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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.
Sprint speed or vertical leap is a much better measure of general athleticism. In an endurance sports, the trained athlete always beats the untrained one. But you would never beat Usain Bolt in sprinting even if you trained your entire life and he just did normal childhood activities.
But obviously, there's a lot of training involved in IQ as well. IQ tests rely on the fact that people aren't training for them, and quickly become tainted when people do. I've seen data showing that, among IQ test subskills, the one which is most correlated with g is actually vocabulary. This is, of course, easily trainable. But training speed varies by intelligence. And, of course, smart people will develop large vocabularies in their day-to-day life. Other skills, such as digit span, may feel less trainable, but there are tricks you can learn in only a few hours to improve your ability considerably.
In any case, to answer your question, IQ is g in so much as we are able to measure it. And what is g? It is the general factor of intelligence determined by analyzing correlations between different skills. There are clusters of skills which are highly correlated and relate to things that we might consider mental abilities. But there are other skills (like running fast) which are uncorrelated and do not pertain to general intelligence. So, mathematically, a single factor g is determined by its correlation to other skills which we know to be g-loaded. A person with high g will likely have a good digit span, but we won't be able to assume anything about their running speed. (I'm a little out of my depth here on the mathematical rigor, so perhaps someone can explain this better.)
In any case, I think IQ tests measure g well enough up to at least 2 standard deviations above the norm (assuming no intensive preparation).
How would you make an IQ test better to measure g more appropriately?
My point was less about the specifics of measuring intelligence or athleticism and more about asking if given the degree of uncertainty, is it really a good idea to run headfirst into embryo IQ selection. There are almost certainly aspects of intelligence not captured by IQ tests that help with mathematics, physics, music, writing, etc. By optimizing so narrowly for IQ we don't know if we could be excluding the regions of gene space that might generate a brain that performs best at those tasks, much like focusing only on triathlon (or vertical leap or sprint) performance would exclude the musculoskeletal parameters that make Messi or Phelps so perfect for their chosen tasks.
Sure, there are aspects, but 1. what makes you think they would be negatively correlated with IQ 2. we can't measure them for now or it is too time consuming
Right now, most genetic studies on intelligence do not even use IQ but use EA (educational attainment) as a proxy for IQ. Obscurantists laugh that genes explain small fraction of EA, but what do you want if these studies do not use full genome sequences and mediocre proxy of IQ?
I don't think they would be negatively correlated, I just think there are enough unknowns that the possibility is far from negligible. My priors are that the "no free lunch" theorem applies to intelligence, so if I had to guess I would expect some degree of tradeoff, particularly at the upper ends of performance (whether in intelligence or athleticism). Hence why we never see people elite in both running and swimming events despite both being strongly, positively correlated with "general athleticism".
There is no reason to believe the "no free lunch" theorem holds and plenty of reasons to believe it doesn't. There are lots of genes with purely deleterious effects (those which are fatal to embroys, for instance. Or cystic fibrosis).
Even if the tails come apart -- e.g. you cannot simultaneously MAXIMIZE running and swimming ability -- does not mean that there's no genetic free lunch. Starting from a genotype that wasn't near human capacity in either, you could increase both.
If I were to refine my thoughts, I would say I believe not in an absolute, universal no free lunch, but rather a weaker, "not much free lunch beyond a particular threshold". As you put it, where the tails might tend to come apart.
My concern lies there, at least to the extent that human progress depends on the abilities of the individuals at those tails.
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Wouldn't trade-offs being everywhere in evolutionary biology count? I'm not an expert, but as I understand it, if intelligence were a 'free lunch' wouldn't we expect to see far less variation in intelligence in humans? Natural selection having already optimised it?
The most significant drawback for IQ is 'doesn't want to have children' and longer reproduction cycles. Also, a fraction of variation in intelligence is non-linear (heterozygosity) which simple selection cannot maximize and this is why agriculture uses f1 seeds, albeit aiming other traits.
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There's lots of traits that haven't reached fixation, but this doesn't mean there's no free lunch. Evolution is slow and the environment changes much more quickly; we are not at equilibrium. The "no free lunch" theorem is equivalent to "all organisms are equally fit", which is clearly false.
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Natural selection was still in the process of optimizing our genes when they hit the point where their phenotypes could invent and spread much faster-optimizing memes and then (in an instant, geologically) start wondering whether faster optimization was possible for genes too. Even brain size growth, perhaps the cruelest obvious tradeoff, doesn't show any obvious signs of having leveled off.
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