Chimpanzee Intelligence Is Heritable [pdf]
pdf.yt
pdf.yt
What? Was everyone blind before the discovery of quantum mechanics? If we can't measure things we don't understand, how the heck would we come to understand them? Through their affects on the world? "No, you say, "we can not perceive things whose causes we don't understand." Where did you get your epistemology? Was it The Secret?
Karl Popper.
>If we can't measure things we don't understand, how the heck would we come to understand them?
We get new ideas, such as the concept of distance, by guessing them in response to problems.
It is possible to be intelligent and unwilling to follow instructions. In fact, I would not be surprised if there was an inverse correlation between the two in humans.
True. But whether an instruction has been followed is easy to measure and relates directly to language, unlike the other criteria in Table 1.
Also, note that chimps are capable of tearing limbs from humans. So if people could be bred from them I would like them to be basically friendly and cooperative.
Mitchell, David (2014-09-02). The Bone Clocks: A Novel (p. 179). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
It's taboo to both the left and the right. Both like to pretend differences in innate ability don't exist. The left likes to explain disadvantage exclusively as a socially constructed phenomenon that can be remedied through social engineering. The right likes to chalk it up to laziness or moral corruption, arguing that the disadvantage more or less deserve it.
If it's biological to any significant degree, they're both wrong. It's heritable, so no amount of social engineering will fix it, and it's also not a result of chosen moral deficiencies or laziness so it's not a moral failing. Being born with a lower IQ is no more your fault than being born without an arm.
It also leads to taboo discussions around wealth distribution. If our success rates are largely a result of our success at winning the genetic lottery, can you morally justify really massive levels of wealth inequality? Is it just that random initial conditions completely dictate outcome?
If intellectual ability is largely heritable, then both the left's PC moralizing and the right's Calvinist moralizing are bullshit.
I've toyed around with the concept of a kind of transhumanist socialism in which these kinds of enhancements -- both germ-line and for already living people -- would be made universally available to everyone. I wonder to what extent the failure of socialist schemes is the result of their technical inability (or unwillingness) to address the root causes of inequality. Use a progressive income tax not to fund the zero-sum redistribution of wealth, but the positive-sum redistribution of ability. Transform humanity into a "runaway self-improving AI."
As far as I know, virtually everyone in every political persuasion or "wing" would be horrified by that concept. Given what garbage pretty much all of today's political discourse is, it kinda makes me think I'm onto something.
And since these beliefs often have political implications, human tribalism takes over. What begins as a benign debate over, e.g. the validity of research methods, often devolves into controversy that's actually a proxy war for some tangentially related idea.
Because people are scared to make claims about trait heritability in humans. The moment someone publicly says anything about e.g. genetics influencing human intelligence, someone flies out of left field and accuses them of being a racist.
The absolute inanity of political correctness has turned certain areas of scientific inquiry into political minefields.
As a start: There is proper definition of intelligence. A friend of mine currently is evaluating current standard tests for emotional intelligence as part of a midsize project (I think several Ph.D.s and various bachelor/master thesises) and from what he tells the state for the art is more guesswork then science.
(I have no idea how either tests work, but I'd be inclined to believe it's harder to test for "tactfulness" than "ability to recognize patterns")
In short, society is not mature enough to handle this area of research right now. The consequences of getting it wrong, or even right, is severe.
Edit: typo
In this case, there's something similar: a lot of the information a CS paper might include inline has been shunted aside to "Supplemental Information includes one figure, three tables, and Supplemental Experimental Procedures and can be found with this article online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.05.076 ", and much of the background here (eg the development of the test battery) is in previous papers. This is more reporting the apex of their work, if you will.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
They have not, actually. Not b and certainly not c.
"Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."[1]
It is completely unremarkable that chimpanzee studies show "heritability" for what counts as intelligence (by this study's model) among chimpanzees. In general, for any trait, closely related individuals show a stronger resemblance than less closely related individuals, and that is what "heritability" means, nothing more. Eric Turkheimer (one of the authors cited in the article submitted here, and a co-author of the review article I have just quoted and cited) declared as the "first law of behavior genetics" that all human behavioral characteristics are heritable, and that is very close to being literally true. But he also writes, in a later commentary article, "Heritability isn't an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size."[2]
The chimp research is interesting, and I suppose other researchers will try to replicate or refine it, but it still leaves us a long way from understanding the genetics of human intelligence. Human intelligence is indubitably influenced by hundreds of genes, each of small effect size, and many with unknown pleiotropic effects. We are so far nowhere near understanding what genes do to influence human intelligence.
"At the time most of the results we attempted to replicate were obtained, candidate-gene studies of complex traits were commonplace in medical genetics research. Such studies are now rarely published in leading journals. Our results add IQ to the list of phenotypes that must be approached with great caution when considering published molecular genetic associations. In our view, excitement over the value of behavioral and molecular genetic studies in the social sciences should be tempered—as it has been in the medical sciences—by an appreciation that, for complex phenotypes, individual common genetic variants of the sort assayed by SNP microarrays are likely to have very small effects. Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Doing otherwise may hamper scientific progress by proliferating potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not appreciate that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public risks creating an incorrect perception about the state of knowledge in the field, especially the existence of genes described as being 'for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."[3]
Meanwhile, we know that even monozygotic ("identical") twins can be discordant for IQ or for any other human behavioral trait (this observation is also called a "law of behavior genetics"), so the one thing we can be sure of is that something other than genes matters for the expression of absolutely every trait that a human being can have. This being well known, those of us who have already received our shuffle of genes may as well devote time, money, and effort to finding out what environmental factors may help us engage in problem-solving about important human problems.
[1] Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
[2] Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5.
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
[3] Chabris, C. F., Hebert, B. M., Benjamin, D. J., Beauchamp, J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M., ... & Laibson, D. (2012). Most reported genetic associations with general intelligence are probably false positives. Psychological science, 23(11), 1314-1323. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611435528 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498585/
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9938142/Most_Repo...
It is true that heritability does not logically imply immalleabillity. But, leaving aside the many cases of untreatable or fatal genetic diseases as possibly too easy, I am struck by how often heritability does turn out to be about traits which are difficult or impossible to change; we are familiar with the case of intelligence, of course, but it shows up almost anywhere heritability does. Consider the case of politics: political affiliation is highly stable over lifetimes, impenetrable to argumentation, people will tie themselves in knots to preserve their beliefs (consider the people who argue that WMDs were successfully found in Iraq), increasingly linked to fundamental differences in cognition (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8512400 ) - and political attitudes are highly heritable (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8512399 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8504593). This pattern pops up over and over again: if a study calculates the heritability of a number of traits, the traits which are high on heritability and low on shared environment will strike one as things which are hard to change. If you don't like attitudes or politics or intelligence, consider personality like the Big Five construct: OCEAN are all highly heritable (~40% avg), and yet, largely unchangeable. Do you know any way to increase Conscientiousness aside from dopaminergic stimulants? I don't. Do you know any way to increase Openness besides possibly psychedelics? I don't. And so on.
> Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Doing otherwise may hamper scientific progress by proliferating potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not appreciate that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public risks creating an incorrect perception about the state of knowledge in the field, especially the existence of genes described as being 'for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."[3]
It would be nice if, in your constant citation of Chabris, you would incorporate any of the information I've given you in my other replies to you.
Again, it's not deductively logically valid, but it is most certainly inductively and statistically valid, and those are the validities that concern us: absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and for few things is there a more glaring absence than for intelligence boosts. After a century of formal pursuit, what do we have to show for it? A few very early childhood interventions like iodine; some interventions one should trust as far as one can kick them like dual n-back; and some stimulants offering temporary boosts (but are they boosting actual peak intelligence or just affecting motivation?).
He's obviously well acquainted with the literature, witness his perennial work sample test bit but he places radically different burdens of proof on ideologically convenient and inconvenient arguments.
The Blank Slate, everyone has equal potential view has been the underlying education school dogma since at least the early seventies. People have been searching for ways to raise and equalise outcomes for (I think) longer than you have been alive. No one has found anything that does both.
Absence of evidence is in fact evidence of absence, and the more effort, time and money has been expended in the search for evidence the stronger the evidence for absence is.
If you have access to some research to the contrary please share.