Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science

People with genotypes associated with higher educational attainment tend to delay or forgo childbearing, leading to negative selection on those alleles; equilibrium could be centuries away, but directionally this is dysgenic under present conditions.

Genetic data (e.g., from Andhra Pradesh) imply ~99.5% within-jati mating per generation for millennia, a level of reproductive separation that is unusual even compared with groups like African Americans under slavery or most other mammalian societies.

Ashkenazi Jews exploded in visible achievement only after 19th‑century emancipation; Khan suggests similar potential for historically enterprising but constrained groups like Fujianese Chinese, while pointing to South Indian Brahmins as an already salient example in global tech and academia.

Males have only one X chromosome, so deleterious mutations are unmasked, increasing low-end impairment; additional masculinizing developmental steps and testosterone’s immune tradeoffs increase instability, which can generate more failures but also more extreme high-end outcomes.

Over the next decade, Khan expects CRISPR and related tools to cure disorders like sickle cell and cystic fibrosis in living adults; editing embryos for polygenic traits like IQ likely requires at least ~20 years and may work better by removing de novo harmful mutations than by adding ‘genius’ variants.