Genetic engineering will soon be able to create the smartest people in history, the theoretical physicist and researcher in the field of genomics is sure. The latest technologies make it possible to count on predicting intelligence in the foreseeable future. But it can create inequalities like never before.
“I have always believed that von Neumann with his brain belongs to some other species, that this is a clear example of human evolution,” - Nobel Prize winner Hans Bethe.
“Alpha kids wear gray. Alphas have a much harder job than ours because alphas are incredibly smart. It's wonderful that I'm beta, that our job is easier. And we are much better than gammas and deltas. Gammas are stupid.”- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
Lev Landau, Nobel laureate and one of the founding fathers of the great school of Soviet physics, had a logarithmic scale for ranking physics theorists with levels from one to five. The first level physicist was ten times more influential than the second level physicist, and so on. He modestly set himself at 2.5, and only at the end of his life moved to the second level. At the first level, he had Heisenberg, Bohr, Dirac and a few other people. Landau put Einstein on the 0.5 step.
My friends in the humanities and other sciences such as biology are amazed and alarmed that physicists and mathematicians can think in such hierarchical categories. Obviously, in these scientific fields, the difference in ability is not so pronounced. But Landau's scheme seems to me quite appropriate: the contribution of many physicists is completely incomprehensible to me.
I even came to the conclusion that the Landau scale can, in principle, be extended above the Einstein level of 0.5. Genetic studies of cognitive abilities indicate that today there are varieties of human DNA, which, if ideally combined, can lead to the emergence of individuals with an intelligence qualitatively higher than anything that existed before on earth. Roughly speaking, if we think in terms of the Landau scale, we are talking about people with an IQ of the order of 1000 points.
In Daniel Keyes's novel Flowers for Algernon, a mentally retarded protagonist named Charlie Gordon participates in an experiment to improve intelligence, as a result of which his IQ rises from 60 to 200. From a bakery worker who was laughed at by friends, he turns into a genius, without every effort to understand the many hidden connections in the world. “Now I live at the very top of clarity and beauty, the existence of which I never knew existed,” writes Charlie. - Ideas explode in the head like fireworks. There is no greater pleasure in the world … This is truth, love and beauty, fused together. This is a delight. How can I give up all this? Life and work - better than this a person cannot have anything. The answers are already inside me, and soon, very soon they will burst into my brain."
The difference between superintelligence and today's average IQ of 100 will be even greater. The possibility of superintelligence arising is a direct result of the genetic basis of intelligence. Traits such as growth and cognition are governed by thousands of genes, each with its own little effect. An approximate lower bound on the number of common genetic variants that affect each trait can be inferred from the positive or negative impact on it (height is measured in inches, and IQ - in points) already discovered varieties of genes, called alleles.
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The Social Science Genome Association Consortium, which includes dozens of university laboratories, has identified several sections of human DNA that affect cognition. They show that a number of snips (single nucleotide polymorphism, or DNA sequence differences of one nucleotide size) in human DNA are statistically correlated with intelligence, even after correcting for repeated tests of 1 million independent DNA regions in a sample of more than 100 thousand people.
If cognitive abilities are controlled by only a small number of genes, then each of the gene varieties should significantly change the IQ - by about 15 points when comparing two people. But the biggest difference scientists have been able to identify to date is less than one IQ point. The big difference would have been easier to spot, but it hasn't been found.
This means there must be at least thousands of alleles for real differences to be observed in the general population. A more complex analysis (with a large margin of error) gives a final figure of 10,000.
Each genetic variation slightly increases or decreases cognition. Because cognition is defined by the cumulative array of small spillovers, it is usually dispersed and follows the familiar bell-shaped curve, where there are more people in the middle than at the edges. A person whose number of positive options (increasing IQ) is above average will exceed the average in ability. The number of positive alleles is above the average required to increase the value of a particular trait within the standard range, that is, by 15 points, in proportion to the square root of the number of variants, that is, equal to about 100. In short, a hundred additional positive varieties can increase IQ by 15 points.
And since there are thousands of potential positive options, the conclusion is quite understandable. If a person can be genetically engineered to have a positive version of each causal variation, then the result can be cognitive abilities that are about 100 standard deviations above the average. This equates to 1,000+ IQ points.
It is not at all clear what exactly the value of IQ will have within such limits. However, we can confidently assert that, whatever this value may be, this kind of ability will far exceed the maximum intelligence of any of the 100 billion people who have ever lived on Earth. Let us imagine the abilities of major scientists, who in their maximum form will be present all at once in one person. This is almost perfect reproduction of images and speech, ultra-fast thinking and the ability to do calculations, powerful geometric visualization, moreover in higher dimensions, the ability to simultaneously and simultaneously perform many analytical and mental actions. The list goes on. Charlie Gordon, but squared.
To achieve this maximum, it will be necessary to directly adjust the human genome, creating favorable variants for each of the 10,000 locations. In the optimistic scenario, this will someday be possible if gene-altering technologies such as the recently discovered CRISPR / Cas system, which sparked a revolution in genetic engineering, emerge. Harvard genomist George Church even suggested that CRISPRs (short palindromic repeats, regularly spaced in clusters) would allow mammoths to be revived by selectively modifying the genomes of the Asian elephant embryo. If Church is right, we should include supergenies in addition to mammoths in the list of wonders of the new genomic age.
Some of the assumptions behind the 1000 IQ forecast are now a matter of controversy. The very idea of quantifying intelligence seems controversial to some.
In the autobiographical book "Of course you are kidding, Mr. Feynman!" Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman devoted an entire chapter to his attempts to avoid studying the humanities. He called her "Always trying to get out." While studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he wrote, “I was only interested in science; nothing else worked for me."
Familiar moods. Conventional wisdom says that good mathematicians are at odds with literature, and vice versa. This distinction has influenced our understanding of genius, indicating that ability and giftedness appear in one part of the brain, but not as a whole. Because of this, the very idea of an IQ of 1000 points becomes problematic, because it is impossible to grasp the immensity.
But psychometric research, whose purpose is to determine the nature of intelligence, paints a completely different picture. Millions of observations show that virtually all “primitive” cognitive abilities, such as short and long term memory, the use of language, quantities and numbers, visual representation of spatial relationships, pattern recognition, and so on, are in a positive relationship and relationship.
Positive relationships between narrowly focused abilities indicate that a person with outstanding ability in one area (for example, in mathematics) is likely to have abilities above average in another (speech ability). They also show that there is a reliable and useful method of compressing information related to cognitive abilities.
Another assumption about the 1000 IQ prediction is that cognition is highly influenced by genetics, which means it can be inherited. There is very solid evidence of this. Behavioral geneticist and twin researcher Robert Plomin argues that the genetic influence on intelligence is stronger than any other human characteristic.
In studies of twins and adopted children, the pairwise IQ ratios are roughly proportional to the degree of relationship, defined as the proportion of genes shared by two individuals. Only small differences were found depending on the family environment. Children of the same parents who have no biological relationship, growing up in the same family, have almost zero correlation in cognitive abilities. These results are corroborated by other large studies conducted in different places, including in different countries.
It would seem that in the absence of hunger and deprivation, the upper limit of cognitive abilities is determined by genetics. However, in other studies, where participants experienced additional environmental pressures, such as poverty, malnutrition, lack of education, heritability rates were much lower. Under unfavorable environmental conditions, a person does not fully reveal his potential.
Probably, the superintelligence is a matter of the distant future, but in the near future we can expect even smaller, but still important events. A lot of data on human genomes and corresponding phenotypes (these are physical and mental characteristics of a person) will significantly expand our understanding of the genetic code and, in particular, the ability to predict human cognitive abilities. Detailed calculations indicate that it will take millions of phenotypic-genotype pairs to figure out the genetic architecture using the most modern statistical algorithms. However, as the cost of genotyping is rapidly declining, this could happen in the next ten years. If the existing estimates of heritability say something,then the predictive accuracy of genome-based intelligence can be better than half the standard deviation (that is, better than plus or minus 10 points).
When forecasting models become available, they can be used in reproduction. This is the selection of embryos (the choice of a fertilized egg for implantation), and active genetic modifications (for example, using CRISPR methods). In the first case, parents, choosing one of ten eggs, will be able to increase the IQ of their child by 15 or more points. And this is a big difference: either your child is barely doing well in school, or he goes to college and studies there successfully.
Oocyte genotyping is technically quite well mastered, and now all that remains is to develop a comprehensive phenotype prediction for embryo selection. The cost of this operation will be lower than the fees for many private kindergartens, and the consequences will be for life, including for posterity.
But moral issues also arise that deserve close attention, and they will have to be resolved in a fairly short period of time, which remains until such opportunities appear. Each society must decide for itself where to draw the line for human genetic engineering. And here we have very different prospects. Some countries will certainly allow this kind of genetic engineering, opening the door for the world's elite who can afford to travel abroad to reap the benefits of reproductive technology. As with most technology, the rich and powerful will be the first to benefit. But I believe that over time, many countries will not only legalize human genetic engineering, but also make it a voluntary part of their national health system.
The alternative would be inequality of a kind never seen before in human history.
Stephen Hsu is professor of theoretical physics and vice president of research at the University of Michigan. Scientific advisor to the Beijing Institute of Genomics and founder of its cognitive genomics laboratory