The Plot Thickens in the Gnarly Story of IQ and Genetics

Researchers are finding new links between specific genes and intelligence. Can we use this knowledge to make people smarter?

Stephanie Pappas
Jul 20, 2017 · 13 min read
An image from “A Child is Born,” photographer Lennart Nilsson’s 1965 book about fetal development.

Not laughing anymore

People have been interested in improving intelligence since before there were reliable ways to measure the concept. The coiner of the term “eugenics,” Francis Galton, got the idea of breeding “better” humans after reading his half-cousin Charles Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species. He was also the author of the first attempt to study exceptional intelligence: an 1869 tome called Hereditary Genius.

It gets weirder

Not everyone thinks the future will look so different, though. “I would have stopped 10 years ago myself, and that’s almost to say I wouldn’t have started,” says Wendy Johnson, an intelligence researcher at the University of Edinburgh who has been a critic of genome-based searches for the key to intelligence. “I think we’re wasting a lot of money.”

Sharpening our minds

And yet, even amid all the noise and confusion, genetics may yet tell us something about intelligence and give us tools to boost it that are a lot less ethically fraught than embryo selection or genome editing.

NEO.LIFE

Making sense of the Neobiological Revolution.

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Stephanie Pappas

Written by

I write about science, technology and the things people do with them.

NEO.LIFE

NEO.LIFE

Making sense of the Neobiological Revolution.

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