Last I checked, most people mated with a partner of their choosing.
That you call it love and not "selection of the most desirable traits" doesn't change the facts ;-)
That you call it love and not "selection of the most desirable traits" doesn't change the facts ;-)
The word can be used in a modern context, where eugenics is performed voluntarily, on a very small population, and under scientific supervision for causes that benefit the entire humanity. The rest can live and love whoever they want.
Genetic manipulation functionally falls in the same category, but it is better accepted because it doesn't have the negative history attached to it.
This fear is really surprising to me.
Now if the choice comes down to something between two individuals because technology makes it possible to make certain choices that's a different matter but even then you are treading in dangerous territory. Who gets access to the technology? How do you verify that the technology is safe? Is there a beta test period? Who gets to be a beta tester? Anyway the list is long and the technology is nowhere near where it needs to be for even these kinds of choices to be made between two individuals let alone at the population level.
I find the idea in general just intuitively unappealing. Humanity can't breed itself out of the problems it is in. Being smart is simply not enough. Anything worthwhile requires hard work. So are you going to breed for hard work as well now? I don't see these scientists looking for those genes though.
What if the person does not fit your definition of a super intelligent person with a high IQ but instead is a genius in music. Also, how do we know that by focusing only on super intelligent people we won't be killing off the other traits that make life worthwhile, the arts, music, film. There are multiple perspectives that make a person a genius, high IQ is just one of them among many.
As somebody else mentioned, just like breeding dogs, you may be able to select for one trait at the expense of the others.
Frankly high IQ is overrated. It is probably biased anyway. i.e. Children that grow up in high income families have better IQ results than children living in poverty. It could simply mean that the differentiator is good education at an early age.
Yes, because high IQ parents tend to make more money and tend to get high IQ children (even if those children got adopted away or orphaned early on). On the other hand, if high income families adopt children of low IQ parents those children end up with an IQ resembling that of their low IQ biological parents.
The research has been done.
Was race accounted for. i.e. Where there minorities and white kids in the group. If only white kids then that tells me that the problem is more systemic. i.e. racism.
Hopkins, Russell, Schaeffer, "Chimpanzee Intelligence is Heritable", Current Biology, 2014.
<way too many coauthors to list but the main guy seems to be P.M. Visscher>, "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic", Molecular Psychiatry, 2011.
The latter paper reports on a study (with N=3511) on unrelated people to see whether their genotype and their phenotype regarding intelligence had anything to do with each other. People were tested with DNA chip for SNPs and had their IQ measured. The interesting result was that people who had more similar DNA also had more similar IQs (and vice versa, of course).
Drop me an email @gmail.com for copies.
(Which it does, btw.)
I understand the urge to resist reducing humans to a single numerical measurement, but the fact is that "IQ" or "g" or general "cognitive ability" or whatever you want to call it is strongly positively correlated with almost every trait and life outcome that people value.
Thanks to Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.
Once you are responsible for a child, you stay responsible.
Don't make this weird.
Compare and contrast with a society that values the outcome of the work rather than how book smart you need to be able to do it. For example nature conservation is pretty easy to understand how to do right, and there's a tangible lasting benefit.
Guess it depends on what you view as a society worth having.
It depends on the moral sensibilities of the A'ers.