We will crack the genetics of intelligence and personality in just a few decades, after that DNA extracted from ancient DNA can easily be analysed to give us a good idea of cognitive abilities in those time periods.
I’d be willing to take a bet on that, if we can agree on what would constitute a hit or miss, but your time frame is exceedingly vague—“a few decades” sounds more like a personal hunch than a real estimate.
He’s probably thinking of Hsu and the big Beijing genomics project for IQ, which is already running. It’s hard to imagine, as genome sequencing approaches $1000, that whatever genetic basis exists won’t be pinned down within a few decades. We don’t have to understand why they affect IQ as they do, we just need to infer which ones and the direction of the effect.
That study will probably step right into the trap of ‘got a generator of trillion hypotheses; got a million hypotheses with extreme confidence in them’. It seems people deliberately walk into such traps to produce some data to justify the funding.
The combined effect of what ever genes affect intelligence, is likely to be strongly nonlinear (e.g. a improves iq, b improves iq, a and b decrease iq) . That will be the case even for very simple functional measures, like the speed of running, as clear from understanding of how genes can affect speed of running. There is optimal length to a bone, there’s a lot of genes that affect length of a bone, they must sum to ideal bone length for maximum speed. Repeat for many bones and other parameters.
But as there is no understanding how genes may affect IQ, one has a free pass to model effect on IQ with much simpler model than needed for the running speed, and get away with it, even though its complete absurd. People fail at abstract thought, and IQ is abstract. It’s easy to imagine that it won’t be pinned down, as we’d have only a few billions people to sequence, but much much larger number of pairs and triplets of genes.
I’d be willing to take a bet on that, if we can agree on what would constitute a hit or miss, but your time frame is exceedingly vague—“a few decades” sounds more like a personal hunch than a real estimate.
He’s probably thinking of Hsu and the big Beijing genomics project for IQ, which is already running. It’s hard to imagine, as genome sequencing approaches $1000, that whatever genetic basis exists won’t be pinned down within a few decades. We don’t have to understand why they affect IQ as they do, we just need to infer which ones and the direction of the effect.
That study will probably step right into the trap of ‘got a generator of trillion hypotheses; got a million hypotheses with extreme confidence in them’. It seems people deliberately walk into such traps to produce some data to justify the funding.
The combined effect of what ever genes affect intelligence, is likely to be strongly nonlinear (e.g. a improves iq, b improves iq, a and b decrease iq) . That will be the case even for very simple functional measures, like the speed of running, as clear from understanding of how genes can affect speed of running. There is optimal length to a bone, there’s a lot of genes that affect length of a bone, they must sum to ideal bone length for maximum speed. Repeat for many bones and other parameters.
But as there is no understanding how genes may affect IQ, one has a free pass to model effect on IQ with much simpler model than needed for the running speed, and get away with it, even though its complete absurd. People fail at abstract thought, and IQ is abstract. It’s easy to imagine that it won’t be pinned down, as we’d have only a few billions people to sequence, but much much larger number of pairs and triplets of genes.