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This is for PZ Myers

2 pointsby davidiachabout 9 years ago

1 comment

dalkeabout 9 years ago
This appears to be a blog argument with little relevance to HN.<p>I&#x27;ll summarize it as: Physicist Hsu argues that there are techniques by which it may be possible to genetically engineer hyper-intelligent humans. Biologist Myers argues that it&#x27;s hard to measure intelligence, it&#x27;s not clear that intelligence can easily be tweaked through the genes, and other biological complications, as well as questions about ethics and the observation that better &quot;sociology and education and social services&quot; is already known to lead to more intelligent people, so why not focus on that instead of &quot;mad scientist&quot; research.<p>Hsu responds by arguing that population genetics is more additive than biologists - especially evo-devo biologists like Myers - believe, and since chickens can be bred to be bigger and faster maturing, so can human be bred to be more intelligent.<p>Hsu&#x27;s response depends strongly on 1) being able to measure a correlation between intelligence and SNPs, and 2) the assumption that these SNPs are &quot;roughly additive&quot; in benefit. See his preprint at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1408.3421" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1408.3421</a> . I attempted to read it, but Gould&#x27;s &quot;The Mismeasure of Man&quot; strongly affect my understanding of the topic; and Hsu&#x27;s preprint appears to accept what Gould calls the two deep fallacies of reification and ranking. I do not not have the knowledge to evaluate the abstract in its full context. I do think his discussion of the Flynn effect reveals a severe misunderstanding of history and people.<p>Hsu does not address the ethical and moral issues that Myers raised.