Yes. I expect extreme cases of human intelligence to come from a combination of fairly good genes, and a lot of environmental and developmental luck. Ie if you took 1000 clones of Von Neumann, you still probably wouldn’t get that lucky again. (Although it depends on the level of education too)
Some ideas about what the tradeoffs might be.
Emotional social getting on with people vs logic puzzle solving IQ.
Engineer parents are apparently more likely to have autistic children. This looks like a tradeoff to me. To many “high IQ” genes and you risk autism.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In the modern world, we have complicated elaborate theoretical structures that are actually correct and useful. In the pre-modern world, the sort of mind that now obsesses about quantum mechanics would be obsessing about angels dancing on pinheads or other equally useless stuff.
Emotional social getting on with people vs logic puzzle solving IQ.
Not sure I buy this, since IQ is usually found to positively correlate with purported measures of “emotional intelligence” (at least when any sort of ability (e.g. recognizing emotions) is tested; the correlation seems to go away when the test is pure self reporting, as in a personality test). EDIT: the correlation even with ability-based measures seems to be less than I expected.
Also, smarter people seem (on average) better at managing interpersonal issues in my experience (anecdotal, I don’t have a reference). But maybe this isn’t what you mean by “emotional social getting on with people”.
There could have been a thing where being too far from the average caused interpersonal issues, but very few people would have been far from the average, so I wouldn’t expect this to have prevented selection if IQ helped on the margin.
Engineer parents are apparently more likely to have autistic children. This looks like a tradeoff to me. To many “high IQ” genes and you risk autism.
Seems somewhat plausible. I don’t think that specific example is good since engineers are stereotyped as aspies in the first place; I’d bet engineering selects for something else in addition to IQ that increases autism risk (systematizing quotient, or something). I have heard of there being a population level correlation between parental IQ and autism risk in the offspring, though I wonder how much this just routes through paternal age, which has a massive effect on autism risk.
This study found a relationship after controlling for paternal age (~30% risk increase when father’s IQ > 126), though the IQ test they used had a “technical comprehension” section, which seems unusual for an IQ test (?), and which seems to have driven most of the association.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In the modern world, we have complicated elaborate theoretical structures that are actually correct and useful. In the pre-modern world, the sort of mind that now obsesses about quantum mechanics would be obsessing about angels dancing on pinheads or other equally useless stuff.
So I think there’s two possibilities here to keep distinct. (1) is that ability to think abstractly wasn’t very useful (and thus wasn’t selected for) in the ancestral environment. (2) Is that it was actively detrimental to fitness, at least above some point. E.g. because smarter people found more interesting things to do than reproduce, or because they cared about the quality of life of their offspring more than was fitness-optimal, or something (I think we do see both of these things today, but I’m not sure about in the past).
They aren’t mutually exclusive possibilities; in fact if (2) were true I’d expect (1) to probably be true also. (2) but not (1) seems unlikely since IQ being fitness-positive on the margin near the average would probably outweigh negative effects from high IQ outliers.
Yes. I expect extreme cases of human intelligence to come from a combination of fairly good genes, and a lot of environmental and developmental luck. Ie if you took 1000 clones of Von Neumann, you still probably wouldn’t get that lucky again. (Although it depends on the level of education too)
Some ideas about what the tradeoffs might be.
Emotional social getting on with people vs logic puzzle solving IQ.
Engineer parents are apparently more likely to have autistic children. This looks like a tradeoff to me. To many “high IQ” genes and you risk autism.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In the modern world, we have complicated elaborate theoretical structures that are actually correct and useful. In the pre-modern world, the sort of mind that now obsesses about quantum mechanics would be obsessing about angels dancing on pinheads or other equally useless stuff.
Not sure I buy this, since IQ is usually found to positively correlate with purported measures of “emotional intelligence” (at least when any sort of ability (e.g. recognizing emotions) is tested; the correlation seems to go away when the test is pure self reporting, as in a personality test). EDIT: the correlation even with ability-based measures seems to be less than I expected.
Also, smarter people seem (on average) better at managing interpersonal issues in my experience (anecdotal, I don’t have a reference). But maybe this isn’t what you mean by “emotional social getting on with people”.
There could have been a thing where being too far from the average caused interpersonal issues, but very few people would have been far from the average, so I wouldn’t expect this to have prevented selection if IQ helped on the margin.
Seems somewhat plausible. I don’t think that specific example is good since engineers are stereotyped as aspies in the first place; I’d bet engineering selects for something else in addition to IQ that increases autism risk (systematizing quotient, or something). I have heard of there being a population level correlation between parental IQ and autism risk in the offspring, though I wonder how much this just routes through paternal age, which has a massive effect on autism risk.
This study found a relationship after controlling for paternal age (~30% risk increase when father’s IQ > 126), though the IQ test they used had a “technical comprehension” section, which seems unusual for an IQ test (?), and which seems to have driven most of the association.
So I think there’s two possibilities here to keep distinct. (1) is that ability to think abstractly wasn’t very useful (and thus wasn’t selected for) in the ancestral environment. (2) Is that it was actively detrimental to fitness, at least above some point. E.g. because smarter people found more interesting things to do than reproduce, or because they cared about the quality of life of their offspring more than was fitness-optimal, or something (I think we do see both of these things today, but I’m not sure about in the past).
They aren’t mutually exclusive possibilities; in fact if (2) were true I’d expect (1) to probably be true also. (2) but not (1) seems unlikely since IQ being fitness-positive on the margin near the average would probably outweigh negative effects from high IQ outliers.