Selective biological breeding

[Guest all_purpose_sandpaper]

People I have asked with the same question, bit like a mailing list

 

what?

[Guest Coalbucket PI]

intelligence is not a genetic trait.

 

I'm glad to see you backtracked a touch from this cold hard statement

[Root5]

Where is the line drawn between nature and nurture? I understand that genes are nature and the way your parents brought you up is nurture.

 

But what about condition in the womb before your birth. Does that count as nurture as well?

 

What if there are pesticides in your neighbourhood from the farm down the street, and they give you developmental problems or something like that? Is that nurture as well?

[Guest Coalbucket PI]

Nature/nurture is just a catchy phrase, don't get too hung up on it. The real issue is genetic or environmental. Prenatal conditions are an environmental factor. But it's still nature and the two are always interacting anyway, for example you might be genetically more vulnerable to a certain environmental factor such as a pesticide contaminant.

[goDel]

exactly.

i generally hate discussions like the nature/nurture discussions. they're mostly dated and the language and concepts are insufficient to come to a meaningful conclusion (nature vs nurture instead of genes vs environment for instance). we have no idea what intelligence actually is, so help yourself and make up your own definition (whether from an individual perspective, society or a gene itself). and also, the influence of the environment on the genes themselves (the interaction mr coal refers to) is still a point of research.

i may have been out of it for too long, but as far as i can tell, science is only half-way to be able to find some meaningful answers.

[Guest joshier]

Any quantitative trait can be selected for or against, so there's no reason you couldn't breed out 'slow' octopi by traditional breeding methods - there are smarter and dumber dog breeds, for example, and that's pretty uncontroversial (Australian Shepherds vs. miniature toy poodles are the extremes as I recall), and there are a couple of genetic variants in humans that correlate with half a dozen or so points of IQ (if you google 'jews and overclocking' you'll come across a pretty interesting essay by Cochran that surveys some of this in people).

 

Thing is, if you look at what's coming down the pipe in terms of whole genome trait mapping, we'll probably know all/most of the genetic variants associated with neurological performance soon enough (as they're somewhat protective against Alzheimers, at least in the sense that smarter people have a higher starting point in terms of cognitive decline), so barring a civilizational collapse I'd expect the deliberate engineering of intelligence to go from medical treatment to luxury consumer good to human rights issue in my (certainly your) lifetime. Neuronal architecture is pretty well conserved across species, so what works in one will likely work in others (though perhaps at some cost; overclocking isn't a bad analogy - higher performance at the cost of reduced stability).

 

So while breeding might generate a smarter cephalopods (by selecting against the dumb ones) is certainly doable, we'll have the tech to engineer 'em soon enough.

My reply:

That's great and I'll be looking into these subjects, especially the essay you mentioned.

 

OK I knew that there was going to be draw backs related with high intelligence (or prematurely and destabilised gene sets expressing X trait), however humans have slowly evolved into stable intelligent and you could say most normal people in the average IQ may be happier than the ones with high IQ.

 

So, from that, are we saying that for a stable IQ in natural terms, many many generations need to be slowly inclined to evolve to that? otherwise a too-quick selective breeding method will turn into instability such as the overclockers term Cochran used?

His reply

It depends on what you mean by stability. If you look at the rate of severe mental retardation in humans, it's not really that uncommon - neural architecture is complex, and there's a lot that can go wrong with the process (from trisomy 21 to arsenic in one's drinking water). The Cochran essay discusses this at the high end of IQ, where uncontrollable spasms and neurological pathology might be the result of a candle burning twice as bright/half as long, but it's pretty much the same principle.

 

The slower a complex process is, in general, the more time there's been to work the kinks out, and that's as true of biological systems as anywhere else.

[lumpenprol]

yay, that makes sense

[chenGOD]

intelligence is not a genetic trait.

 

I'm glad to see you backtracked a touch from this cold hard statement

 

lol internets is good for firing mouth before thinking ;)

 

 

Nature/nurture is just a catchy phrase, don't get too hung up on it. The real issue is genetic or environmental. Prenatal conditions are an environmental factor. But it's still nature and the two are always interacting anyway, for example you might be genetically more vulnerable to a certain environmental factor such as a pesticide contaminant.

 

This is important, because again, the genetic is always played out within an environment.