Comments on: Are super intelligent human beings coming?

By: Assistant Village Idiot

Assistant Village Idiot — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 20:00:08 +0000

@ parker. Yeah, it gets mentioned about every ten comments on boards that discuss genetics. Usually without further information, just that virtue-signalling tone.

Sergey, I am willing to be convinced, but I’m not there yet. A bottleneck which creates both increases independently is plausible, but so is a possible connection between sphingolipid disease vulnerability and intelligence. Also, I think the estimate of the bottleneck is more recent than the destruction of the 2Temple. I don’t doubt that there is a tracing to common ancestors, but that does not mean they were measurably more clever at that point, Cohanim or no. Last I checked over at the West Hunter discussions, Jewish men plus some Jewish and some northern Italian women in the 10th C moving up to the Rhineland was the prevailing theory. No one seems to notice the Jews as especially intelligent in ancient times, neither in Palestine nor in scattered groups throughout the Mediterranean.

@ blert: I knew Grady by correspondence when I was in Prometheus, decades ago. His essay caused quite a stir there. A nice man, I think – sad ending. I think he relied too heavily on the William Sidis ~~history~~ legend for that. Sidis was legitimately highly intelligent, but not the astronomical IQ claimed.

By: Sergey

Sergey — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 13:47:56 +0000

No signicant evolutionary changes can be explained by shifts in gene frequencies or by any other genetical events. Most people believe this, but only because of our almost complete ignorance of the mechanisms of ontogenesis. Phenotypes can be changed only by changing development processes, and the latter are very narrowly determined and amazingly stable, constrained by factors almost completelly unknown and mostly having nothing in common with genetics as such. Neodarwinian view of evolution is complete bullshit, but it will probably take decades before this dogma would be eventually discarded.

By: parker

parker — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 03:40:12 +0000

People who believe in super humans might want to take a long, in depth look at the 3rd Reich.

By: Dennis

Dennis — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 23:35:09 +0000

I was hoping for a study which specifically addressed the purported linkage between diseases involving sphingolipid metabolism and IQ and refuted the hypothesis. Years ago I seem to remember reading an article which linked homozygotes with increased intelligence but now that you have challenged the hypothesis I admit that I can’t find anything recent on the subject.

The point I was making about genetic engineering is that most SNPs which persist in a population have trade offs. Eliminating some of them in favor of other SNPs may have unintended consequences. There may be a natural limit to human intelligence which genetic manipulation can not overcome.

By: Sergey

Sergey — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 20:17:25 +0000

Another fact about Ashkenazim revealed by genetic studies is that all their lineages can be traced down to just four men and four women, all living about 2000 years ago, when Romans destroyed the Temple and forced almost all Jewish population into exile. All the men belonged to priestly caste of Cohanim, presumably persons with very high intelligence. So superhumans are really already here: they are called Ashkenazim.

By: neo-neocon

neo-neocon — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 19:59:45 +0000

Dennis: You might be interested in this.

By: Sergey

Sergey — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 19:56:56 +0000

Yes, I am sure. There were no actual facts connecting this monogenic diseases to general intelligence, only analogy with schoolbook example of sickle-cell anemia. But this analogy is deeply flawed, since advantage of heterozigotes must be really strong to overcome negative selection for gomozigotes. In malaria striken areas this disease is the main cause of infant mortality, so selective pressure is really high. But enhanced intelligence hardly gives any advantage in procreation, especially in traditional Jewish communities, where all mariages were arranged. Another point mentioned in the article is simultaneous arising of these genes about 1100 years ago, which is impossible to explain by any selective factors. Such events are well known in population genetics and considered to be “bottleneck” effects – a catastrophic population depression with following recovery fixing random features of a small parent population. Other study of Ashkenazim also indicate such bottleneck on a large set of genes completely unrelated to any phenotypical traits (synonimous nucleotide substitutions).
Ashkenazim are for human genetics what fruit flies are for general genetics: the most studied object, exactly because of unusually small genetic diversity, which greatly helps in finding any regularities and connections between genes and phenotypical traits.

By: Dennis

Dennis — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 18:10:45 +0000

Sergey Says at 11:57 am
“Dennis, there is no connection between rare genetic diseases that are not so rare among Ashkenazi Jews, and intelligence…”

Are you sure? This article is a little bit old, but I’ve not read anything to refute this information.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/researchers-say-intelligence-and-diseases-may-be-linked-in-ashkenazic-genes.html?_r=0

By: Ira

Ira — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 18:02:25 +0000

And there is the Star Trek original series 1967 episode "Space Seed" in which we meet Khan Nonie Singh, played by Ricardo Montalbé¡n, who spectacularly reprised his role in the great 1982 feature film Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan. As described in Wikipedia (emphasis added by me):

Khan is one of a group of genetically engineered superhumans, bred to be free of the usual human mental and physical limitations, who were removed from power after the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s.[3] Khan had been both the most successful conqueror and the most benign ruler of the group, ruling more than a quarter of the Earth's area across Asia to the Middle East from 1992 to 1996 with a firm but generally peaceful hand until he was deposed. While most of the supermen were killed or sentenced to death, Khan and 84 others escaped Earth by way of the sleeper ship SS Botany Bay.

By: Sergey

Sergey — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 16:57:44 +0000

Dennis, there is no connection between rare genetic diseases that are not so rare among Ashkenazi Jews, and intelligence, which can not be traced to any specific genes or gene combinations. High incidence of these diseases is the result of inbreeding, inevitable in small isolated communities in which these people lived for centuries in Europe. Overall genetic diversity of Ashkenazim is very low compared to other groups of such size. The causes of extraordinary high IQ in this group are still unknown and is a hot topic in human genetics.