Robert Plomin of King's College London has been plugging away at the genetics of IQ for decades. It's been frustrating, but now he thinks he's getting somewhere. The London Sunday Times reports:
Scientists have identified more than 200 genes potentially associated with academic performance in schoolchildren.
Those schoolchildren possessing the "right" combinations achieved significantly better results in numeracy, literacy and science.
The finding emerged from a study of more than 4000 British children to pinpoint the genes and genetic combinations that influence reasoning skills and general intelligence.
One of its main conclusions is that intelligence is controlled by a network of thousands of genes with each making just a small contribution to overall intelligence, rather than the handful of powerful genes that scientists once predicted.
... There are potentially many millions of these variations, but the team restricted their search to looking at the million or so of the most common, to find out which gene variants were most frequently found in children with either a high or low level of academic achievement.
"Out of the gene variants we looked at, a couple of hundred are emerging which seem to have a small but significant relationship with ability in maths and English," said Professor Plomin.
... Research into height, for example, has picked out 300 genes that affect how tall people will grow, but even these genes can only explain 15 per cent of the total variations in human height. It implies that hundreds more genes must also play a part.
John Hawks points out a recent Nicholas Wade article in the NYT making a similar point the lessons of an experiment on fruit flies to breed for earlier hatching:
One well-known path to change is a heavily favorable mutation in a single gene. But it may be well known only because it is easy to study. Another path is exploitation of mildly favorable differences that already exist in many genes.The question has considerable practical importance because if complex traits, including susceptibility to disease, are influenced by just a few genes, then it should be easy to develop treatments that target the few genes’ products. But if tens or hundreds of genes are involved in each trait, the task may be close to impossible....
The conventional view is that evolutionary change is generally mediated by a favorable mutation in a gene that then washes through the whole population, a process called a hard sweep because all other versions of the gene are brushed away. The alternative, called a soft sweep, is that many genes influence a trait, in this case the rate of maturation, and that the growth-accelerating versions of each of these genes become just a little more common. Each fly has a greater chance of inheriting these growth-promoting versions and so will mature faster.
In sequencing their subjects’ genomes, the researchers found that a soft sweep was indeed responsible for the earlier hatching. No single gene had swept through the population to effect the change; rather, the alternative versions of a large number of genes had become slightly more common.
The debate about whether evolution proceeds by altering one or many genes started 90 years ago among the three founders of population genetics, Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright and J. B. S. Haldane. Haldane favored the single mutation mechanism, but Fisher and Wright backed multiple gene change. The fruit fly experiment “is a total vindication of Wright and Fisher and a major defeat for Haldane and a lot of conventional geneticists who have sided with him,” Dr. Rose said.
The demise of the Haldane view “is very bad news for the pharmaceutical industry in general,” Dr. Rose said. If disease and other traits are controlled by many genes, it will be hard to find effective drugs; a single target would have been much simpler.
So, it's not surprising that intelligence is dependent upon a lot of genes. That's generally true for a lot of complicated traits.
This was my comment over at Marginal Revolution a few months ago when David Shenk's book came out:
ReplyDeleteJudging from Shenk's appearance with Will Wilkinson, there are two problems with his ideas:
1. He attacks strawmen, like suggesting that people like Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein don't understand heritability or that IQ researchers don't understand that the environment affects gene expression.
2. He makes god of the gaps type arguments, like the fact that we haven't found any genes that correlate significantly with IQ.
As for the 10,000 hour thesis, well it is true that to be a genius you have to put in the time and effort necessary master your area, but that doesn't mean that an ordinary person who puts in the same amount of time and effort will become a genius. Likewise opportunity is necessary too, but isn't sufficient. In other words, genius requires natural talent plus hard work plus opportunity. This seems so obvious to me that I wonder why anyone would believe otherwise.
Using a god of the gaps argument is always dangerous because those gaps tend to get filled in, in this case awfully quickly.
And a bear defecated in the woods...
ReplyDeleteI'm looking around here and at gnxp.com and at Razib Khan's Blog for comments about the hugh german discussions around THILO SARRAZIN. But I cannot find very much yet after a couple of weeks.
ReplyDeleteYou have to know: Thilo Sarrazin for us is the german "Bell Curve Debate", that never has been taken place in Germany. (Even today there exists no translation of Herrnstein/Murray into german language.)
The importance of the debate around Thilo Sarrazin may be the same - at least - at it is worked out in the very good article
"'You Have To Tell The Truth' — The Bell Curve After Ten Years"
http://vdare.com/sailer/bell_curve_10yr.htm
about the Bell Curve Debate.
A lot of Germans are looking toward Sarrazin like a revolutioner, calling him something like "Che Sarrazin".
A lot of political correctness is collapsing in Germany today in favour for scientifical corretness. There is a lot of hope, that this will change the thinking about the devastaing politics in the last decades concerning immigration policy, conservative values, german identity, falling birth rates of the autochthon population and of the right half of the bell curve.
The R-squared reported was pretty low though -- just 3.2%; this ain't exactly the revolution, not yet. We need the serious SNP chips to find the rarish variants that make up the bulk of the variation.
ReplyDelete@Ingo Bading: Sarrazin, the Sweden Democrats... something is stirring in Europe. Too bad more in the U.S. don't notice.
ReplyDeleteScientists have identified more than 200 genes potentially associated with academic performance in schoolchildren... The finding emerged from a study of more than 4000 British children to pinpoint the genes and genetic combinations that influence reasoning skills and general intelligence...
ReplyDeleteI assume that these people actually know what they're doing [i.e. that they aren't simply blindly sifting through this mass of information like beach-combers searching for a diamond], but just in case they don't know what they're doing: They really need to consider the possibility that what they're dealing with here is a genealogical residue which - while it might CORRELATE with intelligence - might not form the actual loci which DETERMINE intelligence.
I.e. that particular set of 200 genes might merely be the genealogical detritus left behind by, say, these exceptional children's Magna Carta Surety/Plantegenet/Tudor/Stuart ancestry, and, instead of determining intelligence, might instead determine, say, their red hair and their hook noses and their high cheekbones.
A lot of political correctness is collapsing in Germany today in favour for scientifical corretness.
ReplyDeleteUgh.
All in all, I don't know whether that's a good thing - out of the frying pan of secular-humanist nihilism, and into the fire of science-pagan nihilism?
Maybe we sane folk can just sit back and watch the two camps annihilate one another.
I was reading a couple of Sewall Wright's papers on relatedness and inbreeding. He kept using the phrase "unit of genetic inheritance." This was before the term "gene" had caught on apparently.
ReplyDeleteThis is off topic, but related to IQ: Anyone else impressed with how the Democrats managed to make voting for the biggest Pentagon budget ever a referendum on gay rights? What should hurt the Dems with their 'progressive' base is helping them. Bizzare.
ReplyDeleteAnother way to look at this is to consider Columbus.
ReplyDeleteColumbus was trying to meet the Chinese but he ended up meeting American Indians instead. He was traveling west in 1492 while the Asians had been traveling east for about 13,00 years. They met up in the Caribbean.
Columbus immediately knew that the people he met were not Chinese because the Chinese are smart and the Indian peoples he met were stupid. This distinction still holds today. The Computer Science Department at Cal Berkeley is full of people of Chinese descent while the Home Depot parking lot is filled with people of American Indian descent.
It is well accepted that the Siberian people migrated east into the Americas across the Bering land bridge about 13,000 years ago. These same ancestral peoples went south into China.
So we know that it takes no more than about 13,000 to make a smart Asian by natural selection. This is roughly the same period of time that separates a dog from the gray wolf.
All this suggests that with artificial evolution - selective breeding - it would be pretty easy to get higher intelligence humans, and you don't need to know exactly which genes are involved.
Albertosaurus
PBS ran a really good Nova program last night about genes and the effect they have on different areas of the body. Particularly interesting were the "switches" within DNA that control the the function of the genes and even if the gene is fuctional at all. I will bet that the more they look into the genetics of IQ, they will find that these switches play a role.
ReplyDeleteSuch studies confirm conservative wisdom: people are what they are, and they cannot be changed.
ReplyDeletePlomin: "if tens or hundreds of genes are involved in each trait"
ReplyDeleteDidn't this NAZI SCUM get Lewontin's memo?
Just goes to show that "genetic engineering" for traits like intelligence may turn out to be impossible, at least via the test-tube approach.
ReplyDeleteHere's an alternative: suppose a group of Ashkenazi went through Africa impregnating as females as possible. Since one male can impregnate many females, how many males would it take (assuming females are receptive) over what period of time to significantly alter the African IQ?
I can't do the math but at least here is a possible approach that might work in principle.
Alternatively, you could use artificial insemination from sperm donors, which might get around the "racial" aspect of the problem. Which approach would the females favor?
Of course these two approaches are not mutually exclusive, nor are Africans the only possible target population.
Spread the wealth. For as it is written, the seed of Abraham will be as numerous as the stars. What the heck.
Of course everyone who posts on isteve knows that adult IQ is more than 50% determined by genes.
ReplyDeleteOnce this knowledge is difused throughout our society, will it actually change behaviour?
The following article was just posted to the web (google it)
__________
'They' Are Not Taking 'Our' Jobs
by John Feffer
My neighbor two doors down flies a Confederate flag alongside his more conventional stars and stripes. He drives a pickup truck, sports a number of provocative tattoos, and is about as white as Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich. I don't know if he would vote for either Sarah or Newt, but he's a pretty conservative guy. Still, he gets along reasonably well with the interracial couple who lives between us. And his son-in-law, an immigrant from El Salvador, just spent the last two weekends replacing our damaged shed with one that looks a whole lot better than anything Home Depot offers.
_________
My question is, once people like the "neighbor" in the story above fully understand HBD, will this knowledge of HBD make his daughters more likely to try to marry a Chinese man and less likely to marry a Salvadoran man?
Putting it another way, will widespread knowledge of HBD change behaviour among high IQ whites?
Will it change behaviour among low IQ whites ?
I don't see why any mutation is necessary to account for IQ differences. Isolation and challenging environmental factors would select smarter people to live longer and procreate more. The resulting population will have greater general intelligence than those without similar environmental conditions.The fact that IQ appears to depend on numerous genes rather than a few mutations would bear this out.
ReplyDeleteYou have to know: Thilo Sarrazin for us is the german "Bell Curve Debate", that never has been taken place in Germany.
ReplyDeleteWell, here in Finland we have Tatu Vanhanen, but he's generally dismissed as a crackpot. He's not even hated as an evil racist because he's not taken seriously enough.
The genetics of a given trait doesn't have to be the same in different populations. Muscle mass in cattle is influenced by many different genes in most breeds - but in some breeds, more than a third of the variance is caused by a single myostatin null variant.
ReplyDeletePlomin has only looked at one population.
Lots of genes influencing intelligence strongly suggests to me that there could be multiple brain architectures that can result in smart humans. This might account for why Asian neural networks have superior speed and precision, resulting in larger percentages of National Merit Scholar Semifinalists, while European neural networks are optimized for the kind of fuzzy logic which gave birth to the industrial revolution, modern science, and the information age. Seems to me that the advancement of mankind needs both types of intelligence. And with CA a world laboratory of East-meets-West gene mixing, perhaps a new kind of intelligence will emerge. (Just a thought).
ReplyDeleteIngo Bading said..."I'm looking around here and at gnxp.com and at Razib Khan's Blog for comments about the hugh german discussions around THILO SARRAZIN. But I cannot find very much yet after a couple of weeks."
ReplyDeleteI knew Thilo Sarrazin's book had made a big initial impact in Germany but didn't know it had led to so much discussion. Like you, I haven't seen much about it on the Internet.
"You have to know: Thilo Sarrazin for us is the german "Bell Curve Debate", that never has been taken place in Germany. (Even today there exists no translation of Herrnstein/Murray into german language.)"
I didn't know that nor did I know there's no German translation of The Bell Curve. I see more news of this kind coming from Britain, France, Italy and Scandinavia than from Germany. I wonder why that is?
Anyway, thanks for the information.
Ingo Bading,
ReplyDeleteyeah, Germans were slow to catch up to reality. I guess its all that reeducation the allies conducted after the war. And the gate-keeping role of the ZDJ and their media cronies.
I'm also hoping things normalize, but I'm not holding my breath. Liberals are a tough bunch and are not going to yield any institutions without a serious fight.
Robert Plomin of King's College London has been plugging away at the genetics of IQ for decades. It's been frustrating, but now he thinks he's getting somewhere.
ReplyDeleteSigh. Steve the reason no one of importance is dying to find out if intelligence arises genetically is quite simply: They would be the ones who would have to deal with the social fall out.
There is no benefit to this kind of research for society as a whole.
A lot of political correctness is collapsing in Germany today in favour for scientifical corretness.
ReplyDeleteGermans, unlike Americans, do believe in science; your native culture is actually good at it. Maybe there's hope.
There is a lot of hope, that this will change the thinking about the devastaing politics in the last decades concerning immigration policy, conservative values, german identity, falling birth rates of the autochthon population and of the right half of the bell curve.
Good luck with that. Though I suspect falling birth rates of the autochthon population have as much to do with economic factors as anything else; if the Frauen get too SWPL-ish, they're not going to feel like having kids.
Also be aware that this whole IQ thing may not work the way you hoped; once multiculturalists can't deny IQ, they may decide they want to import high-IQ minorities instead. And the guilty masses may go along with it. The Chinese are very disciplined and bookish; I actually suspect they would make pretty good Germans. Of course they may just want to stay put and help their country grow.
I wouldn't count on our "Occupation Media" reporting this find very much.
ReplyDeleteThilo Sarrazin for us is the german "Bell Curve Debate", that never has been taken place in Germany. (Even today there exists no translation of Herrnstein/Murray into german language.)
ReplyDeleteIt's not like there has really been a debate about Murray in America. I wouldn't even call it a discussion. On occasion his name is mentioned and he is disparaged. That's about it.
But anyway, the huge amount of support for Thilo in Germany is surprising and invigorating.
It is interesting that Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese have similar IQ but very different levels of religious observance.
ReplyDeleteKoreans are famous for including among their number some very devout Christians but Japanese and Chinese, not so much.
Korea in the past was responsible for a massive number of female babies sent to the USA for adoption.
I am not an expert on this but my understanding is that in some cases if a poor married woman in China gets pregnant, her husband will force her to get the fetus tested and abort the female fetuses and carry the male fetuses to term. On the other hand in Korea, if a poor married woman gets pregant her husband will force her to get the fetus tested and plan to put the fetus, if female, up for adoption but will make plans to keep it if it is male.
For some reason, married couples in Korea are reluctant to abort the females while married couples in China are ok with aborting the females.
I always wondered if it is just the poor married Christians in Korea that showed this reluctance or whether it is a Korean thing that extends to Christians and non Christians alike. Is it fair to say that Korea as a country is more religious than China as a country or is it just the Christian Koreans that are more religious
Steve,
ReplyDeleteI was bothered to find, on Half Sigma's blog, Yan Shen posting some negative and untrue things about this blog.
I don't want to dignify his comments by repeating them here, but let me say for the record that I think the treatment of the subject of asian IQ vs white IQ was handled very fairly here. It was pretty clearly established that Northeast Asians have IQ that is much much higher than whites and also that if you average the IQ of all other Asians you come to an average IQ way lower than the IQ of whites. In other words, asians that are not Northeast Asians have lower IQ than whites
And there is assortive mating going on. All over the USA you see super high IQ white males marrying females of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese ancestry while at the same time you see super low IQ white males marrying Southeast Asian females.
Have you guys followed the recent development of the Commonwealth Game to be held in New Delhi?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2010/09/21/pkg.india.bridge.collapse.cnn?iref=allsearch
It's fair to say these are not the most intelligent people as advertised.
The really sad and maddening thing is that this research has been largely ignored by the American media. Hopefully Nicholas Wade will do a piece on Plomin's research soon.
ReplyDeletethis would make a cool poster
ReplyDeletehttp://www.businessinsider.com/segregation-map-america-new-york-2010-9
Eyyyy, Deutschmeister, you've read pi-news.net right? I read it - at about two sentences per minute! See also alternativeright.com - not that Steve shouldn't also say a word (if he likes), it would be quite interesting.
ReplyDeleteDer Anderer, darueber Sie geschrieben haben, bleibt immer sehr interessant, doch ungluecklich ist jetzt langsam ein Zentrist geworden - ja, ganz vollig, nach meiner Meinung.
Here's to Sarrazin and the land of poets and thinkers!
Related to a past isteve post about this time last year. An excerpt from a November 2009 Economist article:
ReplyDelete"Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.
"About five years ago, genetics researchers became excited about new methods for “genome-wide association studies” (GWAS). We already knew from twin, family and adoption studies that all human traits are heritable: genetic differences explain much of the variation between individuals. We knew the genes were there; we just had to find them....
"Why the failure? The missing heritability may reflect limitations of DNA-chip design: GWAS methods so far focus on relatively common genetic variants in regions of DNA that code for proteins. They under-sample rare variants and DNA regions translated into non-coding RNA, which seems to orchestrate most organic development in vertebrates. Or it may be that thousands of small mutations disrupt body and brain in different ways in different populations. At worst, each human trait may depend on hundreds of thousands of genetic variants that add up through gene-expression patterns of mind-numbing complexity."
Would be interesting to know what is happening with GWAS now. There is a review of the progress as of March, 2010 here: http://www.nature.com/jhg/journal/v55/n4/full/jhg201019a.html , but there is no mention of race or intelligence in the article.
"Have you guys followed the recent development of the Commonwealth Game to be held in New Delhi?"
ReplyDeleteOn the surface it looks to be a shambles.
The games are due to start on Oct 3, but Aust, Can, UK and NZ have expressed misgivings about the unfinished site, citing health and safety as well as the usual security concerns.
Caused by corruption? Suspicion and lack of co-operation between the castes? Maybe India needs a teaspoon of totalitarianism?
Meanwhile China has announced that Guangzhou is ahead of time in completing preparations for the Asian Games..starting Nov.
Ingo Bading said
ReplyDelete>A lot of Germans are looking toward Sarrazin like a revolutioner, calling him something like "Che Sarrazin".<
Beware. Probably a different group of people (who are bad) is calling him "Hitler Sarrazin" for the identical reason!
>A lot of political correctness is collapsing in Germany today in favour for scientifical correctness.<
I hope. And thank you for the genuinely delightful term "scientifical correctness." I will never use a different term for this! Best wishes to you
"It was pretty clearly established that Northeast Asians have IQ that is much much higher than whites..."
ReplyDeleteFirstly, it depends on what "whites" you're talking about. The term is thrown around but never defined on this blog. Secondly, compared to Northwestern Europeans, Northeast Asians don't have a "much much higher" IQ. It's maybe two to five points higher.
"And there is assortive mating going on. All over the USA you see super high IQ white males marrying females of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese ancestry while at the same time you see super low IQ white males marrying Southeast Asian females."
Prove it. The hyperbole and unsubstantiated bullshit in the comments gets a bit overwhelming at times.
Speaking of IQ and genes, the following seems quite relevant. Anybody know what is going on with GWAS?
ReplyDelete"Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.
"About five years ago, genetics researchers became excited about new methods for “genome-wide association studies” (GWAS). We already knew from twin, family and adoption studies that all human traits are heritable: genetic differences explain much of the variation between individuals. We knew the genes were there; we just had to find them....
- The Economist, November 2010
Correction: The Economist article I excerpted above came out in 2009.
ReplyDeleteEyyyy, Deutschmeister, you've read pi-news.net right?
ReplyDeletepi-news.net is a very valuable site for Germans and German-speaking peoples (it's popular in Switzerland and Austria, I think). It could use a few more race realists though (discreet ones, of course, since race is an understandably delicate topic in Germany). The guys there are always blaming the behavior of Muslim immigrants on their religion, while ignoring the issue of ethnicity.
There is no benefit to this kind of research for society as a whole.
ReplyDeleteOn the contrary, it means we can save the commonweal billions of dollars trying to pound square pegs into round holes.
"this would make a cool poster
ReplyDeletehttp://www.businessinsider.com/segregation-map-america-new-york-2010-9"
Yeah, and the blue and orange dots are also a map of home foreclosures, which is why home values for whites and Asians aren't going to drop in the near term as badly as the bellyaching Mort Zuckerman predicts. Notice on these maps how sharp the lines of segregation are. America ain't no rainbow, folks, it's a filter bank spectrometer.
I wish they would hurry up and discover the genes already. The biological egalitarians and g-denialists have a great fondness for the argument that says because the genes for IQ have not been discovered, they thus do not exist, so it is absurd to propose that IQ has a genetic component. This is absurd of course, but if your arguments confirm a deeply ensconced orthodoxy they don't need to make sense at all. See, Lysenko or Stephen Jay Gould.
ReplyDeleteIs it possible to use the same within-family analyses to find out whether these gene combinations are functionally related to IQ and academic achivement? For instance, height is correlated with IQ, but it is not functional correlation but merely coincides with high IQ. Whether a trait is functional or not can be revealed using a within-family analysis of the trait in question. Will this work for genes?
http://paxbritania.blogspot.com/
Mr. Thursday,
ReplyDelete--As for the 10,000 hour thesis, well it is true that to be a genius you have to put in the time and effort necessary master your area, but that doesn't mean that an ordinary person who puts in the same amount of time and effort will become a genius. Likewise opportunity is necessary too, but isn't sufficient. In other words, genius requires natural talent plus hard work plus opportunity. This seems so obvious to me that I wonder why anyone would believe otherwise.
I've wondered the same, and come to the following conclusion: the people putting forth the 10k hours-makes-you-as-good-as-a-genius have let their envy get the better of them.
They would simply rather pretend that they could be a genius too, or could have been, if they'd just worked a bit harder, or had an extra year or so. It makes it easier for them to stomach the fact that they just aren't that much better than those around them, that what they do just isn't that important.
(I'd have posted this on MR, but I've been banned for having verbally rolled my eyes too often, saying Prof. Cowen was egotistical and unknowledgeable at the same time.)
But there are more than just the three traits you list. Genius also has this amazing feature of a kind of tenacity that is self feeding for perfection. The genius is self driven to practice to perfection because something in them doesn't feel the pain of disappointment but sees how close they are to success in a way us mortals do not. There are plenty more such minute traits that feed into it as well: just the right about of joy vs frustration, just the right about of risk taking vs tentativeness (too much and you are crazy but not genius), just the right social balance of not needing people but not alienating them, etc.
Further vindication of the genius of Ronald A. Fisher and Sewall Wright as well ( The Einstein and Bohr of 20th century genetics ). When you think about it, it makes logical sense, big mutations are rare, and beneficial big mutations are rarer still. It would be hard to see much evolution going on if that was all that natural selection had to operate on. On a side note, the drip-drip of genetics findings is making Stephen Jay Gould's leftist tinged biology look more and more irrelevant every passing year.
ReplyDeleteSo genetic engineering is not likely to yield IQ improvement any time in the foreseeable future??
ReplyDeleteI think, "green mamba" is making an important point:
ReplyDelete"pi-news.net is a very valuable site for Germans and German-speaking peoples (...). It could use a few more race realists though (...). The guys there are always blaming the behavior of Muslim immigrants on their religion, while ignoring the issue of ethnicity."
Everywhere there is too much ideology and not enough pure science.
And this is, I think, because of the fear of the monotheistic lobbies everywhere, that on the bottom of science there will not be found monotheism but atheism or paganism.
- Some additional remarks:
The famous german philosopher Norbert Bolz is speaking about a "sign of history" while looking at the Sarrazin debate in Germany.
The famous german journalist Frank Schirrmacher (FAZ, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) is denouncing Sarrazin having a "biologistically" worldview but at the same time he gives space in his newspaper for the german intelligence researchers Detlef Rost and Heiner Rindermann saying, that Sarrazin is scientifically not false but right.
And Schirrmacher expresses his angryness about the ignorance of the german chancellor and the political class, trying to avoid the debate about a political book of which is saled now more than 600.000 pieces in Germany.
The famous german brain researcher Gerhard Roth also said good things about the heritability of intelligence on the line of Detlef Rost.
So there is a lot going on today. In the future no one can speak about all this themes without referring to Sarrazin and hin "genetic determnism".
By the way: Culture is not only determined by intelligence genes, but by serotonin transporter genes also (see for example "Culture–gene coevolution of individualism–collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene").
So I think there exists now good arguments to say that for the individualistic and innovative western culture it is not good to accumulate "asian" serotonin transporter genes by importing high-IQ-minorities.
There is only the need of having fun to have a lot of children by the autochthon population with good intelligence.
Intelligence doesn't come from the genes or from anything physical! It comes from the spirit world, obviously!
ReplyDelete(sarcasm off)
There is a long way to go, but this is interesting research.