Are super intelligent human beings coming? — 28 Comments
I submit, for your consideration, the last verse of The Galaxy Song (emphasis mine):
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth; And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!
Songwriters: JOHN DU PREZ, ERIC IDLE
not if the left can kill them first, they would make things even MORE unequal…
The Link no longer working Neo
Um, the super intelligent are already among us. Barrack Obama, Donald Trump. If you want proof, just ask them.
KRB
This has nothing to do with DNA. Posterity of geniuses is usually mediocre or worse. There is some hereditary predisposition in producing geniuses, but it is impossible to reproduce this trait with any certainty.
I believe, this even has nothing to do with biology of any kind – pure divine grace.
That was a good introduction to the topic, well-explained, leaning strongly to the “genetic load” explanation of g. Plomin (Behavioral Genetics) and Steve Hsu (infoproc.blogspot.com) are indeed among the big names there.
Those who are interested should try West Hunter (Cochran and Harpending, authors of The 10,000-Year Explosion), HBD chick, James Thompson, Razib Khan. However, I warm you that it will very quickly get you involved with people calling you bad names. Some truths cannot be spoken.
not if this continues
It seems like every day, we see new examples of American schoolchildren being indoctrinated with left-wing ideas.This latest example was brought to our attention by a concerned parent.Kindergarten students from PS75, a public school in New York City, recently took part in a class project in which the children were made to create an American flag with the flags of other 22 other nations superimposed over the stripes. Below the flag read the words “We pledge allegiance to an International Flag.”
How about if we settle for more people with a tiny bit of common sense, which is in short supply?
Hard to do when the smart people have no babies and their tax money funds the birth of many welfare kids and low performers who have lower common sense.
It may be peculiar that we’d say they haven’t already been here.
I don’t know what my IQ was at its peak.
I “limited out” Wonderlic’s test — not THE Wonderlic test — they have many, many tests — its their business.
For the test in question Wonderlic put my floor at +6 SD.
When adjusted for speed and ease — freakier still.
And there are many other such scores in my ancient youth.
By the time I was a high school Senior, my cumulative academic record — was a record for the LA Unified School System. It was deemed to big for the file cabinets — and stood atop them in TWO boxes — full reams.
No-one else was every even ‘boxed’ as a pendent file was more than sufficient for valedictorians.
{ That’s 1:: 15,000,000 records wise }
I only saw them when my school counselor patted them on his desk. It had taken him the entire weekend to them, he bragged. It was a point of pride that he read all the way through every ‘cume’ for every child in his care.
The heft was due to the debate: how high up the scale is this kid?
Right now I’m playing the back half of “Charlie.”
With most of the losses in short term recall.
&&&&&
IQ must have DNA to back it up. It’s an innate trait.
Near as I can figure, your peak potential — brain development — occurs very early — probably by the age of one-year.
It’s easy to damage the brain, whereas improving its base function appears to be outside our ken.
&&&&
Advancing IQ — up the distribution is a misleading metric WRT what’s happening in the body.
To obtain shattering test scores and deep knowledge — one must have orders of magnitude more intellectual horsepower.
This reality is so taboo that it — absolute performance — is never found in the professional literature.
Eg — Limiting out on a college prep exam ( SAT ) — while completing the test in 1/6th of the allotted time.
&&&&&&
Super smart folks are not very likely to have many children.
“Members of high IQ societies, especially those that require D15IQs above 145, often comment that around this IQ, qualitatively different thinking emerges.
By this they mean that the 145+ D15IQ person doesn’t just do the same things, intellectually, as a lower IQ person, just faster and more accurately, but actually engages in fundamentally different intellectual processes. David Wechsler, D. K. Simonton, et alia, have observed the same thing.
“Since intimate social relationships are predicated upon mutual understanding, this draws a kind of ‘line in the sand’ at 140-150 D15IQ that appears to separate humans into two distinct groups.
This may truncate the 30 point limit for those between 150 and 160 D15IQ people.
Even when 150+ D15IQ people learn to function in the mainstream society, they will always be considered, and will feel, in some way ‘different’.
Grady Towers explored this in depth in his article, ‘The Outsiders’.
This is of mild interest to the group within which the 150+ D15IQ person is embedded but it is moderately to profoundly important to the high IQ individual who will feel an often profound sense of isolation.”
The cited article opines that the human average IQ is 100.
That is totally false.
IQ was normed to 100 for White European-American youth.
No-one else.
The global mean IQ is 87.
Somalia, and other similar climes have average IQ of below 80.
The genetic drift required to pull a population up +1 SD is enormous.
Some calculations place the bigging of the Ashkenazi rise back a full millennia.
Which should give social engineers pause.
Unless you’re willing to engage in Hitlerian, Stalinist, Maoist, Potist levels of “selection” — natural events will take centuries to produce a new breed of man.
That’s actually pretty quick, BTW.
As it is, intermarriage is as likely to pull DOWN IQs as it is to pull them up. ( Regression to the mean. )
This has been witnessed in Europe.
Second generation Muslim immigrants are proving to be even dumber than their parents — as a rule.
The first generation consisted of folks that were on the right side of their native land’s IQ distribution.
Then regression to the mean kicked in.
This is also being witnessed in Mexican American 2nd generation kids. Regression to the mean — repeats.
“Are super intelligent human beings coming?”
” Kae Arby Says:
March 4th, 2016 at 1:31 pm
Um, the super intelligent are already among us. Barrack Obama, Donald Trump. If you want proof, just ask them.
KRB”
Yeah she delivered a slow pitch right over the center of the plate didn’t she. Your sarcastic comment is apt enough.
But I expected some regular poster to have replied “We are already here”, first,
This quote is from a little boy with a toy tiger that had the ability to come to life when no other humans were around:
“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
If you haven’t seen “Idiocracy”, you should. Crude, funny, scary, prophetic. The only thing it gets wrong is how far into the future it is set.
Old Star Trek T-shirt:
“Beam me up Scotty, there is no intelligent life on this planet”
It is good to read an honest discussion about human intelligence. It seems to me that , unfortunately, the natural trend seems to be towards a decline in human intelligence because super intelligent people often have less children later in life than the less intelligent people.
In many biological traits there are trade offs where a trait which enhances survival in some circumstances decreases survival in other circumstances. An example of this biological balancing act is the genetic variant which causes sickle cell anemia. People who have sickle cell trait have an improved chance of survival when they are challenged with malaria but their offspring who are sometimes homozygous for sickle cell anemia have a much decreased survival. This same trade off is probably at work in some traits which enhance human intelligence.
Because there are so many highly intelligent individuals among the Ashkenazim Jews they have been the subjects of study. Because of those studies, there is increasing evidence that there is a trade off between the benefits provided by genes which promote intelligence and the negative effects of the same genes among Ashkenazim Jews. These intelligence genes contribute to a number of diseases which include Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher, and mucolipidosis type IV which are all very destructive to homozygotes but which contribute to intelligence in those who are monozygotes.
Speaking of super-intelligent beings, Ben Carson is out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People who believe in super humans might want to take a long, in depth look at the 3rd Reich.
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.
@ 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.
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I submit, for your consideration, the last verse of The Galaxy Song (emphasis mine):
not if the left can kill them first, they would make things even MORE unequal…
The Link no longer working Neo
Um, the super intelligent are already among us. Barrack Obama, Donald Trump. If you want proof, just ask them.
KRB
This has nothing to do with DNA. Posterity of geniuses is usually mediocre or worse. There is some hereditary predisposition in producing geniuses, but it is impossible to reproduce this trait with any certainty.
I believe, this even has nothing to do with biology of any kind – pure divine grace.
That was a good introduction to the topic, well-explained, leaning strongly to the “genetic load” explanation of g. Plomin (Behavioral Genetics) and Steve Hsu (infoproc.blogspot.com) are indeed among the big names there.
Those who are interested should try West Hunter (Cochran and Harpending, authors of The 10,000-Year Explosion), HBD chick, James Thompson, Razib Khan. However, I warm you that it will very quickly get you involved with people calling you bad names. Some truths cannot be spoken.
not if this continues
It seems like every day, we see new examples of American schoolchildren being indoctrinated with left-wing ideas.This latest example was brought to our attention by a concerned parent.Kindergarten students from PS75, a public school in New York City, recently took part in a class project in which the children were made to create an American flag with the flags of other 22 other nations superimposed over the stripes. Below the flag read the words “We pledge allegiance to an International Flag.”
http://www.hannity.com/articles/hanpr-election-493995/outrageous-public-school-students-taught-to-14451508/
How about if we settle for more people with a tiny bit of common sense, which is in short supply?
Hard to do when the smart people have no babies and their tax money funds the birth of many welfare kids and low performers who have lower common sense.
It may be peculiar that we’d say they haven’t already been here.
I don’t know what my IQ was at its peak.
I “limited out” Wonderlic’s test — not THE Wonderlic test — they have many, many tests — its their business.
For the test in question Wonderlic put my floor at +6 SD.
When adjusted for speed and ease — freakier still.
And there are many other such scores in my ancient youth.
By the time I was a high school Senior, my cumulative academic record — was a record for the LA Unified School System. It was deemed to big for the file cabinets — and stood atop them in TWO boxes — full reams.
No-one else was every even ‘boxed’ as a pendent file was more than sufficient for valedictorians.
{ That’s 1:: 15,000,000 records wise }
I only saw them when my school counselor patted them on his desk. It had taken him the entire weekend to them, he bragged. It was a point of pride that he read all the way through every ‘cume’ for every child in his care.
The heft was due to the debate: how high up the scale is this kid?
Right now I’m playing the back half of “Charlie.”
With most of the losses in short term recall.
&&&&&
IQ must have DNA to back it up. It’s an innate trait.
Near as I can figure, your peak potential — brain development — occurs very early — probably by the age of one-year.
It’s easy to damage the brain, whereas improving its base function appears to be outside our ken.
&&&&
Advancing IQ — up the distribution is a misleading metric WRT what’s happening in the body.
To obtain shattering test scores and deep knowledge — one must have orders of magnitude more intellectual horsepower.
This reality is so taboo that it — absolute performance — is never found in the professional literature.
Eg — Limiting out on a college prep exam ( SAT ) — while completing the test in 1/6th of the allotted time.
&&&&&&
Super smart folks are not very likely to have many children.
“Members of high IQ societies, especially those that require D15IQs above 145, often comment that around this IQ, qualitatively different thinking emerges.
By this they mean that the 145+ D15IQ person doesn’t just do the same things, intellectually, as a lower IQ person, just faster and more accurately, but actually engages in fundamentally different intellectual processes. David Wechsler, D. K. Simonton, et alia, have observed the same thing.
“Since intimate social relationships are predicated upon mutual understanding, this draws a kind of ‘line in the sand’ at 140-150 D15IQ that appears to separate humans into two distinct groups.
This may truncate the 30 point limit for those between 150 and 160 D15IQ people.
Even when 150+ D15IQ people learn to function in the mainstream society, they will always be considered, and will feel, in some way ‘different’.
Grady Towers explored this in depth in his article, ‘The Outsiders’.
This is of mild interest to the group within which the 150+ D15IQ person is embedded but it is moderately to profoundly important to the high IQ individual who will feel an often profound sense of isolation.”
http://polymatharchives.blogspot.in/2015/01/the-inappropriately-excluded.html
The cited article opines that the human average IQ is 100.
That is totally false.
IQ was normed to 100 for White European-American youth.
No-one else.
The global mean IQ is 87.
Somalia, and other similar climes have average IQ of below 80.
The genetic drift required to pull a population up +1 SD is enormous.
Some calculations place the bigging of the Ashkenazi rise back a full millennia.
Which should give social engineers pause.
Unless you’re willing to engage in Hitlerian, Stalinist, Maoist, Potist levels of “selection” — natural events will take centuries to produce a new breed of man.
That’s actually pretty quick, BTW.
As it is, intermarriage is as likely to pull DOWN IQs as it is to pull them up. ( Regression to the mean. )
This has been witnessed in Europe.
Second generation Muslim immigrants are proving to be even dumber than their parents — as a rule.
The first generation consisted of folks that were on the right side of their native land’s IQ distribution.
Then regression to the mean kicked in.
This is also being witnessed in Mexican American 2nd generation kids. Regression to the mean — repeats.
“Are super intelligent human beings coming?”
Yeah she delivered a slow pitch right over the center of the plate didn’t she. Your sarcastic comment is apt enough.
But I expected some regular poster to have replied “We are already here”, first,
This quote is from a little boy with a toy tiger that had the ability to come to life when no other humans were around:
“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
If you haven’t seen “Idiocracy”, you should. Crude, funny, scary, prophetic. The only thing it gets wrong is how far into the future it is set.
Old Star Trek T-shirt:
“Beam me up Scotty, there is no intelligent life on this planet”
It is good to read an honest discussion about human intelligence. It seems to me that , unfortunately, the natural trend seems to be towards a decline in human intelligence because super intelligent people often have less children later in life than the less intelligent people.
In many biological traits there are trade offs where a trait which enhances survival in some circumstances decreases survival in other circumstances. An example of this biological balancing act is the genetic variant which causes sickle cell anemia. People who have sickle cell trait have an improved chance of survival when they are challenged with malaria but their offspring who are sometimes homozygous for sickle cell anemia have a much decreased survival. This same trade off is probably at work in some traits which enhance human intelligence.
Because there are so many highly intelligent individuals among the Ashkenazim Jews they have been the subjects of study. Because of those studies, there is increasing evidence that there is a trade off between the benefits provided by genes which promote intelligence and the negative effects of the same genes among Ashkenazim Jews. These intelligence genes contribute to a number of diseases which include Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher, and mucolipidosis type IV which are all very destructive to homozygotes but which contribute to intelligence in those who are monozygotes.
Speaking of super-intelligent beings, Ben Carson is out.
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.
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):
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
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.
Dennis:
You might be interested in this.
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.
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.
People who believe in super humans might want to take a long, in depth look at the 3rd Reich.
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.
@ 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
historylegend for that. Sidis was legitimately highly intelligent, but not the astronomical IQ claimed.