Stephen Hsu thinks super intelligent humans are coming. He thinks this because he’s very impressed with genetic engineering (he’s a physicist), and believes that the way to make people more intelligent is to adjust their genes, and therefore, more gene tweaking will lead to more intelligent people, inevitably. And not just intelligent, but super-intelligent, with IQs about 1000, even though he has no idea what that means, or for that matter, even though no one really knows what an IQ of 100 means. We’re going to figure out all the genes that are involved in intelligence, and then we’ll just turn the knob on each one of them up to their maximum, and boom, super-humans.
Good god, what a load of crap. Lots of people seem to think it’s brilliant, though. It isn’t.
Let’s set aside one concern: is intelligence, and more of it, really that good for human beings? We’re dependent on a certain level of smarts — we’re a technologically specialized species — but it’s not clear that we necessarily gain much by getting higher IQs. Fewer Donald Trump supporters, you might argue, but there intelligent, successful people supporting Trump, so there are more complex factors than just IQ behind that phenomenon. There is an argument to be made here against intelligence as a panacea, but as I say, let’s pretend for a bit that it is nothing but good. We want more intelligent people. Society as a whole and every individual would benefit from being more intelligent, just for the sake of argument.
Then the question becomes one of whether such an increase is possible, and whether genetic engineering is a practical way to achieve it. My answer to the first is that it’s unlikely, and the second is a flat no.
Our evolutionary history suggests that there was a period when Homo‘s brain was undergoing a long period of gradual enhancement. It wasn’t Homo sapiens though; it was Homo erectus. Fossils of that species over its 2 million year history show a pattern of slow enlargement of the cranium — they were getting larger brains. Their tools show some pattern of refinement, so there’s some evidence they were using those bigger brains in more sophisticated ways. But taking a million years to figure out how to put a sharper edge on a stone hand axe isn’t exactly a rapid development cycle.
Modern humans emerged out of Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years. They were slightly smaller (and smaller brained) than the robust humans living in Asia and Europe, but they did bring about some advances in technology and swept over the world…and were adept at learning new skills. Again, we’ll say for the sake of argument, they represented a clear adaptive advantage to greater intelligence, even though there is no biological basis for assuming they were more intelligent, or that it was their intelligence that allowed them to displace other human groups. (I suspect that more complex social structures and language, which are obviously a product of the brain, are more responsible than IQ).
But here’s the thing: those early modern humans were pretty much indistinguishable from us today. They were about the same size, looked about the same, had the same capabilities we do now. If we used a time machine to go back and kidnap a Cro Magnon baby, bring her to our time and raise her in an ordinary American home, she’d probably grow up to play video games, shop at the mall, get a college degree, and land a job at an investment bank, and do just fine. Most of the evolving humanity has done since seems to be focused on their immune system and adaptations to agriculture and urban living.
One has to wonder, if IQ is such a great boon to humanity, why hasn’t the biological basis for it shown much improvement in the last 100,000 years? Evolution is far better at tinkering than humans are, and has been tweaking our species for a long, long time, but super-brains haven’t emerged yet. Somehow, genetic engineering is going to find amazing new solutions to intelligence, a quality of the brain that we don’t even understand yet, and cause a great leap upward? Unlikely.
Hsu’s answer is convincing only to the naive. He’s basically proposing that the problem is that intelligence involves a lot of genes, so all we need to do is find the optimal variant in each of the genes involved (evolution has already done our work for us!), and then combine them all into one individual. If a thousand genes contribute to intelligence, and there’s a variant of each that gives +1 IQ point overall, then all we have to do is a massive genetic adjustment that brings them all together. Easy, right?
To achieve this maximal type would require direct editing of the human genome, ensuring the favorable genetic variant at each of 10,000 loci. Optimistically, this might someday be possible with gene editing technologies similar to the recently discovered CRISPR/Cas system that has led to a revolution in genetic engineering in just the past year or two. Harvard genomicist George Church has even suggested that CRISPR will allow the resurrection of mammoths through the selective editing of Asian elephant embryo genomes. Assuming Church is right, we should add super-geniuses to mammoths on the list of wonders to be produced in the new genomic age.
Note his estimate of the number of genes that contribute to IQ: 10,000. That’s half the human genome! Hmmm. I wonder if any of those genes play a role in other processes in human physiology that might be affected by his plan?
Here’s an analogy for you: let’s say a novice car designer has decided that the one quality of an automobile that is most important is speed, raw speed. He doesn’t know much about cars, so he asks more qualified engineers about what elements of the car contribute to acceleration and velocity, and they start off with the obvious…details of the engine, fuel mixes, etc. Then they’re talking tires. Aerodynamics. Weight. Pretty soon they have to admit that just about everything in the car is going to affect the speed at which it travels.
So our blithe designer decides that making a fast car is simple: we just look at each component of the car one by one, and we pick an available option for it entirely on the basis of which option makes the car go faster. We’ll easily be able to make a car that can rocket along at a thousand miles an hour, he thinks.
But we have to ask whether we would want a car where the seats and steering were optimized for speed, where safety options were discarded, where something like visibility or reliability were jettisoned for the sole virtue of going really fast.
That’s what Hsu is proposing. It’s absurd. Humans are even more multidimensional than cars, and he thinks he can flatten people out to a single linear parameter. I think we’ve gone beyond imagining spherical cows to imagining human beings as a point on a line.
But OK, let’s do the experiment. Let’s grab a random human ovum, and our impossibly flawless CRISPR/Cas tools, and go down a list (one we haven’t compiled yet) of 10,000 genetic alleles that each individually make some positive contribution to IQ, and we’ll go through and serially edit each of those genes to conform to our hypothetical optimum.
Every biologist in the world is looking at that paragraph and saying, “Wait, we can’t do any of that, and we don’t have that information, and it’s technically the next best thing to impossible.” But don’t worry, the techno-optimists who have no practical experience at all in this kind of molecular genetics will assure us, someday you definitely can. While the biologists will mutter in reply, “Then where’s my flying car and my jetpack and my hoverboard, guy?”
But here in fantasy land, where I’ve been pretending all the difficult questions can be waved away, let’s pretend we can carry out this experiment, and that it somehow gets past an ethics review board.
Now you’ve got a genetically engineered human egg, where half the genes have been ripped out and replaced with Stephen Hsu’s chosen alleles. Who’s the mommy and daddy? Who’s going to take responsibility for this radical experiment in creative genetic engineering? Assuming this amply poked and prodded embryo makes it past the blastocyst stage (odds are it won’t) and actually comes to full term (in someone’s uterus, unless Hsu is so far into fairyland he’s imaging artificial wombs), you’re at some point going to have this infant with half its genome the progeny of a computer and a bacterial molecular pattern matching system. Now what?
This is where Hsu’s whole idea flops down and dies in a flood of prolonged ignorance. All he talks about is genes, genes, genes, as if these humans will just pop out of a vat to take over his physics job. You know where most of the variability in intelligence comes from: it’s in education and opportunity, not genes, and especially not genes that you don’t understand and can’t measure.
I’m all for increasing investment in biology and molecular genetics, but if you really want to create super-intelligent humans, the best strategy is to invest in sociology and education and social services. If Hsu actually believes all those optimized alleles are out there, why does he allow them to languish in poverty and want? If greater intelligence is an unalloyed good and an unquestionable virtue, why chase after untested genes in unborn individuals rather than crusading to have better nutrition for all children, better preschool education, better schools with more uniform standards?
Those are practical, achievable goals. They’re also more expensive and require broader support than a mad scientist with a tissue culture facility, an electroporator, and a freezer full of reagents. But unlike the mad scientist, feeding poor children and creating a network of well-supported educational institutions would actually directly and effectively increase the overall intelligence and knowledge of the population and create material advantages to any society that pursued that goal within a generation.
If you actually cared about accomplishing an increase in human intelligence, that is. I’m not so sure that the people who are seeking magical solutions in a test tube actually do.
Let’s say for the sake of argument, bigger is better and one doubles the physical size and neuron count of the brain, how are you going to “pay” for it nutritionally?
Brains are greedy things, needing a whopping 20% of our caloric intake, double that and one has to trade off elsewhere or the organism would then starve to death.
How does that organism even hold up its immense head?
Just from a physical design perspective, it’s problematic in the extreme!
PZ, I recall a while back that you made the case that brain size (when it comes to ‘races’) is not at all correlated to intelligence. But here you use ancestral brain size to do just that.
But this is about as fair as me (a physicist) lumping young-earth creationists in with biologists, and then using an idiot like Hen Kam (sic) as an example of a biologist.
You’ve made many excellent points, PZ, except one very basic, IMHO: is intelligence really “a single linear parameter”, along the lines of which human beings can be ranked? I very much doubt it. To me, even the problem-solving aspect of intelligence has many, possibly competing, dimensions: geometrical thinking, abstract symbolic thought, the ability to rapidly form (and reject) likely hypotheses, the ability to imagine possible scenarios in a complex world etc. It is not hard to imagine a first-rate mathematician who would be useless at designing a jet engine, or a brilliant businessman who is terrible at abstract math. So, who decides what these designer babies are optimized for?
Except that flying cars, jetpacks, and hoverboards already exist. They’re not cheap or practical or useful, but the basic underlying technology exists so developing them into common commercial products is a lot more plausible than the superintelligent superpeople with supergenes idea.
#2: I bent over backwards to concede a whole bunch of stuff to the IQ fans in this post, because even when I do, Hsu’s argument is bullshit.
wcorvi #2:
I’m not sure what point you’re making. A sapiens brain is, roughly, half-again as large as an early erectus brain. Clearly an increase of such magnitude will have noticeable effects. On the other hand, any difference there might be between the average brain-sizes of populations of modern humans is minute and any effect is thus negligible; if it exists at all, which I doubt.
My first thought was the education thing. And nutrition: as wzrd1 mentioned upthread, brains are fuel-intensive organs. And the body tends to prioritize other things when there isn’t enough food (like keeping you alive).
Maybe these aren’t a problem if you are an American professional and everyone you know has advanced degrees and a good job and health care, so their kids grow up with books and involved parents and ample food and free of health problems. Almost regardless of genes, you’ll get kids that have decent reasoning skills and programs that help them increase their strengths and compensate for weaknesses.
But raise the same kids in poverty, with parents that are loving, but don’t have the time or knowledge to help with education, and schools that are often substandard and they aren’t going to do nearly as well.
Making “super intelligence” seems more akin to making a car “super awesome” rather than “super fast.” People are really good at optimizing cars for speed once you’ve designed the parameters – e.g. straight for a short distance, highest speed, time around a track. But while g probably exists, we don’t know what causes it.
I’ve found that “intelligence” tends to be a nebulously-defined term that somehow magically seems to accumulate among the privileged. How much of that is the privileged having more access to education, and how much has to do with the definition favoring certain kinds of knowledge over others is a fair discussion, but I think there’s a fair bit going on in the construction of that term either way.
As to the evolution of intelligence in modern humans: If anything, I’d intuitively expect average intelligence to *decrease*, and variation in intelligence to increase, in modern societies.
If you’re a hunter-gatherer travelling in a small group, being dim-witted can get you killed really quickly. Hunter-gathering is DANGEROUS, with very high rates of death through accident or violence: being able to think on your feet and improvise and find patterns gives you an immediate survival advantage. There’s no specialisation, so every individual has to be reasonably good at every relevant mental task for the group to succeed competitively.
On the other hand I think you’d have to be really very dumb to significantly affect your chances of surviving in a modern urbanised society. There’s always someone around to do the difficult/risky mental tasks for you (food safety, electricians…), or they’ve been done already and the results integrated into the environment (warning signs, safety rails…).
A. E. van Vogt beat Stephen Hsu to the punch (several times). But he wasn’t pretending to be a SERIOUS THINKER (at least, not much).
This is so true
“If you actually cared about accomplishing an increase in human intelligence, that is. I’m not so sure that the people who are seeking magical solutions in a test tube actually do.”
Well, yes, as both a moral and a practical question I definitely agree that if higher IQs are what you want, we should invest in children’s environments rather than their genomes. Average IQ scores have in fact risen substantially in the past 100 years, presumably because of better nutrition, less infectious disease, more universal education, and since the ’70s getting lead out of the environment, etc.
However, there is a substantial heritable component to IQ based on twin and sibling studies. IIRC it’s about 50% given the current nature and degree of environmental variation. (In a different environmental context, the heritability would be different.)
Obviously the idea of somehow optimizing all genes for IQ is nonsensical, for the reasons PZ espouses — the result might not even be viable! And the gene variants associated with higher IQ would be different given different environments. But it is possible that some relatively small number of generally tolerable gene variants are associated with some significant number of IQ points, either in an environment and life history we can predict for the child, or quite broadly. It’s certainly not impossible that we’ll one day figure out practical gene edits associated with taller people, higher IQs, stronger musculature — perhaps specific talents like music. When that happens we’ll have to confront it as a moral and sociological problem, because you can bet your bippie some people will do it.
Has anyone else read Michael Swanwick’s “The Dog Said Bow Wow”? At one critical point, a genetically-engineered hyper-intelligent savant nearly destroys London because he sees a problem that he just can’t stop himself from solving…
Wile E. Coyote – Supergenius
Wile E. is not subject to the force of gravity until he looks down. If he were smart, he wouldn’t look down.
Never mind all the other advantages that are associated with reducing poverty, such as increased well-being, less crime, increased productivity, better political stability, more art, more science, etc. Including reduced religiosity, by the way.
A. E. van Vogt’s protagonists were quite hard to kill, a useful quality if you are going to use your brain…
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Another contentious issue is the quest for longer life.
Here is how it should be done, with solid basic research using nematodes:
“A network for longevity” http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-04-network-longevity.html
If Wile E. Coyote were smart, he’d stop buying Acme products—they clearly have serious quality control issues.
BTW the assemblages of commensal bacteria are crucial for avoiding stunted growth and stunted intelletual development if malnourished during early childhood.
I forgot the authors of the article, it was in Science 3-4 weeks ago. Viva crap bacteria!
IQ is a norm-based measurement; a score of 100 is defined as the median of the norming sample. Every 15 points above 100 represents an increase of one standard deviation.
So an IQ of 1000 would be 60 SDs above the median of the norming sample. I guess that’s possible if you norm the test on a sample of paramecium.
Another reason why you should be interested in gut bateria and their effect on the brain.
Gut bacteria regulate nerve fibre insulation https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2016/apr/05/gut-bacteria-brain-myelin
If you have read Stanislav Lem’s “Golem XIV” you might possibly attribute an IQ of 1000 to the titular AI, just before it took off from the observeable universe.
Intelligence is the product of human hubris. Humans declared themselves intelligent. Likewise, they declared everything else unintelligent.
Human belief in human intelligence is one of our strongest beliefs, as strong as our belief in agency. Considering how we might have come to such self-aggrandizement is intriguing to consider.
As with many beliefs, our belief in our intelligence is dangerous.
Hooray for pleiotropy! Wait until this guy learns about epigenetics.
I am not an embryologist, but it sounds a lot more plausible to me than literally everything else he is proposing.
Does he know what intelligence is?
You can’t tweak it unless you know what it is. Just sayin’ …
People already tend to be insufferable thinking they are smarter than everyone else. Even if this bullshit was possible, it would lead nowhere good. People would probably get better at weapons design and wall building.
Part of the problem is imprecision in language. I am confronted daily with spectacular failures of “intelligence” on the part of others, but I estimate that 99.5% of them at least could be resolved not by genetic engineering but by aggressively teaching people critical thinking skills and to pay the slightest bit of fucking attention to what is going on in the environment around them, and impressing on people – with a hydraulic ram, if necessary – that wasting other people’s time is wrong.
Does anyone know if Hsu is a Mensa member? Because this kind of shallow bullshit-centric understanding of “intelligence” just screams “Mensaaaa!” (in a Wrath of Khan kind of scream)
Damn! PZ beat me to it, although *I* want that physicist to stop pipedreaming about biology and get me my damn warp drive!
—
Although, there is a hypothesis that intelligence correlates with brain mass divided by body mass. So maybe all we need to do is select for genes to make us smaller. The super-geniuses may turn out to be Hobbits (the Tolkien kind, not the Flores Island kind). (I’m joking.)
intelligence correlates with brain mass divided by body mass. So maybe all we need to do is select for genes to make us smaller
Or lighter.
I, for one, welcome our new parrot overlords.
We don’t need to do the genetic experiment; nature does it with every child. When we look at mental abilities that might be heritable, the human brain seems pretty well fine-tuned as it is. If you crank up one metal function and you get pathologies in others:
Improved mathematical & spatial reasoning — autism.
Improved perception speed & reaction times — tourettes syndrome.
Improved creativity & artistic ability — depression or schizophrenia.
@Marcus Ranum #29,
Mr. Hsu is not a current Mensa member. I just checked the member database.
From Ed Brayton this morning (Fracking Can’t Cause Earthquakes Because God Does That) — Colorado Republican candidates for US Senate:
It’s obvious that the cure for the plague that human intelligence has unleashed upon the world is not going to be genetic engineering, but more lead and other contaminants in the drinking water. Who needs intelligence if you have lots of jobs?
Azykyroth @28 brought up something that I’ve always wondered about.
The same humans that can now program supercomputers or perform brain surgery were practicing trepanation or ingesting medicinal mercury a couple centuries ago.
If we can go from “well I kinda just figured out how pulleys work” to “I’m flying around the planet at 30k feet twice a year” with roughly the same biology, why think that we can’t achieve even more without running into some biological hard limit of intelligence?
@Zeppelin
This is true, nevertheless intelligent people are still less likely to die due to accidents -click- so it seems that higher intelligence still has advantage.
___________________
If I remember correctly, twin studies showed that approximately 15 points of IQ in either direction (that is whole standard deviation from average) can be definitively attributed to environment. This means that person with the genetic capability to have IQ 115 in optimal conditions could have IQ 85 in the worst possible (survivable) conditions.
That IQ has normal distribution with average 100 and 15 standard deviation is in itself a sign that it is influenced by a lot of small variables in a lot of small ways. Some of those variables are nutrition and health (I cannot find the study now, but I remember that there is f.e. a correlation between physical -specifically cardiac- health and intelligence in young people) some are environment (as already stated – supportive vs. unsupporting parents) etc.
However even assuming that IQ is completely inherited, is only beneficial with no drawback, and assuming that all genes add up linearily, one still cannot conclude that picking the best alleles of all available genes would lead to an individual with an IQ of 1000 (measured against an actual population average now). It could only lead to someone with an IQ of approximately 170-190 (estimated from the normal distribution – these numbers have probability of occuring in the range of one against a few billions) and that is probably the upper limit where it is possible to go with current human genome.
Mathematicaly can the normal distribution go in either direction into infinity, but in reality there always is upper and lower limit.
the question of what intelligence is is safely left out. My understanding of IQ is that the tests are very culturally slanted or biased if that is true then it is not intelligence that is being measured but what is already learned making them a reverse ignorance measure.
I will also go so far as to say that it is not intelligence that is really proposed here but the results of education. The two things are often conflated and confused and used inaccurately both in communicating and in thinking about “the problem”. No where is the problem ever defined to which a supper intelligence is the only answer or the best answer for either.
I agree with PZ here it might be more effective to apply the intelligence we already have on educating and caring for ourselves and our children something we have yet to do in any systematic comprehensive way. Who knows it might even lead to a nicer society and a nicer world to live in.
uncle frogy
Skip the jetpacks- where are my sonic showers?
Start putting those in the doorways to public buildings, and plagues are now significantly cut down (not to mention the world smells better). It could be a revolution on par with indoor plumbing!
But I think before we get to the “let’s tweak the genes to get better intelligence” we have a couple of hiccups to figure out:
1) Define intelligence. Is it larger brains? More wrinkly brains? More neurons? More connections? Can we test it off of an IQ test- and can we make an IQ test deficient of cultural biases? Can we test it off grades? A paperclip test? Is it a matter of intuitively understanding things or is intelligence the ability to pick your way through a complicated problem step by step? Is one intelligence biologically different from another intelligence and is one superior. For instance, if you can figure out how to do a complicated math problem that shows some intelligence in mathematics. But if you can look around a party and adjust your body language, tone, behavior and body distance to make people comfortable that shows social intelligence. Are they both from the same biological place? Can we test that? How do you pick which one is better?
2) Do we know we’ve hit our biological limits of intelligence? How do we know when an individual or a society has?
3) What will be the control, and how the hell do you get that past an ethics board PAST the how do you get the original experiment passed an ethics board?
Inquiring minds want to know.
These arguments often seem to ooze forth from the same well of malignant individualism that gives us objectivist libertarians.
Sure, decent socialised nutrition throughout childhood would improve the average level of intelligence, but that helps other people.
What transhumanism often boils down to is special snowflakes desperately wishing they were even more special. Because when being superior to the people around you is the defining factor in your self worth, striving to be even more so is the only goal.
Yes, we (in the broad sense) do.. but it does seem to be a constant battle; so much so that it appears sometimes that some of us (again in the broad sense) are actively applying our own intelligence toward dismantling the existing efforts to improve and maintain the care and education of our children. There will always be differences of opinion on how improvements can be made, and cost/benefit ratios; but seriously, when one of our political parties makes the wholesale removal of safeguards against environmental poisons into a campaign issue, we ought to wonder if the development and protection of the intelligence of our citizenry is even of the slightest concern to us (in the broad sense).
Yes, of course it is libertarian individualism and transhumanistic concern for “my” little snowflakes. That’s what makes it possible at the same time to love the idea of genetic tinkering to produce super-genius kids (which will eat, drink and breathe and be educated by only the best..), and yet not think or care much about the degradation of the conditions necessary for development of intelligence in the general population.
Perhaps increasing intelligence would involve suppressing “lizard brain” fears that cause humans to fall for demagoguery.
I knew this sounded like something I read about in the last few years. So I found this from Scientific American five years ago: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-limits-of-intelligence/ (sorry you have to buy it to read the whole thing). But it stresses the load a larger brain would put on our energy budget. As one of the other commenters said our brains are a high energy demand. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to create a more intelligent human but we don’t currently know nearly enough to even try, and PZ covers the ethical considerations of what that experiment would entail.
Humans are still showing evolutionary activity in my opinion, or at least mutations. The appearance of synesthesia in humans shows changes are occurring in the TPO portion of the brain, is that an enhancement or a benign mutation without benefit? Nature or nurture? Don’t know.
All that said I’m still waiting for the Singularity! ;-} (and pretty PO’ed that I won’t live to see it) .
Some elements of discussion seem really problematic.
First is the assumption that IQ measures one thing; it really seems to be a mix of different talents. I’m the parent of two kids on the autism spectrum, and my two data points suggest that there are at least 3 kinds of intelligence; linguistic, mathematical, and social. My kids are linguistic and mathematical geniuses respectively and so test very well on IQ tests, which don’t measure social abilities. Compressing lots of different skills into one measurement is pretty problematic, isn’t it?
The second is that IQ is largely inherited. Like a lot of traits, it’s affected a lot more by development than genetic foundations (for neurotypical people, anyway.) People claiming inherited IQ really need to explain the very, very rapid evolution in Ireland, East Germany, Greece, and some of the Balkan countries over the last 50 years. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-wealth/ (Yes, AmericanConservative. Now with Irish, Greek and other races. But the IQ data are interesting, given the proposal.)
Last, twin studies have statistical problems that render their results somewhat problematic. The main one is that the environments separated twins get place in tend to be socioeconomically very similar. Since the genetic component isn’t separated from the socioeconomic one – we don’t run experiments on children – the socioeconomic effects get confused and attributed to the genetic ones. There’s an informative dissection of the statistical problems at http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html and related pages. One of the most interesting results quoted there:
“c. When the communities in the preceding sample were classified as similar vs. dissimilar on the basis of size and economic base (e.g. mining vs. agricultural), the correlation for separated twins living in similar communities was .86; for those residing in dissimilar localities the coefficient was .26.”
Lord, grant me the confidence of a physicist jacking off about biology.
isn’t the size of the human brain limited by the size of the human birth canal, which is limited by the shape of the human pelvis?
Maybe larger brains would be more useful, but not if our mothers can’t give birth to us.
Bigger brains are clearly desirable because the increased energy demand will prevent a beer gut from forming. Obesity for middle aged thinky guys is solved!
dannysichel @ # 45: … the size of the human birth canal, which is limited by the shape of the human pelvis?
Obviously the latter-day eugenicists need to begin by selecting for wider-hipped women. Some might work for zipper-uterused women, to facilitate all the Caesarean births, but (ahem) realistically gestation of geniuses will take significantly more than a mere nine months, so the heavier-duty pelvis will still be necessary. Oxygenating those big brains will also require expanding lung & heart capacity, ergo the human breeder sow will need a larger rib cage and thus a stronger spine: in short, a reversed sexual dimorphism so that males become the smaller gender.
I’m all in favor of the euphenics program our esteemed host proposes, but Hsu and his fellow transhumanists seem to be missing the boat even in terms of their own better-brainz goals. Tweaking the inherently messy processes of genetics will take much longer than a crash program in direct brain-computer interfaces (especially if we dump all those review boards and sacrifice a generation or two of brats to work out functional electrode-implantation technologies asap).
O brave new world, That has such people in ‘t!
Steve Hsu is totally right and will be vindicated in due course.
PZ, do you even science bro?
@48: Steve, is that you?
@#45, dannysichel
No, actually. The (now deceased, sadly) neurologist Harold Klawans theorized — in the highly-recommended book Strange Behavior: Tales of Evolutionary Neurology — that that was the real reason why homo sapiens out-competed the neanderthals: human brains do quite a lot of their growth after birth, during the first six years or so of life. (That’s why the plates of your skull don’t fuse until then.) A human brain can adapt to medical trauma and build connections (which are where the power of the brain seems to come from) long after birth, whereas the neanderthals seem to have been born with their brains full-sized, which meant that, unlike us, their brain size was limited by the size of the birth canal.
There is no directly obvious reason why a hypothetical super-brain-sized human couldn’t attain the extra size by not having their skull solidify until they were in their 20s or 30s. (Note that, unlike Klawans, I Am Not A Neurologist, and unlike PZ, I Am Not A Biologist. There may be a reason why this couldn’t happen which is obvious, but only if you have a background in the fields involved.) This, of course, presumes that a bigger brain would be helpful… it might, but I know that elsewhere, size has diminishing returns. For example, adding more CPUs to a computer only aids in its speed for certain tasks, and only up to a certain point. After you reach a certain point, the overhead of coordinating everything starts to eat up the new speed, and in any event if you have more CPUs (or more cores) than there are threads, extra CPUs actually may slow things down depending on how clever it is about matching tasks to CPUs.
What would probably be a lot more useful would be to make humans age a lot more slowly. If people had to live with their own behavior for a few hundred years, and couldn’t have children until they were 50 or so, I think that that would promote saner behavior than just bumping up our collective intelligence.
Aah, a disciple has appeared to confirm fervently held beliefs of their own intelligence.
Paul Conroy #48
Check back in after this happens … uh … bro.
like, high-five, dude
Paul Conroy @ 48;
I take it you aren’t a proponent of the no gods, no masters component of skeptical thought, then? You know, the whole true believer, blind faith thing is really more the other side’s bag. Just replace Steve Hsu with god and you will fit right in with any number of creationist groups, ‘bro’.
Jeez, PZ. What do you have against the Tleilaxu and mentats?
Alternatively:
Hsu seems like he’s on the right track but where does the sapho juice come in to play?
Frankly, the only plausible mechanism I can see for increasing human intelligence, whatever the hell that means, is eugenics. And I know I don’t need to tell anyone here what a … problematic option that would be.
@InitHello,
Funny you should mention eugenics. Of course the US has a fully fledged eugenics program up and running for decades, legal and all the rest?!
Have you never of abortion, and studied the demographics of those who use such services? Have you never wondered why Planned Parenthood clinics profile low SES areas?
@Greenwood,
I take it that you can’t grok genetics, like your doyen PZ, either – sucks to be you ;)
Paul Conroy:
Except that it is not funny.
Is that a question?
What is “all the rest” supposed to refer to, besides the legality of the program you’re imagining?
I haven’t wondered that. What about the much more likely possibility that people in certain demographics have more reasons to need such services than others? Reasons which obviously don’t need to have anything to do with which traits they think they want in their offspring or in the population, so this also doesn’t have anything to do with any attempt to exercise control over what those traits will be.
On the other hand, that thing which you asserted will eventually be “vindicated” somehow…. That thing really is straight-up, no-bullshit, not-pretending, not-scoring-debate-points, actual, factual, literal eugenics. Why isn’t educating people in all sorts of ways a better method of making them smarter, if that’s the trait you want?
@Razor,
Do me a favor, stop with the Virtue Signalling, it’s tiresome…
Your concept of educating people to make them smarter is funny, and like PZ’s post, totally, stupid. IQ/smarts is genetic, education is knowledge and know how.
You can’t educate a dumb person to be smart, it would be like “trying to make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear”. But enough porcine metaphor – it will probably fall like pearls before swine in this setting.
And you think you do, with your fantasy of Mentat superbrains achieved by some kind of ill defined genetic engineering process, invoked with so little actual evidence to back it up that you might as well just call it magic and be done? That is just adorable.
You really don’t understand how Pharyngula works, do you cupcake?
You know, on this point you are actually right (hey, even a broken clock can be twice a day) – my pronounced allergy to self serving bullshit really is flaring up around you. I’ll be coming out in hives next…
Paul, I recall such a silk purse made of a sow’s ear, without whom we’d never have acquired knowledge of general and special relativity and whose “genius genetic” children failed to make any significant contribution to anything whatsoever.
So, do enlighten us, which genes are involved in the genetics of high IQ? Be specific, as you’ve made a very clear and bold statement, you obviously have an answer. Which specific genes? Which chromosomes? Recessive trait or dominant? You’ve spoken of genetics on the page of a gentleman who can speak volumes on genetics, so we’d all appreciate your filling in the blanks you’ve boldly claimed exist, but which have utterly defeated every geneticist known to man.
Enlighten us, oh benighted one!
David Eriksen @ 55;
By will alone I set my mind in motion,.
By the Juice of Sapho the mind acquires speed,
The lips acquire stains,
The stains become a warning.
By will alone I set my mind in motion.
On the topic of all things Dune, according to recent news reports there is a new type of cannabis circulating in the UK penal system called Spice, maybe that is what Hsu has been using to come up with his… err… brilliant insights?
But yet you think you are…What is your excuse?
When physicists talk about biology, you get balloon animals, vortices, super intelligence, etc. Anything but reality. As a long time SciFi/Fantasy reader, I understand the difference between facts and fiction.
Paul Conroy @ 60;
Wrzd1 makes a good point @ 62 – while I am no more than a layman, it is still evident that for your claim in the above quote to hold, it should be possible to identify a specific gene or group of genes responsible for intelligence, and these genes should then be by far and away the dominant factor in determining the expression of intellect subject to the usual epigenetic effects. As such, it should be possible to identify these genes and predict the intellectual ability of any individual from their genetic makeup with a high degree of accuracy, and yet oddly that has never been done.
Indeed, there are theories of intelligence that hold that it is in large part a learned behaviour, which would seem to blow a huge smoking hole in your contention. I see you dismiss such approaches, but I haven’t seen you produce any evidence to back up your position. Why should we just take your claims on faith?
In the absence of such a tellingly non-existent genetic intelligence test, our only means of determining intellect is to perform some kind of ability based testing, and that is obviously going to be influenced by educational opportunities, upbringing and environment, leaving us firmly in a sphere influenced by both nature and nurture. Will genes be a factor in determining intelligence? Probably, but the critical part of that sentence is that genes would be a factor, not the only factor or even the most significant one, your intellectual ubermensch fantasies notwithstanding.
Reply from Steve Hsu here: http://infoproc.blogspot.com.au/2016/04/this-is-for-pz-meyers.html
I don’t know why we’re bothering to try and have a reasonable argument with someone whose first refuge when challenged is the “evils” of abortion. They’re either trolling, or really, really dumb.
Also, yes, the US did practice forced sterilization many times throughout history, but planned parenthood is not an example of that.
…and that’s all he wrote!
I’ll leave you PZ acolyte guys in suspense as to the details of how enhancing IQ works – or based on the SJW catty tone, in suspenders!
BUH-BYE ;)
Indeed, Vivec, it’s why I mentioned some of the well published instances. Going to a Planned Parenthood clinic is no more necessary than going to any other health care provider, save that in some areas, Planned Parenthood is the only medical care available (well, was, some states saw to it that even that medical care is no longer available to the citizenry).
Apparently, voluntarily walking into a clinic is the same as being compelled involuntarily to be sterilized, turning the very notion of voluntary into some Orwellian version!
I’d call that defective conceptualization of what mandatory and voluntary is, let alone what clinical services are that go far and away beyond mere abortion. Reason departs such people and they go into some random association that supports their delusions in ways astonishing. Free becomes mandatory, a pap smear is an abortion and well, magic or something.
It certainly doesn’t qualify as reasoning.
Ah, so the point, Paul, is 70 to thousands of SNP’s equal a genetic basis to intelligence, because of magic.
No cause and effect, blind assertion only. No observation of specific combinations of traits associated with specific poly morphisms, just “there are many, so intelligence is genetic”.
Seriously?
That’s like saying atoms are intelligent because there are so many different kinds of quarks!
I wonder if we’ll have super-smart general artificial intelligence before we have genetic enhanced smart people. We won’t need the brains, the machines can do it all for us anyways!
Of course, even before we reach super smart general artificial intelligence, we already have things like Watson coming along that can outdo us in certain areas, like Jeopardy!
@Jake Harban, #4
You beat me to it!
That’s a hell of an oblique comment. The fuck does that mean?
When I think of suspenders, I think aging CNN political commentator or “Down to earth” country lawyer.
Should have been your introduction, for all the true facts you presented.
I suspect Paul Conroy’s idea of enhanced intelligence involves a fire hose stream of genetically engineered sperm drowning the world in his awesomesauce.
When I think of suspenders, I think of the things that hold up tuxedo pants and something I’ve frequently considered switching to to hold my pants up.
But then, my washboard belly had a truck parked on the inside of it. ;)
The rest of the “argument” is ~70 SNP’s being observed and that somehow manages to account for the vast constellation observed in humanity. That’s way too small to account for such an immense spectrum, or for that matter, much of anything.
First, does it code for anything? Does it code for a neurotransmitter? Structural protein? Receptor? Nothing whatsoever? Immune complex?
Instead, “because I say it is” seems to be the basis of the alleged solution.
There have already been various studies of twins, which (among many other things) look at traits like intelligence. If you were a belligerent dumbass like Paul Conroy, one who insists it just is genetic, you’d be making a definite prediction about what those studies show: extremely high correlations at or near 100%. And in the real world, they don’t show that. The end.
But of course, it isn’t the end in one sense, because learning how to think about the world isn’t typically what motivates belligerent dumbasses, who believe learning isn’t important because the important thing is imagining that they possess magical blood which they believe justifies their belligerence. So I predict that you could show them evidence like that all fucking day, and they wouldn’t learn shit about it. But after all, why would they need to, when undetectable pixies in their chromosomes are providing them with appropriate ways to think?
Don’t forget about Deep Blue and AlphaGo. Nothing to sneeze at there. So the scoreboard is at least 3-0, not to mention lots of other kinds of AI which either exist already or are currently being developed. So maybe AI is winning by a much larger margin; but in any case, I don’t know of a single genetically modified person who’s been made to do anything better than a normal person. I don’t even know of any project which is actually in the works that has any chance of approaching anything like that. But maybe some “intelligent” person like Paul Conroy can explain why I shouldn’t care about petty details like that.
I wonder if leaving us in suspenders is simply a mangled idiom? I am fairly certain he meant to leave us in suspense.
Ha, totally! It’s the same course with all the flying pigs. It seem to be getting rather crowded over there, what with all the physics science dudes and their abysmal ignorance of biology.
_*reads Hsu’s latest bit of bafflegab*-
What an arrogant little pusworm. Not only is he far into the realm of make-believe on the math, he claims he gets all these factoids about genes from the science of population genetics. He then proves his point with a photo of three chickens.
Hey Steve, body size is really easy to select for artificially because you can see it, and quantify it with only a scale. Breed the biggest birds and cross them with the appropriate cross. CornishxRock is the actual name of the breed fool. Perhaps you should find X since you claim to be such an esteemed mathy science dude. We could theoretically breed humans for higher than average intelligence, but Steve would not qualify as breeding stock, nor are there any other breeds of humans around to crossbreed for F1 hybrids.
consciousness razor @ 76;
Careful @ Consciousness Razor. I am pretty sure it counts as cruel and unusual treatment of idiots to confuse people like Paul Conroy with the facts in this fashion.
You are right – we are probably all wasting out time trying to get through to him. Maybe Paul Conroy’s immunity to reason and evidence based argument stems from some genetic basis? Not super intelligence, but perhaps super-obtuseness and hyper-Dunning-Kryger could be within the reach of modern geneticists if Paul is any guide…
Have some evidence that better educational methods results in better life outcomes. I’m not claiming that this proves that intelligence, whatever that is exactly, is primarily driven by education. But one of the oft used markers for lack of intelligence is educational failure, and this group demonstrates give even the most disadvantaged folks in society, the people that racist claim are in that situation because of biological inferiority, access to good education results in big payoffs for almost every student. A caveat here, I have no idea how accurate their success rate reporting is, but they *are* data driven. They seek out evidenced best practices and apply them rigorously.
The Harlem Children’s Zone project.
I first heard about it in this 2008 This American Life podcast
FossileFishy, how much is base rote knowledge and how much is teaching reasoning and critical thinking of import to a disadvantaged person?
Rote knowledge goes only so far, but teaching reasoning, critical thinking and seeking peer reviewed knowledge is an invaluable resource to build upon.
Indeed, it’s the antithesis of the Dunning-Kruger effect, as one knows that one is incompetent and one knows enough to seek out valid knowledge, rather than presuppose incorrectly.
Or as my old librarian said, teach a child to read, they’ll know how to read what you set before them. Teach the child how to use the card catalog and Dewey Decimal System, you’ve given them the world. ;)
From there, it’s only a matter of seeing to it that access to knowledge is provided, which the internet and Google Scholar readily provide. We have a great opportunity today, something never before available. The internet and the vast resources and vast garbage. Teaching reasoning, screening for quality information and teaching critical thinking may provide much greater opportunities than have ever been possible before in human history.
We merely need to address it as an opportunity.
I don’t know the details of their curriculum, but I did find this on the website:
Emphasis mine.
Critical thinking of common core? The twain so rarely ever meet, save in mutual exclusivity.
I’m not American so I’m not sure what common core is and why folks have so much problem with it. But look at that sentence, it has an ‘and’ in it. They are teaching critical thinking skills and preparing them for common core, not teaching them CT ‘for’ common core. Or so I parse it.
Ah, I forget my audience. The problem with common core was, it became teach to the test, rather than teach to competency in the subject matter.
While some schools still did teach to competency, they were not rewarded for the competency, but disparaged for lower scores compared to those who taught to the test. Add politics into the mess, especially with creationists in the mix, it turned into a political hot potato.
I went to school during “the new math” period, where concepts were taught, rote minimized in favor of competency in the concepts and mechanics and methodology. Our children went to school while “train to the test” was being implemented and experimentation in sciences was… Odd. M&M’s in a jar replaced chemical reagents, microscopes were absent from science classrooms and concepts behind handling equations was absent. We were repeatedly castigated for teaching our children, as they excelled in their testing, which created funding problems for the school.
I’ve never had a problem with different teaching methods being used, but I’ve always had heartburn over training to a test without competency in the subject matter also being taught and in far too many implementations, incompetence ruled. That offloaded catch up to college, creating additional problems.
Meanwhile, tweaking everything to where it worked became impossible for political reasons, turning the entire debate into a vitriol ridden nonsense festival.
Common core is a poorly designed curriculum and education testing initiative instituted by the worst president ever, while slashing school funding. (no child left behind) They had the idea that if we tied federal funding to test scores, education would improve. Clearly it’s the logic of libertarianism, but it is also current law. From the standardized testing wiki:
Minnesota is the only state to reject is as sub-standard, but our public education system is well funded at the state level and ranks among the best in nation.
without a guess at the time period, there is some competition for worst potus.
tossup in my mind between Reagan, who was at the head of the administration that can arguably be seen as the worst thing to happen to democracy and human rights in 60 years.
vs W, who publicly ABANDONED the very concept of human rights, and has a larger immediate body count as a result than Reagan.
I’m assuming you mean W though.
carry on.
I’m reasonably sure that most of what happened was planned.
by the people who want to privatize… everything.. including education.
first and foremost mission was to make the great public education system that was going strong in the 70s… crash and burn.
then you can present a much worse choice as an option instead, and shellac it to make it shiny.
with the bonus that the uberrich can keep even more of their “hard earned” dosh.
Reagan was really bad at economics, but he did actually do some good with the whole USSR cold war deadlock. He successfully slashed the military budget, which is unthinkable to the current regime.
W is simply the worst sort of bumbling rich idiot. He is clueless, entitled, and was not even elected the first time around. That election was bought especially for Dick Cheny, W’s evil handler.
Well, Reagan’s administration “won” the Cold War by spending the Soviet Union into oblivion. That said, I’m damned sure it wasn’t Reagan’s idea, feels more like Bush Sr’s idea.
As for education, I have a more dire view, not only privatization, but privation by intent. A well educated populace is impossible to control, an ill educated populace is trivial to control by their fears and ignorance. I’ve come to believe that that was the goal the entire time. That explains the “anti-intellectual” bullshit that’s long been making the rounds, the embracing of ignorance and idiocy and the unreality show that is the current GOP election.
The only thing that took it wildly off of the wire is, their monster is loose and mucking up the carefully laid plans of his creator.
Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, this one is one that is impossible to feel empathy for. For, both creator and monster are both true monsters.
no, he didn’t. that’s a myth. really really. coincidence /= action.
begin your education about Regan here, but don’t stop there… his crimes go all the way back to even before he was a stooge for the McCarthy commission.
http://www.alternet.org/story/140438/was_ronald_reagan_an_even_worse_president_than_george_w._bush
Reagan as informant:
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/19/ronald_reagan_informant/
“Reagan was really bad at economics”
Irrelevant really. he was a stooge for a very specific plan, which was exercised nearly flawlessly.
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/05/the_ludicrous_myth_of_republican_fiscal_responsibility_a_history_lesson_for_the_modern_gop/
ichthyic
Oh, so it was some other US president who closed down nuclear missile silos and military bases? I personally was quite happy to no longer be among the first people targeted by USSR in case of nuclear war regardless of whether the fall of soviet Russia was coincidental to Reagan’s presidency. It still happened on his watch, and he did encourage glasnost to everyone’s benefit. That’s about the only thing he didn’t fuck up royally.
Tethys @ 86,
You’re confusing NCLB and Common Core. NCLB was a bipartisan bill passed early in the Bush years (working closely with Sen. Kennedy, though later he denounced Bush for not securing enough funding to help struggling schools).
Common Core was a state initiative encouraged by the Obama administration through a series of grants (that were funded through the NCLB legislation, so there is a tie in). Ultimately two consortia (PARCC and Smarter Balanced) were funded to create and implement tests; both consortia are in their second year of operational testing, so it’s still a bit early to pass judgment. The standards themselves go well beyond rote learning and try to emphasize critical thinking skills. I think it’s too early to say whether they’ll succeed.
Originally 42 states plus DC signed up for the Common Core standards; a few have since dropped out.
What a Maroon
No, I’m really not, In order to get federal education funding you have to follow the rules. NCLB has always been doomed to fail because it has been accompanied by slashing education funding.
If they really wanted NCLB, they should have simply adopted the tried and true Minnesota k-12 educational standards. but that would have meant increasing funding. but shrub promised no new taxes so instead they decided to try and build a better mousetrap by instituting the common core curriculum which is far less rigourous than our minimum standards, and then tying funding to test scores. It’s an entirely predictable recipe for failure.
My shift key is being wonky. Sorry for the missing capital letters.
Is intelligence even a single property? It seems like different groups of animals that differ in “intelligence” just have a greater capacity for one or more distinct mental faculties than other species. “Intelligence” as we see it seems to be the result of several different neurological capabilities, like symbolic reasoning, pattern recognition, memory, spatial reasoning, capacity to communicate complex ideas, and so on. Talking about “increasing” it as if it were a single quantifiable property doesn’t make much sense to me.
Tethys:
I guess you mean that in the last couple of years it declined by a relatively small amount from its peak. But to say that he “slashed the military budget,” when apparently it increased during the course of his two terms, is an incredibly misleading way to characterize what actually happened to the military budget under his administration.
What’s supposed to be so significant about closing down some silos and bases? Did that in any sense result in us having a less belligerent and wasteful military? What am I supposed to appreciate about our military, for which I can thank Ronald fucking Reagan? If you took a Before/After picture of it, what I am supposed to think looks better about it in the latter?
Did that cause the collapse of the Soviet Union? Why exactly are we we supposed to be happier with Putin’s Russia compared to whatever the USSR would be now anyway? What makes you think the world (or the US or anywhere) is a better place than it would’ve been, if Carter or Mondale had been elected instead of Reagan? If you’re not making a claim like that, then what are you saying?
You say you even don’t care if this is coincidental anyway… Very well, maybe you can somehow explain your psychological state, although it doesn’t have much to do with what really happened. But why should anyone else be satisfied with a claim which doesn’t amount to “in fact Reagan did X,” which instead is that in some sense you sort of get the feeling like he managed not to fuck something up royally and you don’t care if it’s coincidental because you’re feeling that way whether or not it’s coincidental? What the hell are we supposed to do with that?
As much as I loathe Reagan and events I can’t discuss for NDA reasons, he also primed our nation for an R&D economy. One utterly undone by his successor and the successor’s idiotic service economy.
We’d have been much, much, much better served with an R&D based economy, service sector and licensing technology for others to build than the service one another clusterfuck we have today.
We could have moved from the insane waste of SDI and create useful technologies and advances, growing the economy much more than what a service economy’s collapse has done.
As for nuclear missiles not pointing at you, seriously, do you honestly think that a missile can’t be reprogrammed within a minute or three? That was part of the target package back when Reagan was POTUS, it’s still part of the package. Pre-programmed nuclear missiles are so 1970! Pershing 1A and II missiles were programmed by a DEC PDP-11 series, silo and submarine based missiles by a different computer and that still remains a fact today. Well, save that the Pershings were destroyed, only the Pershing missiles. Trident 2, Minuteman, AGM-86 cruise missiles, B-61 and B-83 nuclear bombs are still in the arsenal. Hell, there was a really big stink in 2007, when a a half dozen nuclear armed AGM-86 cruise missiles flew around the country, then sat on a runway apron overnight unguarded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_nuclear_weapons_incident
A lot of careers ended with that debacle.
But, we’re safer or something.
Tethys @ 95,
Again, you’re confused.
The Bush administration had nothing to do with Common Core. Common Core was a state initiative started in 2009, after Bush left office.
NCLB did not define standards, it merely mandated that if states wanted to receive federal education funds they had to implement standards (subject to peer review conducted by the feds). Common Core is an attempt by the states to create truly standardized standards.
So you’re wrong on three levels: (a) Common Core is not part of NCLB; (b) it is not a federal initiative; and (c) it was not developed by or even during the Bush administration.
Of course you can argue that Common Core was an outcome of NCLB, because it’s an attempt to implement the standards mandated by the law and because the Obama administration used NCLB funds in the form of competitive grants to encourage states to create consortia that use “college and career ready standards” as the basis for testing programs, but that’s far different from the claim you’re making.