Help: Info on intelligence-focused genetic engineering?
This is a request for analyses and info on intelligence-related genetic engineering; how far away is genetic engineering designed to increase intelligence? What’s the scientific/cultural/technological landscape? Are the obstacles funding-related or technological? Are there any proposed methods of intelligence-boosting gene therapy? Any good overall introductions?
I expect genetic engineering and especially intelligence-enhancing genetic engineering to drastically change the socioeconomic and sociocultural landscape when the effects hit. This affects singularity timelines along with everything else about the future. Thanks in advance for any links or explanations.
There has only recently been genetic engineering in primates. They got a yield of 5 marmosets born from 91 embryos. So you might have to convince 90 odd women to have a pregnancy to get a good shot at getting the gene you want.
See this post for some interesting discussion on genetic engineering intelligence, specifically this bit on deletion of genes
I’ve heard that density of neuronal connection correlated with test performance in the lab.
But, as XiXiDu said, we’re going to have a problem with definitions here.
I’ve always thought that if we could show that IQ had a genetic component and if we knew that IQ mattered for academic/career/personal success, then we ought to be thinking of medical ways to improve IQ for those who got the fuzzy end of the genetic lollipop. But we don’t know much about IQ, beyond family tree type of analyses meant to examine heritability—it’s a long way between “X looks like it runs in families” and “Here are the genes for X and the proteins they produce.”
It seems obvious that IQ has a genetic component. It seems obvious that IQ matters for success. I’m pretty sure the science is clear on those points. We’ve even identified hundreds of the genes, including really important ones like those highlighted by the Ashkenazim. What I’m asking is: what’s our plan of attack?
That is the realm of intelligence amplification: nootropics, neurofeedback, meditation, et cetera. Genetic engineering including gene therapy are unlikely to help much, especially when compared to more traditional IA. That is what I spend much of my time researching.
Well, then the next step would be trying to isolate the physiological correlates of those genes. I think it’s important to clear it up on the physical end because people will be arguing till the cows come home about causal relationships as long as we’re just playing with different kinds of test scores, “cognitive” versus classroom.
In the U.S., I’m afraid this might be true, but what about places like India and China? I’m rather scared of a genetically enhanced Friendliness-ignorant existential risks-ignorant India. They seem not to have the same cultural biases as the U.S. does.
To be able to use genetic engineering to amplify intelligence we would have to know what features of the brain relate to an increase in intelligence or problem solving ability. Besides, we don’t even know what intelligence is in the first place.
The only definitive evidence that comes to my mind right now on a relation between brain structure and intelligence is this study:
Striatal Volume Predicts Level of Video Game Skill Acquisition
So my guess is that we are far from using genetic engineering to increase intelligence if we have no good definition of intelligence itself and haven’t been able to pinpoint the underlying neurological features that give rise to exceptional intellectual feats.
This and this. The limits don’t seem to be understanding here; just resources and desire. When does the engineering start?
If you trust that article you link, they’ve found 300 genes affecting height, together accounting for 15% of the variance. Oddly, they don’t talk about the variance of the putative IQ genes, but the past hundreds of putative IQ genes have had similar aggregate effects. One explanation of the similar statistics of IQ and height and their tiny effect sizes is that they’re both failures of the same statistical methods. “In fact, there have been no common IQ polymorphisms which have been replicated.” A few days after that is a thread on LW about failure to replicate. Plomin is cited as someone cleaning up the hype, so maybe he is more careful in his results of last month (that you cite).
If we know anything, it’s that there are no common alleles of large effect for IQ. Maybe most variance in height and IQ is due to mutational load. Large effects are quickly selected away, but small effects can’t can’t be corrected because there are so many other small effects competing to be corrected. Maybe the observed effects of 1/1000 of the variance are what we should be seeing.
But then maybe we don’t have to know anything. If there are no positive variants, if the relevant consideration is number of negative variants, then it may be possible to genetic engineering by always choosing the most common allele, not knowing what any of them due.
I’ve identified the requisite genes to be a prodigy under certain environmental, cultural and educational circumstances: The DNA of Eliezer Yudkowsky. Phew! But how do I engineer myself into a XiXiDu with the intellect of Eliezer Yudkowsky using this knowledge? Well, you better hope for a lot of exponential growth or recursive self-improvement before you can turn this knowledge into personal intelligence amplification without either messing up your personality or cloning a bunch of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s.
I just don’t see this happening any time soon. There is so much to intelligence that we don’t know yet. Doing some statistical DNA analysis of a lot of smart people won’t help either. After all you want their intelligence and not their personality or autism. There isn’t some intelligence module that you can plug in. Intelligence is broad and fuzzy and the underlying genetic structure hopelessly tangled, interdependent and interwoven. It’s not even clear that better academic performance isn’t more dependent on your personality and ability to concentrate etc., rather than some kind of larger brain area that gives you more memory. There are other studies that show that college performance correlates with the ability to focus rather than IQ.
Genetic engineering is playing with fire, because we don’t know jack shit. You’ll likely just mess up everything that you deemed worthy previous to tinkering with your DNA. maybe afterwards you won’t care anymore though. Or maybe you will because the world suddenly looks pale and barren because your intelligence amplification killed your mind’s eye. Or maybe you lose a huge amount of consciousness because it’s a computation sink. Congratulation smart ass, you turned yourself into a p-zombie!
Your whole analysis seems fundamentally confused: I’m not talking about modifying already living people’s DNA via gene therapy or the like. I’m talking about engineering sperm/eggs. Engineering a bunch of Eliezer Yudkowsky-like kids seems like a damn good idea, and eminently possible.
What you wrote is three paragraphs of mere assertion. What’s going on here? Why are people treating intelligence as some mystical process that is beyond the realm of science? What scientific roadblocks don’t I know about? It seems that for a long time the limits were technical, and that we’re starting to gain traction on dealing with those problems. We don’t have to know what intelligence is to find meaningful and usefully manipulable genes that correlate with it. There’s a whole lot about intelligence we don’t have to understand.
I don’t think intelligence is any more ‘mysterious’ than our ignorance. But you have to understand before you tinker.
One of the stranger issues with animal breeding is that selecting for physiological traits tends to have behavioral consequences. All-white animals (chickens, horses, dogs) often have problems with aggression. Chickens selected to lay more eggs are also more prone to stress. Genetic engineering has predictable, consistent results in some contexts (a luminescent fish is, as far as I know, the same as a normal fish except for the glow) but unpredictable results in other contexts.
How much more so, with genes thought to code for intelligence?
Before you start manipulating genes (in humans?!) that merely correlate with intelligence, I think you need to find out a bit more about what those genes do in the brain. Otherwise, you’re more likely to produce a crazy or dead baby than a genius baby.
It definitely goes the other way too: In the Soviet Union some researchers bred foxes for several generations, selecting for tameness. Within a few generations the foxes started developing wider foreheads, wagging tails and floppy ears.
And now they are available as extremely expensive pets.
Please note that I did not intent on being derogatory or that I tried to ridicule your idea. I often forget how what I say is perceived by other people. I’m mainly writing this for myself to clear things up in my head and for further feedback. So it’s just a bunch of ideas in the form of an opposing argument. I don’t even disagree with you really. I often told myself I should rather switch to asking mode rather than devils advocate.
That is called germline engineering I think? Anyway, I believe that is even more dangerous and unfeasible.
On a side note. I’m not treating intelligence as a mystical process but something highly vague. Intelligence is used like the term emergence, you could replace it with the word magic or simply leave it away and get the same result. If it is simply used as a shorthand for ‘problem-solving’ then what does it mean to increase intelligence? A generic solution to a large set of problems? Problems are not solved, solutions are discovered. Intelligence has a somewhat proactive aftertaste. But nothing genuine new is ever being created deliberately. We’ve to figure out how amplify that which allows intellectually productive people to make sense of large amounts of information, draw conclusions and infer new rules. But even then, there is no guarantee it will ever yield anything genuine without a lot of dumb luck. If intelligence would mean that you could simply pull a solution to a problem out of your head then intelligence would be the solution, which doesn’t change anything. No superhuman AI will ever be able to come up with anything that isn’t already hardcoded in its present state, everything else it will have to stumble upon and then alter itself to make effective use of this new discovery.
So you’d then assert that computers, cars, hammers, fire and steel were all ‘hardcoded’ in human’s ‘state’? It sounds like you’re saying that rather than turning us into decent problem solvers, evolution supplied us with blueprints to specific problems we’ve solved?
No, I meant that we discovered those things and did not invent them. If intelligence would have been the solution to discover them then they would have been hardcoded. Intelligence merely allowed us to comprehend certain relationships. But if we already knew how to design intelligence that can recognize and make use of a superhuman set of relationships, then we’d pretty much be that intelligent ourselves. We discover new heuristics and tools to infer relationships that no human could possible come up with on his own, but we’re not able to alter ourselves to make use of this new level internally right now.
Take graphene, they didn’t even predict that it might exist. It was sheer luck that they found it. And this luck will serve as a new stage for other lucky discoveries. Intelligence (indirectly) just made us recognize its utility. Even now we already start using evolutionary algorithms for things like antenna design that humans have a really hard time judging its usefulness, if it wasn’t for the fact that they worked better than what we could come up with using permutations of what we already know.
Who gets to raise the baby FAI team member?