When safe, effective germline engineering for greater intelligence and health is possible, I predict that it will be embraced as enthusiastically by the majority of society as indoor plumbing was.
[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11261872/James-Watso...
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2007/10/watson-loses-cold-spr...
>He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”
An IQ of 125 is well above average and puts him in the top 5% of the population. And on an individual basis, IQ tests have some degree of error and aren't perfect. But they are very useful statistically, especially on a population level where these errors average out.
So was phrenology. This search for the g is just cargo cult science.
Yes, some of them were quite inappropriate, such as:
>His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."
However, after that he says:
>There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.
Now, this latter quote is in my opinion a perfectly reasonable presumption, considering that hundreds of millions of humans historically lived in a myriad of drastically different environments and circumstance. These genetic differences among populations (I'm not talking about the rigid contemporary interpretation of "race", I'm talking about geographical populations) do exist, and it would be absurd to presume that for some magical reason it wouldn't affect cognitive ability as well.
And yet people would still get emotionally triggered and shoot this hypothesis down, just because of the way they are socialized and because it strongly deviates from the mainstream idealization of equality.
Not related to this issue - reality generally is not simple, and I am sad that even contemporary developed societies nurture expectations that are so simplified, idealistic, fictitious instead of being more mature and grounded in scientific reality, regardless of the topic at hand. I just wish that more people were more educated and scientifically literate, and that this would translate into better, proper political positions, instead of the idiotic clusterfuck we have today.
Obviously, these concerns will be a thing of the past considering the future potential of genetic engineering to amplify intelligence, and presuming that eventually such services would be available to your average person.