[ExI] Gene drift

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2018, SR Ballard <sen.otaku at gmail.com> wrote:

snip

> To be honest, I'm not sure I'll have biological children anyway. Firstly, while I do > have a high IQ, and come from a family with high IQ,...

My view of the topic has changed over the last 50 years.  IQ is valued
among transhumanist/extropians for obvious reasons.

Recent studies have found that high IQ people don't reproduce well.
It's not quite as bad as it might seem.  People on the low end of the
IQ distribution don't do well either leading to selection on both ends
of the curve.

Balanced selection is typical of almost any character you can measure.
In the long run, if the selection is not balanced, then the center of
the distribution moves over generations until both ends have about the
same disadvantage.

This was not the case in the fairly recent past.  Gregory Clark
discovered that over ~20 generations leading up to the industrial
revolution there was a strong selection for IQ related traits such as
numericity and literacy in the UK population.  The same selection
forces were active other places in Europe and in China, perhaps even
more so there.

There is (or rather was) a point to high IQ people having children.
At least the genes were available for subsequent generations.  But a
couple of very high IQ people can't expect to have kids as smart as
they are (on average) due to "regression to the mean."  That is
understood by anyone who does animal breeding.  What you need to
improve IQ is a subpopulation where the average member has a
substantial IQ advantage over the population average and a selective
advantage for the group.  There are several such subpopulations in the
world.  I don't think I need to name them.

But I don't think now enough time left for natural or even deliberate
selection to act.  I don't know how close we are to the singularity
where all biological bets are off, or even to full control over the
genetics of children.  I think the most pessimistic estimates are a
few generations.  That's not enough time.

So if you want children for their own sake, go for it.  But don't feel
obliged to do it to improve the average IQ of the human race.

Keith