Humans are in a very different situation than they were for most of their evolutionary lifespan.
For one: there is an abundance of resources: tweaks that increase brainpower at the cost of calories which might kill on the Savannah would be solid gold by today’s standards. You’d be smarter AND hotter!
For two: the kind of things we want people to use their brainpower on are not the same things the brain was evolved to optimize to think about. For example, despite being dis-tractable, my girlfriend can concentrate on and pay attention to animals for hours, and has a strong desire to walk miles and miles every day. I’m sure this was very handy for persistence hunting, but it’s a handicap when it comes to working in a bank. And so Vyvanse comes to the rescue: not as a PURE nootropic but one that allows us to make different neural tradeoffs than evolution was interested in.
For three: Human intelligence already varies quite a bit, much of it achieved by ‘tweaking’ a few chemicals (DNA, for one). We don’t understand the neurological difference between John Von Neumann and an average person, but I think there’s a decent chance that within that variation is not just genetic/developmental differences but ones in neurochemistry that can be duplicated in others.
Finally: evolution is incapable of exploring chemical-space by more than a few compounds per generation. Despite their utility, humans never naturally evolved to produce penicillin, or caffeine, or opiates when needed. There is a HUGE population of chemicals that the human body has never tried producing which we can utilize. The argument that “If this was possible, evolution would have done it” proves far too much.
We know that the variation in any single locus is responsible for < 1⁄100 of the variance of IQ. If genes corresponded to drugs, then that gives an upper bound on the efficacy of drugs. I think that we can agree that 100 does not counts as “a few.”
I believe CronoDAS is referring to Algernon’s Law. Gwern describes the issues pretty well here, including several classes on “loopholes” we might employ to escape the general rule.
The classifications of different types of loopholes is still pretty high level, and I’d love to see some more concrete and actionable proposals. So, don’t take this as saying “this is old hat”, but only as a jumping off point for further discussion.
Miller’s point being that those thousands of genes can easily be driven to fixation by evolution within a fairly short time, yet have not, and it’s not clear from the GWASes yet if they’re even under directional selection.
Right now, between the GCTAs and the failure to find lots of important rare variants affecting intelligence such as mutation load (eg no Swedish paternal age effect, unlike many disorders), the consensus seems to be swinging towards some sort of frequency-dependent or stabilizing selection: greater intelligence comes with some sort of fitness penalty (greater energetic consumption?) or maybe greater vulnerability to developmental disruption through poor environment and so a net disadvantage which favors poorer but more robust variants (and eventually, canalization). Given the accumulation of archaic & ancient genomes and further intelligence GWASes, we may be able to get a definitive answer to the old puzzle of why intelligence is heritable at all in the next few years.
Hence my old point about nootropics: for the effective ones, the reason the evolutionary argument fails may simply be that they require more metabolic resources which would be a fitness disadvantage but that no longer applies in the modern calorie-overload environment.
This isn’t really an answer. There are nootropics which at least seem to make the human brain work better. The question is why new ones aren’t being invented. Are the existing ones really the best possible?
And yes it’s unlikely there are drugs that can magically increase IQ. But there are many other effects drugs can have other than improving IQ. Like stimulants seem to improve focus almost magically for some people.
Even the thing about evolution isn’t necessarily true. Evolution is slow and random, and isn’t optimizing for IQ directly, but also other things like energy usage.
If it was easy to make a human brain work better by tweaking a few chemicals, evolution probably would have done it.
Humans are in a very different situation than they were for most of their evolutionary lifespan.
For one: there is an abundance of resources: tweaks that increase brainpower at the cost of calories which might kill on the Savannah would be solid gold by today’s standards. You’d be smarter AND hotter!
For two: the kind of things we want people to use their brainpower on are not the same things the brain was evolved to optimize to think about. For example, despite being dis-tractable, my girlfriend can concentrate on and pay attention to animals for hours, and has a strong desire to walk miles and miles every day. I’m sure this was very handy for persistence hunting, but it’s a handicap when it comes to working in a bank. And so Vyvanse comes to the rescue: not as a PURE nootropic but one that allows us to make different neural tradeoffs than evolution was interested in.
For three: Human intelligence already varies quite a bit, much of it achieved by ‘tweaking’ a few chemicals (DNA, for one). We don’t understand the neurological difference between John Von Neumann and an average person, but I think there’s a decent chance that within that variation is not just genetic/developmental differences but ones in neurochemistry that can be duplicated in others.
Finally: evolution is incapable of exploring chemical-space by more than a few compounds per generation. Despite their utility, humans never naturally evolved to produce penicillin, or caffeine, or opiates when needed. There is a HUGE population of chemicals that the human body has never tried producing which we can utilize. The argument that “If this was possible, evolution would have done it” proves far too much.
Then why are some people so much smarter than others?
We know that the variation in any single locus is responsible for < 1⁄100 of the variance of IQ. If genes corresponded to drugs, then that gives an upper bound on the efficacy of drugs. I think that we can agree that 100 does not counts as “a few.”
I believe CronoDAS is referring to Algernon’s Law. Gwern describes the issues pretty well here, including several classes on “loopholes” we might employ to escape the general rule.
The classifications of different types of loopholes is still pretty high level, and I’d love to see some more concrete and actionable proposals. So, don’t take this as saying “this is old hat”, but only as a jumping off point for further discussion.
Probably because of different genes, which are thousands, and different early development wiring and education. It can’t be replaced by a few drugs.
Miller’s point being that those thousands of genes can easily be driven to fixation by evolution within a fairly short time, yet have not, and it’s not clear from the GWASes yet if they’re even under directional selection.
Right now, between the GCTAs and the failure to find lots of important rare variants affecting intelligence such as mutation load (eg no Swedish paternal age effect, unlike many disorders), the consensus seems to be swinging towards some sort of frequency-dependent or stabilizing selection: greater intelligence comes with some sort of fitness penalty (greater energetic consumption?) or maybe greater vulnerability to developmental disruption through poor environment and so a net disadvantage which favors poorer but more robust variants (and eventually, canalization). Given the accumulation of archaic & ancient genomes and further intelligence GWASes, we may be able to get a definitive answer to the old puzzle of why intelligence is heritable at all in the next few years.
Hence my old point about nootropics: for the effective ones, the reason the evolutionary argument fails may simply be that they require more metabolic resources which would be a fitness disadvantage but that no longer applies in the modern calorie-overload environment.
This isn’t really an answer. There are nootropics which at least seem to make the human brain work better. The question is why new ones aren’t being invented. Are the existing ones really the best possible?
And yes it’s unlikely there are drugs that can magically increase IQ. But there are many other effects drugs can have other than improving IQ. Like stimulants seem to improve focus almost magically for some people.
Even the thing about evolution isn’t necessarily true. Evolution is slow and random, and isn’t optimizing for IQ directly, but also other things like energy usage.