TagFlynn effect
Can a Dog Be Bred To Be As Smart As a Human?
An enterprising electrical engineer thinks it can be doneWithin one hundred generations or roughly 600 years? That’s the project Payton Pearson, an electrical engineer who gives his affiliation as the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, has set himself: Artificial selection is a well-known phenomenon of selecting for certain physiological characteristics of various species of plants and animals, and it is something that human beings have been doing for thousands of years. A perfect example of this is the union and development of dogs under human stewardship since the beginning of the agricultural era of society. In that time, approximately 6,000 years [1], dogs have been artificially selected in such a way as to produce thousands of different breeds. From the stout Dachshund, a dog breed Read More ›
Could We Really Increase Human IQ via Genetic Engineering?
One suggested approach is to only implant “intelligent” human embryos and discard the rest, to avoid editing individual genesAt Big Think, we have been told by the managing editor, in a tone of considerable confidence: Because intelligence is such a strong genetic trait, rapidly advancing genetics research could result in the ability to create a class of super-intelligent humans one-thousand times higher in IQ than today’s most brilliant thinkers. Stephen Hsu, Vice-President for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University, believes we are only a decade away from identifying the many thousands of genetic variants that control for intelligence. These variants, called alleles, could then be selected for by the parents of a soon-to-be-conceived child, and possibly genetic engineering could be done on adults to boost their intelligence. Orion Jones, “Genetic Engineering Will Create Super-Intelligent Read More ›
Are We Humans Getting Smarter or Have We Peaked?
The really surprising thing, science writer David Robson notes, is that it may not matter as much as we thinkThe Flynn effect — where tested intelligence increased over past generations due to better health and more education — is said to be slowing. Of course, such findings are difficult to assess because they are subject to value judgments. But David Robson, author of The Intelligence Trap: Why smart people make dumb mistakes (2019), offers some useful observations, including asking what does the Flynn effect really measure?: James Flynn himself has argued that it is probably confined to some specific reasoning skills. In the same way that different physical exercises may build different muscles – without increasing overall “fitness” – we have been exercising certain kinds of abstract thinking, but that hasn’t necessarily improved all cognitive skills equally. And some Read More ›