Why the West should be worried about Chinese Eugenics (2013)
edge.org
edge.org
Author manages to squeeze a topping of first semester Introduction to China with a thick crust of massive unsubstantiated overreach.
"hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications."
Nice autopraise, mildly disguised.
"After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness."
Seriously? There was an otherwise intelligent guy working for us who started spouting this kind of drivel. We noticed it all started after he got assigned a female manager and then subsequently a non-white manager. Some people have mild racial hangups, which they then externalize in odd ways like China peril.
Look at the intense selection on the Ashkenazi Jews over maybe 1500 years which has only produced an average IQ of 115 (there are alternate theories for their high IQs).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence
Selection of dog breeds for intelligence (German Shepherds, Jack Russell terriers, Poodles vs eg King Charles Cavaliers, Corgis) seems to have produced a large gap but it took a long time - dogs have been domesticated for ~5,000 years.
Generally selection works quickly at first, by filtering the population for the desired trait. Then it slows dramatically as the process is limited by new beneficial mutations which are rare.
It is noteworthy that genes for high IQ seem to come at a price. Read up about Einstein's son Eduard for example.
Final point: maybe parents will not want to select for IQ. Maybe they would prefer to select for beautiful daughters for example?
Dogs have been domesticated since the dawn of civilization (and probably before), but those specific breeds are relatively new. GSDs are just over a century old, Jack Russells slightly older, poodles several hundred years old and Corgis positively ancient at almost 1000. Note, too, that intelligence was not the sole quality they were bred for. The Russian Silver Fox is a great example of the massive changes that can occur in only a few generations if artificial selection for a single trait is performed.
That said, I agree with the gist of your argument: 15 pts of Iq per generation seems ludicrous.
This one is equivalent to picking the best one of 50 naturally occurring children, and raising them alone, every generation.
If Michael Jordan he had 50 children with a similarly elite mother, most of them would regress to the mean - but the best one could conceivably be near his level. If he had only one kid, it's very likely that the kid would regress significantly.
Also, of course there are negatives to high IQ but most of the time, this selection method wouldn't be done for that level. Two people of IQ 100 would be able to reliably have children of IQ 115, and those kids would have happier, longer, healthier lives, with no increased risks. [see the scottish IQ study; iq at age 11 was linked to a lifetime of better outcomes]
That is the real benefit of this technology - to give people the option of gradually bringing out the best of what's already inside themselves. I don't want to be forced to give my kids a random selection of my genes - I want to exercise some control. And of course there could be problems - perhaps +IQ genes might lie next to other, undetected bad genes. But that's random, and we're already completely subject to it.
That's way too low. It's somewhere in the 19-32k year range: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38279/...
I have read numerous different accounts. It appears that the selective breeding of different breeds is actually much shorter even than 5,000 years. Most breeds are less than 1,000 years old.
1. Author is arrogant, and by innuendo he is also sexist/racist.
2. ???
3. Author is wrong.
Step 2 is where I'm not following your logic.
1. I once knew a guy who agreed with the author. He also had a non-white manager at roughly the same time he agreed with the author.
2. ???
3. Therefore the author if this article is racist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion
Not all observations are extrapolations from a single observation.
No thank you. Free-speech also means speech you do not like, otherwise you don't actually have free-speech. But rather just, "state-approved speech".
That's a really sad world to live in, even more so with the state-sponsored and state-seeded social-ostracism we already have in place to control freedom of speech.
And I recognize your username, do / did you post on a forum dedicated to a certain music genre?
This bothered me more than the autopraise. He (and, if he is to be believed, China) are proceeding from the assumption that IQ can be reduced to a set of switches in the genome.
What if there are alleles that select for intelligence--but also select for a mixture of cancer, OCD, suicidal depression, and plain batshit crazy?
1.3 billion bald, cat cradling, evil geniuses, all saying "mbwah, ha ha" in eerie synchronicity?
I'm not saying it captures every element of our experience, but surely we can point to it and say it represents some subset of our understanding of the idea we point at when we say the word "intelligence". It really isn't competing with anything that's remotely as useful. IQ, although it has faults, seems to be a relatively cheap, standard, well understood metric, that also explains quite a few other phenomenon. If you give me two regression analyses, one of them using IQ and one not, I cannot imagine what understanding you would gain by refusing to acknowledge the former -- and that mistake seems like precisely the type of "foolish over assessment of our current collective understanding" that you deride.
I score very highly on IQ tests, but I've worked with a great many people who I would guess do not score more than slightly above average but nevertheless bring a lot to the table that I cannot.
I guess my point is that using IQ as an authoritative measure of "intelligence" is missing the forest for the trees (well I suppose to best fit the metaphor it would be 'tree').
For animals, it's routine to target a specific trait such as more milk or less aggressiveness and do planned breeding to successfully get the desired outcome. However what we forget is that those animals suffer from many side effects when their one feature is amplified out of proportion. For instance, you can successfully get dog that is super small or super large but they would suffer from severe issues such as bad eyesight or frickle bones. For humans, this gets far more complicated. The intelligence is hardly indicated by ill-defined measurements such as IQ. We don't even dare quantify "creativity" and "taste" which are often drivers to major breakthroughs. In any case, let's say if you do try human breeding to target these qualities and you do end up with people with very high IQ - you can count on lots of potential side effects such as schizophrenia and other mental disorders that dominates lives of people with such out-of-proportion amplified characteristics. On the other end there is a strong argument for random trials, aka, let nature decide evolution. Most high-impact human beings, from Newton to Einstein to Hawking were not the product of other high impact human beings or even high IQ parents, for that matter. They spontaneously appeared on the scene and many times nurture played much stronger role in any case.
In the near future (in evolutionary timeline) in order to survive we might be forced to colonise other planets or cooperate with machines that are orders of magnitude more intelligent than we are today. We either learn how to adapt rapidly or we will be out of the evolutionary game.
1. encourage diversity. This expands the genepool, and the combinations of genes. In particular, allow mating of people with "disorders" because (1) you don't know what other valuable genes they have, (2) the gene directly responsible for the "disorder" may have other benefts (consider sickle cell anaemia), and (3) what is considered a disorder in a present context might be beneficial in a future situation.
2. increase population. This increases the chances of mutations, and therefore of beneficial mutations; and especially the chance of beneficial combinations of genes.
The thing you do not want to do is to select for particular traits! This is primarily because we do not actually know which traits will end up being ideal. Anything else is breeding exotic show-dogs, which are usually no match for the first mongrel that comes along. That is, the mongrel is the superior dog.
Disregard the above if you don't actually want to create a master race, but instead want to control other people and/or feel better about yourself. That's a different handbook.
From what I know about eugenics programs this is horrible! You have my attention!
>A more mature response would be… asking… how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world?
Oh.. so your only concern was that there might be more Chinese people than white people in the future. So… basically a racist rationale for promoting eugenics in this country. Not cool Geoffrey.
Would also like to hear opinions on the author's claim that IQ could be increased 10-15 points on average, per generation. Sounds very unlikely to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua%E2%80%93Yi_distinction
"In its cultural form, the Hua–Yi distinction assumed Chinese cultural superiority, but also implied that outsiders could become Chinese by adopting Chinese values and customs."
What it means is Chinese identity is tied to culture, rather than tied to the actual physical body.
The author's article's point amounts to: "The smartest Chinese tend to be more successful and can afford more children, and this is eugenics."
Agreed, and it sounds like the author has an axe to grind for some odd reason. It's not eugenics that he's attacking only, note the implicit blame of "Darwinians" and "Galtonians" as being a cause for these policies.
While in reality the countryside folks (less density) can have more children than urban dwellers (typically one child).
The same could be true if we just killed low-IQ people, which would be horrific in practice and spirit.
I'm also not sure I particularly care for the "smart" people I know more than the "less smart." This is even more true for the "smart" people I don't know who seem to be making this world worse for all of us. I would pick those "smart" people to be culled, if I had to choose.
The whole premise is that "like produces like", which of course is nonsense. Dumb people have brilliant kids, ugly people produce beautiful children, and so on and so forth.
2. You are wrong vis-a-vis heritability of intelligence. It is largely determined by genes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
3. However - you are right in one respect. There is usually a 'pull to the mean'. That means that children of exceptional people tend to be closer to the average, thus they are not as gifted as the exceptional parent.
1) He was born with a markedly pointy head, which caused much consternation to his parents and relatives.
2) Was developmentally backward. Notably, he failed to acquire language skills for a significant period during his early childhood.
3) He was educationally subnormal, showing signs of what would now be diagnosed as ADHD,and drugged into a stupor.
4) Was bone lazy. I believe that 'schweinehunde' was the informal term used at the time for this condition.
5) Was disobedient and rebellious, or one of those 'malcontents' that perennially threaten to upset the applecart of society (the term 'hooligan' enjoyed a brief vogue for describing this condition).
6) Was Jewish. The eugenics movement designated Jews for mass sterilization, along with Blacks, Poles and the 'bloody Irish' (but then again, these were the same dolts who thought that sterilizing homosexuals would somehow serve to 'keep the race pure').
Albert Einstein was a prime candidate for this preemptive culling.
Note that nobody here advocated forced sterilizations (or killing off ugly babies).
All we said is that it's pretty much settled that intelligence is inheritable.
PS I will contend one point - and that is whether Jews were marked for mass sterilization. That is false.
Jews were marked by Nazis for extermination. However - people who advocated eugenics in other countries (like US or the UK) had no issues with Jews (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States).
If anything, Jews (or more precisely Ashkenazi) are a poster child for eugenics - since really that's what they went through in the middle ages, which is used to explain their enormous achievement (see http://www.economist.com/node/4032638)
"Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation."
Stephen Hsu has written more about it here http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/10/genius-nautilus-magazin...
It's like being able to roll 100 times and picking the best one in D&D character creation. The improvement might not be able to be done infinitely, but could at least get us to everyone having IQ 130, which would mean a reduction in all the problems associated with lower IQ. (Crime, poverty, lack of educational achievement, bad health)
i.e. a father has two variants of chromosome 6, one good and one great. Why not make sure that his kids just "by chance" get the great one? There will be lots of tradeoffs, but it'd always be better to occasionally step in and make a choice than to always accept randomness.
Firstly, the fact that these terms exist in language and officialdom is meaningless. There is perhaps nowhere else in the world today sporting a greater gap between the official line and the reality of popular life than mainland China.
Secondly, Chinese popular nutrition is still in the dark ages, its common currency being tradition, old-wives hearsay and happenstance. Things that are imported or claimed to be imported are held in high esteem for no other reason. Basic biology is barely taught.
I've been here on and off for 13 years, mostly on, and that's most of my adult life. I was born in Australia, my wife is Chinese, and we chose to have our kid in Thailand. However, I have many friends who have had children here and in fact this morning we just visited a friend in a local hospital who had just had a C-section. Frankly, the kid was wasted looking and it seemed obvious to me that they'd scheduled the operation prematurely.
Thirdly, the author confuses Confucian tradition (family lineage oriented for 2000+ years) and eugenics. The benefits of coming from an aristocratic background of eating well, education and the social network that brings is recognized in all societies. Choosing not to have a child (to kill them because of genetic status) is something else entirely, and even checking the sex of your baby is outlawed here... which isn't to say it doesn't happen, just that it's a lot more on the 'no popularly accessible eugenics' side than the west.
However, there is a hint of reality in the article. The Chinese government has for decades collected the blood of foreigners visiting the country, ostensibly as a medical exam to check whether you have some life-threatening disease and may spread it about the country but obviously partly as a backslap to other countries for doing the same and partly as a money spinner. I have often supposed that database, which is certainly linked to other information about visitors such as who they are, where they come from, who their family is, where they have been and what they are nominally doing in the country, is being compiled in to a massive global genetic database for research purposes. That much is perhaps real, but the eugenics line as spouted here is to my mind utterly baseless.
> After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.
I would expect that providing proper nutrition, health care, and primary and secondary education to the majority of Chinese children (especially those in the marginalized countryside) would be far more important than having a handful of rich families gestating designer babies.
e.g. iodine deficiency:
1996: "The World Health Organization says that of the estimated 1.6 billion cases worldwide of iodine deficiency, nearly a third, or 500 million, are in China." http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/04/world/china-confronts-reta...
2006: "After a 10-year government campaign, over 90 percent of people use iodized salt, still leaving 100 million facing deficiency." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/health/16iodine.html
Yes, that is well known, e.g., http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-project-probes-the-geneti... (depending on how you define large-scale -- see the piece).
> if so that research is going towards some sort of comprehensive national eugenics policy?
Now that, as far as I know, is mere speculation, albeit speculation that has been bandied about by many more individuals than just the author of this piece.
Good health (and all the factors contributing to this) and education will probably out-explain genetics for decades to come, and any significant amount of genomic selection in humans would be futile.