IQs have more friends than those with below-average IQs.
But, clearly the stereotype of the Poindexter math student exists for a reason. So it may be that there is a threshold beyond which negative characteristics emerge. Or it may be that it's not so much high IQ, as it is an autistic level of fascination with math, that leads to the typical phenotype of the Cambridge math student.
In any case, there seems like a clear and obvious benefit to going from an IQ of 100 to one of 115.
The experience of the IQ 150 math student is so strange that it doesn't really generalize to the greater population. Although, even here, society will massively benefit from higher IQs even if the individual doesn't.
It's currently beneficial to be 115 iq rather than 100 iq but it could certainly be possible that such a big jump in iq in a single generation risks various other deleterious effects when selecting so strongly for only one thing.
And what if we expand this to include people who have a median familial iq of 85 or even lower. Should the target still be 115? How big a rate of increase is really healthy? How hard should we really select?
So this is impossible without gene editing. The reality of this technology is much different than perception. The average woman with IVF has 7 embryos to choose from. Many of those will be unviable or not ideal for other reasons. Maybe, maybe, you can select between 2 or 3 on average.
You're not getting IQ of 115 from a median family IQ of 85, not that those people do IVF anyway.
I didn't say this was currently possible, I responded to your example of going from 100->115.
Let's say the industry booms and technology advances so we can have a 100 embryos to choose from in 10-20 years, what then?
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