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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.
Okay. I wouldn't worry too much about these things, since in any embryo selection other factors will outweigh IQ. In IVF, embryos are already screened for chromosomal defects. They are also graded based on a cell development and uniformity.
If (lucky you!) you had multiple embryos with no defects and high grades, then you might do additional screening which is already available from Orchid. This might tell you if your child had a high risk of chronic disease or mental illness. If you still had multiple candidate embryos after all that, you might choose one based on IQ. But consider the uncertainty of this test, and also how siblings already exhibit a high degree of similarity with IQ. The difference in expected IQ might be 1 or 2 points with huge error bars.
So I wouldn't worry that we're going to be breeding people like pugs with huge defects caused by over selecting for obscure characteristics.
The biggest risk to our genetic health is that people are having children later in life and intelligent people have too few children.
Where's you getting this from? Per Jensen, average difference between sibs is 12-13 IQ points. If your PGS captures r^2=25% variance, then expected difference is 12.5*sqrt(0.25) IQ points. (That is about 10-20% difference in income when adult). That's for two embryos only. Steve Hsu gave more data - how how far you go with more embryos - but i can't remember where it was
Nobody knows how much of the variance is captured. I assume a low amount as this is unproven technology.
I'll grant that I assumed the average difference between sibling was less than 12-13 points, so if that's true I'll admit the difference in IQ can be more than 1 or 2 points.
(Caveat: even though IQ is mostly genetic, it's still partially environmental. So if the mean difference is 12-13 points, the mean genetic difference is less.)
Nevertheless, until we radically change how IVF works we won't be selecting from dozens of embryos. I still rate this intervention as incredibly minor without further advancements.
Sasha Gusev lists IQ PGS as explaining 41% variance at population level and 14% between sibs, since he tries to give as much deflated numbers as possible without lying, true must be higher.
sibs share environment.
ROI of improvement in possible child income by IVF PGD expenses is high
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