First intelligence gene discovered | Hacker News Reader

First intelligence gene discovered

cosmosmagazine.com

30 pointsiknowl22 comments

The most important quotation from the article for establishing context on what the latest finding means: "It is generally accepted that genes, a good education and environmental factors combine to determine our intelligence. 'If people wanted to change their genetic destiny they could either increase their exercise or improve their diet and education,' said Thompson. 'Most other ways we know of improving brain function more than outweigh this gene.'"

And it's important to remember that the study here is based on data-mining

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

and has the usual defects of unreplicated studies of this kind.

My professional field is statistical genetics. I don't actually want to bet, but if I did I'd give odds of three to one against this replicating, and ten to one against it having anything at all to do with the genetic architecture of human intelligence. My money is on the result reflecting population stratification.

Id just like to point out the gross disparity between the title "First intelligence gene discovered" and the psychologist quoted in the article who was "a little wary of thinking in terms of a gene for intelligence."....

I'm sure it's just a matter of time before people look for correlations between this gene and race.

Boy is this going to open a can of worms.

FWIW, I'm white and Jewish, and I have a TT (ie, the opposite of this "intelligence gene").

This is something that cannot and should not be avoided though ... I remember reading this article in GQ magazine, many many moons ago, about fast twitch fibers being found more readily in people of West African Descent which is what makes them better sprinters (this is why your 100m, 200m races are dominated by people from America, West Africa and the Carribbeans) ... naturally I started to discuss this with a African American Studies Professor I was friends with at the time, and the response wasn't that the research was incorrect, but that it shouldn't be talked about because white supremacists, or other racists would seize upon it to make an argument that since athleticism could be so advantaged by race then intelligence could too.

It makes me sad that America's racial history makes things like this way more fraught with all sorts of dangers than it needs to be, but eventually we do have to do these kinds of research and find out how these things are related to our ancestors ... I for one, think we'll find that skin color has vanishingly little to do with these sorts of things ... I mean, in the matter of fast twitch muscles fiber, it turns out that not all black people have that advantage, only a small group of people from West africa

People will always try to describe things according to race in this country, but I think that as long as we're reasonably careful/responsible with the way we carry out the inquiry, it will benefit us in the long run.

Sprinting does not have the same global impact as intelligence,which is why people get so testy about it.

Well even they do not look for co-relations we all know that Jewish and Chinese are the most intelligent ones. I read a recent study that showed most of the successful entrepreneurs are from Israel or China.

This may be the first intelligence gene discovered; however, it also may be yet another study [1] that is contradicted by attempts to replicate it [2]. I don't know much about Cosmos Magazine, but it's a bit disappointing that a 'science' magazine would cite a single study as conclusive without waiting for peer review.

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17160701?dopt=Abstract

2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17160701?dopt=Abstract

I think you may be confused about the term "peer review", as the study referred to in the OP article certainly underwent peer review in the process of being published in Nature Genetics.

Granted. I meant "replicating experiments" to further validate the findings.

Original articles:

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2250....

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2245....

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2237....

"People who received two Cs from their parents, about a quarter of the population, scored on average 1.3 points higher than the next group - half of the population with only one C in this section of the gene. The last quarter of people, with no Cs, scored another 1.3 points lower."

I'm sure it's a significant step in cognitive research finding a gene that correlates to differences in intelligence but is a 2.6 point spread that big a deal?

Too bad the article didn't mention the specific SNP.

rs10784502

"In addition, the C allele of rs10784502 is associated, on average, with 9,006.7 mm3 larger intracranial volume, or 0.58% of intracranial volume per risk allele and is weakly associated with increased general intelligence by approximately 1.29 IQ points per allele."

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2250....

[Edited to provide a more useful quote]

Just tried and at 23andme it is possible to check this gene, at least with the latest version of their chip (v3). Just got to "Browse raw data" and put "rs10784502" on the right of "a SNP:" and press "Go".

p.s. CT here, the most diffuse variant (the "best" one according to the article is CC).

Where is the "Browse raw data" link?

Edit: Ignore that, found it. Under the Account menu in the top nav.

"No SNPs matching 'rs10784502' found in the data from your chip."

According to the abstract on the Nature Genetics paper, they were looking at this SNP in HMGA2: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/SNP/snp_ref.cgi?rs=1078...

Perhaps also interesting in this context is the fact that the human brain has been shrinking over the last 20,000 years: http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-...

So this is a switch. I wonder if this is a pure improvement, or there are deficiencies common to carriers; perhaps in co-occurance with another switch (like malaria resistance/sickle cell anemia). Perhaps increased incidence of autism/asperger.

I guess you are implying that we don't all have the "smart" version of the gene for that reason.

But the brain accounts for about 25% of glucose consumption in your body. So for genes which enlarge the brain, evolution would have sought the optimal trade-off between increased intelligence vs increased metabolic cost. There may well be no "deficiency" other than that increased cost.

Anton's Key?

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