Why do we want to know?
I ran into an interesting comment on the net the other day.. “for some, it is hard to determine what productive and ethical use society can make of genetic knowledge that certain individuals are predisposed to higher than average intelligence”
Perhaps others can think of some productive and ethical uses. Any suggestions?
Some people may already have a certain amount of such knowledge. For example, my high school geometry teacher thought I would probably do well – he had some strange rationale based on remembering how my mother had done in his class. I did do well, but maybe he was just a lucky guesser.
(1) You could selective abort fetuses likely to have low IQ. (Judging by the popular reaction to Sarah Palin’s trisomy 21 kid, failing to do this already makes you a pariah in some circles.)
(2) If a young child’s genes predict he is likely to be susceptible to the Flynn effect, you could give him extra training to try to trigger the effect. This could provide more focused, effective use of education foreign aid in Africa, where general intelligence is desperately needed.
It would be a first step towards identifying the genes and biochemical pathways responsible for intelligence and the development of therapies for people lacking intelligence.
Populations will never be equal socioeconomically if their abilities aren’t equal. It’s ironic that the kind of people who tend to be concerned by inequality also tend to be the ones who would like people to stop thinking lines of thought that could lead to actual solutions.
Easy — Luke 12:48 — “To Those To whom much is Given, Much is Expected”
Education is more useful for some than others. Don’t marry the town idiot. Let intelligent people immigrate into your country and keep out the stupid. Hire smarts over experience.
And finally, transformative politics in the Middle East may have a tiny bit of trouble getting Iraq up to the civilization level of, say, South Dakota; $1 trillion dollars invested into that project may not be exactly well spent. Ditto for transformative politics in Detroit.
Isn’t this the dual of why information that someone may be genetically predisposed to be less than average intelligence would be useful? In a family where most are at 120+, arrival of a child that is well below average (dull, say with potential of 90 adult IQ) but not obviously retarded can be very useful. Instead of throwing good money after bad (kumon classes?) that the child does not benefit from (but obtains a seriously negative self concept), it may be wise to focus on things that the child is able to excel relatively on and also individualized instruction to cope with dullness (such as strategies to work with a limited working memory capacity in mastering simple arithmetic). This sort of thing is already done in some societies via educational streaming at the completion of the sixth grade (into 2 categories in Singapore).
If the deterioration of intelligence with age can be predicted genetically, that would be useful for much the same reasons. Its a piece of information that is very useful to help adapt to the world in the future by those who have been dealt an unkind deck and don’t see it coming.
Regarding the original question: Don’t the people who run “gifted” programs have the answer? Although their programs are always the first to go on the chopping block.
Can you define “ethical” to match society’s current use of IQ tests? Having done so, are you left with any ethical use of genetics?
Preimplantation selection/screening for smarter kids. I guess to some that’s not ethical… plus I suppose we want to figure out why implanted embryos have poorer health outcomes than the old-fashioned kind before we go too far down this road.
Most of the other uses would just be a supplement to existing tests of intelligence. I think the greater returns will come when we can identify more specific aptitudes or processes. If we know not just that some infant is predisposed to greater intelligence, but that it’s specifically because of better fatty acid metabolism, or neuron development at some particular stage of life, or what have you, we would be better able to maximize the advantage.
“for some, it is hard to determine what productive and ethical use society can make of genetic knowledge that certain individuals are predisposed to higher than average intelligence”
I can only make sense of the inversion of that statement – i.e., “unproductive and unethical abuses that can be inflicted on society by suppressing genetic knowledge etc.”
I don´t see the upside of the positive version of the statement. We do already know that certain individuals are predisposed to higher than average intelligence. Schools and universities function as a filter to identify them. It would be ironic, though, if we tried to instill “intelligent” attitudes in students – patience, a determination to concentrate, focus and think long-term -, while at the same time insisting on employing genetic tests to accelerate the selective process. Can anyone imagine that attempts to use genetic information as a substitute for behavioural data could be anything but counterproductive? Intelligence seems to be irreducibly connected to an element of self-selection. It appears that I can choose to turn myself into a “mind file” for future generations to browse, while the concept of a blank slate of pure intelligence to be diagnosed prior to any emergence of observably intelligent behaviour is inherently self-contradictory. Apparently the “mind file” doesn´t ever offer itself up for read-only access as long as it is indeed more than a disembodied file. Diagnosticians beware!
What I can envision, though, is an SF writer fashioning the plot of a dystopian novel from the premise inherent in the question posed.
Paradoxically, it’s probably the first step in helping rabid culturalists to effectively construct an egalitarian utopia. See, sometimes those hardcore genetic determinists can be useful.
Deeper biochemical knowledge of intelligence differences would certainly mitigate the flakier aspects of intelligence measurement (e.g. the Flynn Effect), and help us develop more accurate assessments.
So if you don’t want to, say, execute a criminal below a certain level of reasoning ability, it would be helpful to know if his measured IQ of 78 is masking deeper real deficits because of faulty IQ measurement inflations. Lives hang in the balance!
In fact, just knowing which genes and molecular pathways influence intelligence difference will give us real and useful knowledge of the mechanics of intelligence differences. This will almost certainly help us modify intelligence better, including developing drugs that can effectively modify cognition at every age, or even just helping us know which vitamins, supplements, and other ordinary aspects of diet, nutrition, and lifestyle will benefit cognition, custom to our own personal genotypes.
This would also probably illuminate (and help us cure) more specific learning disabilities and cognitive problems like Alzheimer’s, Autism, and Dyslexia. Or even non-pathological age related changes, such as why language learning ability decreases so steadily with age.
Further, such knowledge may very well have crazy-important engineering and robotics applications. Imagine the effects that artificially intelligent machines could have on the economy and production! This isn’t trivial stuff, this could literally mean the average person of tomorrow having the living standards of the millionaires of today (but with the leisure time of the poor). Both because of what he becomes capable of, and what his technology becomes capable of.
Because achieving a truly egalitarian society is impossible without understanding the underlying architecture of human variation. If we ignore intelligence differences and simply let the cards fall laizzes faire then we will certainly end up with highly intelligent individuals and groups reaping the benefits while the less intelligent struggle and everyone politely ignores the reason . The flipside is we can try to force variation out by forcing an equality of economic/social/achievement status that is not commensurate with ability/motivation etc that will only make everyone miserable by forcing them in to positions that are unsuitable for them, caping their ability to achieve and handcuffing the whole societies economic capability by making it grossly ineficient ala pure communism. Understanding the reality that is, is always the most important step towards creating the reality you want to see, if you simply ignore reality your attempt to change things will always have unforeseen consequences.
So acknowledging the differences between people is necessary first step towards any feasible Utopian vision.
interesting is a nice way of putting it….
(interesting how many people with graduate degrees i run into who don’t “believe in IQ”)
Thomas Sowell makes the point that aggressive affirmative action admissions policies by colleges mis-match black students to colleges. Intelligent students who could have done well one or two tiers down are thrown into a campus geared towards more intelligent or simply better prepared students. And in fact the black drop-out rates and bar passage rates have been consistently lower than for white students. I await the liberals persuasive alternate explanation.
So, one productive and ethical use society can make of genetic predisposition for higher intelligence would be to stop wasting the lives of a quarter or third of minority college students. Better to be an anonymous lawyer or engineer from a mid-ranked school than a Harvard drop-out with no degree and student loans to pay off.
Daniel, you wrote:
“(2) If a young child’s genes predict he is likely to be susceptible to the Flynn effect, you could give him extra training to try to trigger the effect. This could provide more focused, effective use of education foreign aid in Africa, where general intelligence is desperately needed.”
First off, the Flynn effect is a description of the statistical increase in average (population-wide) test scores over many decades, and thus it makes so sense trying to apply it to one individual. Much like the way you can’t apply an average heritibility coefficient to a single individual, saying that, for example, this baby’s personality will be due 40% to his genes and 60% to his environment (so let’s try and affect his environment). Second, it’s not proved yet what has caused the Flynn effect, your assumption is that it was triggered by “increased training”, whereas most experts have argued that it was due to improved childhood nutrition over the last half-century. So, in effect, your recommendation boils down to trying to give better nutrition to kids in Africa, something the West has already been trying to do, largely unsuccessfully, for may years now.
Overall, my point is to be careful about the way in which we use such constructs as the Flynn Effect. As with the concept of intelligence itself, these terms have been subject to much misunderstanding and misuse.
Isn’t one of the dangers of the ‘blank slate’ view of human nature that any disparities must be due to unfair institutions or inequality? This can lead to resentment & persecution of successful groups.
Having a more realistic view of human nature may reduce the risk of this?
Andrew Yates blogged pessimistically about liberal eugenics. He feels the elite would progressively diverge from the underclass – the favorite fear of knee-jerk leftie know-nothing academic bioethicists – except that Yates is totally an intelligent life form.
http://www.thinkgene.com/genetic-engineering-will-not-save-population-trends/
Basically he points out that you need low time preference in the first place, vs the rest of society, in order to obtain the best liberal eugenic tech. His assumption here is that even if some tech becomes state funded, the best tech will always be more available to the people with the lowest time preference, via money or whatever else. I guess he also assumes the population distro of time preference will never be narrowed up (by noise, short term trends, whatever), which would tend to stop the feed-forward process.
Incidentally, he doubts all this can be averted even if we want to. (For the usual reasons: the chinese will do it if the west doesn’t, people will do it offshore, etc.)
Pinker, OTOH, is skeptical that eugenic tech will ever be very effective in the first place. The thing is, if C&H are right, it would be effective to simply splice one or two of the putative Ashkenazi large-effect alleles, and then avoid marrying another bearer just as the jews already do – or if you do marry one, simply abort homozygote offspring (easy as pie).
Greg, just as an offshoot to your question, the utility of intelligence testing in itself has been especially well articulated by Linda Gottfredson. Just by the off chance that anyone interested hasn’t heard of her, here’s a link to her publications in pdf format:
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/index.html (see for example ‘Of what value is intelligence?’, 2008)
The only non-controversial ethical use I can think of for genetic intelligence testing would be early screening for mental retardation (defined at IQ below 70). The designer baby idea has already been debunked as undesirable by Steven Pinker, as Eric said.
Pinker is likely wrong.
First, it isn’t necessary to find a a large IQ QTL- any allele with the desired large effect scores, as long as its side effects are bearable. Even a rare allele.
And for the idea that alleles of large positive effect on IQ are somehow impossible – I doubt it. A constraint can block possible improvements in a particular direction – remove that constraint and a large improvement may well be possible. Since constraints are often not absolute, just a question of relative costs, simply turning up the strength of selection can do this.
debunked
Not if C&H are right about the jews. Furthermore, what about rare alleles of large effect – if they turn out to exist? It won’t be uncomplicated – they are rare because they have downsides, as Pinker points out – but that doesn’t matter if:
1. their pleotropic downsides are something that doesn’t matter today. Ie, +10 IQ points – but you require 4% more food, or are 20% more vulnerable to smallpox. Who cares about that? Alternately it could be something impactful but worth it – you’re an inch shorter, three years shorter-lived, need an extra 20 minutes of sleep.
2. their downside has to do with unfit homozygotes, but heteros have high IQ. Some things like this might still be undiscovered. Severe phenotypes like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia have all been discovered already. What about an allele which is +5 IQ for heterozygotes but -20 IQ for homozygotes? It may remain too rare to be uncovered by current GWAS, and would not be discovered by medicine because the phenotype is significant but modest. With embryo selection, no one need be exposed to homozygousity disadvantages. Suppose I was born in 2035. My wife and I were both spliced with five alleles each which are harmful homozygously – even if she and I both have the same five, it will be easy to get an embryo with no bad homozygosities.
Now imagine I am willing to consider 10% of women unmarriagable because their splices with heterozygote advantage alleles are too similar to mine. Now each person can probably have 10 or 20 splices instead of five, depending on how many different such alleles are available.
Of course, if civilization were to collapse after most people were altered in this way, there would be trouble.
Orion42, the Flynn effect is measured at the population level, but it is caused by processes operating on individuals. Those processes are probably gene dependent, so creating the Flynn effect using scarce resources requires genetic targeting. It’s a lot more than nutrition, too. Control of parasites and rewiring of developing brains are probably just as important.
“The only non-controversial ethical use I can think of for genetic intelligence testing would be early screening for mental retardation (defined at IQ below 70).”
That’s over half the babies in some areas of Africa! There had better be controversy and clear discussion, because a sensible mandatory screening program in Massachusetts would be radical genetic cleansing if applied to certain countries.
@Razib: interesting how many people with graduate degrees i run into who don’t “believe in IQ”
These people clearly do not properly distinguish between matters of fact and belief systems. A “belief in IQ” could, e.g., consist of positing the existence of an intelligence total – the aggregate IQ of mankind. Given that currently hunger and malnourishment are on the rise – reversing a very long-term previous trend -, it would seem likely that we have to assume that this aggregate is currently falling.
Of course, there is always an option for those who “don´t believe in IQ” to not “believe in the Flynn effect” either. It is, after all, only observable through applying IQ tests and measuring the results.
From an economic – and, to some extent, ethical – point of view, the question would be whether any gains in intelligence that could be effected via genetic engineering would be achievable at a lower cost than picking the low-hanging fruit that does not require genetic intervention but may not be possible to acquire without some invasive surgery on the political and economic level. To anybody considering the costs currently incurred by the pharmaceutical industry the assumption of falling relative expenditures is not exactly self-evident.
Assuming a personal resource constraint that would put me in a position of choosing between booking a flight into space or getting my IQ boosted twenty years from now, it is not perfectly obvious to me that I would take the latter route. Ray Kurzweil, on the other hand, might judge the trade-off differently. I have no doubt that he would be willing to swallow another pill in addition to the 200 or so he claims to be consuming regularly. Maybe he would not even balk at doubling his intake in return for a 10% IQ increase. Analyzing the economics of the issue, however, would involve looking at hundreds of millions of people being subjected to expensive pharmaceutical regimes or surgical procedures. If the lower relative cost of AIDS prevention in comparison to that of therapy argues for an investment in prevention, the same would be appear to be true with respect to intelligence engineering.
Finally there is the issue of prenatal screening. I am pretty much convinced that only some individuals would be willing to adopt it. For it to be practiced universally, religion would have to be replaced by a kind of technological cult supplying the rationale for the enforced application of the tests that would be part of any such screening.
I see two big problems that can be ameliorated:
1. The corruption of the educational system trying to teach things to kids who do not have the intelligence to grasp them while simultaneously dragging the intelligent students down. Like Cliff Claven’s buffalo, the class can only go as fast as the slowest student.
2. The corruption of the political system that comes from blaming low IQs on “oppression”, and the vast welfare system that has been built up on the lie that society is to blame for the lack of success of unintelligent people (this is not just a racial issue, the UK is doing quite well, thank you, at creating a white underclass).
I’m all for charity and helping along folks who need it. I also understand that blaming the victim does happen. But we are about to ride this horse into the dirt. Western civilization really could collapse under the burden of imaginary “sins” (those who are cheered by that prospect should be careful what they wish for).
Any evidence of the evolution of different mating patterns? Specifically the pair-bond structure of European society as against the African system of rotating polyandry… & more attractive, slightly more ‘displaying’ and feminine females in European and Asian lands? Did neanderthal genes have anything to do with this change?
Suppose we knew that some individuals are genetically predisposed to higher intelligence. Suppose further that “genetic” and “non-malleable” can be equated — call this a worst-case scenario. We already know that higher intelligence manifests itself, in part, as a general ability to extract more learning per unit instruction.
Given those assumptions, it is difficult to come up with an ethical or productivity framework under which it is reasonable to teach all students the same way.
If one gives all students the same instruction, as in large mixed classrooms, the less-genetically-gifted students are at a disadvantage; they get less learning per unit instruction. It is not productive (but might be ethical, depending on one’s axioms) to limit genetically gifted students to the more repetitive instruction their less-gifted peers require.
In short, if we really accepted genetic predisposition, we should stop berating genetically disadvantaged groups for low achievement; start stratifying instruction to target the different capabilities of students with differing predispositions; and ensuring that mobility between instructional strata be concomitant with the correlation between genetic predisposition and eventual outcome.
“The thing is, if C&H are right, it would be effective to simply splice one or two of the putative Ashkenazi large-effect alleles, and then avoid marrying another bearer”
–I agree with Eric here. And prenatal screening would even eliminate the marriage concern. This would be very easy.
Joerg wrote: “For it to be practiced universally, religion would have to be replaced by a kind of technological cult supplying the rationale for the enforced application.”
Certainly, I agree this would be true in order for the practice to become universal, but far more interesting to me than the idea of such unlikely universal adoption is the near-certainty of its adoption as a reproductive practice among the world’s elite.
Considering all the time and money invested in the children of this elite class– the hundreds of thousands of dollars that might be spent educating them, it seems likely that families with access to prenatal screening would take advantage of it.
A bit off topic but I think some posters here might want to see results from this poll which asked Americans about their feelings re embryo screening:
Most parents not quite ready to have ‘designer babies’—but demand exists
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/dvorsky20090128/
Some demand is still demand
Indeed, one way of reading these results is to conclude that most people today are not in favor or ready to screen their offspring for enhanced traits. But thatÂ’s not the entire story, nor is it a justification for failing to develop these technologies or denying prospective parents access to them. What these survey results indicate is that there is some demand for these sorts of interventions, just in small doses.
LetÂ’s look at the results of this report a bit more closely. The majority of respondents (52.2%) indicated that there were no conditions for which genetic testing should never be offered. What this tells me is that more than half of respondents are receptive to using genetic technologies for assisted reproduction in some form. ThatÂ’s significant and telling.
In addition, a minority of respondents indicated that they would like to use genetic testing for enhancements such as athletic ability (10%) or superior intelligence (12.6%). While these figures may seem small, they seem less so when considering the entire population. In a country like the United States, where there are about 4 million babies born each year, and assuming that these respondents would use these technologies to screen for higher intelligence, that would represent about 400,000 births per year. ThatÂ’s more babies born each year than through IVF.
We have to be careful when assessing the results of these kinds of surveys. When it comes to ensuring equal and fair access to medical technologies, it’s not like voting for the president. Having control over one’s reproductive processes is a very important thing—even if 90% of the population has no intention of using it for themselves. It’s important to remain respectful and responsive to any kind of demand for reproductive technologies.
Why does it matter that we know X?
It matters because we know that anyone claiming to be sure of !X, whether in the past or present, is either (a) lying, or (b) misguided. To put it another way, we know that if any process for deriving trusted information produces or has produced !X, that process is invalid.
And this is of some importance in interpreting the present and the recent past. For starters, try Alexander Stephens: “Our government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea…”
As you might have noticed, our present political and intellectual institutions have made a rather substantial bet on the proposition that Mr. Stephens was wrong. If he was right, how do they correct themselves?
I’m afraid the obvious answer is: they can’t. Which implies: they won’t. Which implies… but you can probably work that out for yourself.
As you might have noticed, our present political and intellectual institutions have made a rather substantial bet on the proposition that Mr. Stephens was wrong. If he was right, how do they correct themselves?
I’m afraid the obvious answer is: they can’t. Which implies: they won’t. Which implies… but you can probably work that out for yourself.
When we find the genes for intelligence in a few more years, the elites will probably try to find a midway position that incorporates the new information with multiculturalism just as Gorbachev tried to find centre ground between capitalism and communism.
“Pinker is likely wrong.
First, it isn’t necessary to find a a large IQ QTL- any allele with the desired large effect scores, as long as its side effects are bearable. Even a rare allele.
And for the idea that alleles of large positive effect on IQ are somehow impossible – I doubt it.”
Greg, the latest study by Butcher, Davis, Craig and Plomin strongly contradicts your idea (Genes, Brain & Behavior. Vol 7(4) Jun 2008, 435-446).
They did a genome-wide scan for g (general intelligence) screening 500,000 SNPs in 7000 individuals. Only one SNP had a significant effect above the 0.05 level, and none accounted for over 0.4% of the variance in g, with 95% power to detect such associations. Maybe one could combine many of these SNPs, but still, they might have the same hidden detrimental effects as larger-effect ones (if the latter exist at all).
Daniel, you replied:
“That’s over half the babies in some areas of Africa! [that have an IQ below 70] There had better be controversy and clear discussion, because a sensible mandatory screening program in Massachusetts would be radical genetic cleansing if applied to certain countries.”
The obvious solution is that such screening would be relative, mental retardation being at different threshold where the average IQ is lower. Nevermind the fact that Sub-Saharan Africans hardly have access to clean drinking water, let alone expensive pre-natal testing. Also, I would dispute the validity of that IQ figure, but that’s a whole other conversation.
Of course it does not contradict it at all.
If an allele had a large effect but was rare, it would not account for much of the variance. But it would still have a large effect.
Following on from RafeK: it would provide an incontrovertible justification for social welfare programs as an obligatory act of charity from those gifted by the genetic lottery toward those less so gifted…at least insofar as intelligence has contributed to the accumulation of capital that can be disbursed as charity, and those charitable disbursements really do contribute to the amelioration or prevention of the negative social outcomes to which the low in intelligence are prone.
“Of course it does not contradict it at all.
If an allele had a large effect but was rare, it would not account for much of the variance. But it would still have a large effect.”
An allele so rare that it doesn’t appear in a representative sample of 7000? Hmm…
On the other hand, the researchers seem to agree that your position is one possibility: “it may be that there are few common SNPs of large effect and
that there are many more rare variants of larger effect size. Our data cannot address this issue because, for reasons of power, we selectively chose SNPs whose minor allele was common.” (p.442)
If I were a betting man though, I would still say there’s little chance of a single SNP accounting for more than 1% of the population variance in g or IQ (whichever criterion you prefer, they are very highly correlated with eachother).
They only considered fairly common SNPs, far more frequent than one in 7000. Rare SNPs certainly exist in the population they studied, but they didn’t check them.
Next, this is just one population. If you look at the genes that explain variation in muscle mass in cows, a single gene (myostatin) accounts for over a third of the variance in the South Devon breed (a beef cattle breed), but as far as I know the relevant myostatin null mutation doesn’t even exist in dairy breeds.
A gene that increased brain size might well increase IQ: there is a significant correlation. The problem would be safe birth: an insuperable problem in the past, but not such a big deal today, when half of all kids are from their mother’s womb untimely ripp’d.
When we find the genes for intelligence in a few more years, the elites will probably try to find a midway position that incorporates the new information with multiculturalism just as Gorbachev tried to find centre ground between capitalism and communism.
Yeah. And… uh… how’s that one workin’ out? :-)
And frankly, I think it’s a lot easier to find a middle ground between capitalism and communism than between multiculturalism and racism. Heck, we pretty much live in a middle ground between capitalism and communism.
The other? I can’t even imagine it. And it’s not for want of trying. If you can imagine it, do tell…
PatrickH – that is true only to an extent. One can only go so far, and unfortunately the line has to be drawn rather arbitrarily. True radical egalitarianism on quality of life would require the state to reckon and compensate for everything – for far too much. Will we also compensate people who have low ambition? Pay a state stipend to the chronically morally anxious, and another to people with hideous faces?
Obama wants to legislate income equality for women even though part of the inequality may derive from women’s higher odds of withdrawing by choice from full-time work because of children, permanently or semi-permanently. Another part of it may arise because women are less steely negotiators on average (which does sound rather unfair; in a way, so does the having children thing). But shall we adjust the income of shy men too? I hope no one fakes their responses during the government shyness test. Will we pay men for their higher levels of sexual angst compared to women? I think $5 a day should suffice – a mere $1500 a year.
I wonder what fraction of Obama’s crowds who heard him decry women’s incomes with sincere moral urgency ever thought about any of these philosophical complications. One percent?
Yeah. And… uh… how’s that one workin’ out? :-)
It worked beautifully, actually, despite Glasnost and Perestroika not working quite the way Gorb intended.
The Soviet Union dissolved peacefully, Eastern Europe was liberated, and Russia is now ruled by a sensible – and dare I say it – proto-neocameralist rightwing semi-dictator in Vladimir Putin.
Even the former leaders of the USSR got off very easy compared to what happened to the Third Reich’s leadership.
If the multicultis unintentionally dissolve themselves by way of racial-Perestroika in the next decade as efficently as Gorbachev did with the USSR in the 80′s we will be in good shape.
Under this scenario, at worst we would cede California, South Texas and parts of Arizona and New Mexico to Old Mexico in the same way Russia gave up Ukraine and Belarus.
But we can always take those sunny Southwest regions back via warfare at some point – what worked in 1846 can be done even better in the 21st century. (I’m sure old Putin is thinking something similar vis a vis Ukraine and Belarus).
PatrickH, oops, I quite misinterpreted the thrust of your post. Please consider my post pretty much totally unrelated to yours.
Mencius,
If you can imagine it, do tell…
How bout what you yourself propose: a colorblind state, meaning no quotas; thus citizens aren’t required to be colorblind and evaluate individuals as individuals, but hopefully most will. That may not be an ideological or conceptual middle ground, but it is a practical middle ground.
Orion,
> An allele so rare that it doesn’t appear in a representative sample of 7000? Hmm…
Suppose one person in the sample has this rare allele, and has an IQ of 170. That won’t prove anything – in order to show the correlation you would need many people with the allele in your sample. Linus Pauling had an IQ of 170 and had loads of rare SNPs like everyone, but most of those SNPs have nothing to do with his intelligece.
The rough rule of thumb, at least for common diseases, is that alleles with a frequency less than 5% are not adequately addressed by GWAS of today’s scale. I’m not sure it’s the same for other traits. In the future, GWAS will be done with like 500,000 people and that will make things very different.
How bout what you yourself propose: a colorblind state, meaning no quotas; thus citizens aren’t required to be colorblind and evaluate individuals as individuals, but hopefully most will. That may not be an ideological or conceptual middle ground, but it is a practical middle ground.
Oh, I think it would be lovely. The problem, though, is the set of people whose dead bodies you’d need to drive over to get there.
For example: forget the colorblind state. Let’s focus on the colorblind Harvard. What steps would have to be taken, in practice, to get from the present Harvard to the colorblind Harvard? If you have a formula that can solve this problem without the use of a few hundred well-trained riot police, your formula may be too good to be true.
If the multicultis unintentionally dissolve themselves by way of racial-Perestroika in the next decade as efficiently as Gorbachev did with the USSR in the 80′s we will be in good shape.
Sure. But there are quite a few major differences. To name three: Communism in the 1980s had few remaining true believers, Russia was a backwater rather than the nexus of global civilization, and (most importantly) Russians had a simple way out which that nation has taken repeatedly since Peter the Great: abandon the broken Russian way of doing things, and copy the West.
The West has no West to emulate. Inasmuch as there are patterns for something different, they are only found in dusty old books. I don’t see how our present system can go on forever – nothing does – but I fear its end will come later and be much, much uglier than any of us thinks. And those who expect some scientific paper to persuade those in power to give that power up are most certainly fooling themselves.
As someone on Half Sigma pointed out, attributing group differences purely to unfairness leads to problems in education:
“Perhaps it is so obvious that no one here needs to read it, but for the benefit of any newbies who wander in:
We know empirically as well as theoretically that tracking (grouping students by ability; aka “streaming”) produces the best educational results for kids at every ability level.*
However, unless the school population is racially homogeneous, tracking will reveal racial disparities in ability. That is, you will end up with many NAM’s in slow-track classrooms and few in fast-track classrooms.
As soon as the race-grievance industry observes that ratio, no matter how color-blind the scheme for measuring student ability (and regardless of actual educational results however measured), they will accuse school authorities and teachers of conscious racism. They will sue. Pusillanimous judges will rule against the school staff, pinning an (undeserved) “racist” label on them and destroying their careers.
School staff are not willing to sacrifice their own careers so that all kids may enjoy the most appropriate educations. Indeed, since “good test scores” and so-forth are not considered a valid defense to charges of racism, not even NCLB-type pressure can persuade school authorities to use tracking. Sure, tracking would improve the performance of all students– but since it is legally** “racist” it is off the table.
*Honestly, this is so. In “mixed ability” classrooms the smart kids are bored and troublesome, the dull kids are confused and troublesome, and the kids in the middle are distracted by the antics of the other two groups. Few teachers are willing to work twice or three times as hard giving different lessons and assignments (and tests) to kids of different ability levels, so they pitch to the middle– the smart and dull kids both miss the opportunity to learn at their most appropriate paces, so the smart kids get shortchanged and the dull kids get left behind.”
Gottfredson, L. S. (2005). Suppressing intelligence research: Hurting those we intend to help. In R. H. Wright & N. A. Cummings (Eds.), Destructive trends in mental health: The well-intentioned path to harm (pp. 155-186). New York: Taylor and Francis.
ingintelligence.pdf
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005suppress
Greg
I have an off topic question but it’s related to your area of expertise and I wonder if you could help me with it.
Why don’t pathogens wipe out all higher life on earth from time to time? Their numbers are countless and they randomly evolve. Given enough time and chance why doesn’t a pathogen randomly evolve into a supervirus and wipe out all mammals, birds, insects etc? Obviously this wouldn’t be in the pathogens best interests because once the hosts were gone it would die out too. But that wouldn’t stop the random mutation from happening in the first place.
I’m grateful it doesn’t work like this but why doesn’t it? Is this tertiary evidence that something is looking out for us?
Embryo screening for eye and hair color is now being offered in the US by a Califonria based clinic:
entweekly.com.au/news/local/news/general/aussie-couples-sign-up-for-designer-baby-technology/1420723.aspx ?storypage=0#
Aussie couples sign up for designer baby technology
http://www.independ
When AI wakes up and we all wake up to The Rise Of The Machines, we’ll want every trick in the book to give biological intelligence a fighting chance.
If not, we all might be Terminated.
So I think it is pretty ethical to investigate now, while we can. ;-)
Greg, such a super pathogen would kill its host before being able to find a new victim. Then it would die. This need for propogation is what limits how lethal pathogens can be and still be succesful long term.
I find it hilarious that the left even try to oppose genetic engineering and neo-eugenics in any political form or argument.
Isn’t their entire worldview based on the foundation that human nature doesn’t exist? Shouldn’t their appropriate response to be completely ignore any trends in personal genomics? By opposing it in any way — thus acknowledging it as having real world consequences — they undermine their entire belief system.
I think, as one of the commentators said above, the left will eventually come around to the light and make use of biotech for their own utopian visions. And you just know that one of the radical splinter groups will be dedicated to bringing down individuals with genetic advantages (it’ll be a form of genetic marxism). Gotta keep everything equal after all …
“a super pathogen would kill its host before being able to find a new victim. Then it would die. “
Only if by ‘superpathogen’ you mean one that kills its host instantly. It would be better to call a superpathogen one that is capable of infecting all higher organisms, and which kills its hosts infallibly, but not before it has spread to another victim.
Fortunately it is doubtful if such a superpathogen could ever evolve. Pathogens are usually quite specialised, because they need to overcome the defences that the target species have evolved. It’s a bit like asking why no-one has invented a machine that does everything you could want a machine to do. The chances are that such a general-purpose machine would not be very good at doing anything in particular. Jack-of-all-trades, etc…
praeloquor
A super pathogen could just as easily evolve to have a long latency. The more I think about it I can’t understand why higher life is even possible. Think of all the individual microbes living on Earth over a 100,000 year period. Chance alone should produce a super pathogen. Something must be built into the fabric of mutation that keeps that from happening. Maybe it works like kid bowling. Mother Nature put foam in the gutters on either side.
When AI wakes up
At least the Singularitarians will be “terminated”, that will be some relief…
PubMed, I have often wondered about the same thing. The hemlock is currently being devastated just like the american chestnut was by chestnut blight.
thechestnut.htm
I recommend the first paragraph of this paper; note refs 1 and 3.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0003602
ref 3:
Lyons SK, Smith FA, Wagner PJ, White EP, Brown JH (2004) Was a ?hyperdisease? responsible for the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinction? Ecology Letters 7: 859?868.
One possibility is that strongly resistant genotypes should almost always exist if the host pop is respectable in size. Consider if HIV occurred in medieval times, and suppose people didn’t even ever figure out how it was transmitted. It might more or less destroy civilization, but given the well documented existence of quite a few intrinsically resistant individuals, there’s no way man would go extinct.
However, a little googling about the chestnuts makes it look like the same does not hold for them. The population was extremely large (billions) but despite the interest of chestnut lovers, it sounds like no highly resistant (ie, more or less thrivingly resistant) individuals have been found. I don’t think they should be that hard to spot if there are more than a few dozen out there; my offhand guesstimate is that if there were more than 1,000 someone probably should have found one. These people are laboriously cross-breeding lightly-resistant individuals, which I don’t think they would be doing if any thrivers existed.
Example:
http://www2.volstate.edu/jschibig/resurrecting
David B
You are right, a machine that does everything probably isn’t going to be good at anything. But it should be a statistical certainty that a superpathogen would accidentally evolve with the ability to wipe out all grasses, flying insects, mammals or maybe just a certain species. It might take a million years but eventually the worst, horrible mutations would randomly come together in one pathogen and they’d burn through a species like a brushfire. I thank the Lord Zeus that the world doesn’t work like that.
Eric J. Johnson
Thanks for the links Eric! I didn’t realize that rapid, mass extinctions caused by pathogens did in fact occur. The sheer volume of pathogens coupled with their rapid mutation rate makes me wonder why it doesn’t happen all the time. Glad to know that if it happens at all it’s rare.
Following up Eric J. Johnson’s references, the cases he mentions don’t seem to be ‘superpathogens’ in PubMed’s sense. They are specialised disease organisms which have evolved to exploit particular species, which then turn out to be more virulent against closely related but previously unexposed species, which have not had time to evolve defences. An analogy would be with HIV, which is relatively harmless to apes or monkeys, but lethal to recently exposed humans.
We might equally ask why there are no ‘superherbivores’, which would eat up all vegetation until plants were extinct. Why doesn’t a huge locust swarm eat up all the world’s forests? I don’t know, but I guess that even locusts have their limits. They are good at eating and digesting fresh new savannah type vegetation, but they probably couldn’t cope with wood or mature forest leaves, which have strong chemical defences. That’s why forest herbivores tend to be specialised on particular host species.
Overall, I think PubMed has raised an interesting point, but I’m not losing sleep over it. It did cross my mind to wonder if PubMed was a lurking ID troll, trying out a ‘killer question’ for evolutionists, but if so I think it misses the mark.
David B,
I agree with you, mostly. When I said I had wondered about the same thing as PubMed, I mostly meant to say (though I didn’t actually say) that I had wondered about infection causing extinctions – not necessarily mass extinctions. I rather doubt the late Pleistocene extinction was caused by disease; man himself seems a more likely agent, though it seems difficult to give overwhelming and simple evidence.
We might equally ask why there are no ‘superherbivores’, which would eat up all vegetation until plants were extinct.
True, but we also might equally ask whether there are supercarnivores which would eat up megafaunal taxa across most of the earth – and of course, there probably is one. Granted, I don’t think there are necessarily any other examples of such super-monster “vores” of any kind (vores is a term I sometimes use to cover all biomass grabbers, when the distinction between predators and parasites is vague and/or irrelevant).
I’m not sure I agree with your views on the specialization of parasites. Obviously your statements about them “mostly” being specialists are explicitly qualified, and literally true – but I tend to be more impressed by the generalists than you seem to be. Legionella pneumophila can kill both man and amoebas, though infecting man may well be an accident that doesn’t contribute to its fitness; Borrelia burgdorferi infects diverse taxa of lizards, birds, and mammals (in addition to its arthropod vectors of course), though I am not sure whether any particular clone of the bacterium can infect all those different vertebrates well.
Here are a couple other interesting examples: avian malaria may have been a major factor in the extinction of multiple honeycreeper species, but I’m not sure what evidence exists for its preeminence as a cause. At any rate it would be a stretch to call this mass extinction, since the honeycreepers of Hawaii are a radiation only about 5 million years old.
The other example is this guy Poinar’s theory of the dinosaur extinction. He claims the dinos took millions of years to go, and that this hard to square with the Chicxulub event being the sole influence. He also claims that the ecological relations between pathogens and arthropod vectors were novel at the time – apparently he thinks this might have thrown pathogen virulence levels out of equilibrium, or something like that. I have no real opinion on this:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-01/osu-iam010208.php
David B
The examples that Eric J. Johnson gave were exactly what I was thinking about. A pathogen randomly evolves the ability to burn through a species and nothing can stop it. How many countless microbes live in the environment and at what rate do they mutate? It seems to me that chance combined with endless, rapid mutation would ensure a constant stream of superpathogens but thankfully it doesn’t work that way.
According to Eric’s link the only mammal that has ever fallen prety to a superpathogen is a species of rat on Christmas Island. At least that’s the only one they’ve uncovered.
And finally, transformative politics in the Middle East may have a tiny bit of trouble getting Iraq up to the civilization level of, say, South Dakota; $1 trillion dollars invested into that project may not be exactly well spent. Ditto for transformative politics in Detroit.
Or conversely we could discover that Arabs and Europeans are equally endowed genetically for IQ, and that the differences are environmental / cultural / educational, that the rule that successful societies = genetic endowment for IQ is wrong in many cases.
I severely doubt international IQ comparisons, where people like Lynn give US blacks a 15 point bonus over their African counterparts for environmental reasons but many do not give a 15 point boost to other third world countries. Also when, for example, South Asians in the UK appear to equal whites whereas blacks equal US rather than African blacks.
But if we don’t ask the genetic question, we won’t find out for sure if the real answer is actually environmental. Taking things as gospel EITHER WAY is not appropriate.
Eric J. Johnson:
There is some evidence that there were American Chestnuts that were somewhat resistant to the blight, but when people began to panic as the trees died, healthy specimens were cut down for the valuable wood before the disease could render them worthless.
Most attempts to bring back the species consist of backbreeding with the Chinese chestnut.
At least one stand of mature and healthy American Chestnut trees has been found, but it isn’t clear what’s responsible for their survival, and the presumption is that they have been isolated from contamination.
The disease in question wouldn’t be so toxic, except that it developed as part of an arms race with the Chinese Chestnut and happened to be capable of infection the American as well. Evolution is unlikely to produce such a lethal pathogen for a species in the ecology in which that species itself evolved. Only crossing into new ecological territories produces such disasters.
PubMed:
I suspect one reason is that pretty much everything worth eating has its own defenses against parasites, and a great many of those defenses have evolved separately over time, with gazillions of nooks and crannies and special cases and such to deal with the constant pressure of parasites evolving to defeat them. Look at the known stuff that some bacterial infection has to get past to infect you: skin, low-pH sweat, defensins, the parts of the complement cascade that are triggered by sugars that often show up on bacterial cell walls, the macrophages and neutrophils and whatnot that also recognize a bunch of common stuff on the surface of bacteria, plus all the adaptive immune system stuff that’s largely randomized and different for everyone, and that will take a few days to develop, but then give you lifelong immunity in many cases. Different animals have had time for the precise way each of those works to alter, so that evolving a defense to one of them–say, altering your cell wall so that the sugars on its surface aren’t recognized by macrophages as foreign–is unlikely to transfer across all species, and may not even work against all animals in the same species. And then you get to go to the next layer of defense.
Now, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen–pathogens jump across species from time to time, after all. But it implies that evolving to hop across species is likely to take time. If you are a pathogen that drives its host species into extinction, even over centuries, you probably won’t have time to evolve the necessary tricks to infect the next species. If you did manage it, you’d probably run into geographic barriers.
One example of something like this is the delivery by Europeans of the entire Eurasian epidemic disease package to the Americas in a century or so. I think the current belief is this wiped out 95% or so of the native population. But that still means 5% survived, and I guess they would have come back in a couple centuries, had Europeans civilization been wiped out by a big disaster of some kind.
(Just my random thoughts–I’m a cryptographer, not a biologist, so my opinion is worth what you paid for it.)
I like the idea of early Man as a super-pathogen for megaherbivores! But I suppose it could be said that megaherbivores in Africa managed to survive the onslaught, because they had time to adjust. It was only when Man moved out of Africa that megaherbivores elsewhere were wiped out.
PubMed’s argument that there should be more superpathogens sounds plausible enough, but it is difficult to know what we can reasonably expect. Given enough time, and enough elephants, should we expect an elephant to fly? Presumably some very large number of simultaneous mutations would produce an elephant with wings (but otherwise still recognisably an elephant), but probably it still couldn’t fly, for the same reasons that there are no flying birds as big as elephants.
And without crunching the numbers we can’t say how long it would take for the necessary combination of mutations to appear. Suppose it requires simultaneous rare mutations at 100 loci, with a probability of 1 in 1,000,000 per generation at each locus. The probability of getting all 100 mutations simultaneously would then be 1 in 10^600 per generation. 10^600 is a seriously large number. I haven’t checked, but I suspect it is more than the total number of individual organisms (including bacteria and viruses) that have ever lived.
I think man is a pretty good candidate for your super-pathogen, period.
The Large Hadron Collider won’t do it, but let’s wait another 200 years, I’m sure we’ll build something that accidentally eats reality.
Caledonian
Evolution is unlikely to produce such a lethal pathogen for a species in the ecology in which that species itself evolved. Only crossing into new ecological territories produces such disasters.
Clearly you are correct. Evolution doesn’t commonly produce superpathogens. In fact maybe it never does except in quirky situations. From a logical standpoint this makes sense because why would a pathogen want to gobble up all the potential food and die out shortly thereafter? The obvious answer is that pathogens don’t have motivation. They follow their simple, randomly created programming just like a computer virus would.
Evolution is rapidly mutating an unfathomably large volume of pathogens at random and yet life on earth is completely safe. It seems to me that if our system was purely random higher life couldn’t make it. Fortunately it doesn’t work that way and for that I award Mother Nature a gold star.
Maybe it’s as obvious as 1 + 1 but I don’t understand why enormous numbers + random mutation + chance doesn’t pump out a steady stream of superpathogens and every other type of pathogen for that matter.
I would say that the difference between pathogens and carnivores is the relative number of generations of the predator and prey. Humans live similar times to megafauna, so African megafauna was able to keep up the arms race. But pathogens can reach virulence in a single host generation.
But then it occurred to me that long incubation period, which may be necessary to prevent a virulent disease (of animals) from being only locally virulent, means a long life-cycle and thus a long effective generation time.
It seems to me that if our system was purely random higher life couldn’t make it. Fortunately it doesn’t work that way and for that I award Mother Nature a gold star.
Phrases like this made me wonder if PubMed had a hidden agenda. But I will take his argument at face value.
It is not safe to assume that even the most improbable event is eventually bound to happen. I think Eddington once pointed out that if you put a kettle on the stove, if might (according to the laws of statistical thermodynamics) freeze instead of boiling, but it was so improbable that it would never happen in the history of the universe.
Returning to the case of a large number of simultaneous mutations, suppose, as I suggested, that the probability of a specified set of 100 mutations occurring simultaneously is 1 in 10^600. Could this ever happen? I still don’t know the answer, but let’s try a few figures. Assuming that the biosphere has an average depth of 10 km, then it has a total volume of about 5 x 10^9 cubic km, or 5 x 10^18 cubic m. I couldn’t find any estimate for the average number of organisms per cubic m, but let’s assume a safe upper limit of 10^18. The number of organisms alive at any given time would then be up to 5 x 10^36. Let’s assume that organisms live on average for an hour. Life began around 3 billion years ago, let’s say a maximum of 30,000 billion hours. On these assumptions the number of individuals that have ever lived is many orders of magnitude less than 10^600, and the probability that the specified set of mutations would ever occur is negligible. Now, of course, there may be many more than one set of mutations that would produce a superpathogen, but I dont’ know of any strong reason for supposing that there is necessarily even one.
David B
Phrases like this made me wonder if PubMed had a hidden agenda.
I decided that it was a good idea to ignore that the first time you wrote it. Ok, now it’s twice. What the heck are you talking about?
As for your math I think it’s completely wrong. It wouldn’t take 100 mutations. It’s probably more like 3 or 4 extra mutations on top of an already living pathogen.
Adding a single gene creates deadly mouse-pox virus
They added a gene into a vaccine virus made from the relatively harmless mouse-pox virus, hoping to boost the immune system to make more antibodies to kill the mouse egg. But when they injected this modified vaccine virus into mice, all the mice died. In fact, the synthetic virus was so lethal that it also killed half of all the mice that have been vaccinated against mouse-pox.
PubMed:
It’s not just that phrase. Here are some others:
“I’m grateful it doesn’t work like this but why doesn’t it? Is this tertiary evidence that something is looking out for us?”
“The more I think about it I can’t understand why higher life is even possible…. Chance alone should produce a super pathogen. Something must be built into the fabric of mutation that keeps that from happening.”
“But it should be a statistical certainty that a superpathogen would accidentally evolve…. I thank the Lord Zeus that the world doesn’t work like that.”
This looks to me like rather subtle ID-speak, but I’m happy to acccept your assurance that it is not intended that way.
As to my math being ‘completely wrong’, you are not objecting to my mathematics but to my assumption that 100 simultaneous mutations would be required. Maybe not, but you started out with the completely unquantified assumption that:
“It seems to me that chance combined with endless, rapid mutation would ensure a constant stream of superpathogens”
I hope you agree that my example shows that this assumption is not necessarily correct. It depends critically on the number of simultaneous mutations required. You now suggest that only 3 or 4 would be required. I agree that if it is only 3 or 4, superpathogens should be common. The fact that they are not common seems to imply that it is more than 3 or 4.
The benefit of understanding that individuals have different levels of intelligence is manifold. First, people can cease to have unrealistic expecations of themselves and others that lead to disapppointments and misplaced blame (for example, as already mentioned, blaming oppressive white populations for low levels of black acheivement, and perhaps relatively lower levels of gentile achievement on Jewish populations). Second, society can institute policies that will encourage more intelligent people to have more babies, and less intelligent people to have fewer babies. In my mind, that’s exremely important given the importance of intelligence to a well-functioning and liveable society. What people need to understand is that the effect of a growing group of less intelligent people is lower living standards for the entire society (some say this is already manifesting itself in the form of the financial crisis). Such a society may also tend to develop less nuanced and diplomatic foreign policy tools, becoming frighteningly irresponsible in its use of oh, say, nuclear weapons.
“Evolution is rapidly mutating an unfathomably large volume of pathogens at random and yet life on earth is completely safe.”
What in the world gave you *that* idea?
Do you know why we don’t see many hyperpathogens spreading through particular species? Because they’re dead, Dave. They’re all dead. We don’t see evidence of pathogens that can spread very widely because it’s so very difficult to make something that is communicable and lethal to many different species.
You’re never safe.
Caledonian:
When I put something in quotation marks and italics, it is a quotation, with which I do not necessarily agree. Especially when my own comments explicitly reject it.
Gc, why don’t we genetically modify someone to have a huge brain? Since the correlation of brain size to intelligence is approx 0.4, why don’t we try to do something like that irl? Isn’t that a much better idea than AI? I think it’ll be easier trying to find out the biological causes of intelligence first. Stphen Hwking says that last time, we were limited by the size of the birth canal, now by C-sections. I wonder too if huge brains have evolved in the past, like for example in dinosaurs.
PubMed agenda doesn’t seem that much “hidden”, he is just trying to be a little more clever than previous attempts, but the arguments have been made quite a while ago: Saving Us from Darwin.
Evolution keeps going even in cultural matters and hopefully the “god problem” will solve itself into oblivion, going thru monotheism and most especially christianity paved the way to secularism: The Disenchantment of the World.
The next steps may very well “dissolve” the need for the supernatural even if we cannot clearly foresee thru which kind of cultural changes, so let’s resist and endure the nutbars while social maturation does its work.
David B
Now, of course, there may be many more than one set of mutations that would produce a superpathogen, but I dont’ know of any strong reason for supposing that there is necessarily even one.
I had never considered the fact that there might not be a possible combination of genes that could produce a superpathogen. I don’t know if that’s true but I find that a very comforting thought.
As for ID, I’m not interested in the concept let alone in agreement with it.