It's not as ephemeral as you might think. As long as humans have existed there have been cognitive traits that confer an advantage in competitive environments. But our understanding of these traits has improved.
Critical thinking and problem solving, for me, fit your criteria. Are these nature or nurture?
And what of drive and ambition?
There are plenty of really smart people on the dole, yes? But they're probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. How is an advantage an advantage if you're a genius ice sculpturer in say FL? :) Is that not a case of it being relative?
It actually seems pretty complicated here. IIRC the best previous studies just used years in education as a proxy -- not a great one, but an easy number to get, thus allowing large a sample size.
This one seems to do some weird combination of that, plus several smaller datasets which have some kind of test score, all combined & normalized somehow. (Presumably they had some fun conversations with their referees about the statistics...)
Well I hope this turns out to be true instead of another one of those sci pop headlines that never turns into anything (looking at you type 2 diabetes).
It would really help a lot of people if we could segregate children as they enter the school system into more refined groups based on their needs rather than waiting for someone to select you for gifted programs like we do now.
Then each group could focus on its unique challenges in trying to eliminate whatever portion of intelligence is derived from the environment.
I'm sure segregating students based on a genetic test that tries to predict their intelligence wouldn't cause any kind of reinforcement of those trends at all or create disadvantages for those now branded dumb for their entire school career.
Indeed. And the older the testees get the more stable the results are. Infant and early childhood tests are predictive but by 14 or so the results are basically the adult results
Selection of the smartest (also tallest, least disease-prone etc) embryo during IVF. A trillion dollar industry once it is accurate enough - in 15-20 years.
Giving ammo to racists that already take delight in associating intelligence with race… prompting individual or institutional abortion of fetuses that don't appear they will be smart enough after birth…
Denying science because it doesn't fit your preconceived notions? How is that any different than anti-vaxers or global warming deniers? I'm afraid that soon we'll have anti-genomers.
The definition of intelligence and how it should be interpreted is what’s being debated. There is a rich history of people making pseudo-scientific claims based on hereditary intelligence. It’s not clear how close this is from anti-vaxing and how close it is to anti-phrenology to me right now.
> create disadvantages for those now branded dumb for their entire school career
We already do this too an extent, schools have "smart" classes and "dumb" classes, typically for things like math. The biggest problem is that they don't apply this until high school. Aside from any innate ability, kids have different learning speeds and letting them fall behind on a subject they don't understand while the rest of the class moves on does no good for anyone.
It also doesn't help children that do understand what is being taught to have to repeat basic concepts multiple times for the benefit of children that are slower. Intelligence, physical ability, beauty are not distributed evenly about the population of humans. Pretending it is for the sake of feelings is foolish and short-sighted. If we could be adults about the facts and foster each individual's strengths and weaknesses without being cts to each other we would be much better off. Why is intelligence such a touchy subject??? Some people are short, some tall. Some fast, some slow. Some smart, some dumb. It doesn't make them any less human. And denying that certain identifiable groups have clusters of one or the other attribute around their genetics is equally unproductive. Obviously it isn't deterministic in EVERY individual but its a starting point. Give everyone a chance but please stop pretending that everyone is the same or capable of the same things. Human biodiversity is real
There is a huge huge difference between recognizing a student's need for a different learning style empirically and forcing them into a path based on a genetic test from kindergarten. I am absolutely not in favour of one size fits all education styles, but this is definitely not the answer.
“Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able…“
Is it really so bad if it makes them happier? And if the society is happier in aggregate?
I have friends like these, who, if they were to be shoehorned into doing highly abstract creative work, would be downright miserable and would eventually burn out.
People look at BNW as some type of dystopia, but I felt like the novel handled it rather well in the sense than there is a place for outliers to be free as well, without coercion (Iceland).
The people who thought they didn't fit in their 'caste' so to speak weren't forced to work at gunpoint.
The idea of being born into a caste chosen for you before birth and reinforced through biology absolutely horrifies me.
The point of BNW was that there could be effective “coercion” based on molding our desires instead of stamping them out with fear and force. The gunpoint wasn’t necessary; your prison walls were built in your head by chemistry and psychological conditioning.
It sounds bad to you because you weren't conditioned. People are stuck in lower 'castes' even these days in the most progressive countries in the world. Where's the justice in that? You have thousands if not millions of intelligent people across the world having a bad stroke of luck and being born in a different country to the wrong parents.
We all have our prison walls. To pretend that the biological walls are somehow more horrifying and cruel than sociological or economical is, in my opinion, lunacy.
Success in academics is almost entirely derived from motivation and the amount of work and interest that the student puts into it. ESPECIALLY at the elementary school level.
> It would really help a lot of people if we could segregate children as they enter the school system into more refined groups based on their needs rather than waiting for someone to select you for gifted programs like we do now.
This makes me distinctively uncomfortable.
Also, you've made the conclusion that relative intelligence, if even very accurate, implies specific, categorical needs. I'm very confused by this.
Are you against the entire gifted program then? Because current methods leave out some kids who should be in it and probably sign on kids who shouldn’t.
What is wrong with having a more foolproof and efficient way?
Lots of people have seem to taken your similar reading and it wasn’t the intention. We have gifted programs right now. This would be no diffrent on that front.
Where it would be diffrent is very young disadvantaged students that never made it into the gifted program because they didn’t get any attention when they were young will have a much harder time getting missed.
Top tier schools could also start accepting the most genetically superior applicants. Given two students with equal test scores, one might already be 'maxed out' due to environmental advantages. We can start screening for the most potential and get rid of AA while we're at it.
Have you read up much on the education system of Finland? As this is more or less the opposite of their approach.
They do not stream the education system and the quicker children are expected to help explain what they have learned to those still getting to grips with the material. Integrating this method within the lesson structure has the effect of raising the standard of both the slower and quicker kids, for fairly obvious reasons.
Not Finnish, working off memory of a comment on an old message board.
They have many theoretically equal voluntary high school subjects and tests. More able students take many more, known harder ones. This allows self segregation, much like AP classes in the US will have few people with reading difficulties. No one particularly cares because if you want to go to a third level institution after high school you can.
Have you never had the experience of only really getting a deep understanding of something that you are learning, when you take the time to try and teach it to someone else?
Streaming by ability wouldn't solve that. To illustrate why, I am reminded of a quote by Stephen Hawking;
“The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to either be brilliant without effort or accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was the mark of a ‘grey man’, the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.”
You could stream by behavioural attributes to achieve that if you wanted, but then you would have to accept that the classes would be very wide in ability, unless you stream by both behaviour and ability and then end up with a massive logistical nightmare.
It’s not a nightmare, kids that don’t behave can be kicked out of a school to one with less strict standards. Then, simply have every school stream their children based on intelligence.
My local high-school was also the wider area's sink-school that kids got expelled into from other schools, though there wasn't any way of particularly escaping, should you just happen to be going there anyway. Anyway, the transport arrangements for some of the kids was a nightmare.
edit - also, from my observation, concentrating all the nutters under one roof does not really help, if your aim is educational. It just takes a lot of little problems across a lot of schools and turns them into one big unmanageable problem that can be politely ignored.
Education is not a team sport. If kids want to be nutters that’s their problem, not the responsibility of well behaved kids to reform them by proximity.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
----
John Donne - Devotions upon Emergent Occasions - Excerpt from Meditation 17
This is very apropos, OrganicMSG. Stephen Hawking recently passed away, in case you missed it. I'm sure you didn't, given your obvious respect for him.
How fitting that quote about the culture at an elite university is in a discussion of elementary and high school children. I too remember the flush of embarrassment when my 8-year-old peers thought I was "trying". Stepehen Hawking really was wise beyond his ears.
I think this is inevitable. Private schools will absolutely use genetic information for admission if they can. You can outlaw it in state schools, but if the private schools do it, it won't matter what the state system does. You can outlaw the use of genetic information in hiring, but then all you have to do is list your primary school on your resume.
actually, I think this sort of stuff may be good for fairness of the distribution of wealth and income--especially so at the upper end. I mean the top 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% are much, much similar in abilities than they are in wages/wealth.
Is it still correct / accurate to equate intelligence with IQ? I was under the impression that the IQ test has a number of biases (e.g., cultural) that leave it flawed.
Also, what about creativity? Or (pardon me, just an example) emotional intelligence? An over-emphasis of the IQ just feels so 20th century.
> Intelligence, also known as general cognitive function or simply g, describes the shared variance that exists between diverse measures of cognitive ability
From what I can tell they used verbal & numerical reasoning tests, which does to some degree fit a definition of intelligence.
It doesn't measure anything well rounded about a person and it makes me pretty uncomfortable to think this kind of thing could actually be used to divide people.
>Is it still correct / accurate to equate intelligence with IQ?
IQ is simply a way to quantify intelligence.
>I was under the impression that the IQ test has a number of biases (e.g., cultural) that leave it flawed.
There is actually no standardized way to measure IQ. You've heard criticisms of a certain test, but that is just one of many. There are tests that do no use any sort of cultural knowledge at all, such as Raven's Progressive Matrices. Theoretically, a cave man and a Harvard professor could reach the same score, assuming all other factors are the same. It only measures visual pattern recognition, but it is generally assumed that that is highly correlated with overall intelligence.
Nothing more significant than an eleven year old popular journalism report on genetic science? What about in the intervening 11 years? No new science on that?
As another comment points out, a popular science article about a person's a product to law enforcement is not science.
However, "race" is absolutely not biological because so little of race is physical. Nobody has ever denied that skin colour and facial features are biological, its the accompanying traits that round out what makes a "race" that have no significant biological basis
What term can we use to refer to skin color and facial features if race means cultural differences? Also isn't what you're talking about culture not race?
Edit:
I'm going to jump off on a tangent here, but this is something that really bothers me. Clearly to most people race refers to skin color and facial features. Just like to most people gender refers to biological sex. If you want to refer to the non-physical aspects of race, use the term culture, then there will be no confusion. If you wan't to refer to the non-physical aspects of gender, use the term gender identity or gender role.
Race is not an accurate biological classifier, it's an antiquated classifier based on physical attributes. Ethnicity is far more accurate, but still has its drawbacks.
Yes, people who share similar melanin probably have similar genes providing them that attribute, but there are significant genetic differences between a black Jamaican and a black Ethiopian; or, a white Spaniard and a white Russian (not the drink). Saying they're just black or white dismisses the substantial differences that exist.
>Uncertain about the science, the police asked Frudakis to take a blind test: They sent him DNA swabs from 20 people to see if he could identify their races. He nailed every one.
>On a conference call a few weeks later, Frudakis reported his results on their killer. "Your guy could be African-American or Afro-Caribbean, but there is no chance that this is a Caucasian."
So we can see that not only are the classes used more precise than just "black" or "white", but there is empirical evidence that they can be predicted from DNA.
There are many people who have both Caucasian and Afro-Caribbean DNA. Is this result claiming that killer could be one of those people, or definitelt isn't? Those are opposite conclusions that both follow from the same statement, because the claim is ambiguous.
>Is this result claiming that killer could be one of those people, or definitelt isn't?
The latter. The claim is pretty unambiguous. There are genetic markers that are only found in certain populations. His statements imply that he observed no markers that are only found in Caucasian populations, and several that are only found in African or Afro-Caribbean populations. If a person were mix raced, they would likely have a combination.
I read the article and responded to a comment overemphasizing the importance of determining race from DNA.
> So we can see that not only are the classes used more precise than just "black" or "white", but there is empirical evidence that they can be predicted from DNA.
There is no implication from my comment denying the ability to derive an individual's race from DNA. Nor would I ever suggest that you could not predict race using DNA, I am simply questioning the value of doing so. Information from DNA is extremely precise, so diluting the information to interpret race is degrading its potential. As pointed out by others, the human categorization of race is an inaccurate, archaic taxonomy.
Even using the law enforcement aspect of the Wired article, you can clearly demonstrate why race is an antiquated distinction to make when evaluating DNA. If you have more information from DNA, why stop at race? Technology is developing to render facial models from DNA. IMO that is a far superior use of DNA than determining, "Your guy could be African-American or Afro-Caribbean, but there is no chance that this is a Caucasian."
Race is not biological as it is just a historical classification based on some "skin deep” observations of physical appearance.
What is biological is that different people from around the world are genetically more similar to their neighbours than people more distant and people with a similar genetic background tend to look similar.
What is more interesting is not race, but that different human populations around the world are different species that can produce fertile offspring. There are four known living human species; sub-Saharan Africans, Euro/Asians, Melanesian/Australian Aborigines, and African pygmies (there might be some more human species in Africa, but we lack the fossil DNA data to know this). Each one of these different species is a hybrid between ancient sub-Saharan African’s and one of the other homo species that lived on the planet before 50,000 years ago [0].
Races are biologically meaningless, but species are a real things. Lions and tigers are different species of the genus Panthera, they can mate and have fertile offspring.
I think where people get worked up is thinking because there are different species of humans living on the planet that one must be better (or worse) than the other. Nobody with a clue would say that lions are better cats than tigers, just different. The different humans species are the same.
The other thing that makes things more complex is all living humans are predominantly sub-Saharan African (90% to 100%). If you had a large cat population that was 95% lion and 5% tiger you would most likely not even notice it was not a pride of lions. It would still be a different species, and the average member of this population would be different to the average lion, but the differences would be relatively subtle.
> sub-Saharan Africans, Euro/Asians, Melanesian/Australian Aborigines, and African pygmies
These groups are not considered different species or subspecies of human (homo sapiens sapiens). There are homo sapiens subspecies, but all except sapiens are extinct.
No they are not. They just bred with the dominant sub-saharan African species. I am a member of one of the non-dead hybrid species having approximately 2.5% Homo neanderthalensis ancestry.
When people connect race and talents/abilities is when people get uncomfortable though for fairly obvious reasons. Which is likely how many will interpret this result (Race related to intelligence) and probably what you really wanted to say.
Well do you go by the American definition of race, do you go by the Brazilian color scale, or something else? In the US you are considered black if you have at least one black ancestor. Why not the other way around? Race in terms of biological definition is not consistent or coherent. There is also a lot of genetic variation within socially classified races.
People that observe that “race” is a highly malleable concept (there isn't even a broad agreement on how many races there are) that evolves with social, demographic, and economic shifts in the culture whose views of race are examined.
Well its at very least contested whether its a biological phenomenon. Its certainly not a genetic phenomenon and hasn't been treated as such since the mid-twentieth century
> In other words people who don't know the difference between race - a biological phenomenon - and ethnicity - a social phenomenon.
No, people who recognize that despite the conceit that race is a “biological concept”, the identification of race (both ascription to others and self-identified) has always been driven by the same sociological phenomon that drive ethnic identity, and that, in practice, the concept of race operates as simply a broader set of ethnic categories, which is why identification of what races exist and how people are identified as being in one race or another vary not only between cultures, but within the same cultures over time.
Given that the concept of race was defined by family/tribal grouping and observable physical features, which are biological in nature, to point out that it is biological is entirely tautological.
Of course it is biological. Doesn't stop it being an appallingly crap system for human taxonomy. Especially given that there are a very large quantity of people out there whom you would really have to give a long list for in this taxonomy, rather than a word, as people have a habit of not sticking to these neat little groupings when they have sex, even if you force them to with law.
Huh? Nobody denies that your ancestry shows up in your genes. 23andMe has built a billion dollar business on that premise.
I'm more interested in finding the genes responsible for racism. Racism being such a giant human flaw that can lead to the collapse of societies it would be great if we could identify individuals prone to racism early.
No we don’t need to test drugs on multiple “races”. The variation in response for a drug is greater within a “race” than between “races”. We need to test on a wide variety of individuals.
Yes the frequency of response and the side effects will vary by an individual's genetic background, but there is to my knowledge no drug or side effect found only in one broad population grouping.
This comment breaks the site guidelines. Please (re-)read them and make sure not to do this again.
We don't want unrelated controversies, generic tangents, or flamewars on HN. Racewar is right out. If that's what you want to foment, please foment somewhere else.
"""
Intelligence could be measured with a swab of saliva, or drop of blood, after scientists showed for the first time that a person’s IQ can be predicted just by studying their DNA.
In the largest ever study looking at the genetic basis for intelligence, researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Harvard University discovered hundreds of new genes linked to brain power.
Previous studies have suggested that between 50 per cent and 75 per cent of intelligence is inherited, and the rest comes through upbringing, friendship groups and education. That figure was calculated by studying identical twins who share the same DNA, therefore any differences in IQ between them must be non-genetic.
But nobody knew which were the ‘smart genes.’
Now by studying the genetic data from more than 240,000 people, scientists have found 538 genes which are linked to intelligence.
Researchers were even able to predict intelligence just based on a person’s DNA, a breakthrough which could potentially help doctors to diagnose impaired cognitive ability, or allow children to be given an tailor-made education based on their innate abilities.
Scientists knew that a large part of intelligence was inherited but did not know the genes responsible
Dr David Hill, of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology (CCACE) who led the research, said: “Our study identified a large number of genes linked to intelligence. “We were also able to predict intelligence in another group using only their DNA.”
The study also showed that the same genes which influence intelligence are also linked to other biological processes such as length of life.
Although it is known that intelligent people live longer it was generally assumed that the link was due to social causes, such as a better education, leading to a more well-paid job, which brings a higher standard of living and a healthier life.
But the new research suggests that intelligent people are biologically fitter.
The team also found that genes linked with problem-solving powers were associated with the process by which neurons carry signals from one place to another in the brain.
A biological intelligence test could help create an individual curriculum for children
“We have shown is that two biological processes neurogenesis, the process by which new brain cells are created, and myelination of the central nervous system are associated with intelligence differences,” added Dr Hill.
“And some of the genetic variants that are linked with an increase in intelligence are also linked with an increase in life expectancy.”
The study’s principal investigator, Professor Ian Deary, also from CCACE, said: “We know that environments and genes both contribute to the differences we observe in people’s intelligence.
“This study adds to what we know about which genes influence intelligence, and suggests that health and intelligence are related in part because some of the same genes influence them.”
Previous studies by King’s College London discovered that up to 65 per cent of the difference in pupil’s GCSE grades was down to genetics, after analysing genetic data from, 12,500 twins. They found that all exam results were highly heritable, demonstrating that genes explain a larger proportion of the differences between children.
The research was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
"""
> Between 3.64 and 6.84% of phenotypic intelligence (as measured by the VNR Test in UK Biobank) could be predicted (Supplementary Table 10); the upper limit is an improvement of ~43% on the largest reported estimate to date, of 4.8% [16].
Doesn't 7% seem quite small (though better than previous studies)? What am I missing?
You’re not mssng anything. This is not the end, it’s just the end of the beginning. Ten years from now we’ll have tests that come within a narrow margin of error of predicting IQ from spitting in a test tube. Modulo malnutrition and serious physical abuse but the first at least is not common in the developed world.
> Ten years from now we’ll have tests that come within a narrow margin of error of predicting IQ from spitting in a test tube. Modulo malnutrition and serious physical abuse but the first at least is not common in the developed world.
Malnutrition and serious physical abuse aren't the only environmental factors with a known significant impact on intelligence, and nutrition (particularly childhood nutrition) patterns with a serious adverse effect on IQ have been identified in research focussed on first world areas of study; they certainly aren't rate enough to be insignificant sources of variation in the first world.
What are other important environmental factors affecting IQ in first world? I haven't really heard of any other are as important as these, so I'm interested in learning about them.
There are many environmental poisons that affect brain development, consumption of lead, for instance. Also there are many diseases that can effect brain development, such as congenital syphilis.
Don’t forget the most obvious: diet, both of the pregnant, mother, and the growing child. The link between insufficient nutrition and lowered IQ is well established.
Are these significant in the first world though? I thought that phasing out leaded gasoline and lead paint happened enough time ago to not be a significant factor anymore these days. Similarly, congenital syphilis prevalence is not high either, especially as syphilis is quite easy to treat today.
Based on your article, congenital syphilis is extremely, extremely rare. Lead poisoning seems to also be rather low, compared to 50 years ago. I know these two things happen. I asked if they are significant. Seems like they are not.
On their own, maybe not. If taken as examples of two classes of environmental effect, namely environmental toxins and transmissible diseases, I would be surprised if those two broad types did not have a significant effect on the variability of developmental IQ in rich countries.
> I thought that phasing out leaded gasoline and lead paint happened enough time ago to not be a significant factor anymore these days.
No, lead exposure from water systems, unabated older housing, continued use of leaded aviation fuel, and other sources continues to be a nontrivial issue in the US and some other parts of the first world.
To me this kind of tech has great applications for gig economy type jobs, where workers with higher detected intelligence can be efficiently and accurately categorized and made available for a wide spectrum of problem solving tasks.
> To me this kind of tech has great applications for gig economy type jobs, where workers with higher detected intelligence can be efficiently and accurately categorized and made available for a wide spectrum of problem solving tasks.
A genetic test that can predict a single-digit percent of the variation in a value which can reasonably inexpensively be measured more directly isn't even a step toward useful tech for that purpose.
Regardless of where the "average" intelligence level (As measured by IQ tests) is for any specific race/ethnicity/etc, all the data I've seen so far shows far more variation inside each group than between groups. For example, a group might have an average of ~100, and another ~90, but inside each group you have individuals varying between ~60 and ~180.
The point I guess I'm trying to make is that people are individuals, and should be treated as such.
Yes, but if the variance is the same in both groups, then in the group with higher mean you might have orders of magnitude more people above certain cut-off.
For example, suppose you have two groups, each one consisting of 1 billion people. Both groups have standard deviation of 15 IQ, but the mean of group 1 is 90, and the mean of group 2 is 100. Then, the IQ of 160 is 4 sigma above the mean of group 2, but 4.6 sigma above mean of group 1. This results in 31670 people above 160 IQ in group 2, but only 1531 people above 160 in group 1. With your cut-off of 180 IQ, only 1 individual out of 1 billion from group 1 will have IQ above 180, but almost 50 in group 2.
Of course, each individual should be treated as such, but you have to take things like above into account if you are wondering for example why so many top sprinters are of certain genetical ancestry.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] thread"And some of the genetic variants that are linked with an increase in intelligence are also linked with an increase in life expectancy."
Intelligence is such an amorphous concept in our society.
Intelligence is a similarly high level word that just encompasses too many things.
Critical thinking and problem solving, for me, fit your criteria. Are these nature or nurture?
And what of drive and ambition?
There are plenty of really smart people on the dole, yes? But they're probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. How is an advantage an advantage if you're a genius ice sculpturer in say FL? :) Is that not a case of it being relative?
This one seems to do some weird combination of that, plus several smaller datasets which have some kind of test score, all combined & normalized somehow. (Presumably they had some fun conversations with their referees about the statistics...)
0. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-017-0001-5
It would really help a lot of people if we could segregate children as they enter the school system into more refined groups based on their needs rather than waiting for someone to select you for gifted programs like we do now.
Then each group could focus on its unique challenges in trying to eliminate whatever portion of intelligence is derived from the environment.
Surely this could never happen.
I, for one, hope that this story isn't true.
As is the psychology of intelligence. And the relationship between g and being a good developer.
All of this is called doing science - because it's currently a work in progress - not denying it.
We already do this too an extent, schools have "smart" classes and "dumb" classes, typically for things like math. The biggest problem is that they don't apply this until high school. Aside from any innate ability, kids have different learning speeds and letting them fall behind on a subject they don't understand while the rest of the class moves on does no good for anyone.
http://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-class-divided/
Race is one of the triggers for ignorance and hate, it is so visible. Once we make genetic makeup visible, it will change how we see each other.
I have friends like these, who, if they were to be shoehorned into doing highly abstract creative work, would be downright miserable and would eventually burn out.
People look at BNW as some type of dystopia, but I felt like the novel handled it rather well in the sense than there is a place for outliers to be free as well, without coercion (Iceland).
The people who thought they didn't fit in their 'caste' so to speak weren't forced to work at gunpoint.
The point of BNW was that there could be effective “coercion” based on molding our desires instead of stamping them out with fear and force. The gunpoint wasn’t necessary; your prison walls were built in your head by chemistry and psychological conditioning.
We all have our prison walls. To pretend that the biological walls are somehow more horrifying and cruel than sociological or economical is, in my opinion, lunacy.
Success in academics is almost entirely derived from motivation and the amount of work and interest that the student puts into it. ESPECIALLY at the elementary school level.
This makes me distinctively uncomfortable.
Also, you've made the conclusion that relative intelligence, if even very accurate, implies specific, categorical needs. I'm very confused by this.
What is wrong with having a more foolproof and efficient way?
Where it would be diffrent is very young disadvantaged students that never made it into the gifted program because they didn’t get any attention when they were young will have a much harder time getting missed.
Top tier schools could also start accepting the most genetically superior applicants. Given two students with equal test scores, one might already be 'maxed out' due to environmental advantages. We can start screening for the most potential and get rid of AA while we're at it.
They do not stream the education system and the quicker children are expected to help explain what they have learned to those still getting to grips with the material. Integrating this method within the lesson structure has the effect of raising the standard of both the slower and quicker kids, for fairly obvious reasons.
They have many theoretically equal voluntary high school subjects and tests. More able students take many more, known harder ones. This allows self segregation, much like AP classes in the US will have few people with reading difficulties. No one particularly cares because if you want to go to a third level institution after high school you can.
“The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to either be brilliant without effort or accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was the mark of a ‘grey man’, the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.”
You could stream by behavioural attributes to achieve that if you wanted, but then you would have to accept that the classes would be very wide in ability, unless you stream by both behaviour and ability and then end up with a massive logistical nightmare.
edit - also, from my observation, concentrating all the nutters under one roof does not really help, if your aim is educational. It just takes a lot of little problems across a lot of schools and turns them into one big unmanageable problem that can be politely ignored.
----
John Donne - Devotions upon Emergent Occasions - Excerpt from Meditation 17
Unless we establish laws which compensate for the asymmetrical distribution and power, we will see technology used to amplify it.
Gattaca was truly great for many reasons, including showing us a (benign) version of such a society.
If you just check for two X chromosomes...
--Harrison
Also, what about creativity? Or (pardon me, just an example) emotional intelligence? An over-emphasis of the IQ just feels so 20th century.
> Intelligence, also known as general cognitive function or simply g, describes the shared variance that exists between diverse measures of cognitive ability
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-017-0001-5
You're of course free to come up with a different definition.
It doesn't measure anything well rounded about a person and it makes me pretty uncomfortable to think this kind of thing could actually be used to divide people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16548276
IQ is simply a way to quantify intelligence.
>I was under the impression that the IQ test has a number of biases (e.g., cultural) that leave it flawed.
There is actually no standardized way to measure IQ. You've heard criticisms of a certain test, but that is just one of many. There are tests that do no use any sort of cultural knowledge at all, such as Raven's Progressive Matrices. Theoretically, a cave man and a Harvard professor could reach the same score, assuming all other factors are the same. It only measures visual pattern recognition, but it is generally assumed that that is highly correlated with overall intelligence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
There are also g factor tests that attempt to measure overall intelligence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
>or emotional intelligence
Pretty much pseudoscience
https://www.wired.com/2007/12/ps-dna/ (2007)
When will be comfortable accepting that "race" is biological? We need to test drugs on multiple races for this reason.
However, "race" is absolutely not biological because so little of race is physical. Nobody has ever denied that skin colour and facial features are biological, its the accompanying traits that round out what makes a "race" that have no significant biological basis
Edit:
I'm going to jump off on a tangent here, but this is something that really bothers me. Clearly to most people race refers to skin color and facial features. Just like to most people gender refers to biological sex. If you want to refer to the non-physical aspects of race, use the term culture, then there will be no confusion. If you wan't to refer to the non-physical aspects of gender, use the term gender identity or gender role.
Yes, people who share similar melanin probably have similar genes providing them that attribute, but there are significant genetic differences between a black Jamaican and a black Ethiopian; or, a white Spaniard and a white Russian (not the drink). Saying they're just black or white dismisses the substantial differences that exist.
>Uncertain about the science, the police asked Frudakis to take a blind test: They sent him DNA swabs from 20 people to see if he could identify their races. He nailed every one.
>On a conference call a few weeks later, Frudakis reported his results on their killer. "Your guy could be African-American or Afro-Caribbean, but there is no chance that this is a Caucasian."
So we can see that not only are the classes used more precise than just "black" or "white", but there is empirical evidence that they can be predicted from DNA.
The latter. The claim is pretty unambiguous. There are genetic markers that are only found in certain populations. His statements imply that he observed no markers that are only found in Caucasian populations, and several that are only found in African or Afro-Caribbean populations. If a person were mix raced, they would likely have a combination.
I read the article and responded to a comment overemphasizing the importance of determining race from DNA.
> So we can see that not only are the classes used more precise than just "black" or "white", but there is empirical evidence that they can be predicted from DNA.
There is no implication from my comment denying the ability to derive an individual's race from DNA. Nor would I ever suggest that you could not predict race using DNA, I am simply questioning the value of doing so. Information from DNA is extremely precise, so diluting the information to interpret race is degrading its potential. As pointed out by others, the human categorization of race is an inaccurate, archaic taxonomy.
Even using the law enforcement aspect of the Wired article, you can clearly demonstrate why race is an antiquated distinction to make when evaluating DNA. If you have more information from DNA, why stop at race? Technology is developing to render facial models from DNA. IMO that is a far superior use of DNA than determining, "Your guy could be African-American or Afro-Caribbean, but there is no chance that this is a Caucasian."
What is biological is that different people from around the world are genetically more similar to their neighbours than people more distant and people with a similar genetic background tend to look similar.
What is more interesting is not race, but that different human populations around the world are different species that can produce fertile offspring. There are four known living human species; sub-Saharan Africans, Euro/Asians, Melanesian/Australian Aborigines, and African pygmies (there might be some more human species in Africa, but we lack the fossil DNA data to know this). Each one of these different species is a hybrid between ancient sub-Saharan African’s and one of the other homo species that lived on the planet before 50,000 years ago [0].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_humans
As for races vs species, that well has been so thoroughly poisoned that I for one refuse to drink from it. But, you know... you do you.
I think where people get worked up is thinking because there are different species of humans living on the planet that one must be better (or worse) than the other. Nobody with a clue would say that lions are better cats than tigers, just different. The different humans species are the same.
The other thing that makes things more complex is all living humans are predominantly sub-Saharan African (90% to 100%). If you had a large cat population that was 95% lion and 5% tiger you would most likely not even notice it was not a pride of lions. It would still be a different species, and the average member of this population would be different to the average lion, but the differences would be relatively subtle.
These groups are not considered different species or subspecies of human (homo sapiens sapiens). There are homo sapiens subspecies, but all except sapiens are extinct.
When people connect race and talents/abilities is when people get uncomfortable though for fairly obvious reasons. Which is likely how many will interpret this result (Race related to intelligence) and probably what you really wanted to say.
People that observe that “race” is a highly malleable concept (there isn't even a broad agreement on how many races there are) that evolves with social, demographic, and economic shifts in the culture whose views of race are examined.
Race and ethnicity are simply larger and smaller group categorizations of humans, both with reasonably accurate biological tests.
No, people who recognize that despite the conceit that race is a “biological concept”, the identification of race (both ascription to others and self-identified) has always been driven by the same sociological phenomon that drive ethnic identity, and that, in practice, the concept of race operates as simply a broader set of ethnic categories, which is why identification of what races exist and how people are identified as being in one race or another vary not only between cultures, but within the same cultures over time.
Of course it is biological. Doesn't stop it being an appallingly crap system for human taxonomy. Especially given that there are a very large quantity of people out there whom you would really have to give a long list for in this taxonomy, rather than a word, as people have a habit of not sticking to these neat little groupings when they have sex, even if you force them to with law.
I'm more interested in finding the genes responsible for racism. Racism being such a giant human flaw that can lead to the collapse of societies it would be great if we could identify individuals prone to racism early.
Yes the frequency of response and the side effects will vary by an individual's genetic background, but there is to my knowledge no drug or side effect found only in one broad population grouping.
We don't want unrelated controversies, generic tangents, or flamewars on HN. Racewar is right out. If that's what you want to foment, please foment somewhere else.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In the largest ever study looking at the genetic basis for intelligence, researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Harvard University discovered hundreds of new genes linked to brain power.
Previous studies have suggested that between 50 per cent and 75 per cent of intelligence is inherited, and the rest comes through upbringing, friendship groups and education. That figure was calculated by studying identical twins who share the same DNA, therefore any differences in IQ between them must be non-genetic.
But nobody knew which were the ‘smart genes.’
Now by studying the genetic data from more than 240,000 people, scientists have found 538 genes which are linked to intelligence.
Researchers were even able to predict intelligence just based on a person’s DNA, a breakthrough which could potentially help doctors to diagnose impaired cognitive ability, or allow children to be given an tailor-made education based on their innate abilities.
Scientists knew that a large part of intelligence was inherited but did not know the genes responsible
Dr David Hill, of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology (CCACE) who led the research, said: “Our study identified a large number of genes linked to intelligence. “We were also able to predict intelligence in another group using only their DNA.”
The study also showed that the same genes which influence intelligence are also linked to other biological processes such as length of life.
Although it is known that intelligent people live longer it was generally assumed that the link was due to social causes, such as a better education, leading to a more well-paid job, which brings a higher standard of living and a healthier life.
But the new research suggests that intelligent people are biologically fitter.
The team also found that genes linked with problem-solving powers were associated with the process by which neurons carry signals from one place to another in the brain.
A biological intelligence test could help create an individual curriculum for children
“We have shown is that two biological processes neurogenesis, the process by which new brain cells are created, and myelination of the central nervous system are associated with intelligence differences,” added Dr Hill.
“And some of the genetic variants that are linked with an increase in intelligence are also linked with an increase in life expectancy.”
The study’s principal investigator, Professor Ian Deary, also from CCACE, said: “We know that environments and genes both contribute to the differences we observe in people’s intelligence.
“This study adds to what we know about which genes influence intelligence, and suggests that health and intelligence are related in part because some of the same genes influence them.”
Previous studies by King’s College London discovered that up to 65 per cent of the difference in pupil’s GCSE grades was down to genetics, after analysing genetic data from, 12,500 twins. They found that all exam results were highly heritable, demonstrating that genes explain a larger proportion of the differences between children.
The research was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. """
> Between 3.64 and 6.84% of phenotypic intelligence (as measured by the VNR Test in UK Biobank) could be predicted (Supplementary Table 10); the upper limit is an improvement of ~43% on the largest reported estimate to date, of 4.8% [16].
Doesn't 7% seem quite small (though better than previous studies)? What am I missing?
Malnutrition and serious physical abuse aren't the only environmental factors with a known significant impact on intelligence, and nutrition (particularly childhood nutrition) patterns with a serious adverse effect on IQ have been identified in research focussed on first world areas of study; they certainly aren't rate enough to be insignificant sources of variation in the first world.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2628311
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041117005027.h...
Overall exposure is lower, sure, that doesn't mean it is insignificant in impact on IQ (and other health issues, notably cardiovascular disease.)
No, lead exposure from water systems, unabated older housing, continued use of leaded aviation fuel, and other sources continues to be a nontrivial issue in the US and some other parts of the first world.
A genetic test that can predict a single-digit percent of the variation in a value which can reasonably inexpensively be measured more directly isn't even a step toward useful tech for that purpose.
The point I guess I'm trying to make is that people are individuals, and should be treated as such.
For example, suppose you have two groups, each one consisting of 1 billion people. Both groups have standard deviation of 15 IQ, but the mean of group 1 is 90, and the mean of group 2 is 100. Then, the IQ of 160 is 4 sigma above the mean of group 2, but 4.6 sigma above mean of group 1. This results in 31670 people above 160 IQ in group 2, but only 1531 people above 160 in group 1. With your cut-off of 180 IQ, only 1 individual out of 1 billion from group 1 will have IQ above 180, but almost 50 in group 2.
Of course, each individual should be treated as such, but you have to take things like above into account if you are wondering for example why so many top sprinters are of certain genetical ancestry.