A few years ago, in about 2012, genomic models based on GWAS could predict much less than 1% of the variation in cognitive ability (measured by whatever proxy you want – IQ test scores, educational attainment or whatever) and the leftists used to laugh about it – they always just knew that intelligence had nothing to do with genes, after all.
In the year 2016 the genomic-phenotype data samples became big enough to construct polygenic scoring that predicted about 10% of the variation in educational attainment, amounting to an average of an entire grade on high-school curricula.
The leftists aren't laughing anymore.
And the funny thing is that we didn’t even hit a phase transition when we went from less than 1% to 10%, it was just getting more data (samples going from the tens of thousands of genomes to the hundred thousand genome). See, finding the many genes each having a small linear additive effect on a highly polygenic trait (height, for example, or intelligence) is a positive-feedback effort – the more you find, the easier it becomes to find new ones (mostly because the prevalence of these genes are correlated with each other) and at some point when your genomic sample size is big enough you get a ‘phase transition’ where all those genes you were looking almost magically just start revealing themselves t you.
Many of the folk working on this sort of stuff, e.g some of the folk involved with the Beijing Genomics Centre, think that the phase transition for intelligence genetics will be when we have the genomes and test scores of about 1 million people (currently the best we have is around 300,000 and the test data is bad since it’s school attainment, a very noisy proxy for IQ).
And there are plans for projects hitting that million-genome data landmark in the very near future.
There is no need for genetic engineering per se – once we have polygenic scoring that can predict anything close to the 80% of the variation in IQ ascribable to genes if heritability studies are to be trusted (and they are), we will be able to screen embryos and tell which ones are going to grow up to do well in physics class. After that’s, a simple matter of using IVF to produce a few embryos and select the one with the highest polygenic score.
Huge swaths of the population is becoming obsolete by the day with expanding automation, and that problem won’t solve itself. When fast food workers are replaced by machines, contrary to what those idiotic economists will tell you, they will not be able to become programmers. The problem is that computer programming is a very brainpower demanding endeavour and only about the top few % of the population really has the aptitude to become a decent software engineer.
The other problem is that we’ve picked all the small-hanging fruit as far as antimicrobial drugs are concerned and we aren’t inventing new ones anywhere near as fast as the microbes are evolving resistance. Not too far in the future, we’ll essentially be living in a world where most infectious and lethal bacteria are resistant to all the antibiotics we have.
You can’t beat evolution with drugs in the long-run, so what do you do? You exploit one of the features of evolution – variation. No matter how lethal the microbe, there is and will always be a minority of humans who are genetically predisposed to (specific) immunity. Naturally immunological gene-editing will be highly effective.
I don’t know for all of those things but genetic enhancement in two respects, cognitive ability and the immune system, are inevitable.
As it turns out, Sir Francis Galton, that Englishman who coined the word eugenics, had only three enhancements in mind when he used the words eugenics: intelligence, health and character.
