[Humjob]

Very interesting. This topic has some rather pertinent parallels to our current civilization.

Suppose:

a) Human intelligence is heritable.

b) Less intelligent humans are more fertile than their brighter peers.

c) The breeding of the less intelligent is subsidized by society over a long period of time.

What are the long term consequences going to be? I'd bet Peter Thiel has secretly considered this among his theories of why innovation has slowed, but wouldn't dare say so in public.

[JamesArgo]

>Human intelligence is heritable.

This is indisputable. Denying IQ and its heritability is equivalent to denying global warming. It’s settled science. Dysgenics is certainly possible. I think technology like iterated embryo selection and genetic engineering will come into common use before dysgenics kicks in. China is already investigating these possibilities, and their culture does not have the same memetic immune response to such ideas. After one country makes it legal, competitive pressures will force the rest of the world to do it, too. Iterated embryo selection could conservatively raise IQ by 60 points, likely much much more: http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/embryo.pdf

A government would have to be supernaturally incompetent to allow such a gap to develop.

[Humjob]

I've read much the same - it seems to me that the West's current political ethos is largely a reaction to the racial idealism propagated by the Nazis in WW 2, which was used as an ideological justification for the Holocaust. Consequently, any discussion or idea which even tangentially broaches the topic of eugenics/dysgenics is a massive hot potato.

China doesn't have that kind of baggage associated with its history and on top of that it's ambitious to establish itself as a superpower. Thus, Chinese people are far more welcoming of genetic engineering and it won't surprise me at all if China is the first country to implement it on a widescale basis. Then, like you said, competitive pressures will virtually guarantee that the rest of the world will follow its lead.

[vixen99]

With you on IQ but 'settled science' & 'denying global warming'? You evidently enjoy cliches. I don't know anyone on http://wattsupwiththat.com/ or other respected sceptical sites who says there's been no warming this and last century and that it's not partly related to CO2 levels. Anyway, here's a cliche for the collection: 'If you can't explain the 'pause', you can't explain the cause...". Where's the settled science there?

As well to remember that address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900, when (probably) Lord Kelvin - he, of degrees absolute, remarked "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.". Meanwhile a bloke called Planck ...

[rational-future]

Very interesting arguments. That link is quite hard to understand. Is it saying that by throwing out embryos, until you hit a lucky, intelligent one, you can raise the average IQ to around 160?

[JamesArgo]

Slightly-misleading TLDR: Iterated embryo selection is sort of test tube reproduction and selectiong. If you can create gametes from stem cells, then create many more embryos with these gametes and then score each embryo, repeating the process selecting for those that have the best genetic correlates of cognitive ability, you can perform the equivalent of a 2000 year eugenics experiment in a test tube in about six months. You could potentially get far, far higher IQs than 160.

Prerequisites for this are cheap-gene sequencing, very, very large databases of genomes tagged with their donor’s cognitive measures, and advances in human stem cell research.

[rational-future]

What is your time estimate for these prerequisites?

[karmacondon]

These things have been true for all of human history and yet, Flynn Effect. People considered to be intellectual have always been outnumbered by non-intellectuals, but the numbers of both are increasing absolutely. Intelligence may be heritable, but it isn't absolutely so. In the same way that short parents occasionally have tall children, some people have children that are significantly more or less intelligent than they are. Plus environment, personality formation, etc.

I'm not very familiar with Peter Thiel's theories but it's possible that the pace of innovation is just increasing logrithmically. The further technology advances, the more difficult it becomes to make breakthroughs. The average person in 2014 is smarter and more equipped with basic information than the average person was 100 years ago, plus we have access to the internet. IF innovation is slowing, it's not because people are getting dumber.

I'm not sure that intelligence is a prerequisite for innovative ideas anyway. Henry Ford wasn't exactly an intellectual, but he had ideas that revolutionized production. Fetishizing intellect may not be the only path to a better future and we should be wary of equating it with social benefit.

[peterfirefly]

> These things have been true for all of human history [...]

They have not, actually. Not b and certainly not c.

[mtmail]

There is a comedy movie that plays that scenario. 500 years from how people use technology but nobody understands how it works. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy