Does will be ethical to artificialy be means of genetic engineering to increase human IQ

[Kerbart]

Those people who say "Just because we can, doesn't mean we should" confuse me. bit off topic but if we are ever able to clone mammoths, you can be dang sure I want to see one cloned.

Exactly! The possibilities are endless! Adjust the 99% of society to be genetically inclined to like servitude and a simple lifestyle, and 1% to be hyperintelligent and stay on top. They'll be served by people who are happy to live in poverty and work their behinds of for the elite. Everyone wins!

[KerikBalm]

The same way only the rich has phones, computers and cars.

That would depend on the technology.

As it is, IVF is already quite expensive and only the "upper class" can afford it... genetic engineering would be even more expensive.

Maybe costs would come down, but for the first generation, it would widen the gap.

BTW... large portions of the population have none of those three... the world is not just America.

Anyway, I don't have any idea over how genomes can affect intelligence - AFAIK intelligence can't be inherited, only passed by habits of the parents. Also, IQ can be raised way simpler than changing some genetic things, not to mention we must know what kind of intelligence they want to have.

There is clearly a genetic component to intelligence...

There is certainly a genetic component to being a member of a species, and some species are innately smarter than others.

If genetics had nothing to do with it, one could raise a sheep to be as smart as a human.

Or perhaps less ridiculous... one could raise a chimp to be as intelligent as a human (or perhaps, have an intelligence like a human... some tasks they perform better... but as far as I know, nobody has taught them calculus, for example)

You are right, but your children can be smarter than their children, because of evolution, while with gene engineering it would be impossible?

Again... your attempts at logic and forming coherent thoughts astound me...

Edited July 16, 2015 by KerikBalm

[magnemoe]

Exactly! The possibilities are endless! Adjust the 99% of society to be genetically inclined to like servitude and a simple lifestyle, and 1% to be hyperintelligent and stay on top. They'll be served by people who are happy to live in poverty and work their behinds of for the elite. Everyone wins!

Sounds like an nice first stage, now just invade the place and take over as an stage two, with just 1% elite and the rest slaves it would be trivial.

Why not use robots and / or uplifted animals instead?

Have you read Drakon, its about an place like this but better working.

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That would depend on the technology.

As it is, IVF is already quite expensive and only the "upper class" can afford it... genetic engineering would be even more expensive.

Maybe costs would come down, but for the first generation, it would widen the gap.

BTW... large portions of the population have none of those three... the world is not just America.

True, its plenty of costs here, think car not mobile phone. And yes this will be an long process, you also do not want to move to fast it will be bugs.

Best to start with animals, an smarter dog would be useful however will an smarter cat be and good idea

[magnemoe]

An interesting link about this

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/07/breeding-improvement-in-animals-for.html

[KSK]

First give me a reasonable definition of intelligence. Then show me its genetic components. Then tell me how you realistically expect to improve it through genetic modification. Then prove that those modifications are invariant and will result in raised IQ regardless of confounding genetic factors. Finally, describe how to perform that modification with a sufficiently low failure rate to be anywhere near ethically acceptable.

At that point I might start getting worried about the implications of this technology on society at large. Until then I have better sci-fi to occupy myself with.

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Exactly! The possibilities are endless! Adjust the 99% of society to be genetically inclined to like servitude and a simple lifestyle, and 1% to be hyperintelligent and stay on top. They'll be served by people who are happy to live in poverty and work their behinds of for the elite. Everyone wins!

Aldous Huxley begs to differ.

[WinkAllKerb'']

IQ are like cookies and cakes ... yeah you know ... just a lie ... bah nevermind ... if it please somes to "feed themselves" with it we can continue to use it for a 'litl' while ...

Edited July 17, 2015 by WinkAllKerb''
*grumpy mode half on/off*

[Thomassino]

I think this in the near or distant future is inevitable. In the my opinion, humans should increase their intelligence as well as their physical abilities, maybe possibly implement modern technology into their bodies as long as it is used for good purposes, which as we all very well know, won't be. But maybe once when humankind will become tired of thousands of years of wars and hatred, it will look at the stars and see those immense possibilities they offer. Maybe then will humankind overcome its evolutionary instinct "kill or be killed" and we will enter the next, worldwide golden age of prosperity, knowledge, exploration and mutual respect. Someday...

[Scotius]

Less stupidity is always a good thing

[Beowolf]

IQ are like cookies and cakes ... yeah you know ... just a lie ... bah nevermind ... if it please somes to "feed themselves" with it we can continue to use it for a 'litl' while ...

Yeah, you keep on telling yourself that.

Wife is a nationally-recognized expert on measuring human cognitive development. The only problem is that teaching someone what IQ measures takes about a hundred hours of grad school. So laypeople think it measures "intelligence", which is such a poorly-defined term as to be meaningless. It's like trying to get universal definitions of "god" or "love".

But, for the actual things the subtests in an IQ test does claim to measure, its predictions are often good enough to count as hard science, supported by literally billions of data points.

Want to know if your kid's likely to go to grad school? An IQ test can tell you.

Want to know if your kid's going to end up in prison, or become pregnant before age 18? IQ tests are almost frighteningly good at this.

Want to know if your kid's going to make lots of money? IQ tests are a decent indicator, with fairly strong correlations. But parental income's still more important.

And my personal favorite: Want to know if your kid will have a self-described "happy life"? IQ tests are fairly good at this, too, and it goes backwards. The higher the score, the larger the problems you will end up worrying about, and the less happy you're going to be.

But they can't tell you how "smart" someone is, and don't claim to. We don't know what that word really means. A human brain's consists of half a million neural networks (see: cortical column) that operate pretty independently. IQ tests give a good workout to a small percentage of them, involved with specific tasks like short-term memory, 3D visualization, or "executive function", psychologists' term for what I'd call long-term planning and delaying gratification.

Note that IQ also is a measure of "now", and changes during life. It isn't a permanent thing, like "are you straight or gay?" More like, "how much can you bench press?" Just like bench pressing, it tends to stay close to stable because people don't often change their lifestyle. Want to increase you IQ? Go see a cognitive psychologist, get tested to learn your weaknesses, and she can give you exercises. Brains are amazingly modifiable, though just like getting into physical shape, it takes a long time and a lot of work, so most people won't stick with it.

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As for the OP's question, ethics are only a local/national matter. As long as human economy is competitive, as soon as the capability is reliably available, some people will use it to give their offspring an edge. If the small first generation appears to pay off for the kids, the middle class worldwide will latch onto the idea, and the next generation will have millions of them.

Several cultures, including China, were ethically against the use of computers and data processing back in the 60s. China specifically was strongly against the warehousing of data on individuals. 50 years later, and China's a global leader at it. When you look at cultural ethics nationally, and generation-by-generation rather than day-by-day, They're pretty flexible, and nearly always will bend to competitive economic pressure. The cultures that can't adapt end up non-competitive.

But, really, if we had the tech ability to make such changes in human brains, we'd have no clue where or how to start! We know what a bunch of cortical columns do, but it's all low-level stuff. For example, there's one that identifies all the semicircles in your field of vision. Will enhancing that help academic performance? Who the hell knows? Only a few years ago, we thought our minds lived within our brain's nerve cells. Turns out the scaffolding that holds the nerve cells in-place is extremely active on its own once someone figured out how to measure it (see: glial cells). THAT'S 90% OF THE BRAIN'S VOLUME, and we thought it was inert!

Sensory inputs are going to be the first things figured out. That's because it's easy to isolate what a test subject sees|hears|feels and look at how their brain responds to controlled inputs. So I think we'll get brain-based VR before we get tech that modifies how we think. Today, we can look into your brain's "video buffer", and identify what you're looking at. Plus, when you imagine a scene, that same buffer is used, so if I put you in an fMRI machine an ask you to imagine you're at the beach, the computer can actually pick out recognizable waves and palm trees in there!

[WinkAllKerb'']

want to know the difference between you and me ; ) the number of kids we have ; ) but i can teach you how to count properly with your own if you really need ; )

[Darnok]

Less stupidity is always a good thing

You won't get less stupidity by genetic modifications, you get this by education of math and science and proper values.

By proper values I mean those that do not cause societies of disputes, help maintain the freedom of the individual, an individual can possess his own views and further develop them at much as he or she wants to, even if they differ from the views of other members of society.

[KerikBalm]

Oh look, a post trying to change the topic from discussion of genetic engineering, to criticism of those that criticize Darnok's (fringe) views.

[Darnok]

Oh look, a post trying to change the topic from discussion of genetic engineering, to criticism of those that criticize Darnok's (fringe) views.

Vote against genetic engineering is also on topic in topic about genetic engineering

And this thread is about "ethical" aspects of genetic modifications, so first we should answer

"do we need genetic modifications?" or

"how genetic engineering would improve our IQ, without changes in educational system?".

Edited July 22, 2015 by Darnok

[peadar1987]

Oh look, a post trying to change the topic from discussion of genetic engineering, to criticism of those that criticize Darnok's (fringe) views.

Fringe views should be immune from criticism, open your mind! The only way criticism is allowed to flow should be from pseudoscience towards reality!

[RainDreamer]

Interesting video that might be related to this:

[KSK]

Interesting video that might be related to this:

I don't think it does really. We've got a much greater understanding of the things you'd need to engineer in to improve athletic performance. We know how skeletal muscles work, we have some ideas about how we could improve the performance of cardiac muscle, we know how we could boost oxygen transport, we've got a pretty good handle on metabolism and some of the factors that affect it. It would still be difficult but at least we have some idea of what needs to be fixed or tweaked, biochemically speaking.

Whereas, as Beowolf pointed out, we don't know where to start with the brain.

[KerikBalm]

Well, there is a good correlation between brain size and intelligence. Its not exact... but a bigger brain seems feasible and like it would be a good start.

The brain already consumes something like 20% of the energy your body expends at rest... so its not without drawbacks...

[KSK]

Well, there is a good correlation between brain size and intelligence. Its not exact... but a bigger brain seems feasible and like it would be a good start.

The brain already consumes something like 20% of the energy your body expends at rest... so its not without drawbacks...

Well it would be one way of tackling obesity. Think harder - burn more calories. The bigger skull required to house that bigger brain would be more of a drawback I think.

[Darnok]

Well looks like americans are evolving back... to no-farming-sapiens, they deceived evolution hunting for promotions in super markets

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/06/120606-americans-heads-getting-bigger-science-health-skulls-evolution/

[RainDreamer]

Well it would be one way of tackling obesity. Think harder - burn more calories. The bigger skull required to house that bigger brain would be more of a drawback I think.

I think another big problem that could occur is the difficulty for human women giving birth to bigger head babies. Human babies already have really disproportionated head comparing to other animals, it is hard enough as it is already. Adding bigger brain and we might have to have bigger birth canal to accommodate that, and then the structure of the body itself to carry that baby without breaking the poor women's backs.

[Kinglet]

Increasing IQ won't make humanity any better. I know many people with high IQ that only fully use their intelligence when they are encouraged to by a exercise or test.

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I don't think it does really. We've got a much greater understanding of the things you'd need to engineer in to improve athletic performance. We know how skeletal muscles work, we have some ideas about how we could improve the performance of cardiac muscle, we know how we could boost oxygen transport, we've got a pretty good handle on metabolism and some of the factors that affect it. It would still be difficult but at least we have some idea of what needs to be fixed or tweaked, biochemically speaking.

Whereas, as Beowolf pointed out, we don't know where to start with the brain.

Plus some animals have developed very strong and/or fast muscle types which we could use. One example of that are the muscles that ringneck doves use to sing.

[Wesreidau]

If it were unethical to enhance IQs genetically because it would further the rich-poor IQ gap, we might as well throw all of those universities, homework assignments and books away. Its not fair to the children who's parents are working four jobs and can't read a book to them at night.

... http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/new-family-values/6437058

World's going crazy.

[peadar1987]

If it were unethical to enhance IQs genetically because it would further the rich-poor IQ gap, we might as well throw all of those universities, homework assignments and books away. Its not fair to the children who's parents are working four jobs and can't read a book to them at night.

... http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/new-family-values/6437058

World's going crazy.

Which is why education should be free. Like genetic technology if it ever becomes safe and mainstream. It is absolutely unethical to allow the rich access to higher education when the poor are completely priced out of the equation.

[Wesreidau]

Well certainly, we can make the retroviral gene therapy free. But what if people don't take it? There would still be haves and have-nots.

[Kinglet]

Which is why education should be free. Like genetic technology if it ever becomes safe and mainstream. It is absolutely unethical to allow the rich access to higher education when the poor are completely priced out of the equation.

Good education should be free.