"For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children."
Author manages to squeeze a topping of first semester Introduction to China with a thick crust of massive unsubstantiated overreach.
"hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications."
Nice autopraise, mildly disguised.
"After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness."
Seriously? There was an otherwise intelligent guy working for us who started spouting this kind of drivel. We noticed it all started after he got assigned a female manager and then subsequently a non-white manager. Some people have mild racial hangups, which they then externalize in odd ways like China peril.
I too am rather skeptical of the claim of 15 points per generation.
Look at the intense selection on the Ashkenazi Jews over maybe 1500 years which has only produced an average IQ of 115 (there are alternate theories for their high IQs).
Selection of dog breeds for intelligence (German Shepherds, Jack Russell terriers, Poodles vs eg King Charles Cavaliers, Corgis) seems to have produced a large gap but it took a long time - dogs have been domesticated for ~5,000 years.
Generally selection works quickly at first, by filtering the population for the desired trait. Then it slows dramatically as the process is limited by new beneficial mutations which are rare.
It is noteworthy that genes for high IQ seem to come at a price. Read up about Einstein's son Eduard for example.
Final point: maybe parents will not want to select for IQ. Maybe they would prefer to select for beautiful daughters for example?
>Selection of dog breeds for intelligence (German Shepherds, Jack Russell terriers, Poodles vs eg King Charles Cavaliers, Corgis) seems to have produced a large gap but it took a long time - dogs have been domesticated for ~5,000 years.
Dogs have been domesticated since the dawn of civilization (and probably before), but those specific breeds are relatively new. GSDs are just over a century old, Jack Russells slightly older, poodles several hundred years old and Corgis positively ancient at almost 1000. Note, too, that intelligence was not the sole quality they were bred for. The Russian Silver Fox is a great example of the massive changes that can occur in only a few generations if artificial selection for a single trait is performed.
That said, I agree with the gist of your argument: 15 pts of Iq per generation seems ludicrous.
The selection in Ashkenazi was not done in the same way proposed here - filtering took whole lifetimes. In this system, you compress the whole "live 50 years and have slightly more / fewer children" step into one procedure.
This one is equivalent to picking the best one of 50 naturally occurring children, and raising them alone, every generation.
If Michael Jordan he had 50 children with a similarly elite mother, most of them would regress to the mean - but the best one could conceivably be near his level. If he had only one kid, it's very likely that the kid would regress significantly.
Also, of course there are negatives to high IQ but most of the time, this selection method wouldn't be done for that level. Two people of IQ 100 would be able to reliably have children of IQ 115, and those kids would have happier, longer, healthier lives, with no increased risks. [see the scottish IQ study; iq at age 11 was linked to a lifetime of better outcomes]
That is the real benefit of this technology - to give people the option of gradually bringing out the best of what's already inside themselves. I don't want to be forced to give my kids a random selection of my genes - I want to exercise some control. And of course there could be problems - perhaps +IQ genes might lie next to other, undetected bad genes. But that's random, and we're already completely subject to it.
The Ashkenazi thing is bullshit. If you follow the references in the Wikipedia article looking for hard statistical evidence of higher IQ you end up with very thin sourcing from two iffy papers.
The Flynn effect in the U.S. already seems to be causing about 3 points of IQ gain per decade. If a generation is 25 years, that's 7.5 IQ points per generation. It doesn't seem unreasonable that if you explicitly selected for this trait you could double the rate of evolution.
> <dogs domesticated> somewhere in the 19-32k year range
I have read numerous different accounts. It appears that the selective breeding of different breeds is actually much shorter even than 5,000 years. Most breeds are less than 1,000 years old.
This bothered me more than the autopraise. He (and, if he is to be believed, China) are proceeding from the assumption that IQ can be reduced to a set of switches in the genome.
What if there are alleles that select for intelligence--but also select for a mixture of cancer, OCD, suicidal depression, and plain batshit crazy?
It's also worth considering that your hypothetical might be anything but! At extremely high levels of intelligence the rate of extreme social disorders skyrockets up to "most" (I recall the cutoff for 50% happening at ~165 IQ, but it continues to rise even after that, limited primarily by our lack of data on IQs much higher). I'm not entirely sure if this analogy is appropriate, but just as organisms with more cells are more likely to produce cancer, it seems minds with more thoughts racing through them are just as damaged by some small percentage of errant thoughts (some are extreme delusions, some are just the product of the isolation of a brilliant mind growing tired of a world, retreating from it, losing touch with how to interact with excellence and subtlety, and seeing even less subtlety in the world, simply growing more tired of it, ending with many extremely intelligent people simply unable to interact with others in any normal way).
This. The generalization of intelligence to just a single number, or even a bunch of numbers, strikes me as a foolish over assessment of our current collective understanding of human intelligence.
So, let's say we have a number. It correlates with ability to solve a number of different puzzles, lines up with our understanding of certain dangers (iodine deficiency, etc.), is consistent, explains some variation of the success in certain tasks or areas that are not explained by experience or upbringing.
I'm not saying it captures every element of our experience, but surely we can point to it and say it represents some subset of our understanding of the idea we point at when we say the word "intelligence". It really isn't competing with anything that's remotely as useful. IQ, although it has faults, seems to be a relatively cheap, standard, well understood metric, that also explains quite a few other phenomenon. If you give me two regression analyses, one of them using IQ and one not, I cannot imagine what understanding you would gain by refusing to acknowledge the former -- and that mistake seems like precisely the type of "foolish over assessment of our current collective understanding" that you deride.
I'm not arguing that IQ doesn't measure anything, my point is simply that it is a one dimensional measure of something for which we do not know how many dimensions there actually are.
I score very highly on IQ tests, but I've worked with a great many people who I would guess do not score more than slightly above average but nevertheless bring a lot to the table that I cannot.
I guess my point is that using IQ as an authoritative measure of "intelligence" is missing the forest for the trees (well I suppose to best fit the metaphor it would be 'tree').
The word 'racist' succeeds in generating an emotional swirl with unpleasant connotations while failing to communicate what is meant when it is used. It's just a lazy expletive.
Your masterful logician skills appear to have failed to notice that the author being wrong and being racist were unrelated. One can be racist and right, or non-racist and wrong, but in this case the author is wrong about where China is coming from and going to, and then later also keeps flashing his racist colors.
Not all observations are extrapolations from a single observation.
What? Let's knee-jerk our way into legislating thought-crime, really?
No thank you. Free-speech also means speech you do not like, otherwise you don't actually have free-speech. But rather just, "state-approved speech".
That's a really sad world to live in, even more so with the state-sponsored and state-seeded social-ostracism we already have in place to control freedom of speech.
My guess is that eugenics experiments on humans would most likely turn in to disaster, not just from ethical perspective, but from the desired outcome perspective.
For animals, it's routine to target a specific trait such as more milk or less aggressiveness and do planned breeding to successfully get the desired outcome. However what we forget is that those animals suffer from many side effects when their one feature is amplified out of proportion. For instance, you can successfully get dog that is super small or super large but they would suffer from severe issues such as bad eyesight or frickle bones. For humans, this gets far more complicated. The intelligence is hardly indicated by ill-defined measurements such as IQ. We don't even dare quantify "creativity" and "taste" which are often drivers to major breakthroughs. In any case, let's say if you do try human breeding to target these qualities and you do end up with people with very high IQ - you can count on lots of potential side effects such as schizophrenia and other mental disorders that dominates lives of people with such out-of-proportion amplified characteristics. On the other end there is a strong argument for random trials, aka, let nature decide evolution. Most high-impact human beings, from Newton to Einstein to Hawking were not the product of other high impact human beings or even high IQ parents, for that matter. They spontaneously appeared on the scene and many times nurture played much stronger role in any case.
If selective breeding based exclusively on IQ criteria would produce significant number of individuals with schizophrenia and other mental disorders then I would just update the breeding criteria to eliminate those unwanted traits from the gene pool as well. After all, evolution is all about trials and errors.
You'll probably end up with each guy trying to find the best girl he can, and each girl trying to find the best guy she can... Evolution proved it to work :) We should concentrate instead on removing impediments to this, such as arranged marriages, rapes and accidental pregnancies... Contraception is helpful on the latter...
Natural selection works fine, but relying exclusively on it might be dangerous for the human species in the longer run. Millions of species have died out because they were unable to adapt to the changing environment fast enough.
In the near future (in evolutionary timeline) in order to survive we might be forced to colonise other planets or cooperate with machines that are orders of magnitude more intelligent than we are today. We either learn how to adapt rapidly or we will be out of the evolutionary game.
The super villian's handbook for creating a master race:
1. encourage diversity. This expands the genepool, and the combinations of genes. In particular, allow mating of people with "disorders" because (1) you don't know what other valuable genes they have, (2) the gene directly responsible for the "disorder" may have other benefts (consider sickle cell anaemia), and (3) what is considered a disorder in a present context might be beneficial in a future situation.
2. increase population. This increases the chances of mutations, and therefore of beneficial mutations; and especially the chance of beneficial combinations of genes.
The thing you do not want to do is to select for particular traits! This is primarily because we do not actually know which traits will end up being ideal. Anything else is breeding exotic show-dogs, which are usually no match for the first mongrel that comes along. That is, the mongrel is the superior dog.
Disregard the above if you don't actually want to create a master race, but instead want to control other people and/or feel better about yourself. That's a different handbook.
Selective breeding is the primary reason why Canis lupus is one of the most diverse species now. Excessive interbreeding between races can impair diversity just like too little interbreeding.
>China has been running the world's largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years
From what I know about eugenics programs this is horrible! You have my attention!
>A more mature response would be… asking… how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world?
Oh.. so your only concern was that there might be more Chinese people than white people in the future. So… basically a racist rationale for promoting eugenics in this country. Not cool Geoffrey.
As a native Chinese, I found most of articles to see my country as "the next big thing" or something like that are either: 1. lack of enough homework to know a bit deeper of what they are talking about or 2. intended to serve the opposite purpose of what the article itself means.
As a chinese, I can safely assure you that this article is utter bullshit. Typical of the kind written by western scholars without a single shred of understanding of the chinese culture. The chinese culture is one which places emphasis on the cream of the crop i.e. the top scholars, scientist etc. Politicians usually rise to power through connection or by slowly working their way up. This is completely contrary to those of the west where politicians are usually those who are the best at convincing people, not chosen because of their ability. The west worships democracy and condamns china for it single party rule, yet they set double standards when it comes to human right abuses such as guantanamo bay. What they seem to forget is that china has 1.35 billion people, 4.3 times those of America. Any problem the US has will be amplified by 4.3 times.
It is a tremendous stretch to call this guy a scholar using this piece as an example. When scholars (western or otherwise) write an essay to make a point, they back it up with evidence from sources other than themselves. This article was not a scholarly work.
"In its cultural form, the Hua–Yi distinction assumed Chinese cultural superiority, but also implied that outsiders could become Chinese by adopting Chinese values and customs."
What it means is Chinese identity is tied to culture, rather than tied to the actual physical body.
The author's article's point amounts to: "The smartest Chinese tend to be more successful and can afford more children, and this is eugenics."
>'The author's article's point amounts to: "The smartest Chinese tend to be more successful and can afford more children, and this is eugenics."'
Agreed, and it sounds like the author has an axe to grind for some odd reason. It's not eugenics that he's attacking only, note the implicit blame of "Darwinians" and "Galtonians" as being a cause for these policies.
<quote>The author's article's point amounts to: "The smartest Chinese tend to be more successful and can afford more children, and this is eugenics."</quote>
While in reality the countryside folks (less density) can have more children than urban dwellers (typically one child).
>>Would also like to hear opinions on the author's claim that IQ could be increased 10-15 points on average, per generation.
The same could be true if we just killed low-IQ people, which would be horrific in practice and spirit.
I'm also not sure I particularly care for the "smart" people I know more than the "less smart." This is even more true for the "smart" people I don't know who seem to be making this world worse for all of us. I would pick those "smart" people to be culled, if I had to choose.
You don't have to kill them, you just stop them from reproducing. It is cheaper and easier (in the horrific brave new world sense) to just sterilize anyone below a desired IQ threshold and let them act as worker class. Because by the time you can accurately gage adult IQ you would have already invested a lot of resources into the child.
The whole premise is that "like produces like", which of course is nonsense. Dumb people have brilliant kids, ugly people produce beautiful children, and so on and so forth.
3. However - you are right in one respect. There is usually a 'pull to the mean'. That means that children of exceptional people tend to be closer to the average, thus they are not as gifted as the exceptional parent.
Would an individual have been chosen for sterilization if:
1) He was born with a markedly pointy head, which caused much consternation to his parents and relatives.
2) Was developmentally backward. Notably, he failed to acquire language skills for a significant period during his early childhood.
3) He was educationally subnormal, showing signs of what would now be diagnosed as ADHD,and drugged into a stupor.
4) Was bone lazy. I believe that 'schweinehunde' was the informal term used at the time for this condition.
5) Was disobedient and rebellious, or one of those 'malcontents' that perennially threaten to upset the applecart of society (the term 'hooligan' enjoyed a brief vogue for describing this condition).
6) Was Jewish. The eugenics movement designated Jews for mass sterilization, along with Blacks, Poles and the 'bloody Irish' (but then again, these were the same dolts who thought that sterilizing homosexuals would somehow serve to 'keep the race pure').
Albert Einstein was a prime candidate for this preemptive culling.
If anything, Jews (or more precisely Ashkenazi) are a poster child for eugenics - since really that's what they went through in the middle ages, which is used to explain their enormous achievement (see http://www.economist.com/node/4032638)
I'd be interested in any perspective at all other than the author's, as he does not support his claims with anything other than general "it's widely understood" hand waving nonsense.
You seem to have missed the author's explanation of how they could get 10-15 IQ points per generation:
"Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation."
Once we've found which genes produce a 10-15 IQ point difference (and that's a big "once"!), we select for those genes, and get a 10-15 point boost in the next generation. Eventually, assuming an ongoing eugenics program, we get a strain that breeds true for those characteristics, and the 10-15 point gain becomes permanent. What makes you (or the author) assume that every generation we're going to find another set of genes that will produce another 10-15 point boost?
I don't think you even need to think of it on the level of genes (because most of the time, chromosomes are inherited whole (barring crossing over)). So you'd just be picking the best combinations of random selection of chromosomes contributed by the parents.
It's like being able to roll 100 times and picking the best one in D&D character creation. The improvement might not be able to be done infinitely, but could at least get us to everyone having IQ 130, which would mean a reduction in all the problems associated with lower IQ. (Crime, poverty, lack of educational achievement, bad health)
i.e. a father has two variants of chromosome 6, one good and one great. Why not make sure that his kids just "by chance" get the great one? There will be lots of tradeoffs, but it'd always be better to occasionally step in and make a choice than to always accept randomness.
Firstly, the fact that these terms exist in language and officialdom is meaningless. There is perhaps nowhere else in the world today sporting a greater gap between the official line and the reality of popular life than mainland China.
Secondly, Chinese popular nutrition is still in the dark ages, its common currency being tradition, old-wives hearsay and happenstance. Things that are imported or claimed to be imported are held in high esteem for no other reason. Basic biology is barely taught.
I've been here on and off for 13 years, mostly on, and that's most of my adult life. I was born in Australia, my wife is Chinese, and we chose to have our kid in Thailand. However, I have many friends who have had children here and in fact this morning we just visited a friend in a local hospital who had just had a C-section. Frankly, the kid was wasted looking and it seemed obvious to me that they'd scheduled the operation prematurely.
Thirdly, the author confuses Confucian tradition (family lineage oriented for 2000+ years) and eugenics. The benefits of coming from an aristocratic background of eating well, education and the social network that brings is recognized in all societies. Choosing not to have a child (to kill them because of genetic status) is something else entirely, and even checking the sex of your baby is outlawed here... which isn't to say it doesn't happen, just that it's a lot more on the 'no popularly accessible eugenics' side than the west.
However, there is a hint of reality in the article. The Chinese government has for decades collected the blood of foreigners visiting the country, ostensibly as a medical exam to check whether you have some life-threatening disease and may spread it about the country but obviously partly as a backslap to other countries for doing the same and partly as a money spinner. I have often supposed that database, which is certainly linked to other information about visitors such as who they are, where they come from, who their family is, where they have been and what they are nominally doing in the country, is being compiled in to a massive global genetic database for research purposes. That much is perhaps real, but the eugenics line as spouted here is to my mind utterly baseless.
Are there any sources (besides this rather fantastical article) that BGI-Shenzhen is conducting large-scale research into the genetics behind human intelligence, and that if so that research is going towards some sort of comprehensive national eugenics policy? Has anyone else written about this sort of project? Or is this all just (rather misguided) wishful thinking?
> After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.
I would expect that providing proper nutrition, health care, and primary and secondary education to the majority of Chinese children (especially those in the marginalized countryside) would be far more important than having a handful of rich families gestating designer babies.
> Are there any sources (besides this rather fantastical article) that BGI-Shenzhen is conducting large-scale research into the genetics behind human intelligence
> if so that research is going towards some sort of comprehensive national eugenics policy?
Now that, as far as I know, is mere speculation, albeit speculation that has been bandied about by many more individuals than just the author of this piece.
My belief is that the idea of "intelligence being genetic" has zero practical benefits.
Good health (and all the factors contributing to this) and education will probably out-explain genetics for decades to come, and any significant amount of genomic selection in humans would be futile.
China's increasing economic power is being converted into soft-power where every scholars writes such baseless stuff glorifying China. This article has less to do with reality of human population and more to do with Chinese investments in western scholars and media.
I think they are correct in that Eugenics should be taken more seriously, if not to explain better why it doesn't work. We may find that some things are easy to eliminate while others are impossible.
Author manages to squeeze a topping of first semester Introduction to China with a thick crust of massive unsubstantiated overreach.
"hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications."
Nice autopraise, mildly disguised.
"After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness."
Seriously? There was an otherwise intelligent guy working for us who started spouting this kind of drivel. We noticed it all started after he got assigned a female manager and then subsequently a non-white manager. Some people have mild racial hangups, which they then externalize in odd ways like China peril.