This should give pause to all those proposing interventions less intensive than the full time parenting provided by adoption and expecting great results.</blockquote

A philosophical bre/ak/e for the woke debaters in this field.

Critics said that the finding that identical twins reared apart correlated in intelligence was not due to their genetics, but to them having been placed in similarly bright families

So the critics were conjecturing that the experienced social workers who organise adoptions were convinced hereditarians who believed that matching bright to bright was how they could best simulate nature’s ways.

So unless the criticsy thought that the experience of such social workers was worthless, they were paying a cack-handed tribute to hereditarianism. Were they really so dim as not to recognise this? Or did they just declare, in the Marxist fashion, that the social workers were guilty of false consciousness?

these components jointly accounted for 8% of the IQ variance in adulthood. The heritability was estimated to be 0.42

And the other 50%? It seems to me to be misleading to call it “environmental”. What should it be called: what’s a good adjective for a catch-all category for things not understood? “Stochastic” won’t do. I have it: call it “unknown”.

The massive contribution of genetic inheritance is established beyond doubt. It doesn’t really matter if the “unknown” is 50%, or perhaps only somewhere above about 12% (100% – 64% – 7% – 15% – 2% ), or maybe a bit below 79% (100% – 21%) . It’s surely got to be the target for almost all further research.

criticsy was a typo but carries a pleasant implication of critics + clerisy.

Prospero experienced this:

A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;
And as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers.

My eye-brain combo wants to draw the slope on the left graph steeper but who am I to argue with statistical software.

The slope of the regression line on the left graph isn’t one to one. Is that the effect of regression to the mean?

Or more low-IQ outlier situations like profound mental retardation from mutations like trisomy?

The most recent adoption in which I was involved was around 2013 or so .
It was then accepted in English law that adoptive parents must be given full information about their child’s background – including information about the birth parents and family -when there was any chance of it affecting the child and or the adoptive family. This included illnesses where there was or is or could be a familial pattern – diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s , hypo-tension etc; psychiatric factors- bipolar, schizophrenia, ADHD , – and parental intelligence. ( Usually the birth-parents are pretty thick – quite a few of them were nasty in all senses of the word. )
It was accepted – at least tacitly- that the intelligence of the birth parents was quite predictive of the child’s development. And we tried to convey to future adopters that no matter what they did the teenage years of their new child were bound to be -well – interesting . Or whatever euphemism came to mind. Usually the prospective adopters were kind, intelligent and loving . We tried to persuade them that their own characteristics are absolutely NOT guaranteed to be acquired by their child. But on the other hand , most people do not acquire a family pet because they imagine that it will go to university or even get a prize at Cruft’s.

As an aside, a late uncle was a social worker. By the early to mid 60s, some of his classmates had moved into university positions. In the early 80s, I sat on a committee guiding an employee assistance plan. One of the committee turned out to be one of his old classmates, who, according to my uncle, was one of the “new wave” types to whom a spade wasn’t a spade, it was an agricultural implement. Long on hypothesis, short on reality.

information about the birth parents

Insofar as the father is known.

So, bright parents create bright environments (add 1%), brothers and sisters in that family contribute to that environment (add 4%), and the interaction adds another 3%, thus 8% in all.

I’m just curious, is this generalizable? Is there an argument for family size here? It sounds like it’s saying that creating a larger number of high IQ children (up to a point, recognizing deleterious effects of parental age also) will reinforce the adult IQ of the others, and this effect is far more powerful than anything the parents themselves can do directly (while still tiny compared to genetic effects).

If nurture conquers all, no bright parents would ever have dim children, nor dim parents bright. You need the genetic lottery to explain such ill-matched generations.

With this simple argument I once persuaded a journalist to give up her extreme nurturist views. “Why” she asked “have I never heard this argument before?”

“Because you drink with duds” said I, cheerfully.

‘…It was accepted – at least tacitly- that the intelligence of the birth parents was quite predictive of the child’s development. And we tried to convey to future adopters that no matter what they did the teenage years of their new child were bound to be -well – interesting . Or whatever euphemism came to mind. Usually the prospective adopters were kind, intelligent and loving . We tried to persuade them that their own characteristics are absolutely NOT guaranteed to be acquired by their child. But on the other hand , most people do not acquire a family pet because they imagine that it will go to university or even get a prize at Cruft’s.’

I see some of that around here. The area is almost perfectly non-black (0.3% black), but there is the occasional black child, apparently adopted out of an excess of Christian zeal.

It never looks like it is working out.

And gee, there couldn’t be any flaws in these surveys or anything, now could there. Science is perfect.

Imagine if Steve Jobs was adopted by a hillbilly family in West Virginia ?

Really poor and dysfunctional families rarely get to adopt kids, but it would be interesting to see the outcome if mulatto children were adopted by Black parents with 90 IQs compared the the mulatto children adopted by Whites parents with 100 IQs. Probably not many parents with two digit IQs adopt many children.

Does anyone study the effect on IQ (and other traits) of fostering?

“Imagine if Steve Jobs was adopted by a hillbilly family in West Virginia ?”

You’d be able to watch porn on your favorite I-rifle during deer season.

…high predictive validity for PGS EA for verbal IQ is perhaps to be expected given that verbal IQ correlates more strongly than other IQ subscales with educational attainment…

Verbal IQ subscale needs to be completely reworked. It measures vocabulary more than intelligence which is exactly the wrong way to measure real IQ. Every other component is, rightfully, eliminating the influence of knowledge differences as much as possible but verbal IQ is actually going in the opposite direction for some inexplicable reason.

anon(184): Now that was funny!

Re vocabulary and IQ .

I can see the possible link between vocabulary size and intelligence , subject to the usual caveats .

I wonder though if for example having an average vocabulary in two or three languages is the equivalent of a large vocabulary in only one language ?
Just asking for a friend

In which case, the characteristic decontexualization that the Internet provides is possibly the worst thing that we could have done to support intelligence development.

Sorry, but we’ll have to disagree on this one. A proper IQ test should eliminate knowledge (or knowledge differences, to be exact) as much as possible when measuring intelligence. That’s how it works with other components. A “math” question in a normal IQ test would always stick to basic math so it wouldn’t matter if the test-taker had a high-school or university diploma.

Verbal IQ subscale is the only one going in the opposite direction. It literally favours a CRT dullard over a Physics genius who might not know, or care about the finer points of “intersectional mansplaining”.

Thank you.

Verbal IQ subscale is the only one going in the opposite direction. It literally favours a CRT dullard over a Physics genius

In theory, maybe, but in practice?

Unless there is new evidence to the contrary, wordsum correlates better with intelligence than educational attainment. This rings true to me. At least in previous generations, it was not uncommon for very intelligent working-class people to have relatively low educational attainment. They read the newspaper and did crossword puzzles (associative reasoning) while talking and sharing interesting things with their granddaughters.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-raw-scores-on-the-Wordsum-test_fig1_271074326

Did the adptees get an IQ boost a whole? If adoptees were + 15 IQ (likely smaller) over their expected iq if the hadn’t beem adopted, then thst would not show up in the correlation, right?

Also, it’s curious thst the correlations’ confidence interval cut off a zero. Correlation (�) can go negative. I would think the confidence interval for a � of 0.01 would have a confidence interval that went negative. Is my intuition off? Did they carefully chose a CI percent that would stay positive.

In my experience, it seemed as if smarter people often have trouble explaining concepts to considerably dumber people, so I could see that 120 IQ parents might have trouble explaining things to 85 IQ kids. Is my intuition off, yet again. Maybe it is. I seem to recall that white teachers do better teaching black kids than black teachers. That is likely to be a 15 point gap, if not more.

Rob,
I have a some observations about why brighter people often have trouble explaining things to less bright people.

A lot of people have memorized a lot of jargon, and the simpler interdependencies between the concepts. However they don’t clearly understand the essence of those concepts and processes, so they have trouble translating it into everyday language.

The IQ concept doesn’t distinguish between numerical and verbal aptitudes. Translating concepts to a different dialect is a verbal reasoning skill, and the skills of a lot of bright people are centered on numerical reasoning, not verbal reasoning.

There is an unwritten guild law that says thou shall speak in jargon and thou shall be ejected into the wilderness if you speak in everyday language. “Experts” who speak in everyday language are often attacked by their peers, so most don’t ever try to do this. Any aptitude a person has, which isn’t ever exercised, atrophies, and then they can’t do it even if their life depended on it.

~
That said, good teachers work hard at finding ways to reach all students, so likely they have more practice translating concepts to different dialects. As a result of this practice, some teachers get pretty good at it.

In both theory and practice you can teach a person to score much higher on the verbal IQ component by giving them a number of select books and a thick thesaurus.

That’s a huge red flag. The person didn’t increase his intelligence (raw brain power – not knowledge) but his official IQ is now higher. As a matter of fact, he can continue increasing his verbal IQ score all the way into the old age as his actual physical brain starts deteriorating and other IQ subscales decrease. That’s another red flag.

The fact that there is some correlation in many cases is irrelevant. You’re not supposed to measure knowledge in a proper IQ test – ever – and vocabulary is knowledge that varies wildly across time and space. James Thompson already published a number of articles showing IQ correlation with career advancement or even health outcomes but nobody is suggesting that salaries or health records should be incorporated into IQ tests. There’s a reason for that.

This is one of those topics where I followed the threads to a surprise conclusion (at least it was surprising to me).

It helps the gut level belief in this to see an adoption in action.

My aunt and uncle lived on the east side of San Francisco bay. He designed instrumentation for managing industrial processes. She was the head of a high school English department. Pretty typical suburban, upper middle class.

They had 2 daughters, my uncle wanted a son, and didn’t want to end up with many daughters in an effort to have a son. So they adopted a son. The son turned out to be a classic good old boy – large, slightly overweight, friendly, easy going and outgoing. Out of high school he ran the barbecue concession at a local park. Eventually he became a refrigeration technician. So he wasn’t stupid, but he wasn’t up to doing the engineering to design what he worked with. More importantly, he liked interacting with people and fixing things, and he hated paperwork. The more my cousin resisted joining the professional-worker social-class, the more they all treated him like a deplorable. Then he moved to northern Idaho where he fits in better.

There must be hundreds of millions of kids with screwed up lives because the adults raising them believed that kids are clay and they could make the kids into anything they wanted, while at the same time the kids were feeling in their bones what they were, and weren’t. This includes ambitious working-class families that “give their kids every advantage” in an effort to force them into the upper middle class, where they don’t fit, and don’t want to be.

A few times I lived with that aunt and uncle for a while, which reinforced my west coast cultural characteristics. There is a huge cultural gap between the Bay Area and New York City. These are fundamentally very different cultures. How much of this cultural difference is absorbed during childhood, and how much of it is genetic? Did the people with a genetic inclination to be easy going and freewheeling move to the west coast and reinforce and magnify the difference between the west coast and east coast of North America?

In any case, its obvious that I had engineering and management genes that my cousin didn’t, and more than simple aptitude, I had an interest in doing those activities, and he didn’t.

~
A related issue, which I see very little discussion on, is the effects of mixed marriages on the children. I don’t see any discussion of the effects of this on society.

Since a lot of behavior is genetically based, children from mixed marriages don’t fit into any cohesive culture because some of their behavior is problematic in any one culture. Children from mixed marriages are permanently handicapped in their ability to live a successful life. Some succeed in spite of this handicap. How much more successful would they have been without that handicap?

Maybe there are gumbo cultures somewhere, which have a bit of everything in them, but I doubt if they are cohesive, successful, or enduring.

There are creole cultures. However, once they pass thru the mixing and evolution processes and have a cohesive culture, the parts of the parent cultures, which were dropped, don’t fit in any more with the creole culture. So once again there is a clear concept of what is “our” culture, and what is culture from other cultures, which is excluded from their culture. It seems highly likely that the remaining cultural parts reinforce the other parts in constructive ways, and the parts from the parent cultures, which would cause cognitive dissonance within the creole culture, were dropped.

So a marriage between a creole person, and a person from one of the originating cultures, would be still be a mixed marriage, and their children would have problems fitting into either the parent culture or the creole culture because some of their behavior genes would be at odds with that culture.

A very common example of a fundamental and chronic cultural behavior conflict is that in the professional-worker social-class loud raucous laughter is never okay in any setting, public or private, and many other cultures think life is flat and boring when loud raucous laughter is not allowed. This particular issue is a root in many severe cultural conflicts.

People, who promote mixed marriages, are right up there with the Nazi doctors who did destructive experiments on humans.

How much of the conflict going on in the west today is caused by people who are too genetically mixed to fit in anywhere, are deeply unhappy, and are failing around?

This genetic mismatch is complicated by the fact that many people use defense mechanisms to avoid and bury issues they don’t want to deal with, and then they project outwards their unresolved distress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanism

How many of the vicious woke are projecting outwards their own distress about not fitting in, and in true modern fashion are blaming others for their sense of distress?

The slope of the regression line on the left graph isn’t one to one. Is that the effect of regression to the mean?

Two reasons: First, for intake IQ of the parents, we only had mom’s or dad’s IQ for each family, but not both. For follow-up 3, we had ICAR-16 data for both parents in the majority of cases. Second, there was some minor attrition with a handful of families present in intake but not in follow-up. Attrition wasn’t high enough to affect robustness of the comparison (see supplement for details).

Or more low-IQ outlier situations like profound mental retardation from mutations like trisomy?

We had no profoundly low-IQ individuals in this data set. In order to ensure full understanding of the written materials, participants at intake (long before my time) were screened for IQ > 70, and only one participant was dropped from intake data as a consequence.

I would err on the side of caution and say that these conclusions have limited generalizability. None of the families we studied came from extremely impoverished backgrounds, and all grew up in a relatively homogenous culture (Minnesota). As for family size, the adoptive and biological families we included were matched to each other for number of offspring, typically two in each family. They were also at least roughly matched for children’s ages.

Just to make sure I understand correctly, in Figure 2 at the top the two panels contain the same children just with the different sets of parents, right?

The two panels represent mostly different parents and offspring, but there is some overlap: Some families were mixed, in that they had both adoptive and biological children. Figure 2 is meant mostly for illustrative purposes—the biometric decomposition took non-independence into consideration.

Did they look at age of adoption as a factor?

All adoptees in this cohort were required to have been placed for adoption before reaching two years of age (M = 4.7 months, SD = 3.4 months). We did not explicitly look at the age of adoption within this range as a predictive factor, though I probably have that data lying around somewhere…

P.S. Is full text available anywhere?

You can find the full text and supplement on James Lee’s website (first entry under 2021): https://jamesjlee.altervista.org/

Did the adptees get an IQ boost a whole? If adoptees were + 15 IQ (likely smaller) over their expected iq if the hadn’t beem adopted, then thst would not show up in the correlation, right?

Although this wasn’t the focus of the paper, adoption did appear to raise the children’s IQ by an average of 2.83 points.

Also, it’s curious thst the correlations’ confidence interval cut off a zero. Correlation (�) can go negative. I would think the confidence interval for a � of 0.01 would have a confidence interval that went negative. Is my intuition off? Did they carefully chose a CI percent that would stay positive.

The familial correlations’ CIs weren’t cut off at zero. You can find the 95% CI for each familial correlation in the supplement (Table S11): https://jamesjlee.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/SI_IQ_adoption_rv2_final.pdf Indeed, some of them dipped well below zero, especially for the adoptive relationships.

The CIs for the variance estimates (main text table 3) were cut off at 0, because variance can’t be negative. (Incidentally, negative C variance can result from biometric models when there’s evidence for non-additive genetic variance, but that wasn’t the case here.)

‘In both theory and practice you can teach a person to score much higher on the verbal IQ component by giving them a number of select books and a thick thesaurus.’

I question the truth of that.

“Intersectional mansplaining” was just a crude example. The point was that CRT dullards love their “big” words to the point of feverishly inventing new ones on a daily basis. Their lectures and literature will be much denser, in more ways than one, when compared to Math or Physics studies.

My main point are:

– A good IQ test should always put every test-taker on a level playing field in terms of knowledge. Vocabulary knowledge in particular varies wildly across age groups, educational levels, chosen subjects, schools, no schools and above all across different temperaments.

– We also have good correlation between school grades and intelligence but we don’t inject them in IQ test scores for a good reason.

– Verbal IQ is the only subscale that can be boosted through learning – even in old age as the physical brain and other subscale measurements start to decline. That’s just laughable. We clearly have a problem here. One of these things is not like the others.

Why? Verbal IQ subscale relies a lot on vocabulary (size). Vocabulary is a type of knowledge that can be learned. As a matter of fact, most of us will expand our word libraries until death or senility kicks in.

You are correct that a poorly implemented vocabulary test would measure education, not intelligence. In addition, a person taking an intelligence test, which isn’t in their first language, would be handicapped, and they wouldn’t score as high in verbal intelligence as they would on a test written in their first language.

All that said, it takes verbal intelligence to understand the significance of the subtle nuances between synonyms. In the intro for this page, it gives an example of a set of synonyms: begin, start, commence, and initiate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synonym

While they are synonyms, they also have different nuances. The better a person understands those nuances, the stronger their verbal intelligence will be. While the word “commence” isn’t commonly used, it seems to me that the other 3 words are widely used, and most people would have an opportunity to pick up on the distinctions between them, if they have the verbal intelligence to do that.

If a person doesn’t have the verbal intelligence to see, understand, and articulate the nuances in how these words are different, then it seems unlikely that they could study up and increase the score on their IQ test.

Probably, as they get older, some people gain a better understanding of these nuances. A compensation would be to compare scores for people of the same age group.

There are all kinds of pitfalls with implementing intelligence tests, and possible mitigating factors for individual results. For instance, a person who doesn’t read, and lives in isolation with very little verbal interaction with others, will have a stunted verbal intelligence score.

The key point is that well designed tests for verbal intelligence provide some useful general indications for most people. However if in a specific case, exactness is needed in assessing a person’s intelligence, then more in-depth testing should be done.

It seems like there are 2 different things. One is the ideal for intelligence tests that the creators of the tests strive for. The other is recognizing when intelligence tests are good enough to provide useful results, and also recognizing their limitations and when the results won’t be useful.

Sure, let’s see some references:

1) In this article you’re stating:

verbal IQ correlates more strongly than other IQ subscales with educational attainment

That’s a bit of an understatement, in my opinion, but let’s just say that verbal IQ score can be improved through “educational attainment” – a.k.a. learning. Red flag. You’re not supposed to learn your way into higher IQ score – especially if your physical brain cells start deteriorating and every other IQ measurement declines.

2) Your reply #20 links to this article where you state:

As a rough guide, teenagers have about 12,000 words and college students 17,000. Older adults have 17,000 to 21,000 words, and a minority have many more.

Those are huge differences – and they have nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with learning. It’s also a “rough” guide which completely ignores individual choices of schools, hobbies or chosen educational pathways and goals. I’ve already noted how some of the dumbest “social sciences” fill their dogma programme with unnecessary exotic words for the sake of appearing smart. I’m willing to bet big money – without reading – that “White Fragility” contains many, many more “big” words than any Physics book of similar size.

3) I distinctively remember one of your own articles referencing a study – tracking lifetime IQ measurements – showing verbal IQ trending upwards – up to a point – while every other IQ measurement and the average efficiency of physical brain cells declined. Again, one of these things is not like the others and that’s just laughably wrong.

Unfortunately I don’t have a link but I’m sure you can find it. Bottom line is that data in this instance doesn’t matter. We can use reason. Please explain to me why an average 60-year-old can’t expand his vocabulary by, say 50% if he’s dedicated, and significantly increase verbal IQ score. This could easily overtake any actual brain cell deterioration so please explain to me what we’re measuring with verbal IQ? We can literally have a case where a deteriorating, physically sub-optimal brain can improve its verbal IQ score. Why is that allowed?

Emily W. thanks for the response. It’s pretty cool and a privilege to be able to interact with one of the study authors.

The blues musician John Mayall and his then-wife Pamela adopted a Nigerian infant (Benedict) in the 1960s – I don’t know if that was John’s attempted payback for the blues music that made his career (as well as that of Clapton/Peter Green/Mick Taylor etc). Then they were divorced in the early 1970s.

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-john-mayall-of-john-mayall-the-bluesbreakers-with-his-wife-pamela-84178451.html

In the 1980s I used to go to his son Gary’s “Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues” dance nights in London. It’s still going!

https://www.gazrockin.com/gass-rockin-blues

I wonder what happened to Benedict Mayall?

I would have expected having the IQ for both parents at follow-up to give a stronger correlation (opposite of what was seen). Similarly for the presumably higher IQ heritability in the older children. Any thoughts on that?

The main reason for this is probably that the IQ test used at follow-up (ICAR-16) is much lower in reliability than the measures taken at intake (WISC/WAIS). It is unfortunate that the full Wechsler couldn’t be given to our follow-up participants, but we had to work with what we had. The ICAR-16 is great for what it is, but 16 items measuring four subcomponents can’t compare with a full WAIS.

How comfortable are you with using the EA3 PGS for Asians given that it was developed with Europeans? I see significant effort to look at that in both the paper and the SM. Table S14 is the best summary of that I see. There we see the R^2 for PGS_EA reduced about 60% and 1/3 for Total IQ and ICAR-16 for Asians relative to whites. But the most interesting result is the Years of education R^2 for Asians being twice that of whites?! Any idea why that would be?

It would be inappropriate to use these PGS for any sort of group comparisons, and the primary reason we included them was to test the hypothesis of the adoption placement effect. We were also puzzled by the seemingly high PGS estimates in a non-European sample too. But considering that mean IQ did not differ significantly across the groups we studied, the most probably reason for the unusually high estimate is allele ascertainment bias. Allele frequency ascertainment bias can arise from systematic deviations from the expected theoretical result due to sampling processes of the genotyping chip used to ascertain SNPs and their population-specific allele frequencies; a lower frequency of the minor allele in East Asians can cause the appearance of a higher PGS without underlying predictive significance.

That is an extremely interesting point. Could you elaborate on that a bit? Will the presence of non-additive genetic variance always (or usually) lower C below its true value? With that variance ending up in E for an ACE model? Or would it appear in G-E covariance?

Biometric models iteratively adjust variance components until they best match the constraints of equations describing familial relationships and the observed correlations. If the correlations between biological relatives is much higher than their degree of relatedness would suggest, you can end up with negative C. If you do a back-of-the-envelope heritability calculation with Falconer’s equations on twin data, you can see this effect in action: If the monozygotic twin correlation is greater than twice the dizygotic correlation, you’ll end up with negative C. So, e.g., if identical twins correlate on some phenotype at .7 and fraternal twins correlate at .3, you’ll have c^2 = 2(.3) – .7 = -.1. The logical consequence is that the presence of dominance variance will artificially lower C below its true value.

We ran separate biometric models on our data which included dominance and excluded it, and the dominance estimate was consistently 0. Dropping the parameter from the model therefore produces better estimates of the remaining parameters.

Incidentally, there is compelling theory and evidence for most genetic variance being additive (see, e.g., Hill et al., 2008 and Maki-Tanila & Hill, 2014) and dominance variance being negligible (Hivert et al., 2021 and Pazokitoroudi et al., 2021) in many psychological variables, including IQ and educational attainment. In fact, EA4 (currently in the works with >3 million participants) specifically ran a dominance model and found no evidence for dominance in educational attainment.

I’m not aware off the top of my head of any human behavioral traits that consistently show evidence of dominance variance, but in general, traits that are under strong directional selection can sometimes show significant amounts of dominance relative to additive genetic variance. Such traits often include life-history phenotypes that are highly correlated with fitness and under strong selection pressure, particularly when studied in wild animals (see, e.g., Crnokrark & Roff, 1995).

Dr Thompson, you have probably seen this before

@res Does that work here?

I found this paper “Genetic enhancement of cognition in a kindred with cone–rod dystrophy due to RIMS1 mutation�

They found a very rare genetic defect in RIMS1, a gene expressed in neural synapse. It’s also expressed in retina. The mutation seems to raise verbal iq, and the authors think g, by 25 points. The cost is going going blind.

So, a very rare gene, phenotypic defect, and big boost to IQ. Sounds like organic genius to me. That’s just the kind of allele i postdicted. I feel smart now. We should look for more. If only to give kids who have them appropriate special ed. But really to figure out how to boost IQ without going blind.

“The point was that CRT dullards love their “bigâ€� words to the point of feverishly inventing new ones on a daily basis. Their lectures and literature will be much denser, in more ways than one, when compared to Math or Physics studies.”

Hard to argue with that ; )

I’m glad we agree. This is important because later on, when comparing White Fragility and Fundamentals of Physics books, you seem to disagree.

“A good IQ test should always put every test-taker on a level playing field in terms of knowledge.”

I think you need a qualifier in that. Say “as much as possible�? You do realize as stated your goal is unattainable, right?

Uh, please don’t do that. I don’t want to pepper my posts with tedious and unnecessary qualifiers. Let’s just say that nothing is perfect but some things are less perfect than others. In this case, my position is that verbal IQ is a much less perfect measure of actual intelligence than other IQ subscales. I am not one of those people who don’t “believe” in IQ tests – quite the contrary- but I do have a problem with one of the IQ subscales trying to measure intelligence by heavily measuring knowledge while all the others avoid it as a rule.

“Verbal IQ is the only subscale that can be boosted through learning”

That seems obviously wrong. Do you really think practicing Raven’s Progressive Matrices style questions would not help someone who was previously unexposed to that type of thing? At the extreme end, test prep which included the exact questions to be used later would presumably improve results on most tests.

That’s true but you’re talking about actual cheating which makes your objection kind of a nitpick, again. I’m sure it happens in some cases, which is unfortunate, but the data I’ve seen so far doesn’t show a significant percentage of people increasing their non-verbal IQ scores over time. It’s a demanding task and test creators are obviously mitigating the problem with reasonable success.

A person’s vocabulary, on the other hand, will diverge in different directions and at different speeds even without cheating. They’ll change their spouse, friends, work environment or hobbies and learn new words (or even end up shrinking their vocabulary in some cases). Change is actually unnecessary – an academic who communicates a lot with other academics will keep increasing his vocabulary regardless of any attempt at cheating. The same applies to bookworms or Grievance Studies adherents. They can be smart or dumb but they will expand their vocabulary – and verbal IQ – while their real intelligence (raw brain power) stays the same or even declines.

Some dimensions to consider here.

1. Variability of performance with learning. How much of a difference does the full range (say raised by wolves to reading voraciously since age 3) of learning variability make for IQ? How much of a difference does the typical range (say 5% to 95% of reading/learning effort in a population) of learning variability make for IQ? How much effort is required to move measured IQ? I would expect the improvement curve would be steep for much of going from raised by wolves to mandatory K-12 education, but much shallower after that.

2. Persistence of learning improvements on measured IQ. I would expect specific training (e.g. tell people all of the words in Wordsum) to fall off quickly while general learning would be more durable (but also less dramatic in effect).

Sounds reasonable. Please point me to any research dealing with those subjects.

“Those are huge differences – and they have nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with learning.”

That false dichotomy is a gross overstatement. I’m curious, do you think intelligence affects the ability/efficiency of learning?

Of course it does but “nothing to do with intelligence” in this case means that an average teenager will almost double his vocabulary by simply learning. College will push it from 12 000 to 17 000 words and then it will go to 17-21K or even much higher in some cases. They won’t become more intelligent in terms of raw brain power – which is what IQ tests should measure – but their verbal IQ will surge and the sky is the limit.

Intelligent people will have higher “ability/efficiency of learning” but how is that relevant? They will also, on average, be much more inquisitive which will further boost their vocabulary-acquisition pace but that’s also irrelevant to my point? My point is that knowledge is not intelligence. That’s why we have school grades for knowledge and IQ tests for intelligence.

“I’m willing to bet big money – without reading – that “White Fragilityâ€� contains many, many more “bigâ€� words than any Physics book of similar size.”

I hope you haven’t been foolish enough to actually place that bet with anyone (especially given the “many, many moreâ€� bit). But if you’d like to do it now… I took roughly 3000 word excerpts from Chapter 1 of White Fragility and Fundamentals of Physics…

I suspect that the sample size is too small. Something tells me that the anti-white crusader couldn’t resist adding more and more exotic words in subsequent chapters in order to appear smart while the physicist didn’t have that chip on his shoulder. I can’t be sure, though, so maybe you’re right but my experience with those two groups tells me otherwise.

“tracking lifetime IQ measurements – showing verbal IQ trending upwards – up to a point – while every other IQ measurement and the average efficiency of physical brain cells declined. Again, one of these things is not like the others and that’s just laughably wrong.”

The 389 page WJIV Technical Manual is an excellent reference for age curves of different subtests.
https://www.wjscore.com/Files/WJIVTechnicalManual.PDF
More at this comment.
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/no-skin-in-the-game/?showcomments#comment-4100684

See Figures 5-3 and 5-4 on page 137. You are right about one thing being not like the others.
The Comprehension-Knowledge (Gc) factor cluster and Vocabulary (VL/LD) curves both show the gradual increase from about age 20 to 65 you mention. The others show varying levels of flat and declining after age 20. Cognitive Processing Speed (Gs) and Perceptual Speed (P) are notable outliers in the other direction (declining more quickly than the others).

That PDF link doesn’t work, unfortunately, but I’ll try to find it through the data you provided when I get more time. Thanks. It does look like verbal IQ is “not like the others” which is part of my main point. A person can boost their score in that area even when physical brain deteriorates.

“Bottom line is that data in this instance doesn’t matter. We can use reason.”

Yes, we have often seen how well that works in the past. /sarc

I was referring to that particular instance. It wasn’t a call to abandon facts in principle. I didn’t have a link to the study so I made an argument based on logic.

Perhaps the going blind family did not want to be studied? I would not be leery of being studied for intelligence research, though no one’s breaking down my door to try. A quick googling and I could not find out who they are, names and locations, at least. Someone should preserve that, lest the researchers die without divulging.

As to why there was no follow up, at least according to Google Scholar, I would guess that researchers are leery of doing research that smacks of eugenics. There does not even have to be an official policy. Just don’t give grants for that. Or make getting ethical clearance nearly impossible. I’ve read that Rushton was a pariah at his uni, no grad students for decades, office in the basement, that sort of thing,

Consider the comparison to doing genetic studies of American Indians. It’s not illegal, but no researcher wants to be at the center of a controversy, so they don’t even try. The promise of tenure selects for people who value job security. That they have tenure at one school means they don’t want friction with colleagues.

Speculation aside, talking to the reasearchers is probably the best way. There was a corresponding author on the RIMS1 paper, you might consider emailing him about why they didn’t follow up. I might, too.

I would like to know how that family was discovered, and why doctors thought they were brainy. It’d be a hint on how to find more organic geniuses. I think they’ll be reluctant to come forward, because disabled and different kids are mistreated by schools and other kids. It leaves scars.

I’d like to toot my own horn and say my method of looking for siblings with big IQ Δ would have found these people. Also my method of looking for very smart people with physical (I don’t want to say defects) differences and disabilities.

Twenty five points is a lot 1.67 σ. Difference between retarded and Normal. Between normal and solid college material. Between that and genius. Or even between genius and your name will never be forgotten. And the ceiling is above 150! Two people in a thousand for a normal population.

You know, there are lots of families in which all the kids take the SAT, though in different years. College board probably has records of families where one got 1550 and another 900. That would be interesting to have. Does it happen more often than one would predict from the σ of 12 within sibships?

My idea of organic genius is very different from folk theories of smart people going crazy. I concede that most eg schizophrenics have low IQ. I’m saying that some don’t, and they’d be interesting to sequence. An analogy would be the analysis that “proved� PANDAS (pediatric acquired neurological disorders associated with strep) by looking at all the kids who got strep, But strep causes crazy was not really the claim. The claim was “some strain of strep causes crazy� they would have to sequence the streptococcus bacteria from all these kids to test it. That said, not sure I believe in PANDAS.

Looking at ways to make dumb people smarter is probably ok with their peer group like I read a piece about a doctor/scientist (i forget) who is working on a way to make people with Downs more intelligent. The drug is called mementine, I think. On the other hand, the young college-educated set is extremely woke.

Remember Greg Cochran’s thing about heterzygosity for some sphingolipid disorders boostin IQ? I wonder if youncould sell a pregnancy vitamin pill with iodine and some sphingolipids or bprecursors to pregnant women. Or dorks who want to get smarter. Add creatine, too. Here’s a review of creatine in healthy people. Some evidence it works, especially in vegetarians. Sell it to Indian students (the kind who live in India)

What works on people with trisomy 21 might not work in normal people, but my guess is it would. Teenage boys produce a ton of testosterone, but steroids work for them.

One could write interesting sci-fi about engineering or breeding nearly superhuman geniuses who go blind in their forties. Along the lines of Camp Concentration, maybe. When is it ethical to create people who will be severely disabled at a young age? That it’s based on a real condition makes the sci-fi hard. Maybe someone invents usable synthetic eyes, and the geniuses become much harder to control. Give the silver eyes in the movie, maybe opalescent,

Sorry, got distracted.

I would like to see how the RIMS1 kinship bunch do when their eyes have not declined and they can take a full IQ test. Are they even smart as kids? As babies or toddlers?

I’d like to see this mutation put at the appropriate place in the mouse RIMS1. Also macaques or chimps. Would like to see a homozygotes- do they get 50 points?

It is interesting that this intelligence-enhancing gene affects the eyes. Coupled with the fact that near-sighted people are more intelligent, i envision that eye differences might be a fruitful place to look for organic genius. Like blue eyes. They are so common in some populations, but universal in none. Doesn’t that imply heterozygous advantage? Further, the allele is not old and the haplotype is long. It was under positive selection in heterozygotes. Maybe the blue eyes genes affect cognitive ability or profile? On Twitter, Uriah(@crimakid, and apologies if you led me to him) noted that NFL quarterbacks who get to the super bowel are bluer eyed than NFL QBs, who are themselves more likely to have blue eyes.

Back to RIMS1, I would love to know what it does in the brain and when it matters for intelligence. Worse comes to worst if you’re genetically engineering embryos, put a standard RIMS1 gene under a promoter for retina-only genes, and RIMS1-IQ under a brain-only promoter. Add a microRNA for the mutant gene in the retina to reduce off-target expression. Viola! smart kids who don’t lose their sight.

Off this gene. It is shocking how little serious research is done on atrempting to understand and increase intelligence. Considering that raising IQ 25 points across the board would be utterly transformative. Every serious problem, from climate change to dempgraphic realities would be transformed. We’d get new problems, of course. If we could do it, and China could not, it would ensure our status as the hyperpower, despite our unfortunate demographic choices. Vice versa, and no one ever catches China. They’re going to the stars.

If IQ went up nearly 2σ across the board, then we would solve real problems scientifically instead of dealing with the results politically. We would cure aging, not fiddle with social security. We’d create a von Neumann economy, where machines reproduce themselves towards human ends, rather than fiddle with interest rates. We’d prevent hurricanes, instead of building higher levees around New Orleans.

Perhaps China getting a strong head start on upping IQ would get us in a space race sort of mindset? Except for satellites, space is not that important. Well, place ICBMs go through, too. But intelligence affects everything.

I’m sorry this is not a papers-focused comment, but it is late.

in the present sample, who are predominantly international placements with limited information on birth background …

Gee whizz, how many complications might that produce?

Hold on. How is that compatible with Study eligibility was limited to those families living within driving distance of the research lab ?

This paper is too ill-written for me to take it seriously. They simply don’t explain their vocabulary unambiguously. Presumably I am meant somehow to intuit the meaning of their sloppy English. The referees should be shot.

Thanks for the links. I did use that method to quickly look for the PDF but that resulted in a document dealing with disabilities and a number of registration requests. I hate it when they do that. Anyway, I’ll take a look when I get the chance.

In the meantime, I stand by my conviction that the verbal IQ component is deeply flawed. It measures vocabulary – which is a form of knowledge and an automatic red flag in my opinion. Every other IQ subscale avoids measuring knowledge for a good reason. Call me a purist, but if I wanted to hire genuinely intelligent people, who excel at problem-solving and unique insights, I’d use IQ tests without verbal components or ignore verbal components in those that do.

I keep hearing that verbal IQ is useful. That’s clearly true. I never said it wasn’t. I just believe that it should be separated form tests that are supposed to measure raw intelligence or heavily modified to minimise measuring knowledge. It’s not gonna happen, of course, but that’s fine – I’ll just ignore it or use it to locate communicators.

I also keep hearing that vocabulary and verbal IQ correlate well with intelligence. True, again, but it also correlates well with CRT mediocrities, introvert bookworms and all kinds of random environmental and life-choice factors that might not require high ability. Furthermore, the fact that it does correlate well with intelligence creates another problem that proves my points. Intelligent people will continue increasing their vocabulary (on average, of course) at a much steeper rate than most others all the way into the old age. Their education, work and social environment will boost it and the fact that they’re more inquisitive will often result in a lifetime of informal studying.

That’s great, of course, but it creates a problem with measuring IQ. Whatever verbal IQ gap they had at 20 in comparison to an average person will keep widening.

This leads me to the second red flag: improved verbal IQ scores as the brain ages and deteriorates. Thank you, again, for linking to a study that actually shows that it’s happening but everyone is avoiding talking about it. My first question when noticing the problem was WTF but the next two were more useful: why and what does that mean? The answers are “because it measures knowledge” and “it’s flawed”.

You know, it is quite possible that someones are interested in IQ booster genes. There may be startups working with, just off the top of my head, RIMS1 variants in organoid brainlets. I bet it’s possible to do an in vitro “eyelet� with enough retina to see RIMS1 variants doing their thing. These companies don’t talk about it. They don’t want controversy, like people screaming about eugenics and the Holocaust or the poor being left behind as the rich become genetic supermen.

But when they actually have a product along the lines of a couple does the in vitro thing and gets a dozen viable zygotes. then the company applies proprietary treatment x, which will cost, I dunno, 100k at first. Out of the dozen, two are viable and modified, normal RIMS1 in the eye, fancy RIMS1 in the brain. At that point, when they go into clinical trials, the screaming starts, but it’s muted by the little voice in the critic’s head, ‘my baby could be way smarter than other people’s.� Liberal critics can even make fun of conservatives who approve of tech developed with fetal tissue, aborted naturally or not. Religious conservatives might not approve, but they have influence through Republicans, who never win. Once a seriously effective, voluntary “eugenic� procedure is actually possible, then opposition becomes much more pragmatically focused.

That would explain why there has been no published research. Companies do not have to announce publicly what they want to do, and technically potential investors are bound by non-disclosure.

at the very very top, the great scientists all had out of this world V scores.

Gauss vacillated between being a philologist and a mathematician, Kolmogorov as well.
Agassiz and Darwin had near-genius prose styles.
Newton is often mocked for his studies of Hebrew texts, but his Bible studies are not mocked by people who know what they are talking about.
Feynman was reputed to be one of the greatest conversationalists of his day – almost everyone who talked with him one on one agrees, except for a few people who had their own agenda.

A counter-example is von Neumann, but he just didn’t ever bother to try. Also, most people who remember talking to him did not talk to him in Hungarian.

Among the greats I have not mentioned (in other words, among the 20 or so most famous scientists of the last hundred years), about half clearly suffered from some form of autism.

And when I say suffer, I mean suffer, in every sense of the term. My guess is that the autism knocked down their actual V scores by several standard deviations, with no benefit to their scientific insights – most people don’t think of it that way, but imagine, if you will, a Godel or a Dirac who were normal guys.

…but I think you are underestimating the value of verbal IQ in creating a well rounded intellectually creative person. Even in STEM.

Why would you think that? Maybe you’ve decided that I have some kind of chip on my shoulder and that leads you to make these unfounded guesses based on my supposed motives. That’s a fool’s errand. My motives are irrelevant. I did score exceptionally well on two official IQ tests (in my native European language – not English) and one unofficial, non-verbal IQ test later on. Verbal IQ scores weren’t standing out in any direction, so when you’re responding to that imaginary person it only distracts from what’s written on the screen.

That said, in your case it’s more likely that you’re being a pedant, again, and latching on the fact that I’ve written “ignore verbal IQ” without any qualifiers so now I’ll end up hiring a bunch of deaf-mutes from Timbuktu. I don’t think so. What I’ll avoid with my approach is hiring mediocrities who’ve stumbled into solving crossword puzzles because their father liked them or bookworms who ended up there because of their shyness. Only in Hollywood movies is that scrawny, bespectacled kid an automatic genius with a time-machine in the basement.

As for “well-rounded”, I think they’ll be sufficiently well-rounded with Thompson’s 17-21K words (plus the specialised jargon in their field) and if they ever double it their verbal IQ would skyrocket while boosting their actual intelligence by… 0%.

Worth a look to see how high the verbal scores were for most of them.

How is that relevant? Did I ever say that legitimately intelligent people have deficient vocabulary?

The question becomes which are the more accurate measures.

Top speed, acceleration and horsepower are excellent measures of car performance. They will also, predictably, decrease with time. Mileage is not, but feel free to inform the owner about the good news. One of the measurements is going up, after all, and there’s certainly some positive correlation between good cars and how much people like to drive them.

Very smart people can explain things easily to dull people. It’s in the middle it goes wrong.

I assume iterated means PGS-selected embtyos to gametes to embryos made from those gametes, and on and on? That would be as effective as breeding real people selected by PGS, but much faster, right? If you are looking at 5 points/generation from embryo selection, you could probably keep getting 5 points every selection cycle, until variance has been exhausted or the children finally produced cannot carry their massive heads.

Certainly strong selection on a large, fast-reproducing population can change a trait quite a lot very fast. Cost of that is the parents would be raising their great^n grandchildren. They won’t be as closely related as parent child. You could maybe breed more of the parents into iterated kids

gwern mentions that large phenotype uplifts could occur if gamete (especially spermatids) could be non-destructively genotyped. If one had access to essentially an unlimited number of such sperm one would then have the potential to optimize a haploid of a human’s genome. Yet, this might be already possible. If one were able to genotype 3 of 4 connected spermatids during telophase II of meiosis II, then one would be able to infer the exact genotype non-destructively of the other spermatid. If the genomes of one million (on average) of such spermatids could be inferred, then one would roughly have the optimized haploid genome of a man. A similar strategy could apply with the polar bodies of females, though owing to the difficulty in obtaining large numbers of egg cells, such an optimization might only allow for finding the best egg cell of 10 instead of the optimal of essentially an infinity of sperm for males. The chosen optimized sperm could fertilize the best egg cell through ICSI and this might allow for substantial and rapid phenotype selection and enhancement.

During each succeeding generation optimal sperm selection could occur and the sperm could then act as a genome vector for the optimized chromosomes to the female lines. So, in the first generation the daughter (and the sons) would receive 23 selected chromosomes. When this first generation mated, the males with another contribution of an optimized haploid genome would transfer these 23 selected chromosomes to the embryos that would become female (perhaps ~12 on average without egg selection and with 10:1 selection possibly 15 of the selected chromosomes from the mothers would also be inherited). The females of the second generation would have possibly 38 of 46 selected chromosomes. Within even ~3 generations a strategy with optimized sperm selection would create humans with fully selected genomes. The sperm from the males is adding 100% selected chromosomes (i.e., 23 selected chromosomes) every generation! Selected chromosomes would rapidly displace the non-selected chromosomes.

This might be the most rapid method to optimize human genetics with seemingly low end reproductive technology: the only unknown here is whether the 3 of 4 spermatids could be identified and sequenced while retaining the fourth spermatid with inferred genotype. With a large enough number of sperm, the fitness difference between the number 1 and 2 rated sperm (of perhaps 1,000) probably would not be that large. Perhaps even the difference in fitness of the egg cells might then be considered less important as after the first generation or two all the chromosomes would be selected for both parents. Here the heavy lifting of selection is done mostly through sperm.

In such a scenario, the reproductive outcome is less constrained by embryo choice. In fact, using this gamete selection idea the entire concern about “embryo abortion” might be overcome. If you can choose gametes, then there is then no obvious need to have to choose from a large number of embryos anymore. You could simply start with the fittest sperm and fittest egg perform ICSI with the intention of implanting this single embryo. There would no longer be any rational of having a whole rack of embryos to select among. The economics involved would actually create a large incentive to use a single embryo, if possible.

Wait, Gwern’s iterated embryo selection is wannabe mom and date produce some gametes. Those gametes are combined into, say 10 embryos. Those embryos produce/turn into gametes, and those gametes are combined with each other? So they are hyperinbred? I just assumed it was SIMS for selection. That a bunch of people’s embryo-derived gametes formed a “breeding population� with generations on the order of weeks or months, not 20 years.

I am not sure super-inbreeding in vitro would work out. I have heard that the average person is a carrier for like 2-7 lethal recessives. But that’s just lethal. Look at Saudis or Pakistanis in Britain to see the effects of non-lethal negative alleles. And they are not siblings. In vitro, only alleles that kill cells generally, embryonic stem cells specifically or sex cells and whatever stages are between the last two. Neural defects would not be weeded out, for one.

Who’s dumber? A. Adopted child B. Adopting parents

Factorize, on pre-sperm to sperm quartets, whatever they’re called (the 4n cell to 4 x 1n of sperm) sequence 3 to get one nondestructively sequenced is a really good idea. If you are in academia or med/biotech, you should look into getting IP on an instantiation of that, the broader the better. If you don’t want intellectual property, you should consider peer-reviewed publication. Cattle and horse(?) breeders could make money off that.

If you’re a humanitarian and just want a better world, then you should contact gwern or Steve Hsu and get the idea closer to people who matter.

Seriously, that is too good of an idea to languish on a blog. Even a fantastic blog like this one.

You could also say, have children and drop an illusion. I became more gene-aware when one of my children did some seriously foolish things in his youth – which I couldn’t get too angry about because they precisely – scarily – paralleled identical foolish things I did at the same age.

You can also be adopted, meet your natural parent and even if a total leftie, discover that genes are important. Favourite BBC comedian Mark Steel on discovering his real father (a Jewish financier, gambler and millionaire):

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jun/27/mark-steel-finding-out-who-i-am

He says he had a revelation about inherited traits when he found a story about his father in a magazine gossip column. He and some friends were on a yacht in the Mediterranean when someone fell into the water, and he dived in to rescue him. Several years later, the man bumped into Mark’s father and said: “Aren’t you the former backgammon champion?� Quick as a flash, he said: “No, I’m the man who saved your life, you cunt.�

Mark laughs and says: “Natasha said I must be his son; his response was funny, feisty and sweary – which, she says, describes me perfectly. I never knew there was a sweary gene, but I’ll take it.�

Did Mark learn anything about himself in the process of writing the show. “I started off convinced that we’re formed by our environment and genetic makeup accounts for very little, but now I know that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I think I’m a strange hybrid of Scottish Trotsky politics and Jewish humour, with a bit of Swanley thrown in.�

Who said everyone is conservative about what they know best?

Rob and YetAnotherAnon thank you very much for showing support for my idea about sperm selection. I find it very encouraging that you both are able to understand this somewhat complex biological argument and that you can see potential in it. I would appreciate other Agrees or Thanks to this post from those on forum who are also able to recognize the potential. Comments from forum thought leaders would be especially welcome.

To reiterate in the technical biological vocabulary of spermatogenesis; a diploid spermatogonium becomes a primary spermatocyte then 2 secondary spermatocytes, 4 spermatids which then develop into 4 sperm cells. Importantly, once we know the genotypes of 3 of the 4 spermatids, the genome of the fourth spermatid can be known with certainty without having to genotype it. All that would be required to make such an inference is for the genome of a somatic cell from the mother and father to be sequenced. The basic idea itself is easy to understand, however all the complicated vocabulary and complex rounds of mitosis and meiosis does obscure the fundamental simple logic involved.

Genotyping of the 3 spermatids of each quartet could be done at various levels of intensity depending upon the level of refinement of the selection process. For a coarse sort possibly even as few as 10 genotypes per chromosome might be sufficient, though as the selection entered into the final rounds perhaps ~ 1,000 genotypes per chromosomes might be thought necessarye (in order to locate recombination points).

There is a parallel process that occurs with oogenesis. Yet, here the 4 resulting cells are not all viable: Only the egg cell can continue in development, the other three cells — the polar bodies — are unable to mature further. These three polar bodies could possibly also be genotyped to determine the exact genome of the egg cell without the need for invasively probing it. Both the sperm cells and the eggs cells could potentially have inferred genotypes known and be selected for optimal embryo genotype.

On its face, the ability to select the genomes of embryo at the gamete stage would appear to offer an extremely powerful reproductive technology. Being able to at least organize the macro-scale features of a genome (i.e., the chromosomes) should offer substantial control over polygenic scores, while merely selecting 1 in 10 embryos has only limited potential selective force. The calculations to date suggest that embryo selection might yield only ~3 IQ point enhancement with given predictors.

With possibly up to 1,000 fold sperm selection and 10 fold embryo selection the potential genetic uplift would be expected to be substantially greater. In fact, at 1,000 fold selection, 1 in 1,000 sperm would achieve an optimal haploid genotype (ignoring recombination). They would have the maximal polygenic score on a chromosome by chromosome basis from the father’s genome. It would clearly be of interest to determine what the IQ distributions of the optimized haploid sperm from the UKBB might be. I have attempted such calculations on publicly available phased genotypes with the early EA results and the resulting phenotypes suggested substantial genetic uplift for typical people. Doing a near population scale simulation |(e.g., with the UKBB) would be highly instructive.

Others might find the possibility of a near term induction of a Genetic Singularity Event. Depending upon the feedback I receive I am ready to investigate this further. There are clearly those who would make achieving this task easier; I would encourage them to enter the discussion and offer helpful suggestions and guidance. The primary technical question that is left outstanding is whether 3 of the quartet of spermatids can be cleanly separated and then genotyped. If this were possible, then a dramatic transition in human civilization might be a near term possibility. With intense spermatid selection, the first generation of sons and daughters would have the potential benefit of a full haploid of 1 in 2 chromosomal selection. In the next generation, sperm selection would allow for 1 in 4 chromosomal selection (i.e., the spermatid’s haploid genome would be the optimal chromosome wise genome drawn from the the 4 grandparents (less the genetic potential that is lost due to lack of intense selection on the egg cells).

A crowdsourcing campaign would seem to be well suited to advancing this idea. So, those who might be able to offer financial assistance would be warmly welcome. Once the basics could be established a great number of people might see how this could be of utility in their lives (e.g., parents to be, etc.). Comments would be greatly appreciated.

I guess I was not clear. this is a fantastic idea. Stop shopping it around. Don’t get us dumbass blog commenters to stroke your ego.Ask Prof Thompson to delete all the comments in this “subthread� yours, my reply, your reply, then my reply etc.
tonight (realistically tomorrow)

Suppose a social worker has a white child available for adoption, and several white families wanting to adopt. Is there any tendency to (i) give parents of boys a girl adoptee, and vice versa, or (ii) give the child to a family which most closely resembles him/her in hair colour, eye colour, build, …?

And if there are such tendencies would they matter a hoot? I don’t know of any correlation of IQ with those variables but then I am ignorant of the literature.

interesting to you, perhaps.
not to us.

The left’s basic strategy is force people of colour onto a Procrustean bed of white expectations. It outrages them when this strategy doesn’t work.

Rob, thank you very much for taking the effort to help me with this. I had no idea what might be involved in monetizing the concept to an enforceable patent. It has been investigated further and it appears that what is truly needed here is technology called in vitro gametogenesis– roughly, growing gametes under laboratory conditions. Once this technology is perfected massive genetic uplift would then seem inevitable. Several avenues could achieve this. For example, one would then have access to an unlimited number of egg cells which could be fertilized by existing sperm collection techniques. This would allow for an unlimited number of embryos to be genotyped. The 3 in 4 spermatid selection idea might then also be useful.

Such technology should be expected to cause a Genetic Singularity Event. Average human IQ might increase by 100 IQ points within a generation or two. Questions of class and race would in such a scenario rapidly disappear from relevance. At this time due to the highly limited extent of existing genetic enhancement people continue to imagine a future with a stratified society. There is a widespread lack of imagination of how the currently available technology will evolve in time. With science and technology when you are in for a penny then you are in for $100 million trillion. The medium term prospects for our species are not encouraging. We are right on the very edge of extreme technological change and people largely seem unaware of what is approaching.

I think that the ability to see things that are not present — for example, the future, time-space, etc. would be a great way of accessing intelligence. Sci-fi writers have typically demonstrated fairly limited power to see into the future. It is never that obvious what technologies will be embraced by the mainstream: even technology companies with market power still seem to be largely unable to accurately imagine our future. Nevertheless, the discussion about gamete selection is one important topic that will drive us forward. Admittedly, this future of rapid IQ uplift could offer substantial challenges to our species. As much as people might like to provide advantage to their children through genetic engineering, the concern that now lurks on the horizon is that we would completely lose control of such uplift if it were to stretch upwards into hundreds of IQ points. There has been a focus on the possibility of AGI taking over our planet– basically computers that learn to build better computers with a generation cycle measured in tetrahertz. What if a similar outcome were to occur with the genetic engineering of our own species? Our species might need to reconsider our ongoing need for ego gratification and the need to better others or we might step onto a merry-round that offers us no viable long-term future.

And the other 50%?

Life?

Or the cosmos.

Or even better, BIIK. (Buggered if I know.)

are all psychology professors mentally retarded?

It is quite important that we maintain contact with the frontier of reproductive biology in order that we are informed of when a Genetic Singularity Event might occur. Increasing average IQ by 2-3 SD would clearly have profound implications for our species. Such a cognitive uplift would increase the rate of technological change by upwards of 3 orders of magnitude: This change would not go unnoticed.

What technology might unleash such a disruptive tidal wave of innovation? It has been suggested that intense chromosomal selection through large scale production of gametes could achieve this result. As noted in my recent posts, the technology involved is in vitro gametogenesis. If a laboratory protocol for the creation of gametes grown in a lab dish could be developed, then very large scale cognitive uplift would then be achievable. Once achieved, existing humans would no longer have a clear economic function and realistically this would be expected to create wide-scale social collapse.

I have investigated in vitro gametogenesis and apparently it is thought to be plausible over the medium term time horizon (~~10 years). Mice studies have already demonstrated success for this application. Importantly, the technology of in vitro gametogenesis has a strong advocacy lobby, as many of those with infertility problems see this approach as their only chance at having biologically related children. Such a primal and innate need to reproduce their own genomes would seem to virtually ensure that in vitro gametogenesis will materialize whatever the obstacles that might be present. A large scale IQ uplift (along with the accompanying social disruption) in the not too distant future would then seem reasonably likely.

I have given my spermatogenesis idea further contemplation and it occurred to me that perhaps in vitro gametogenesis might not actually be required for spermatid selection. There might be a much simpler short-cut. In vitro gametogenesis attempts to recapitulate a sequence of complex biological signals that direct the germ cells down certain developmental pathways. This differentiation process involves highly complex chemical signalling that has already required decades of painstaking research to unravel.

However, for the purpose of selecting spermatids perhaps it might not be necessary to determine these intricate biological processes. Those who might be interested in selection of their spermatids already have well-functioning reproductive biology –> All that is needed is to obtain a small sample of their gametes that include complete quartets of egg/sperm cells. This has me wondering whether some sort of capture system could allow for this. For example, creating some sort of capture device (within for example the testis) that could perhaps surround 10 primary spermatocytes and could then sequester all of the 40 resulting spermatids during each cycle through meiosis II. This would dramatically reduce the complexity of the problem involved. Basically, instead of solving a very difficult problem why not solve an easy one which would achieve the same objective? All the complex biology could be done for us by existing reproductive hardware that has evolved through upwards of billions of years instead of us trying to recreate everything de novo in vitro in a lab. A simple capture technology might leverage the technology that nature has already engineered for us.

This could allow us to experience the exciting potential of genetic uplift not possibly decades from now but years(?).

42% heredity, 8% environment, and 50% BIIK.

Now, if you were a “climate scientist” you’d reject the BIIK, re-normalise the other two, and claim 84% heredity, 16% environment. Because, after all, there’s nothing a “climate scientist” doesn’t know.