Help: Info on intelligence-focused genetic engineering?

Well, then the next step would be trying to isolate the physiological correlates of those genes. I think it's important to clear it up on the physical end because people will be arguing till the cows come home about causal relationships as long as we're just playing with different kinds of test scores, "cognitive" versus classroom.

If you trust that article you link, they've found 300 genes affecting height, together accounting for 15% of the variance. Oddly, they don't talk about the variance of the putative IQ genes, but the past hundreds of putative IQ genes have had similar aggregate effects. One explanation of the similar statistics of IQ and height and their tiny effect sizes is that they're both failures of the same statistical methods. "In fact, there have been no common IQ polymorphisms which have been replicated." A few days after that is a thread on LW about failure to replicate. Plomin is cited as someone cleaning up the hype, so maybe he is more careful in his results of last month (that you cite).

If we know anything, it's that there are no common alleles of large effect for IQ. Maybe most variance in height and IQ is due to mutational load. Large effects are quickly selected away, but small effects can't can't be corrected because there are so many other small effects competing to be corrected. Maybe the observed effects of 1/1000 of the variance are what we should be seeing.

But then maybe we don't have to know anything. If there are no positive variants, if the relevant consideration is number of negative variants, then it may be possible to genetic engineering by always choosing the most common allele, not knowing what any of them due.

SCIENTISTS have identified more than 200 genes potentially associated with academic performance in schoolchildren.

I've identified the requisite genes to be a prodigy under certain environmental, cultural and educational circumstances: The DNA of Eliezer Yudkowsky. Phew! But how do I engineer myself into a XiXiDu with the intellect of Eliezer Yudkowsky using this knowledge? Well, you better hope for a lot of exponential growth or recursive self-improvement before you can turn this knowledge into personal intelligence amplification without either messing up your personality or cloning a bunch of Eliezer Yudkowsky's.

I just don't see this happening any time soon. There is so much to intelligence that we don't know yet. Doing some statistical DNA analysis of a lot of smart people won't help either. After all you want their intelligence and not their personality or autism. There isn't some intelligence module that you can plug in. Intelligence is broad and fuzzy and the underlying genetic structure hopelessly tangled, interdependent and interwoven. It's not even clear that better academic performance isn't more dependent on your personality and ability to concentrate etc., rather than some kind of larger brain area that gives you more memory. There are other studies that show that college performance correlates with the ability to focus rather than IQ.

Genetic engineering is playing with fire, because we don't know jack shit. You'll likely just mess up everything that you deemed worthy previous to tinkering with your DNA. maybe afterwards you won't care anymore though. Or maybe you will because the world suddenly looks pale and barren because your intelligence amplification killed your mind's eye. Or maybe you lose a huge amount of consciousness because it's a computation sink. Congratulation smart ass, you turned yourself into a p-zombie!