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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (171753)	10/3/2005 8:23:08 AM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

That's what I thought too, but an intelligence researcher I know in Australia told me he figures there are only half a dozen genes causing a major effect. That's pretty cool! Easy to pick up and plug in. Not thousands of interlocking genes. Maybe he's right. I'm in no position to debate it. I wonder how long it's going to be before we start twiddling with embryonic DNA to get a better baby/human being. I'm not inclined to think of the individual act of DNA twiddling to be ethically wrong, but it'll make an interesting society, wealthy people will be in a better position to twiddle. Poor people will be stuck with what they got. Some time ago I vounteered into the bone marrow donor program. The nurse asked if I wanted a copy of the test/antigen results and I thought sure. That would be interesting. I couldn't begin to understand the test results. After hours of googling, I still couldn't begin to understand what it all meant. I couldn't even figure out where in the helix it was coming from. Google will wipe everyone completely, even if all humans combine together to answer, because Google doesn't forget and can locate information quickly. Humans grow old and die. They forget. Can't recall quickly and have trouble figuring out who has the right answer. Perhaps this was a problem before the internet ... I see the biggest problem with the internet as a knowledge base is how do you separate the fact from fiction? In some cases there is the academic equivalent of peer review. Wilkipedia, for example. But there are "wars" in/at Wilkipedia over content. Will there someday be a filter in Google which says...give me only the accurate stuff? Check that box. If not, are we going to get cluttered with wrong data? Will we toss up our hands in frustration and turn on a reality show? Intelligence is a bit like pornography; tough to define, but you know it when you see it. Probably true in many cases. But we do love metrics, even when they are all flawed/not comprehensive. Hypthetical IQ test analogy question. A belt is to a pair of pants like suspenders are to: A. a shirt B. a pair of pants C. hose D. leather shoes If I'm taking the IQ test in America the correct answer is B. If I'm taking the test in England the correct answer is C. If I'm in the "wrong" country when I take the test, I'm stupid. My cousin writes that her son who just entered kindergarten is adding triple digit numbers, multiplying and dividing in his head. Is the kid a budding math genius and/or did he pick up a piece of a savant gene set? Is a savant a genius? jttmab P.S. If Tendler were here, I'm not sure what he would say. He might say, "Maurice, you got it right"; "jttmab, you got it right; or "Maybe I could have said that better."