There’s plenty of people with an IQ of 140, and plenty of people with an IQ of 60, and it seems most of this variation is genetic, which suggests that there are low hanging fruit available somewhere (though poss bly not in single point mutations).
Also when a couple with low and high IQs respectively have children, the children tend to be normal, and distributed across the full range of IQs. This suggests that there’s not some set of critical mutations that only work if the other mutations are present as well, and the effect is more lots of smaller things that are additive.
The book Innate actually goes into detail about a bunch of IQ studies and relating it to neuroscience which is why I really liked reading it!
and it seems most of this variation is genetic
This to me seems like the crux here, in the book innate he states the belief that around 60% of it is genetic and 20% is developmental randomness (since brain development is essentially a stochastic process), 20% being nurture based on twin studies.
I do find this a difficult thing to think about though since intelligence can be seen as the speed of the larger highways and how well (differentially) coupled different cortical areas are. There are deep foundational reasons to believe that our cognition is concepts stacked on top of other concepts such as described in the Active Inference literature. A more accessible and practical way of seeing this is in the book How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barett.
Also if you combine this with studies done by Robert Sapolvsky described in the book Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers where traumatic events in childhood leads to less IQ down the line we can see how wrong beliefs that stick lead to your stochastic process of development worsening. This is because at timestep T-1 you had a belief or experience that shaped your learning to be way off and at timestep T you’re using this to learn. Yes the parameters are set genetically yet from a mechanistic perspective it very much interfaces with your learning.
Twin studies also have a general bias in that they’re often made in societies affected by globalisation and that have been connected for a long time. If you believe something like cultural evolution or cognitive gadgets theory what is seen as genetically influenced might actually be genetically influenced given that the society you’re in share the same cognitive gadgets. (This is essentially one of the main critiques of twin studies)
So there’s some degree that (IQ|Cogntiive Gadgets) could be decomposed genetically but if you don’t decompose it given cultural tools it doesn’t make sense? There’s no fully general intelligence, there’s an intelligence that given the right infrastructure then becomes general?
There’s plenty of people with an IQ of 140, and plenty of people with an IQ of 60, and it seems most of this variation is genetic, which suggests that there are low hanging fruit available somewhere (though poss bly not in single point mutations).
Also when a couple with low and high IQs respectively have children, the children tend to be normal, and distributed across the full range of IQs. This suggests that there’s not some set of critical mutations that only work if the other mutations are present as well, and the effect is more lots of smaller things that are additive.
The book Innate actually goes into detail about a bunch of IQ studies and relating it to neuroscience which is why I really liked reading it!
This to me seems like the crux here, in the book innate he states the belief that around 60% of it is genetic and 20% is developmental randomness (since brain development is essentially a stochastic process), 20% being nurture based on twin studies.
I do find this a difficult thing to think about though since intelligence can be seen as the speed of the larger highways and how well (differentially) coupled different cortical areas are. There are deep foundational reasons to believe that our cognition is concepts stacked on top of other concepts such as described in the Active Inference literature. A more accessible and practical way of seeing this is in the book How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barett.
Also if you combine this with studies done by Robert Sapolvsky described in the book Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers where traumatic events in childhood leads to less IQ down the line we can see how wrong beliefs that stick lead to your stochastic process of development worsening. This is because at timestep T-1 you had a belief or experience that shaped your learning to be way off and at timestep T you’re using this to learn. Yes the parameters are set genetically yet from a mechanistic perspective it very much interfaces with your learning.
Twin studies also have a general bias in that they’re often made in societies affected by globalisation and that have been connected for a long time. If you believe something like cultural evolution or cognitive gadgets theory what is seen as genetically influenced might actually be genetically influenced given that the society you’re in share the same cognitive gadgets. (This is essentially one of the main critiques of twin studies)
So there’s some degree that (IQ|Cogntiive Gadgets) could be decomposed genetically but if you don’t decompose it given cultural tools it doesn’t make sense? There’s no fully general intelligence, there’s an intelligence that given the right infrastructure then becomes general?