Citation needed.
Seriously, I can think of like four reasons, mostly technological, that engineering smart babies isn't going to happen in my lifetime. Just to name a few--
1. We don't have a good enough understanding of intelligence to describe the target.
2. We don't have a good enough understanding of intelligence to separate the
developmental factors from the genetic factors.
3. We don't have a good enough understanding of the genetic factors to know what changes
need to be made to the DNA.
4. We don't have a 'one-and-done' method of genetic engineering -- you can't modify a
single embryo reliably.
5. As applied to humans, the iteration cycle is well over twenty years and the biggest
IRB nightmare you can imagine.2. Irrelevant (just like #3 and #4) because we're not talking about identical cloning.
3. We domesticate on iteration and result, not strict design.
4. Reliability is a lot like saying we get results, just not 100% of the time.
We probably already have altered humans in circulation. The Israelis aren't waiting around for approval, they are just doing it. I wouldn't be surprised by someone discovering the US Military has embarked on a genetic program (Bourne Identity style). Even the Germans were doing it in WW2, so I could see it coming to light in my lifetime. It wont be commodified in the US in 50 years, but swiss facilities might be an option.
I can almost forgive the early twentieth century for its idiocy, but this is a computer science heavy board and evolution is a hill-climbing algorithm. Reducing variation in the population (eg, killing/sterilizing "stupid" people) just clusters your population more tightly, which makes it prone to getting stuck on local maximums.
It's almost acceptable if you lived before DNA was understood and either thought that the evolutionary landscape was perfectly sloped upward or our genome involved continuous "factors" that could be "concentrated", but nowadays we know that DNA comes in discrete chunks (genes) and that the edit distance between two good versions of a gene can be greater than one (eg, you might need three mutations to get from good gene A to better gene B, and it passes through less-good genes C & D to get there).
Eugenics is entirely a short-term gain: you entrench your population solidly in a local maximum, which gives you a higher average than before, but prevents you from ever reaching a higher non-local maximum.
(And that's assuming that your environment is stable and your selection function was well-chosen.)
Our current methods of genetic engineering involve things like "use a really tiny needle to inject a few hundred copies of a gene into a cell; hope a couple of them are inserted into DNA in such a way as they're expressed and none of them are inserted into the DNA in such a way that they stop other important genes from working".
This is fine if you want to engineer, like, wheat. You do this to a bunch of wheat, you plant it, you grow it, you discard the plants that don't grow right or just don't have the target change, the ones you keep you breed the old fashioned way until you have a stable plant line expressing the desired gene.
Applying a method like this to humans means you end up with a lot of sickly or dead or malformed babies, a lot of normal but rather expensive babies, and some number of babies on which the treatment was successful and the target genes were correctly inserted.
Assuming either you can filter out the failures at an early enough stage that no one cares, or you are such horrible people you're cool "filtering them out" as 1, 2, 3 year olds, or you're cool with creating birth defects but nice enough to provide economic support and health care to them for their entire lives as long as you also get some number of smart babies...
So you've created some adorable abominations against god and man!
Well, do the genes you inserted correctly do what you want them to?
Our DNA does not contain lines like "max_items_in_shorterm_memory = 7" that you can just change to a 15 or a 50. It codes for proteins, molecules of funny shapes that either serve as building blocks for our cells directly or catalyze reactions or do any number of other things, and it codes for in which cells these proteins are manufactured and in what quantity. Presumably you want your modification to be primarily expressed in brain cells and not in muscle or kidney cells (it doesn't do much good to improve brainpower if you also induce renal failure), let's have that be a gimme.
So how do you know that your modification is working? When we create things like bt corn or vitamin A wheat, you can just look at the corn plants or wheat seeds and see if they are producing lots of bt or vitamin A like you want. You could probably perform a few brain biopsies to determine if the target protein is being produced in the target quantities in the brain, but that probably induces a little brain damage while also not actually answering the question: if you were wrong in your guess, your genetic modification may work correctly (produce the right protein in the right parts of the body in the right quantity at the right time with no deleterious effects) and still not improve memory or spatial reasoning or conciseness or whatever else you care about.
So you've got to raise these babies until they're ten or twenty or thirty years old, studying them all the way, and try to guess whether they are smarter than they would be without the modifications. You need statistically meaningful sample sizes, with control groups of similar but unmodified genetics raised identically. Time-consuming and expensive!
Time-consuming and expensive kind of sums up the whole process. It doesn't make sense for individuals (you can't just say, "make my baby smarter"); it doesn't make sense for governments (there are cheaper ways to either make an entire population smarter or get your hands on a handful of geniuses).
And create a divide between the rich who can afford it for their children, and the poor who can't.
The circumstances you're born into still correlate highly with life outcomes, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise.
The incentives are such that it's going to happen. Also, it looks like very-large increases in IQ will be possible once we have millions of genomes tagged with their donor's IQ and a reliable means of editing thousands of alleles. More than a few standard deviations. I would certainly use this were it available today. If a rich person has to fly to Korea to do it, so what? Any country that bans it will fall behind.
The gains from this may be such that governments will think it worth subsidizing it for the poor's children. High IQ people commit less crimes, pay more taxes, tend not to use welfare. Liberals and conservatives will likely both converge on such subsidization.
Are you saying that's the primary reason for the status divide? Any citations that support that, the most recent research I've seem looked at societal status/wealth of families a few generations back and then traced living descendants to find how stratified things were. They found a high degree of stratification; that across generations it was far less likely that poor ancestors had wealthy descendants. Perhaps IQ goes this way too?
>High IQ people commit less crimes //
Or get caught less often. Wealthy people (in the UK) often commit some common crimes at what seems like a far larger rate because the penalty is usually just a fine and to the wealthy it's pocket-change [speeding, parking offences, tax evasion ...].
Yes. IQ is highly heritable.
Gwern has a good page covering this research: http://www.gwern.net/iq
As most people desire wealth and intelligent people are better at achieving their desires, wealthy people tend to have higher IQs on average than less-wealthy people. This has class implications as IQ is highly heritable. This isn't good or just; it's just the state of things. When I was young I was a blank slatist, but the world kept disappointing me. Marvin's razor:the most depressing explanation is likely be the truth.
> Or get caught less often.
I suppose smart criminals are less likely to get caught. Nice selection effect there, but I doubt it accounts for much of the difference.
Obviously a high IQ person on average will have a better job/more money and therefore have less reason to commit crimes.
You think average/below average IQ people are scared to jaywalk, illegally park because they're scared of the fine?
Does your ideology really cloud your reasoning to that extent?
Bernie Madoff was probably pretty smart though don't you think?
And there are no doubt plenty of others who are too smart to get caught, and if caught not prosecuted, and if prosecuted not convicted. I'm not convinced hi IQ people commit that much less crime. Just that they probably commit less petty crime.
mikerichard's point about less 'reason' to commit crime I think is a good one. A lot of crime stems from desperation.
Now I don't know about trying to create some kind of Bentham inspired calculus to put criminality on a weighted scale versus IQ and see if it all balances out.... The most terrible outliers are often economic or political leaders, by definition, their power in society gave them opportunity to commit "worse" crimes.
Both are debatable.
Empirically, many people with high IQs do badly financially, for a variety of reasons - not least because IQ doesn't correlate with ambition, creativity, strategic insight, mental health, empathy, or social skills.
Practically I'd expect useful intelligence enhancement would be incredibly difficult, with many potential side effects.
If you want to improve population intelligence, it may be better to invest in better nutrition, health care, and education.
>High IQ people commit less crimes
Or do they just get caught less often, and convicted less often if they're caught?
>If you want to improve population intelligence, it may be better to invest in better nutrition, health care, and education.
We've already plucked this fruit. Genetic engineering of embryos to IQs higher than any living human looks possible without side effects, as alleles that effect intelligence aren't likely to be additive: http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421
The things AI is able to do is growing rapidly too. Nothing looks like a big deal to the Freakonomics guy because the next thing comes out so quickly and replaces it that it doesn't seem like a big development, whereas we had decades to admire and reflect upon what a big deal our cars and light bulbs were.