I, too, have applied for, and then had revoked, access to dbGaP. In my case, I worked for a corporation that wanted to simplify the hosting of this data to appropriately credentialed researchers with the goal of making genomics look more like modern bigtech data processing.
We made friends with the various program managers, did all the necessary due diligence, applied, got approved, downloading hundreds of terabytes of data, and then received a stern note from the leadership at NIH that we had to delete everything. Apparently, some Very Important People at NCBI didn't like Google and really didn't like the idea that we'd have a copy of all this data, even though the intent (I can say authoritatively since I was the founder of the project) was to accelerate scientific research.
It's now hosted on AWS as a public/private dataset.
I try to avoid human genomics or really any controlled-access dataset now. The total value in the data is much smaller than generally claimed, and entrenched interests go out of their way to gatekeep and sort of maintain an "artisanal, bespoke" approach to data processing.
Now, if you want to use this data to make strong conclusions about the relationship between genotypes and human intelligence: best of luck to you, as you'll be grabbing the electrified third rail of American politics and science. Nearly every foray into this area generates controversy, and even intelligent, good-faith researchers end up in a trap of "appearing to be racist, or sexist". With career ending consequences.
We had a legitimate research use for the data (hosting it for scientists) and it wasn't part of any consumer products. Anyway, I don't work there any more and part of that is I realized that Google can't do research on these sorts of things without getting involved in too much politics.
This actually makes me feel more confident in the system. I as an average citizen, would prefer if an advertising company did not have access to a giant database of genetic information. (I also don’t want Bezos to have access either, for what it’s worth).
Imagine finding a correlation between specific genes and specific spending habits.
Have Alphabet spin up a company that does what 23andMe does, offer a cooler, trendier version of the competition to entice adoption, then in the fine print say they’ll mine the data they find in your genes.
Those resulting ads are gonna get ugly, quick.
Edit: Although, in the context of medicine, it would be pretty cool if you can find trends in medicinal health that tend to be common with individuals like yourself, and give you warnings should conditions are more likely to arise. I imagine that would involve adding in a different dataset to compliment understanding characteristics of your DNA
There's a ton of research on consumption patterns of those experiencing symptoms of mental illness, and genes can be good indications of predispositions for those illnesses. There's also research on how social media platforms can induce symptoms of mental illness by tweaking the algorithm that shows content to users.
Not only could platforms use that research to optimize engagement/conversions/etc of those with genetic likelihoods of experiencing such symptoms, but unscrupulous platforms can use those genetic predispositions to algorithmically target and induce symptoms of mental illness in the vulnerable. If a platform knows that a user has a predisposition for overeating or depression, they can then try to lead that user into patterns that will make them sick, with the intention of getting them to engage in the desired behavior of clicking, buying, etc.
Sure, if a Google researcher applies for and gets access to dbGaP through NCBI, they will get a secret key to decrypt the private parts of the data. But that wouldn't make any sense since this is many many terabytes of data and typically you'd want to convert it to a format that is optimized for data processing.
But that wasn't the point. The point was to have copies of the data preloaded into Google Cloud, preformatted for high performance data processing by a wide range of researchers. One of the highlights of my career was working directly with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat on mapreduces that turned FASTQ and BAM files into sstables.
Never mind that governments are the ones who used similar data sets to murder their own citizens by the millions within living memory. The important thing is that we keep it out of Google's hands!
I, and everyone else, get a say in what the government does. It's one of the only institutions that I get a say in, and one of the only institutions that people can audit.
I am not a Google board member, I have no say in what they do. The government does, though, in a limited fashion.
Please don't mistake my desire for Google not to have data with the implicit approval of such datasets existing in the first place.
Also, please remember the millions of people that were starved, enslaved and murdered by the East India Company.
Thanks for your work, even if it got shut down. Good thing the price of gene sequencing continues to fall - eventualy a responsible and open group of academics will start a more accessible database. Illumina's new machine is reportedly $200 a person.[0] At this price 1 million entries in the dataset would cost two hundred million. GWAS starts being useful at a few hundred thousand entries. I honestly don't think 200 m is so much in the grand scheme, given that biotech companies are valued in the tens of billions. The price will also only continue to fall. Science doesn't acquiesce to ideology - it's the other way around.
GWAS is a very limited technique. Most people in genomics still have very simplified models of how complex organismal phenotypes are formed. My goal was to build an embedding between genotype and phenotype that had predictive and generative abilities. Based on everything I've seen, a few tens of millions of genomes for a few hundred highly specific molecular phenotypes is definitely doable if you had all the world's genomics data at your fingertips.
These are controlled access datasets for a reason- although anonymized, they really do contain a fair amount of PII and NCBI is exceptionally concerned about the potential for abuse. Generally, in terms of weighing the balance between this being "publicly funded, therefore publically accessible" and "publicly funded, available to credentialled researchers through an application process", the NIH has concluded that yes, they can limit access to the data.
For what it's worth I've mentioned elsewhere I no longer work directly with human genomics data because it's such a political hot potato you can't really do any good research.
When I was in university, academics of every discipline made it clear to me: controversial research does not get published. Donors have huge sway over the university, and if the university fears controversial research will chill donors they will intervene. This is on top of other mechanisms like foreign censors (one academic had a colleague who's book was banned in much of South Asia), and good o'l fashioned twitter mobs.
Tenure, despite it's elitism and problems of fostering a gerontocracy, is one of the few mechanisms that helps people explore controversial topics. But even then, finding can be cut and labs shut down even if the tenured professor is not fired.
>Note that none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences. Apparently, NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.
For those who don't click the link. This is getting to really dangerous territory. Political correctness wants to remove genetics altogether from the study of the human condition. Blank-slate cultists are scared of what research will find.
> Blank-slate cultists are scared of what research will find.
The folks who have objections to this sort of research aren't actually existentialists when you push them even a tiny bit on their beliefs. The tabula rasa is just used as a rhetorical tool to deflect from criticism with regards to certain uncomfortable genetic questions.
It's a philosophy of convenience, easily discarded when one needs to argue in favor of, for instance, certain forms of equity.
You should take seriously that a vast amount of research of this kind is pseudoscience, and that there isn't much science that can be done from it.
All "heritability" research is just an analysis of correlations between genes and expressed behaviour. On these grounds a scottish accent is highly heritable, since the accent correlates extremely highly with some genes.
We do not have the means to create new human beings with different genetic profiles and observe them accross many environments, as they develop, to determine if "somehow" a gene causes anything so macroscopic like "intelligence".
So, quite literally: we cannot do science. We cannot create experiments to test hypotheses.
Genes have no plausible mechanism to "cause" intelligence. If they play a significant role, it is a very large number of genes building tissues which are completely opaque (brains, etc.) whose interactions with the environment are completely opaque.
Heritability research, and "psych-genetic research" of this kind is, necessarily, pseudoscience. It's adhearents are the poorest statistians and have the least understanding of the scientific method you could hope for.
We have no scientific theory of intelligence which provides causal variables that we can experiment with; we have no theory of biological mechanism, likewise; we have no theory of genetic mechanism --- all we have are some aging loons with stats software content to put iq-test-scores (ie., people competing patterns of shapes...) and Genes into it.
Whatever can be found by these loons isn't worth a scientist finding. "Data" isnt innocent, it is collected and used for a reason; and pseudoscience isnt innocent.
Correlating genes with ESP ability is likewise nonesense, and that has as much scientific merit.
I think this post reveals a lot of ignorance in how scientists study heritability.
To give a simple example, one of the best tools is comparing identical twins to non-identical ones. If the correlation between the fraternal twins is substantially less than the correlation between the identical twins then we can know a genetic factor us in play.
Your argument is also too general in that it labels all observational science as pseudoscience. Is astronomy pseudoscience? You don't need to be able to manipulate the environment to do science, just have a hypothesis and a way I'd getting new observations that would probe/disprove the hypothesis.
I'm very well aware of how "heritability" is studied. It is defined to be a correlation, so twin studies do not estimate heritability. They attempt to estimate how much heritability is explained by gene expression being the cause of the relevant behaviour.
Twin studies assume a model of environmental variation which cannot be evidenced, because the relevant target of study (a human being in its environment) cannot be experimented on to evidence anything. Twin studies are not RCTs (which are themselves the minimum an experiment needs to be to count as science).
Indeed, the assumed model of the interaction between genes and the environment is *plainly false* (namely, that "equality" between environments exists and that it has linear non-feedback, non-cyclical effects).
Twin studies on star signs would likewise produce as compelling evidence that star signs cause personality. (Can you see why that would be?)
Science requires such experiments take place. No amount of post-hoc analysis of correlation can produce a causal explanation. One must control causes to do so.
Hence, much of this abuse of statistics is unreporducible pseudoscience; it is well known to be outside these fields by anyone with any credible understanding of statistics.
Every chemist will defend physics; and every chemist, biology. And every biologist neuroscience.
Can you cite me anythihg other than the abject horror of real scientists outside these fields on reading their reports?
I'm sorry to break the news: this is peudoscience in the tradiiton of pseudoscience which was invented by psychology's repurposing of statistics for post-hoc analysis of correlation on human data (ie., the most complex systems known to exist) which fails even basic tests of scientific credibility.
Complex systems resist study by the use of the scientific method, and require the best minds in modelling and statistics to even produce "rule of thumb" models (eg., consider the climate).
What we have in heritability, psychometric, etc. research is loons studying the climate (ie., analogously, humans) by putting thermometer readings into GUI stats software and publishing the results.
They're fools. Neo-homeopaths, whose lab coat is "statistics"/.
That post cements that you do not understand the fundamentals of the scientific method or how we do scientific analysis. E.g. that we assume "that "equality" between environments exists"
You're very confused about how a lot of things work on fairly fundamental levels which would take hours to disentangle, so all I can do is recommend learning more on philosophy of science and read some more papers on heritability. Maybe this one picked not entirely at random: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Holland-2/publica...
I am presently researching a PhD in the philosophy of science and causal analysis; I have two degrees in physics, and I have spend the last nearly 10 years with major lead researchers and data scientists across many industries.
My opinions here are a summary of a talk I recently delivered at a conference on issues applying "ordinary statistical methods" to complex systems, esp. those with profound hysteresis, such as people. But likewise, my opinions arent rare amongst people with similar experience to me: psychmetrics, psychology, heritability research, and so on -- are widely regarded amongst my peers as pseudoscience.
Very refreshing to see someone actually providing a link for further reading. This raises the level of discourse on HN.
His argument as I understand it, is that the MZ twins have a different environment in ways such as being treated as more similar by their parents. This means that high similarity in one respect (such as appearance or temperament) can contaminate the natural experiment by making people assume they are more similar in another respect (such as intelligence or learning style) and treating them the same where that second trait is relevant, thus making the second trait more highly correlated than they would be by genes alone (e.g. you assume they're equally intelligent and thus give them the same education).
This has some merit but is quite far from a knock-down argument.
My previous talks with a professor studying genetics in Oxford has given me the impression that heritability is settled science and theres a huge volume of papers in the area, so I'm not going to change my mind based on an anonymous comment and a paper by a non-academic with an axe to grind without first going back and consulting with her.
Given your statements here I am quite confused as to how you can have a degree in physics while dismissing science where you can't make interventions... did you study astronomy at all in your degree?
I'm also confused as to how you state that genes do not cause intelligence, do you think a mouse is less intelligent than a human due to its lack of soul or something?
I dont have that high an opinion of astronomy, but my issue is what counts as an explanation (a model with causal variables), and what counts as an experiment (setting the value, etc.) -- astronomy can often pass these tests on the underlying models.. and are usually good at reporting the confidence intervals as a appropriate.
My issue with something like a human being is that the state space is going to be non-linear, in the sense that suppose we have an explanatory model of the human in their environment, state = h(x_env, x_body, t, ...)
This makes controlling, really in any sense, those variables is going to be nearly impossible. So close values in `x` space, eg., two environments that look nearly-identical, are going to have radically different values in state space.
Psychologists, using linear "mereological intuitions" based on classical physics, will deny this. A physicist however, would not make this mistake. In cases of hysteresis and complexity, we're well-aware tiny variations in an environment can produce radically different paths thru' state space.
(And I think people are more complex than magnets!).
The fundamental issue with the field of studying human behaviour with scientific methods, is that (imv), we dont have scientific methods. We shouldn't expect science to provide us a method which works in every env.
I have, perhaps, high standards on what counts as science; it's esteem imv comes from disciplines that can meet those standards. Everyone else is rent-seeking.
----
Edit:
> genes do not cause intelligence
If there's an infinite number of possible people P, our genes make a subset of those impossible because they're not "biologically possible".
There is a narrow sense of "cause" which therefore says that genes play a causal role.
I was taking a more robust sense, in which (one plausible view), is that the set of effects we call "intelligence" are gounded in the body, but a cause of the environment.
Splitting these issues out is very subtle however.
One simple way of making this clear: most possible bodies arent intelligent; they dont speak; they dont think; etc. And all those are biologically possible.
Just as genes dont cause English speaking, they dont "obviously" cause intelligence. Most biologically possible people are basically unable to think, never having been developed in a social environment.
Very cool! Reminds me of the Thompson compiler hack.
Not only they tell us genetics doesn't exist, but we can't say it's shitty science because they're the ones telling us what's shitty science and what's not! Brilliant!
Sorry I can understand why they want to stop this. It would likely be used by MAGA and similar organizations to justify a lot of what I see as coming down the road from that particular political faction to justify policies aimed towards minorities and women.
Plausible, just as is the hypothesis that leftists in support of the “anti-racist”
doctrine are blocking this research because they want to continue to explain away all differences in outcome to “structural racism.”
Aside that the article said that "none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences", so what?
It's not as if the research caused these people to have the views they have; they use it as a post-hoc justification. And more importantly it's not as if they can't do their own research, even if it's bad quality (or even fake). By remaining intentionally ignorant yourself you won't have a strong answer, and let the "MAGA and similar organisations" take the initiative and control the debate.
Besides, it's not as if reality is going to change just because we don't research it, and if we understand reality better we can maybe do better by everyone.
At that point they are no longer get to call themselves scientists. A scientist use the scientific method to get at truth. They don't get to hold back research because it might help a political course they don't like.
It's willfully naive to believe that a bad actor will feel any impact from being called "not a scientist". Plenty of people will call a eugenicist a scientist because it suits their narrative.
If it is used by such people, what of it? Should we stifle research if it proves that claims of disreputable individuals were true all along? Any scientist worth his salt should only be interested in the pursuit of truth. The Noble Lie is never an answer.
>It would likely be used by MAGA and similar organizations to justify a lot of what I see as coming down the road from that particular political faction to justify policies aimed towards minorities and women.
Given that SO many women and minorities actively support and vote for these groups and candidates, and this is a democratic system, is this really such a bad thing in this case?
In short, if groups of people actively and happily vote against their own best interests, and to keep themselves oppressed, is it wrong for them to be oppressed? Or, in this case, is democracy even a system we should be upholding? And if not, what is the alternative? A system where a group of unelected, unaccountable elites run society because they know what's best? I honestly don't have the answer here.
I don't believe the meaning is unclear. The OP asserts that a large number of minority voters and women voted republican in the last two trump elections. Do you take issue with the premise? Do you consider the finding not to be meaningful?
FWIW as far as I can tell, the OP is correct in that 55% of white women, 36% of hispanic men, and 30% of hispanic women voted for trump. It was also telling that in the 2020 election support for the republican party from all minority groups increased by a few percentage points. I think that counts as "SO many". It's not a majority, but I don't think the OP claimed that.
Only counting white women is misleading but I can see the point there. But 36% is definitely not "SO many": it doesn't win an election of two parties, and that was the whole premise of GP.
>Do you take issue with the premise? Do you consider the finding not to be meaningful?
Just wanted some elaboration. It's a bold claim given with no data.
I never claimed that "SO many" equaled a majority. 36% is more than one-third, which seems like a lot of people to me, and not really that far from a majority; it doesn't take that much to get (1/2 - 1/3) (one-sixth) to change their minds.
"SO many," if defined as less than 50%, is irrelivant given a democratic sysyem with only two parties. Therefore "SO many" must refer to more than 50%.
36% knowingly voting for a known fascist and attempted insurrectionist is pretty scary, no matter how you slice or pendanticize it. What else do they support, fascists tend to turn to violence when they can't win elections.
Yep, this is exactly my point. But any time I talk to American liberals, they just hand-wave it away because that group of people is less than 50%. "They're not a majority of the population, so they're nothing to worry about!!" Talk about the 2016 and 2020 elections and American liberals will claim that Trump voters were a tiny, tiny minority (rather than less than 2% difference as it was in reality).
Hitler was elected by a minority of the population, but American liberals seem to have forgotten that. It's becoming easy to see how leaders like Hitler come into power. If Trump had been much more competent and destructive than he really was, the US would be really screwed right now, while American liberals would still be sitting around whining about how "gerrymandering" got him elected by a tiny, tiny, tiny minority. (Yes, I know gerrymandering only affects elections for the House members. American liberals don't: they routinely blame gerrymandering for governor's elections and Senatorial elections.)
I feel like I always have this argument with American liberals: in your mind, a minority of voters can simply be ignored, even if they're 49.9% of the vote, because "there's only 2 parties so those voters don't matter". And then when things change slightly, you get a fascist elected into power and you're shocked because you preferred to ignore those voters.
30% of a large population group is a very large number! It's just US first-past-the-post politics that somehow convinces people that anything less that 49.9% is somehow insignificant, and 50.1% is somehow a vast majority (I exaggerate, but you get my point).
Right, so what's the alternative? If you support democracy, then you must therefore support the right of people to vote for fascism. If you don't support the rise of fascism, or don't think people should be allowed to vote for fascism, then you're rejecting democracy, and therefore supporting authoritarianism (which is what fascism turns into).
The disconnect is that you can limit the range of what democracy permits without being anti democracy.
If we're voting on dinner, and I say I'm not going to eat at any restaurant with an F health inspector rating, we can still vote.
Democracy always has to accept that we must set limits on choice. I can't vote for a foreign national to be our president. But honestly, I'm not that broken up about that limit. Just like I wouldn't be that broken up about limiting the ability to elect fascists.
>Democracy always has to accept that we must set limits on choice.
Ok, and who sets those limits? If an unelected group sets the limits, then what you have is not a democratic system at all; it's more like a 1-party state where you can vote who whomever you want, as long as The Party has approved them.
Yes, limiting the available options is part of the political elite’s job. But there are practical constraints on what’s possible. Skewing the political options too far from what the voting public wants leads to the rise of populist demagogues in the short term and revolution in the long term. Elites cannot just impose their narrow ideological commitments on a populace that largely rejects them.
That doesn't replicate the conditions of national elections which are monopolistic and repeated. You can't opt to participate in a different group and you have to play all your games with the same rules - if you refuse to eat at F-grade restaurants you may end up starving.
In "real" elections you end up without the ability to set those convenient limits consistently or usefully.
And "politics" is the conflict over groups fighting for power to set these limits. There's no escape from the friend/enemy distinction. At some point there will be irreconcilable disagreements and opposing factions. Who has power to set the terms of political discourse is what all politics is.
Did you even read my comment? Why does discussing intelligence drop reading comprehension on HN by 50%?
>Note that none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences. Apparently, NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.
I think what the author sneakily avoids is that what is being withheld is socio-behavioral measurements made along with the genetic samples. And the reason is that people who didn't actually gather data themselves are ignorant of the shortcomings of the measurements. This includes both "intelligence" testing and measuring/assigning "race". As the parent of a phenotypically "white" child and "black" child (who share both parents, to be clear) this later point is really relevant. It's possible that people can study these things carefully, but an obvious precursor is understanding that if someone doubts their dataset is appropriate for something, they probably have good reasons. Bias in deep learning models is a classic case of this....
Remember the uproar when the George W. Bush admin banned research in stem cells on religious grounds? All the uproar from the left and the pledges of enlightened EU countries to step in to support the freedom of scientific inquiry? Whatever happened to all these folks?
All these scientific datasets gathered with taxpayers money should be made public. If people end up discovering "dangerous" patterns then well... so it's scientific progress. Sometimes they don't conform to our preferred bias.
Could an entity with sufficient resources just FOIA the data? It does not appear to fall into any of the FOIA exemptions or exclusions. The closest would be #6, which protects information that would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. But since researchers are accessing this data, shouldn't it already be very carefully anonymized?
My concern would be a Gish Gallop[1] if anyone in the public could claim to use this data for their purposes. But this is less of a concern with established researchers who have a reputation to consider.
The problem is that while the genomic data is fine, the attached metadata regarding "race", "intelligence", etc. is of questionable and deeply biased origin. GIGO.
By providing blocks on certain types of research which are known to be flawed because they try to make the garbage metadata meaningful…some of the worst of the bad science performed over the last 200 years gets eliminated. Really, some of the ideas that exist that form the basis of IQ &c. aren’t much better than phrenology.
The quality of the data is important in every research field and it is a factor widely and openly discussed whenever a new paper is out. We can't even start having a conversation over it if such datasets are not easily available.
There are many helpful questions that can be answered with imperfect data.
What if you wanted to search populations with a high concentration of strongly retarded children to look for epidemics of birth defects, and then compare areas by race to see if it looked like there is any unexpected bias?
A research block would stop this and other useful question from being answered. The data would easily suffice, whatever its defects, because you wouldn't need high-resolution IQ measurements, only enough to detect severe defects and you wouldn't need genetically-accurate racial identification, only a rough guess because that's what visible minority means.
But because a bunch of pearl-clutchers are afraid of MAGAites the researcher trying to find and fix other cities like Flint Michigan would instead of demonized, denied tenure, and hounded out of academia.
I hate this stuff, but I also understand it. The human race has continuously proven itself too immature to deal rationally with the true nature of human biological diversity. Give us any axis on which we can sort ourselves and pretty soon we're using it to play ape status games or worse.
We are not truly intelligent beings yet, just a clever neocortex grafted clumsily onto an animal. That animal happens to have a lot of instincts around tribal in-group/out-group behavior that immediately kick in when differences are discussed.
My personal opinion is that things like genetic differences in ability or gender developmental stuff should be studied but it should be discussed in the most obtuse and utterly alien academic jargon possible for an effect bordering on encryption. It should be impossible to quote such research in any way that would be comprehensible to someone outside the field, making it impossible to cite it directly in support of popular political arguments.
Or maybe gate it off entirely. Maybe we should not publish openly about human genetic or gender differences for the same reason we do not publish precise schematics for atomic weapons or detailed how-to documents on how to create a doomsday plague with a mail order CRISPR kit. That reason being: some of us will use such knowledge to kill each other.
What I really hate is that humanity can't handle understanding itself.
This doesn't do anything to dissuade people from belief in racist ideas of genetic intelligence, or whatever else. Why are scientists gating off research and data, if they're so confident that the problematic conclusions are incorrect? Because the problematic conclusions are correct, the racist will say. Scientists wouldn't lock away data that disproved racist theories of intelligence, would they?
It's a fallacious argument, but one that will probably work on a lot of people.
Ultimately, it’s almost impossible to disentangle systemic environmental effects from this sort of dataset.
That is to say, centuries of systemic oppression and suppression, in addition to things like redlining and ensuring that waste dumps &c. are closest to minority communities tends to result in environmental effects being confused with genetic effects.
Will growing up near a supermax site with less money because the industries have moved away reduce one’s chances for improvement and one’s measurable IQ? Yup. Do people of color live close to such sites at much greater rates than whites? Yup.
Actually, studying the genetic aspect will reduce this bias, as research should find the same porportion of genes involved in intelligence (or some equivilant) in both groups.
The double helix was found in 1953. Modern genetics is very new. You can't compare it to "science" done 200 years ago. Also eugenics is not 200 years old (not that you explicitly said otherwise). Studying genetics directly solves the nature vs nurture debate: not immediately but over time as more and more of the brain will be solved, until you can get tested for your inherent ability with high accuracy.
Genomic studies are very new, yes. Modern understanding of genetics is around 184 years old (Mendel's enumeration), but trait inheritance has been understood non-scientifically by farmers for as long as livestock. However, scientific and pseudo-scientific approaches to "race" and "race mixing" has been around in the Americas since the 1600s (the first "miscegenation" laws).
I will also state outright that genomic studies will not solve the nature vs nurture debate, because of epigenetic factors (itself a newer concept). Children whose mothers are stressed in the first two years of their life get different genetic expressions during maturation because of the exposure to more stress hormones than others. Children who do not receive a "normal" amount of attention do not themselves learn to pay attention to others as much. (This last is a fairly plausible hypothesis for the development of ADHD proffered by Gabor Maté.)
>Modern understanding of genetics is around 184 years old (Mendel's enumeration)
I would say observation rather than understanding. In my opionion if you can't say what genes are then you can't say you understand it. That's a very recent development.
>genomic studies will not solve the nature vs nurture debate, because of epigenetic factors
That needs to be studied too. But much "epigenetic" factors still require understanding the genome anyway, such as non coding RNA and histone modification. The first case is just a different use of DNA (ei. not for creating protiens) and the second is itself defined by protiens indirectly. The only exception I know is DNA methylation which is "truly" epigenetic in that it is not (or is only weakly) directed by the genome. (There can be more such genome-independant factors, I'm not sure.) So yes, understanding the genome does (mostly) settle the nature vs nurture debate.
>Children whose mothers are stressed in the first two years of their life get different genetic expressions during maturation because of the exposure to more stress hormones than others. Children who do not receive a "normal" amount of attention do not themselves learn to pay attention to others as much. (This last is a fairly plausible hypothesis for the development of ADHD proffered by Gabor Maté.)
These are examples of nurture. I'm not really sure what point you are making here. Gene expression is dependant on enviromental factors? That's been known for a while. Seems irrelivant to the discussion. With regard to my "inherent ability" comment, that (obviously) doesn't take the enviroment into account. For a simple example, if one's inherent ability for strength building is high, but he becomes paralyzed, he will not do well in sports.
(epigenetic factors are by definition heritable, in case that's what you meant?)
Right, but it's better to be able to point to the data set and explain why its entanglements with wealth, geography, culture, etc. Fundamentally, hiding data doesn't just hinder people trying to use it to make racist claims. It's also depriving people of the ability to disprove those claims by pointing out how interconnected that data is with other factors. And so in the end, it ends up making it easier for the racist claims to go unrefuted.
What you say above is only true of racial differences, which are honestly less interesting than the differences between families and regions. And we may be able to untangle things there...
>Maybe we should not publish openly about human genetic or gender differences for the same reason we do not publish precise schematics for atomic weapons or detailed how-to documents on how to create a doomsday plague with a mail order CRISPR kit. That reason being: some of us will use such knowledge to kill each other.
I've sometimes wondered if the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that the knowledge to destroy the entire population became available to too many individuals in those societies.
For instance, suppose some new physics were discovered and technology developed so that it was possible for an average-intelligence person to build a true earth-destroying doomsday bomb in his basement. It would only take one crazy person to eliminate humanity. Even more likely is the ability to genetically engineer a doomsday virus; just look how bad COVID-19 was. If some angry teenager could make something far worse, we're doomed as a species, or at least as a civilization.
The scientists were the ones leading eugenics the last time around. Stop pretending that there's a better class of people that are the only ones trusted with certain knowledge.
I'm not an accredited scientist, and neither are 99% of people in this forum. You think it's best if certain truths about the world are intentionally kept from us by people who chose different career paths?
Information will always be distorted and abused but it's much easier to do that when only certain people are allowed to have access to that information.
Sure, we're all dumb apes, but putting on a lab coat doesn't change that fact.
Kind of defeats the purpose of studying it doesn't it? Presumably we do research to inform decision, usually about social policy. Social policy is, ostensibly, dictated by voters in democratic societies.
Might as well not do the research, and I don't mean that cynically. It might genuinely be for the best.
Even if you were to do that, the fact that the research is hidden in the first place is enough alone to say "they are keeping the truth from us" and make our long youtube vids that tell you the Real Truth.
There is a depressing # of voices here in this discussion which argue that ignorance is better than search for, however imperfect and fractional, knowledge, because humans (always some other humans) aren't capable of handling the truth.
I will try to argue against them from a pragmatic point of view.
The US sure is the top dog in scientific research, but far from the only dog. New competition has arisen, mostly Asian countries that do not care too much about historical Western traumas and sensibilities. The US is no more capable of blocking certain research worldwide that the Pope was, back in the Early Modern Era.
By blocking intelligence research in the US, the US is basically ceding the ground to those competing countries on ideological grounds. As a result, they will get ahead and possibly discover new facts.
(At this point, too many smart readers will wave the suggestion away with a bland "Intelligence is too complicated to be ever really understood." Sorry, I don't believe that. Intelligence is surely complicated, but so was atom splitting. It would be strange if there were never any results in the field, regardless of work spent.)
Which means that a generation or two down the road, strategic adversaries may have tech to alter intelligence and other mental traits, because they will know what to edit and how. Perhaps not that much, but who knows how genetic and epigenetic manipulation in human beings is going to look like in 2070.
Such an ability may prove even more world-changing than the atomic bomb, and the US is shooting itself in the foot by making sure that it won't be able to compete on the field early.
> There is a depressing # of voices here in this discussion which argue that ignorance is better than search for, however imperfect and fractional, knowledge
You are being too generous. They argue for ignorance now, only because they are forced to by the starkness of the "do or do not" research question. Otherwise they would confidently claim every notion they dislike has been widely debunked (and give examples of 19th century studies getting debunked, while avoiding mention of any post-1950s research). When pressed, they would retreat to "it's complicated", and finally to "so what/you shouldn't care anyway" [1].
And when the discussion is over, they will immediately forget it, and revert to using an absolutist blank slatist assumption (with zero basis in research) to legitimize their politics, and deconstruct [2] their opponent's.
[1] "I don't have a dog. And if I had a dog, it doesn't bite. And if I had a dog and it did bite, it didn't bite you. And if I had a dog and it did bite, and it bit you, then you provoked the dog."
[2] Not just delegitimize, but deconstruct, i.e. "not only should you not care about those things, those things don't even exist, they are mere social constructs with no biological basis"
> "I don't have a dog. And if I had a dog, it doesn't bite. And if I had a dog and it did bite, it didn't bite you. And if I had a dog and it did bite, and it bit you, then you provoked the dog."
The Cold War didn’t become a Nuclear War because both powers realized in some capacity that an arms race spurred by this very assumption that the other is creating ever more advanced technology which could threaten one’s power would ultimately just result in each country annihilating the other in the name of self defense/preserving power/stability/“peace”.
Who benefits from those “advances” in technology in that case?
To argue that dangerous/unethical/X research must be done just because a potential adversary is also doing that research is what armed the world with the nuclear option in the first place. Sure, nuclear weapons would likely have been theoretically discovered anyways, but did they need to be actually built? Did we need to execute on actually building and using nuclear weapons to understand practical use cases for nuclear energy?
Because I am certain that powers today in an arms race with each other could and would, by this logic, discover and unleash entirely new man-made horrors upon this world that make nuclear weapons look elementary, if this is the path we’re going to go down.
Just because some people choose to study eugenics does not mean we all have to (or should).
Your argument only works if you consider eugenics to be inherently unethical, which isn't necessarily true.
Previous attempts such as exterminating anyone with flawed genes was certainly unethical, but that was just an example of people drunk on power exercising it.
The benefits from ethical eugenic research would be to the whole society. You'd get less genetic illnesses, improved metabolisms, better eyesight etc. In theory it's basically just improving the odds of rolling good genetics for everyone.
It's certainly not going to be easy however, and to be frank: I doubt any of us will be alive by the time the research would bear fruits.
> Previous attempts such as exterminating anyone with flawed genes was certainly unethical, but that was just an example of people drunk on power exercising it.
IMO it really depends on how you're doing the extermination. Killing adults/children with the relevant genes is of course hilariously unethical. Killing fetuses with the same genes is very debatably unethical - as in, a lot of people will very strongly say it's unethical, but other societies will do so at >90% rates (see Down's in Iceland as an example).
I find it hard to think of a way in which editing an individual embryo to change the relevant genes is unethical besides the "changing anything is evil eugenics" objection.
> The Cold War didn’t become a Nuclear War because both powers realized in some capacity that an arms race spurred by this very assumption that the other is creating ever more advanced technology which could threaten one’s power would ultimately just result in each country annihilating the other in the name of self defense/preserving power/stability/“peace”.
I think the Cold War stayed cold because the potential downside of using weapons outweighed the potential benefits—-the use of a single nuke could only bring marginal benefits, but at the risk of Armageddon.
> To argue that dangerous/unethical/X research must be done just because a potential adversary is also doing that research is what armed the world with the nuclear option in the first place.
What was the alternative? To bury our heads in the sand and hope that the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets were too scrupulous to pursue a strategic advantage? C’mon.
Unilateral disarmament isn’t moral. It’s naive and dangerous.
It’s strange to see this structure of argument: it effectively admits that we ought to do anything that a less scrupulous person or country would do, because (tacitly) we have more scruples. That’s never made any sense to me.
More seriously, it suggests that we ought to pursue any unethical domain so long as our perceived competitors will. Should the US have sunk billions into Lysenkoism[1] because the Soviets did, or phlogiston[2] research because there’s an off chance we’ve actually been wrong for the last 200 years?
In other words: this requires us to add a perverted normative glance to science, the kind you seem keen to avoid in the first place. Is it ideal that Americans get squeamish whenever intelligence is brought up? No. But doing something that’s largely failed to meet scientific standards just because another big country might do it doesn’t pass the smell test either.
> Is it ideal that Americans get squeamish whenever intelligence is brought up?
But they don't get squeamish. They confidently claim there is no basis for intelligence (or personality in general) in genetics [1,2], then use any differences in behavior or outcomes as evidence of racism.
[1] I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. ― Stephen Jay Gould
[2] In fact, you did so in your very post, comparing the link between genes and intelligence to Lysenkoism or Phlogiston.
I don't know if you could have picked a worse quote to back up your point than footnote #1.
While it is likely true [0,1] that the mean/median of one group is more genetically intelligent-capable than the mean/median of a different group, the variance is going to make it so that there are extremely intelligent outliers in both groups. And if we're focused on intelligence and its products, the potential of those outliers being wasted due to slavery/poverty/racism/etc is the travesty being pointed out by the quote.
[0] Intelligence capability obviously relies on genetics. In the most obvious way, the genes of ursa americana result in a much less capable brain than the genes of homo sapiens. So, unless maximum "intelligence-capability" is the thing most strongly selected for (doubtful), genes that cause higher intelligence capability are going to be correlated with other genes that developed at the same time. But actually measuring that, in some objective way? I'd say you're better off focusing on the other end of trying to define what "intelligence" even is, at the computational level, and then the organizational level, before you can even think about judging the contributions of the biological substrate level.
[1] The reason this is generally ignored or even rejected is that it's an utter red herring. At most you can say it influences individual outcomes by a tiny bit, while being overwhelmingly swamped by the larger issues of culture, nurture, environment, access to resources, and overarching personality. Meanwhile, less intelligent people love to reference their race as evidence of their own intelligence/virtue/etc, because happenstance attributes of their existence are their primary "accomplishments". So it's best to not add fuel to that fire.
I apologize, I should have included more context. While the quote by Gould is obviously true in a literal sense, Gould himself was in the business of debunking "biological determinism" [1]. In that light, the quote is an admission that he does not care about truth, that his research is a mere means to, or foundation for, a political end. I.e. Lysenkoism.
[1] Calling it "determinism" sets up a clever strawman by giving the impression that only genes matter, and environment has no effect. Strengthening the strawman case is how his book on the subject devotes many pages to debunking 19th century science. And doesn't even get that right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man#Reassess...
I didn’t compare genetic general intelligence to Lysenkoism. I compared eugenics to it; the critical difference is the misguided conceit that we can engineer general intelligence.
And yes, lots of Americans correctly identify that racism plays a significant role in perceptions of intelligence. This doesn’t alter the fact that many are squeamish about discussing it directly.
It is a known issue with social science that culture will bias research focus and conclusions that align with where the researcher lives. A typical finding is that US researcher tend to find research data that demonstrate individualistic virtues, while places like China and Russia tend to find research data that demonstrate collectivism virtues.
In general there are a few conclusion that should be drawn from that. One is that researchers tend to focus on research subjects that align with their own cultural biases, so while the data might be unbiased the choice of research subject is not. It is that naturally those researcher will have a harder time considering alternative explanation for a given set of data, even if that data itself is unbiased.
The key is always to consider culture into context of research and understanding how it limits the ability of the researcher, especially when politicians take such conclusions and runs with it.
This is a very vague response. I’m not really sure what it’s supposed to say — of course scientists are affected by the cultures they live in. But eugenics is not even good science, much less a popular social opinion. I believe that’s true just about everywhere.
Eugenics is politicians taking science of genetics and running with it in the context of certain cultural and political ideologies. The science of genetics is good and has significant contributed to medical science, historical research and our understanding of human, animals and plants. It has contributed to research of plants and animals, and the worlds ability to both feed people and to conserve the environment.
Eugenics is not science. It is a set of political beliefs and practices.
Lysenkoism was the denial of evidence-based genetic science motivated by political concerns. It elevates what powerful people will allow you to believe over an investigation into the truth free of any ulterior motives. I’m not sure that example demonstrates what you think it demonstrates. If anything, Lysenkoism held back the Soviets in competition with the West.
You just drew the connection: like Lysenkoism, eugenics is not good science. It’s reactionary sociology and political ideology wrapped in the language of genetics.
Because it isn’t good science, it isn’t clear what the Chinese have to benefit from it. That’s their mistake to make, not unlike the Soviets with Lysenkoism. But that doesn’t suggest that we should blindly copy their mistake.
You keep using the word "eugenics". I do not think it means what you think it means. Eugenics was the attempt to genetically improve human populations by either encouraging or forcing sterilization, abortion, and birth control among the poor and disabled. This was neither good science nor bad science, because it wasn't science at all, but rather a social and political movement as well as a set of governmental policies. (And, just as an aside, "reactionary" isn't quite the best characterization of the political ideology that motivated eugenics; eugenics was pioneered largely by American progressives roughly a century ago.) Analyzing genetic data that NIH is gatekeeping is not eugenics in any way, shape, or form.
While I don't know what you're talking about when you use the word "eugenics", I don't really need to because your argument has the same flaw regardless. Whatever "eugenic" hypotheses you're worried about, if they really are "bad science", the data will bear that out and the best solution is to disseminate that data as freely as possible rather than withholding it. Conversely, the only way bad science can be protected is by prohibiting inquiry and establishing dogma by fiat, which is exactly what happened in the case of Lysenkoism.
Well, a firearm is a practical thing: it’s a weapon you hold in your arms and potentially use to kill people.
I think the Lesenkoism analogy is more appropriate here: our best science demonstrates, at the most, that our strongest attempts to genetically influence general intelligence have weak effects, if any. So it’s not so much latent danger (the way rejecting firearms would have stopped much of Western history) as it is poor science that produces limited value relative to its financial and civic costs.
We haven't really attempted to genetically influence intelligence because the most obvious ways of doing so are horrendously evil. This doesn't mean it cannot or should not be studied as the results could prove useful.
E.g. let's say we discover that there's a common defect in a particular gene makes aurul learning harder, then we can raise awareness and get schools to check if struggling students might do better with pictorial learning.
Knowing both that this mutation exists and how prevalent it is (and where!) is important for knowing if its worth expending limited school resources on alternative approaches.
Virtually nobody has a problem with individualized genetic treatment. We already have gene therapy, even customized gene therapy. Treating a hearing disorder, even before birth, is not particularly controversial (at least, no more controversial than any hearing treatments).
That’s discrete from eugenics as popularly understood, which involves large-scale engineering of the gene pool across generations. There’s general scientific consensus that the latter doesn’t even work, and near universal consensus that it’s unethical.
> There’s general scientific consensus that the latter doesn’t even work
This is completely false to such an extent that I've read it several times to see if I've misunderstood.
Humans have been breeding new varieties of plants and animals for millenia. Compare modern bananas to their ancient ancestors[1] or the modern chihuahua to its wolf ancestors. Heck, you can have substantial changes in just a dozen generations if your selective pressure is strong (or even one, if you sterilize every single light skinned person the next generation will be much darker skinned).
We’re talking about humans, not bananas. Similarly, the implication with eugenics is that we can somehow improve general human intelligence or other desirable traits, not fruit bearing capacity. The scientific consensus is that we don’t even know what general intelligence is, much less which complex of genes produce it.
Edit: and, to be clear: the reason we can successfully breed bananas (or dogs) with desirable traits is because we aggressively cull the undesirable traits. I assume you understand what this would imply in human beings, and why this is unacceptable.
"That doesn't work" and "that's unethical" are not the same thing.
We can select for anything we can measure. E.g. if we did sperm harvesting from everyone who scored top marks in memory tests and sterilised the rest we'd get a population that's very good at memory tests (and probably also has better memory than today's average).
In theory we could attempt to measure general intelligence using a battery of tests for everything we can think of and this would probably improve general intelligence. It would probably also give us all Tay-Sachs.
"There’s general scientific consensus that the latter doesn’t even work"
Genetic counseling such as "when two people have the same recessive gene coding for a serious disease, they shouldn't have kids together" works very well and is used in many countries to suppress prevalence of various diseases.
The first country to introduce a program to suppress Tay-Sachs this way was actually Israel, the home country of Holocaust survivors. If they can tolerate it, so can the rest of the world.
Testing and counseling for Tay-Sachs is not the same thing as attempting to breed abstract desirable traits, like general intelligence.
Again: there is no major controversy over things like the former, and that’s not what’s popularly understood as eugenics. So it’s not clear how it rebuts the objection to what we’re actually talking about, which is the West matching the (potential) reactionary eugenics of China.
It is not the same, but not that different either. There is a gap of 150 years and a lot of technological development between the relatively simple Tipu Sultan bamboo rockets that rained on the British in 1799 and ICBMs that can carry a nuclear warhead across the globe, but it is not really a difference of kind. They are both solid-propellant rockets working on the same principle. It is possible that future genetic and epigenetic manipulation will be much more subtle than whatever we can do today.
Or perhaps you are addressing the categories. Well, "health" is, to some degree, socially defined. As is "disease".
There were times when homosexuality was classified as a disease. Not that distant times. Alan Turing (in)famously committed suicide because of that.
As of now, scientists working in the longevity field are pushing for aging itself to be redefined as a disease.
Parents of heavily intellectually disabled kids would probably agree to any reasonably safe treatment that would help their kids, if such treatment existed. Not having enough general intelligence is a big obstacle in everyday life. HN gets an audience of mostly smart people; most of them cannot even begin to understand how cognitivelly loaded is contemporary world.
First firearms were rather primitive as well. The English famously kept on to bow and arrow until the 16th century or so.
I am sure that complexity of genome and epigenome is huge and that we are just at the beginning of the journey. But unlike Lysenkoism, I believe that the underlying principles are sound.
But I disagree with the idea that you can easily measure value of science by its costs, especially short term.
Look no further than Katalin Kariko, one of the most important people in mRNA. They demoted her at UPenn in 1997 because they considered her research not valuable... and yes, it actually took 20 years for it to bear fruit.
> But unlike Lysenkoism, I believe that the underlying principles are sound.
Is this an expert opinion, or a lay opinion? Eugenics is one of those fields where there’s a split distribution: experts are generally less confident in the scientific value of eugenics research than the public is.
No domain is infallible, and science is by its nature unsettleable. But the fact that a particular academic department was unfair to a particular academic is not especially strong evidence that the scientific community is wrong, as a whole, about eugenics.
One of the problem is the constant use of the word "eugenics". Whatever will emerge as a result of current and future biological research, is not going to resemble old school eugenics from times when even the DNA wasn't understood.
You have a lot of results that are used in practice already today. Embryos in IVF are genetically screened to weed out serious issues, and so are often developing foetuses in natural pregnancies. Certain countries have genetic counseling to reduce frequency of locally important diseases such as Tay-Sachs.
Aren't these methods of preventing human suffering valuable?
Okay, you can have that argument with a corporation. I'm having the argument with a taxpayer funded resource under the US Federal Government and it doesn't seem like a limitation it can create or sustain, legally. It should sell it off so you can have your argument.
This is a perfectly reasonable argument for any scientific funding, public or private. It’s arguably even more pressing in the public setting, given the civic interest in public institutions not funding junk science (or distributing private generic data).
I don’t see why this situation would be unsustainable for the USG. It’s not a particularly unusual one.
In WW2 you had all this "research" conducted by Dr Mengele and funded by the state. Should the US have done the same, just with taxpayer money? I know retroactively it's easy to say "no" but were you at that time presented with this dilemma?
How is this even remotely comparable? Mengele "experimented" on living people, inflicting truly horrendous amounts of pain and suffering on his patients, it doesn't compare even slightly to what we're talking about here.
The context is matching the eugenics research that China is known to have done, which includes human subject research. There was a pretty infamous example of embryo modification, IIRC, a couple of years ago.
I don’t know if it will be commonplace in 50 years, but I think it will in 250. This seems like deciding to not study topics might have elements of discomfort at substantial risk of becoming the subservient population to groups with assisted tech (or even just a better understanding of developmental nutrition and environmental factors).
250 years is a long, long time in tech and science. 250 years ago, Watt was just coming up with the first efficient steam engine.
You can actually already edit genome of living things today, using tools such as CRISPR. Granted, they are still rather primitive, but they are getting better.
I am almost positive that by 2070, genetic engineering will be as ubiquitous as semiconductors are today.
I mostly agree with you, though the natural rate-limiting cycle time of edit-to-observe is much longer in human developmental genetics than in software or semiconductors.
The problem seems exacerbated in the US, because of the association of culture with genes and sub categories of citizens based on these crystallized association. It would be far less problematic if US society viewed and recognized only one big group of American citizens with a shared culture, with their specific history and genes being individual and private matter, like in some other countries (not to say it’s all rosy there, but at least there is that). These research could still be extrapolated but only to arbitrary group of individuals with no official existence, instead of well defined “races” like in the US. Of course it’s just an outsider reflection, I may get things wrong here.
> Which means that a generation or two down the road, strategic adversaries may have tech to alter intelligence and other mental traits, because they will know what to edit and how.
We know that we'd improve the intelligence of children across the board if we had free school lunches and classes started at 11am. That's pretty low hanging fruit for a country with our resources, so why haven't we accomplished this?
>By blocking intelligence research in the US, the US is basically ceding the ground to those competing countries on ideological grounds.
Just in the 20th century USSR similarity banned Genetics and Cybernetics. While keeping ideological purity it had to sacrifice agriculture developments and, later, computers. The Genetics alternative, funnily enough, had been Lysenkoism, which is also something we can observe in the US nowadays.
At some point you have to question the effects you have as an individual on the rest of society. The implicit axiom that "doing what's in your own best interest is not unethical" clashes with the fact that this often means seeking unfair advantages or worse, normalizing them.
Eugenics at scale seems inherently unethical to me because its purpose and effects are contradictory under any moral justifications I can think of, except that which basically say "I deserve this power because I have it."
If we can't distribute a vaccine universally and equitably, we definitely can't eugenics. It will always boil down to who has the most proximity to the resources.
On the individual level the purpose of eugenics is to make your life better. But if it's done on a societal scale, then that reason becomes increasingly meaningless. It's all too often co-opted into nationalistic, corporate, or blind structures which you might not even notice as an individual.
I hope this sort of thing will be treated like high-tech weaponry, even if not weaponized. On the individual level I want the most protection possible, but I'm not allowed to get a Sherman tank, at least not very easily.
Because it’s incredibly difficult a priori to restrict only research that could lead to unethical eugenics without restricting that which could lead to ethically sound, widely beneficial eugenics or even unrelated advances.
You can (for example) ban research on things might lead to the development of novel poisons. But that ban is almost sure to prevent the development of some new cancer treatments.
Anything that increases the health outcomes of humans in the long-run would be broadly beneficial and could stem from research that's initially targeted at understanding the role genetics plays in intelligence. That could be breakthroughs in early childhood (or lifelong) nutritional support, eradication of diseases, creating lower susceptibility to some forms of cancer or heart disease, improvements in pedagogy, improvements in general intelligence, lower susceptibility to cognitive decline.
Research is not laboring to progressively color in a pre-defined picture, where you can just tell research scientists "don't color in the naughty bits".
Do you have a list of all the genes and all the things that they impact, even slightly, alone and in combinations? That list in itself would seem to be extraordinarily valuable, perhaps even Nobel Prize winning.
We don't know what unrelated items or generally applicable patterns we might find when we go looking into basic research.
"Murder" itself contains a moral judgment and is actually banned.
Some forms of eugenics are routinely practised in the West already. For example, pretty much every IVF clinic out there will recommend patients to scrap embryos that are proven to be aneuploid. (So either not viable, or, in some cases, viable but with Down syndrome.) This is accepted everywhere I know and is considered a part of your reproductive rights.
How is this not "good eugenics"? How would you frame it as unethical?
"Eugenics" actually just means attempting to improve the genome our children will have. This does not need to involve forced sterilisation or indeed the government at all.
E.g. giving all parents free genetic screening and genome correction for their fetuses if they wish it would be eugenics.
If you want to be reductive about it, then the answer is yes. Or do you think that some stern moralizing talking points directed at Russia or China will stop them? That seems to only be a tactic successfully deployed in the United States.
An argument could be made about setting an example, which US as the leading country still is in some ways for Russia and China, whether they want it or not, especially for the people if not the gov.
Oh they do. Even some staunch putinists would say Russia is following US/western example (like of meddling in foreign country affairs in case of Ukraine).
I am reading this with contact lenses in my eyes. How is that different from a potential future intelligence magnifier?
We take it for absolutely granted that people's weaknesses and handicaps get compensated with inventions all the time. Organ transplants, artificial limbs, immunotherapy for cancer.
If it turned out that intelligence tends to correlate with depression, but the depressive part could be tuned out, would it be ethical to let the individuals suffer from depression and deny them a potential cure?
As far as eugenics goes, it is already to a large degree performed by proxy: the elites intermarry. But we are not really talking eugenics here; I am almost positive that in the second half of the century, genetic and epigenetic alterations in living adult humans will be commonplace.
I'm not comfortable playing MAD/prisoners dilemma with stakes this high. If other people are, and the systems we make put those people in charge, then maybe it's for the best. Perhaps we'll destroy ourselves so thoroughly no civilization could rise from the amniotic goo, let alone one that takes wargames so seriously.
> By blocking intelligence research in the US, the US is basically ceding the ground to those competing countries on ideological grounds. As a result, they will get ahead and possibly discover new facts.
Couldn't the same be said about the OG Nazis? All of their medical "experiments" on prisoners of concentration camps [1] were unethical, there wasn't even anything of note found out because they were either shit at documenting "experiments" or the "experiments" were just the personal dreams of sadistic "doctors".
There are lines we damn well shouldn't cross, and where it is worth we should sanction violators. We are supposed to have learned from "historical Western traumas and sensibilities", because if not then all the suffering would have been in vain.
Most genocides in history didn't rely on any data (Caesar or Genghis Khan certainly didn't run any population analysis before putting entire cities to the sword) and most databases have never been used for a genocide. The correlation is weak.
What actually prevents genocides is good institutions, not deliberate ignorance.
> What actually prevents genocides is good institutions, not deliberate ignorance.
And you would trust China in that, a country that locks up Muslims in concentration camps and surveillances its citizens to a degree the Soviet KGB and German Stasi wouldn't have dreamt of?
I agree with your first sentence. China cannot be trusted. I grew up in late Communist Czechoslovakia, I have no illusions about totalitarian states.
All the more reason why not leave the entire field of human genetics exclusively to them - imagine a future in which rich and influential people can get treatments for certain deadly diseases only in Shanghai and Beijing and China demands not only money, but allegiance for keeping them alive.
As for your last sentence: this ship has sailed some twenty years ago. At the current stage, China can only seriously damage/destroy itself from within. Totalitarian states are weaker than they appear, though. It may very well happen.
> there wasn't even anything of note found out because they were either shit at documenting "experiments" or the "experiments" were just the personal dreams of sadistic "doctors".
As far as I know pretty much all we know about the effects of exposure to cold temperatures from frostbite to eventual death was found in Japanese and German prison camps in WW2. Quite reasonably so, I imagine it to be hard to find volunteering participants for a study where the proposal is "we'll freeze you to death".
I don't think the US is ceding any ground personally. They are probably doing the research intensely but just not public all. All the research done by Nazi's was absorbed by the US during operation paperclip. Most of those heinous nazi scientists were rewarded for their cutting edge work by the US.
Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra)[a] was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.
> I would agree that there are lines that shouldn't be crossed in actions. But only actions. I will never celebrate or promote ignorance over knowledge.
With the exception of studying natural phenomena like astronomy, geology or weather events, all knowledge of humanity has been gained by willful actions of humans.
I think that there are red lines in humanity that should never be crossed by anyone and where active ignorance is the only way to prevent untold horrors. Even knowing stuff like which genes contribute to intelligence can and will be abused - the Nazis, for example, forcibly sterilized people they considered to be "mentally deficient". There is not much fantasy needed to think up a dystopian country that limits which people can conceive a child based on their genetic compatibility, for example, to prevent "dumb" children from being born.
And to believe that this would only be an issue for dictatorships like China (which has shown many, many times that it does not care about ethics or human rights at all) and that democracies could never fall down to such levels is IMHO beyond foolish. No democracy is safe from falling down very deep cliffs - the US and the UK show just how thin the veneer of civilization is and how easy authoritarianism can take over.
I think the end game in genetic manipulation of living beings will look a lot different.
For example, there is a lot of research going into so-called in-vitro gametogenesis. Basically, production of sperm and ova from stem cells. You can already produce fertile ova from blood cells in mice. In humans, the process is a bit more challenging and will likely require artificial ovaries, but there does not seem to be any really major obstacle in the way. It is mostly technical stuff to be mastered.
Thus, somedays in the future, 2040 or 2050, you may simply walk into an IVF clinic, have your blood drawn and 1000 healthy eggs produced out of it. (It might actually work for males as well - a boon for gay pairs.) 1000 healthy eggs mean 500 viable embryos. Choose one for implantation, or perhaps two. (Or perhaps artificial wombs will be already available.)
At this moment, people will start to choose according to criteria that other people will abhor. Simply because they will be able to.
And all of this technology is double use. Much like firearms or computing. You can prevent untold horrors or you can unleash them.
I respect your idea that some technology should be taboo, but I don't agree with it, and I think it is fundamentally unviable in a world of nearly 10 billion people and 200 nation states, which is becoming increasingly multipolar. The next Cold War will have a substantial biological component.
The problem is there is no way to measure intelligence objectively. Every intelligence test ever devised either measures something else unintentionally (usually prior knowledge/communication skills), or nothing at all. Your response that it _could_ be done doesn't actually refute that it hasn't. Sending a man to walk on the sun feels as impossible now as sending a man to walk the moon 100 years ago.
Do I think we're behind as a country because NASA isn't sending people to the sun now? No.
I'm universally fine with waiting until there's a theoretically viable approach before throwing random innocent lives at things which have no evidence of working even in theory.
Back in the early 19th century when electricity was being studied by the pioneers of the domain, there wasn't any understanding what electricity even means; people like Ampere, Volta and Ohm were alive, but the units named after them weren't.
This didn't prevent the field into developing into what it is today, acquiring more knowledge along the way.
As of today, we measure intelligence using tests on paper. In the future, it might be done using something like MR or CT, only more sophisticated. We can certainly map some cognitive processes in ways like that already, so it does not seem as absurd as walking in 6000 Kelvin on a gassy surface.
Regardless of if it is or isn't possible in the future, until there's evidence all the NIH is doing is preventing people from spreading pseudoscientific claims. I've no problem with saying mislabeling a key statistic in a study isn't scientific, especially when that is provably the plan ahead of time.
When you say "there is now way", are you saying that we don't currently have a way, or that it's impossible to do? If it's the former, more research would certainly help.
But the same argument that they have against research in genetics applies there too, doesn't it? Attempting to measure intellectual capacity assumes that there can be a difference and tries to make that visible.
Or, as others in this thread have argued: how should the person feel that doesn't get a high score, and shouldn't we outlaw research in that area to make sure they don't feel bad?
No. I don't believe we should outlaw research that makes people feel bad. I predict that there's functionally very little genetic difference in cognitive abilities because human beings are simply far too similar (this does not say "exactly the same") to each other in all other measurable attributes. Still, it's moot because we can't measure intelligence and pretending we can isn't scientific.
The Chinese can do all the research they like, because the Western political and media classes will have no trouble ignoring them. See for example the polls of anthropologists (not geneticists) limited to the US, confidently proclaiming race (or some exceedingly narrow definition of it) doesn't exist:
I doubt it will come from Europe; genetic testing (like 23andme and parental tests) is literally banned in France because "genes don't exist/don't matter" and "we're all French".
This research will come from China, which has taboos about certain political topics, but not race.
The stem cell research ban was to assuage religious people. This I understand, the last thing I want is some insurance company saying I need to pay 10x because of my genes.
> the last thing I want is some insurance company saying I need to pay 10x because of my genes.
On average you would expect to pay the same of what you are paying today. But it would give discount to people with longevity genes and makes the bills more expensive to disease-prone individuals.
Yeah. That's fuuuuuuuuuuuucked up. "Sorry you were born more likely to suffer disease, which is unfortunately going to make your life much harder. We'd like to double down by making you pay more money too. Hope you are comfortable being both less wealthy and less healthy!"
I can't say anything about this concrete case, but I think especially from an anti-racist and anti-sexist standpoint, one should thoroughly and ruthlessly perform research into differences, as that is the only way to falsify racist and sexist ideas. But if one is not convinced of anti-racism in the first place, and only conforms out of social pressure... then I can see why one would be afraid of such research.
But what if research does find out meaningful differences? It's all a matter of how we look at it. We all agree that they are differences between different families. In one family people tend to be tall, in another they have musical talent, and so on. Its undeniable that there is some influence from genetics in our lives; it mostly becomes problematic if we think of it in terms of races, gender, instead of "my genetics, my parents, my ancestors". When it becomes essentialized, and puts people into boxes where it becomes a destiny (X people are like Y).
I think in a saner world, we would want to know as much about our genetics and out biological potential as we could - alas, we are not in a sane world yet.
>But if one is not convinced of anti-racism in the first place, and only conforms out of social pressure... then I can see why one would be afraid of such research.
If you are not racist in your self-image, but you suspect that a study will show that some people are inferior, then you are likely going to be against such a study. I think this applies to many people.
But if you are convinced that there are no meaningful differences between groups, or that the differences are innocuous, then there is no reason to oppose such research.
What is preventing one of the genetic sequencing services from making the connections? There must be enough commercial databases available to allow them to "add data about health, education, occupation, and income".
Sooner or later, the data will be available. Where will it end? Will "stupid" people stop having children or will they choose intelligent donors until genetic engineering is possible?
To those saying the data should be open in the pursuit of truth, damn the consequences, please consider this scenario:
Researchers come to your community and tell everybody they're studying genetic diseases. Their research will provide comfort to those who suffer. Sounds great, so you all hand over your DNA/ec to these researchers. Then a few years later, using that same data, researchers publish studies saying that your people are genetically stupid. That you're a bunch of subhumans generally unqualified for anything but menial labor. How does that make you feel the next time researchers come around asking for more data?
You'll tell them to fuck off, that's what you'd do. Why would you consent to research that demeans and degrades you and your people? And because your community now has an adversarial relationship with scientific research, that initial promise of research helping people goes out the window too.
If using this sort of data as a weapon against others is permitted, you harm not only the people you collected the data from, but your own ability to collect data from them again in the future.
The reality is researching these kinds of things is frowned upon (in the west, at least) because it makes people uncomfortable. And it makes people uncomfortable because we don’t like the idea[1] that certain traits are more common in others, and certain things society values (intelligence, athleticism, beauty) obviously have at least some genetic component.
Consider another hypothetical where this research is de facto banned in the west because everyone feels yucky about it, but it isn’t in e.g. China where novel technologies in the future allow selection or even manipulation of genetics for intelligence/beauty/whatever. Not a position I’d like to be in.
[1] we don’t like this idea because it runs against a lot of philosophy that I’m quite sure you have read for how we want our developed society to treat its members - as equals.
One does not need to think that others with less desirable characteristics are less worthy of their own existence just because those characteristics have an identifiable genetic cause. That people are mean to each other - because some are dumber than others, or less pretty than others, or can't run a mile in under 6 minutes - is not a reason to restrict research into what makes those things possible, it's a reason to be more vigilant about virtuous behavior.
> That you're a bunch of subhumans generally unqualified for anything but menial labor
That seems more like a moral conclusion than a scientific one. Sure, maybe scientific evidence can fuel discrimination, but at least it gives us something over which we can have an intelligent conversation. It bounds a discussion that nowadays encounters no resistance or counterarguments in certain groups. And there will always be a group of people genetically smarter, more athletic, good looking than yours. So it doesn't take much thinking to reach the conclusion that we are all in this together.
> That seems more like a moral conclusion than a scientific one.
That distinction doesn't change anything. Even if you can keep that sort of language out of even the preprints, you'll have politicians citing the studies and making those statements themselves.
It boils down to this: if you tell people you're collecting data to help them, then you can't allow that data to harm them.
Regardless of what motivates scientists, they need the consent of people they are collecting DNA/etc from. That consent won't be given without some persuasive justification and that comes in the form of arguments about the good that will come from the research. If the research actually brings misery, you're going to have long term trust problems with the people you're trying to study.
No, I'm sorry, you haven't thought that through. Scientists don't research cancer simply because they're curious about "the truth about cancer"; they do it to cure cancer patients, because they think that's good. And despite how much "truth" they could discover by performing unethical experiments, ethics boards and the Hippocratic oath subordinate that goal to the broader ideas of medical ethics and what is "good."
> plenty are doing cancer research simply to get paid.
Presumably because they think being paid is good. Pure truth-seeking is fairly marginal.
> Why have you put the word "truth" in quotation marks here?
"Truth" and "good" weren't really the best words to use in either of the contexts I used them above ("knowledge" and "right" would have been more correct), but I wanted to specifically use those words because they were the ones you had originally framed the discussion with, so I put them in quotation marks to draw attention to the fact that I was reusing your words. It was kind of cumbersome, looking back on it.
> The truth is always good in my view.
Suppose a physicist in Nazi Germany runs away rather than help the German nuclear program to invent the atom bomb because he knows Nazi leadership would do terrible things with it. This is an example of a scientist choosing not to pursue knowledge because that knowledge would, in that context, be harmful. I don't think any truths are inherently harmful, but some are contextually harmful when known by certain people (e.g. Nazis), and I think it's ethically justifiable for even a scientist to prevent those people from learning those truths.
Everyone’s just trying to get that Nature paper. If torturing mice will do it you will torture mice. This kinda research is so hard that really you just care about getting your thing out there; thinking about abstract stuff like doing good is a luxury you can’t afford.
Would you invite the allegedly subhuman human races to this intelligent discussion? Would you really want to start a dialogue with whether or not you deserve equal treatment? If you'd like to talk to someone who discriminates against your people, you're welcome to do so now without distracting the broader scientific community from better pursuits.
For physical excellence, we have a literal competition around the world comparing our most physically fit specimens against each other to determine how they rank against each other. I could draw some interesting conclusions based on simply analyzing that data alone.
For intellectual excellence we could look towards chess tournaments and Olympiads as some of the forms of data available for analysis, drawing similar conclusions as we do from the physical excellence observations.
One could say that those are both secondary sources of information, where direct genetic sequencing could be seen as a primary source of information.
It would of course be wonderful to be able to say with certainty, our most advanced intellectuals have concluded that our findings based on secondary sources correlate with our findings from primary sources, and additionally have made their findings public to allow for scrutiny - but of course, who would want to do that, when its much easier to handwave away any attempt to draw conclusions as racist or biased.
Somewhere out there is a person with the genes to unlock biological immortality, but sure, lets block access for researchers because their public (scrutinizable) results are biased, or based on biased data.
Btw, there is no unbiased data in the world, should we cancel all science?
My interpretation of the point here: the people running this data set work for a scientific org but they don’t consider science to be their sole or top priority. Rather modern progressive mores sometimes take precedence.
I suppose it’s ok to consider the trade offs between these concerns. But at times this comes off as pure censorship in support of dogma, and that fails to convince anyone except those who already want to be convinced. Ie it’s not improving our discourse it’s just making science worse.
Or maybe they will use that data to discover that IQ scores are noticably lower in the community and surrounding areas where an open-pit mining operation is leaching toxins into the water? Or maybe the data is used to determine the most effective public policy interventions to assist communities where scores are lower? The first step in addressing a problem is to recognize than in issue exists in the first place. Whether we measure them or not, differences in intelligence will continue to exist, and that will lead to disparate socioeconomic outcomes.
> Or maybe they will use that data to discover that IQ scores are noticably lower in the community and surrounding areas where an open-pit mining operation is leaching toxins into the water?
One research group may do that, while another weaponizes the data instead. One doesn't cancel out the other.
Good point, we should ban all jogging because of the Boston Marathon.
We should ban all cars because terrorists might use them.
Damn, you would hate to find out how they use sonar today.
You are literally proposing that we just halt science altogether?
FYI you seem to have gotten stuck in the HN spam filter. Maybe email dang to sort that out? All your comments are showing up as "dead" and requiring someone to manually vouch them.
Alternatively, “We’ve found certain genetic markers correlate with these specific quality of life issues, and now we can investigate ways to overcome it.”
We know certain people have genetic dispositions towards sickle cell, skin cancer, Tay Sachs, and so on. If it turns out some group is genetically predisposed to struggle a little more with math, then as a society, we can find a way to help them better overcome that. Burying our heads in the sand won’t benefit anybody.
You’re not going to find a race or subgroup that’s all around better at everything, if that’s the worry. Every animal on earth that’s good at something is not good at something else.
If a community declines the possibility for future science and discovery, because they don't like the results, then maybe they are, in fact, a little bit stupid.
Considering the flynn effect alone, even a 10 point difference in IQ wouldn't really matter like that.
And if your threshold is 10+, I strongly doubt a single such group exists. I'm not very worried about the risks of upsetting a sufficiently unlikely group.
I'd probably be worried about people mishandling news of some tiny bias, but that's a different problem entirely.
The people who collected that data from you and the people who weaponized it against you are probably not the same people, but it makes no difference if the former permitted the latter.
As for correcting misinformation, I'm sure you've heard that misinformation travels further and faster than the truth. By the time you figure out where their statistical errors were, the study has already been spread around the world by those that wish you harm.
Furthermore, most of the people from whom the data is collected are not scientific researchers. They are members of the general public. How can a firefighter, real estate agent or aerospace engineer refute a jargon-heavy genetic research paper with subtle statistical errors? Go back to university first? You don't have the time or expertise to refute every bad paper written about you.
Your implicit claim that the only thing standing between two groups and genocide is scientific authority is wrong. The white-black iq gap has been public for decades. Those who build racist theories from this already exist. A few research papers will not create the explosion you are imagining.
"A new research study says..." Would absolutely make headlines on racist networks. Sure, old studies say vile garbage, but a new study feels more authoritative. Humans have a temporal bias, and will absolutely look at things in the recent past more strongly.
You're overestimating this point. Flase racist research papers come out all the time. There is a known "scientist" who shows up in google scholar all the time. Nobody pays attention to him because he has been debunked by multiple people multiple times. (Not by snopes but by the scientific community.) No major news site would publish his claims. Even if they did, it wouldn't measurably change anything, as there would be appropriate backlash. We see already preemptive inappropriate backlash — imagine how hard justified backlash will be..
Your imaginary deeply pessimistic scenario only highlights the issue: if you have an adversial relationship with science because you don't like the outcomes, then we're stuck on major issues in our society.
Climate science is widely rejected not for its science, rather for its outcomes. Nobody rejects science that improves quality of life though.
You seek truth or you do not. You can't cherry pick the truth or make it go away.
So let's say your scenario plays out. Researchers objectively established that "my people" are cognitively underdeveloped compared to another group.
Well, so what, if that's the truth? If it really is the truth, I'd likely already know that, as I would have experienced it myself. If I were to be a woman (I'm not) I would have experienced that I'm physically weaker than the typical male. The truth is not degrading, just the way you packaged it.
Differences in capabilities are plain to see at every single level. It shouldn't be this controversial. The only controversial part is what you do with it, but if you constantly overcorrect into the utmost cynical scenario, you're blocking all potential progress. Further, it only invites speculation, conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Insights in genetics could drive better health outcomes, investment in education, socio-economic investments, the like.
That's kind of assuming a lot. What if instead, in a hypothetical future, we all collectively discovered that one's efficacy in today's society depends on their ability to match their brain type to their job and certain types of jobs that certain types of brains depend on are going away, we might be able to structure society with the correct share of jobs between all people and shift into a state where everyone can be efficacious! Hypothetically, it wouldn't even be the first time humanity decided to map brain types with social roles in order for everyone to get their fair share and be efficacious! What a shame, because that would require all the good people of the world to overcome their malignant shame and actually do research into the issue.
Although, I have to agree with you in that the people currently leading the charge don't seem to have everyone's best interests in mind.
It's happened. On multiple occasions. It's not at all a stretch to believe it will continue to happen.
And why do we care about optimizing the efficient of certain types of brains? At best it's a notional win for business owners. At worst it leads to eugenics, discrimination, etc. Even if we find anything in the data, there's simply no upside.
Not everything needs to be optimized for efficiency.
No, it hasn't happened on multiple occasions. It happened one time thousands of years ago in one region of the Earth. I must remind you that the industrial revolution and the social ills it brought happened more recently. We aren't talking about the same thing.
What? Researchers have absolutely used data (or consent for one procedure) specifically to excuse eugenics, nonconsensual experimentation, and policy decisions that keep "undesirable" folks out. Science has a long and continued history of this. I'm not sure what you are even suggesting ...
Examples of things like the Tuskegee Experiments, the North Carolina Eugenics Board, hell, we're less than a decade past when hundreds of women were sterilized because they were thought to be "unfit" because of their prison sentences and race.
Nazis tried to use pseudoscience to exterminate everyone that didn't have an ancestry lineage to the sunken city of Atlantis. You are spouting a ridiculous myth, eugenics has never been scientific, it's all about trauma and lies.
Since you asked, search for Ayurveda. Vata, pitta, and kapha describe these brain types that have been a permanent staple of society since we left Africa. Ayurvedic societies were able to be efficacious by ensuring everyone has a role in social life by understanding what makes us different and using it for everyone's benefit.
But it's been popular and studied by people who called themselves scientists many times. You and I would agree they aren't scientists, but the public sure think they are at times.
There are ways to fight back against such abusers:
- Announce that you re moving your research to china
- Claim that the chinese will get an advantage on this
- Claim a priori that your research demonstrates how genetics don't matter , even if it does
unfortunately, research in europe / japan and elsewhere follows american trends to the T, so there is not even the probability of having some competition here
I don't think the NIH is the only source for this type of data. Don't 23andMe and other DNA data companies have millions of genomes of individuals along with their names and addresses? These can easily be (or already have been) linked to much more personal, financial, and other information than is in the NIH data.
We know these companies have used their data for law enforcement purposes. Do they also allow academic researchers to use it (anonymized, of course)?
Is it a strawman if the editorial referenced by the article basically holds GP's point (as I remember it at least, I can't see it now)
>In creating this guidance, we took as a starting point the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — humans are “free and equal in dignity and rights”[0]
This document was written before the discovery of the double helix. How can we take it as a starting point? I think the flagged post was perhaps flame-baity, but I don't think the point you're making is so cut and dry. As I remember it, GP's argument was that liberal ideology holds the equalness of all people as a fundamental truth rather than a result of inquiry. That seems to be what is happening in reputable scientific jounals.
Let's say a researcher wanted to do a study to find out what gene polymorphisms are associated with better performance on standardized tests. Nope, can't do it. Might reveal that some people, or God forbid kinds of people, are genetically less intelligent than others and that is a forbidden conclusion. Heck, this post might even get flagged because it raises the possibility that this proposition could be true.
Meanwhile, in other countries, they are offering gene modifications to insert these genes discovered by researchers doing this forbidden research into consenting adults. Anyone in the west who would want to confirm their research would get locked out of the database.
Ah, the freedom of research vs what humanity made of it debate.
One can detect what this debate is about, in the direction its proponents want to take the results. There is no search for a "cure" no search for a way to help, instead its almost always a search for a "anti-social" behaviour justification. I want to cut responsibilties for my fellow men, want to cut taxes and justify atrocities, in war and peace, looking scientific doing it.
One can predict the "research" to be showing up usually in booming and busting places, were good-times spending has to be cut back and crisis looms.
Want some mental model with some actual explenation power?
Human groups cycle through resource crisis since the dawn of time. And we adapted natural instinctive responses to that.
A exponential curve cycling endlessly between TheHornOfPlenty > PreCrisis > War > Reconstitution. And evolution, the blind, mindless industrious process it is, "optimizes" to any constant environment, even a cycling one.
So there you have them, the whole zoo of adaptions and even "non-intelligence" which all have a place. To not party hard and produce labour intensive offspring en mass is "intelligent" if ones instinct consider the optimization for the loop holy. To have no feeling but group loyalty is not intelligent, unless you are in a mass butchering in some trench and try to get your side home safe. Its not intelligent, but is very good adaption.
To be paranoid and direct society tensions to outsiders of the group, is not intelligent, but well adapted to this cycle. All paid the ferry-woman in the end, before science came along and was able to suspend the self destructive vehicle for 70 years.
So what is intelligence? Optimal Adaption to the inevitable? Hacking the circumstances, until the inevitable makes it a sizeable catastrophe?
Lets assume, being on board, you favour Hacking the circumstances, aka research: You can build great structures from the various loop adaptions. The paranoid make for great explorers of stagnant fields, when forced through training and kept from noise over interpolation.
The peacefull ones are great incremental researchers, in newly discovered fields.
The warlike ones, make for great critics, unafflicted by emotions and with a few of the whole.
Intelligence is the usefullness of pieces in societal machines. The individual is irrelevant.
Good. If there's anyone out there anyone who thinks there isn't an entity that will happily take databases of genetic information and use it to develop the most horrifyingly efficient genome specific advertising and hiring selection algorithms i've got some snake oil to sell you (it has peptides).
I see a lot of controversial comments about race, etc. Well the big joke is is that there are huge ancestry biases in genetic databases. They are not representative of much of humanity.
The other thing I think people here are not considering is the issue of informed consent on the part of the patient. When patients agree to give biological samples, they generally do so with the understanding that that they will be used for a particular purpose or within some scope. It is unethical for researchers to use the bio samples or data outside the bounds of patient consent because it is disrespectful and violates their autonomy.
For example, if I tell you that I am going to use your DNA to cure cancer, and then turn around and give it to someone who wants to develop a bio weapon (or targeted ads), that is not cool. You would probably feel duped, and never would have agreed had you known it could be used for such purposes. This is kind of an extreme example, but hopefully it makes the issue clear.
My guess is that this is less about “censorship” and more about legal issues around patient consent.
We made friends with the various program managers, did all the necessary due diligence, applied, got approved, downloading hundreds of terabytes of data, and then received a stern note from the leadership at NIH that we had to delete everything. Apparently, some Very Important People at NCBI didn't like Google and really didn't like the idea that we'd have a copy of all this data, even though the intent (I can say authoritatively since I was the founder of the project) was to accelerate scientific research.
It's now hosted on AWS as a public/private dataset.
I try to avoid human genomics or really any controlled-access dataset now. The total value in the data is much smaller than generally claimed, and entrenched interests go out of their way to gatekeep and sort of maintain an "artisanal, bespoke" approach to data processing.
Now, if you want to use this data to make strong conclusions about the relationship between genotypes and human intelligence: best of luck to you, as you'll be grabbing the electrified third rail of American politics and science. Nearly every foray into this area generates controversy, and even intelligent, good-faith researchers end up in a trap of "appearing to be racist, or sexist". With career ending consequences.
I study tardigrades instead now.