An intelligence researcher back in 2001 was keen to go into finding the genes for intelligence. My brother and I were going to fund him [we would set up a company with a view to patenting some process and providing a service to women]. The intelligence researcher thought that there would be only about half a dozen main genes that would need to be found to get 80% of the supersonic action. For one reason and another we didn't get around to doing it.
I asked him about it a couple of years ago and he said that it doesn't seem so simple now and that the genes are all over the map.
The fear about eugenics is misplaced. Eugenics is great and is why we are not like chimps. Eugenics got a bad name because evil-doing fools like the Nazis did the opposite of what was a good idea when they tried to exterminate Jews. Any half wit can see that Ashkenazi Jews have got an extreme dose of The Right Stuff - hence they feature so much in the high performance intellectual stakes. Adolf [being an envious post traumatic stress syndrome sufferer from WWI and growing up in Vienna] developed an antipathy to Jews of pathological proportions. There were also dopey ideas about race as though races were encapsulated collections of genes which were able to be collectively defined. Collectivists ignore individuals and bundle everyone into some government programme whether they like it or not. The make dopey universal laws that everyone must comply with, forcing square pegs into round holes and ignoring the normal distribution of everything.
Women conduct eugenics programmes all day every day, rejecting male suitors in droves. Women universally look for intelligence in men, along with sense of humour, kindness and other things down the list such as hunkability. The joke is that men simply look for big tits but in fact they don't allow intelligence to get too far down the list though they don't push it as far up the list as women do. Women are merciless in their eugenics programmes. Every generation they reject the bottom 10% of males [near enough for government work, with a few mistakes allowed through] which causes a rapid increase in intelligence.
The Flynn Effect is not an accident and it is not because tv makes people smarter.
Women are not the only drivers of intelligence, but they have a major effect. Genocidal war was traditionally significant too, with the smarter winning males exterminating the losers. Regular garden variety challenges to survival such as figuring out how to catch and eat a dangerous rhinoceros are important too.
China started an enormous eugenics programme decades ago and it's now in full swing. The one child policy and female abortions and perhaps infanticide resulted in a huge surplus [some 20%] of men. So the women have a big surplus of males looking for a mate. The males have to compete and 20% must lose. Since women choose intelligence, those males who don't have it are going to find they do not have children.
If those women and their brighter husbands can also choose their zygote, then there is going to be a major jump in intelligence in China.
The problem for women in choosing mates is that much of DNA is hidden from view, so they have no idea whether they are signing up for all sorts of genetic disasters. With genetic selection possible, the selected zygotes can be much improved over the viciously cruel and random natural selection methods of nature which simply tries all combinations and bad luck for the lottery losers.
A doctor and his wife I know were doing just that [zygote selection] because he has a stomach cancer gene [he had his stomach removed in his late 20s which turned out to already be cancerous when inspected]. Their zygote selections failed to live, so they have gone with the old way - hoping that their baby is lucky. Having had the experience himself, he's in a position to say that the risk is not so terrible that it's not worth being born. Nobody is perfect so their baby might be imperfect in a stomach cancer way but a winner in some other way.
The Made in China genetic selection method with the one-child policy is likely to be highly successful. The welfare programmes of the "free" world which result in hordes of unintelligent children with no father is not.
Unlike most physical characteristics, intelligence is almost a freebie, with no physiological cost. Like upgrading from a 286 to 386 to Pentium chips and now to Snapdragon and Krait. Last year was the year of the dragon - the Snapdragon [by Qualcomm] and this year is the year of the snake - the Krait [also by Qualcomm]. Intelligence is not like being 3 metres tall which comes with blood pressure problems and burst pipes in ankles, or being 200 kg of muscles which comes with nutritional needs and cooling problems not to mention difficulty fitting into an airline seat. Intelligence in human brains just takes a small amount of space.
There are probably not many people who wish they were less intelligent. I could have used heaps more. Studying was such a hassle. Some people could do it fast and well, twirling the Cosmos in their heads, throwing Fourier Transforms around like frisbees.
Most mothers will not tick the box "Less intelligence please". Unintelligent men are not going to have flocks of gorgeous women ravaging them. They will continue to be marginalized in society. The unintelligent are still an allowed target of jokes while cripples, Jews, Negroes, Moslems, women, homosexuals and for God's sake even the Irish are not.
Mqurice
PS: If Made in China eugenics is looking for "the right stuff" they are looking in the wrong place if they confine their search to Chinese and Europeans. They are like the drunk Irish guy looking for his keys under the street lamp because there's more light there. Ashkenazi genes are a hybrid of genes from a small part of north west India and across the middle east as far as Morocco. There are absurdly smart people who show up from north west India from time to time - mathematical whizzoes and whatnot. It is a good idea for Made in China genes to be upgraded in the gene pool they have at hand, but that will take them only so far. |
