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I am a geneticist - nobody talks about selectively breeding human IQ because it gives you bad press, your uni may fire you and you will no longer get any grants.
But humans are just animals, and IQ is just a normally distributed polygenic trait... so ask them about whether it would be possible to say breed +5SD weight or wing size in fruit flies or mice length and they will say "of course"
The rapid turn around of generations via embryonic eggs is science fiction, but it's much closer to "geostationary sattelite" than "warp drive".
Curious. Why people do genetics research at all if it's prohibited where it matters the most, or "EA PGS explains 4% of variance"? Do (some) geneticists secretly hold politically incorrect opinions?
Most work in human genetics is finding the cause of genetic disease (inherited and cancer)
In all western countries I can think of, they do prenatal screening tests, the results of which are used to kill the genetically less fit.
What is this if not government eugenics program that almost all scientists support? High 90% of people terminate down syndrome foetuses upon positive result.
In polls, most westerners are ok with termination to stop disease, just not ok with anything that looks like making super babies
Though of course, if you look at sperm donation stats I am sure the average chosen donor is above average IQ, height, attractiveness etc
Do you think there are alleles than benefit individual's intelligence when they are found in their mother but not themselves?
Yes:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8456157/
Thanks, but this is for EA, not IQ. I was curious about better prenatal environment for better IQ rather than helping child get degrees.
EA correlates with IQ, and is the best we have in many cases
EA takes seconds to fill out on a form, so there are millions of genotyped samples and thus good GWASs
IQ is harder to obtain, and is controversial so nobody wants to fund it, so nowhere near as many samples
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Thanks.
There are still studies ilke EA3, EA4... which is only barely related to finding disease. Why do researchers do that?
I think you're missing something here, a large fraction (or majority in many countires) doesn't test of Down syndrome even if they can afford it.
I'm afraid IQ might be higher than average mostly due to positive correlations with EA and income. Height isn't neccessarily good.
Can you tell if you work in human genetics or not? What can you say about MAOA 2R allele (and 1.5 R allele)?
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... okay
As you said, 250 IQ is 10 SD. 5 SD and 10 SD are very different. If you had said 175 IQ, I would not have said that was categorically impossible. While I still do think that IQ is going to have construct issues, if you just assume a normal distribution there will be people who have + 5 SD out of 9 billion people.
The thing, though, is that intelligence isn't like muscle mass. In two ways. One (pretty confident), it's not just a thing you can measure. We genuinely do not know what the capabilities of '250 IQ' would refer to. No such people exist, not even close. IQ is defined by rank ordering an existing distribution and mapping it to a normal. If you carried out your method, and the 250 IQ person wasn't actually practically smarter than the 160 IQ person, you could still say - well, he's 250 IQ, because of the distribution of test scores we inferred the way we did the selection! And there wouldn't actually be anything wrong with that, other than the person not actually being usefully smarter.
Two, (much less confident, plausible but not more likely than not imo that the scientific consensus disagrees with this) intelligence isn't something where there's an obvious disadvantage to more of it. For muscle mass, past a certain point there's some fitness advantage from being stronger but it's more than compensated for by things like energy / diet requirements. So in an artificial environment with infinite food, it's really easy for natural selection to just modify whatever regulates how much muscles grow and grow more and have them get massive. I think intelligence is just hard, though. It's just a very complicated thing, and there's no simple way to have more of it if some other tradeoff is fixed. More intelligence mostly isn't a matter of increasing the number of neurons, plenty of people with the same head size as von Neumann just weren't von Neumann. And at von Neumann's scale non-additive effects probably play a significant role in getting you from 'very smart' to 'top 100', and natural selection just won't work as well on those.
We can get freakish results via artificial selection, but yes we hit limits, eg greyhounds are only like 30% faster than wolves.
But look at corn vs teosinte, or milk yields per cow doubling in the last 50 years... or von Neumann in 1000 years from a hybrid of Middle easterners and Europeans...
I think we could make IQ tests that went further than the current highest scores ie reverse digit span tests, reaction times etc. If you can reliably get the same answers as someone with 160 IQ but faster... you're smarter than them
But yeah the real proof would be accomplishment, IQ is just the best measure we have for intelligence and the goal would be better output eg important original research etc
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