CapitalistImperialistPig

Lubosh has joined the fray. And PZ Myers has another rejoinder to Steve. Myers's latest is such a confused mishmash of dubious assertions, irrelevancies, and physicist baiting that it hurts me to say that he's mostly right, but he is. He claims, with no real evidence, that human IQ hasn't increased in the last 100,000 years. He makes a big deal of the fact that race horse speed hasn't increased in 50 or more years. This is true, but it ignores the fact that the effective breeding size of the race horse population is tiny - about 31 ancestors, and that artificial rules prohibit any kind of genetic engineering not known to the ancient Egyptians. He makes a big deal of the fact that super high IQs may not have been adaptive in the past, and that there are ethical and practical reasons why experimenting with genetic engineering of smarts might not to be a good idea. Lumo makes the point that this latter fact is irrelevant - for the moment we are talking about possi...

A slightly better one, that is. Steve Hsu's pursuit of IQ 1000 reminds me of a few, mostly quite modest, improvements that I would like for my current wetware. a)More durable memory. Steve reports that after reading a book, John von Neumann could recall every word. That would be useful. b)Faster learning. Why should endless repetition be needed to learn a new skill, like math, piano or Spanish? c)More alacrity at puzzle and problem solving. d)Faster neural cycling times. Milliseconds drag on. I wouldn't even need anything like the full million fold speedup to silicon based times - a modest factor of 1000 would be cool. Heck, even a factor of ten might be nice.

Steve Hsu and PZ Myers are apparently engaged in a bit of mutual trash talk. The subject is whether the human IQ can be significantly enhanced by genetic manipulation, with Steve, naturally, saying yea and a nay from PZ. I'm far from being a fan of Myers - he's way too dogmatic for my taste - but I would definitely give him this one on points. Myers: Stephen Hsu thinks super intelligent humans are coming. He thinks this because he’s very impressed with genetic engineering (he’s a physicist), and believes that the way to make people more intelligent is to adjust their genes, and therefore, more gene tweaking will lead to more intelligent people, inevitably. And not just intelligent, but super-intelligent, with IQs about 1000, even though he has no idea what that means, or for that matter, even though no one really knows what an IQ of 100 means. We’re going to figure out all the genes that are involved in intelligence, and then we’ll just turn the knob on each one of them up...