Is It Ethical To Hand-Pick Your Child’s Genes? - Dr Jonathan Anomaly

Why do people really dislike conversations about IQ?

I think it's pretty straightforward, and that is norms that followed the end of the Second World War. So what ends up happening in the 1920s and '30s is IQ tests were already pretty decent by then. They did have some bias back, back in the day when they were invented, but they were relatively good at gauging cognitive ability. But what ended, what ended up happening is some people misused IQ to justify, for example, uh, restrictive immigration policies in the United States first. And then, you know, after World War II, actually interestingly, a quick divergence here, Hitler had Jews and, and non-Jews, Gentiles cognitively tested, and he found that Jews consistently scored higher on IQ tests than Germans did, and he banned IQ tests, um, in Germany.

Wow.

So it's not-

So actually being anti-IQ is a Nazi policy.

Is pro-Nazi, that's right, right, right.

(laughs)

So... But, but at least according to the lore, and, and some of this lore is true, some of the, some of the hardcore coercive eugenicists in the 1920s and '30s did notice cognitive differences between populations. And even though Hitler found the reverse between, you know, Jews and, and Gentiles, what, than what he wanted to find, it became stigmatized after the Second World War because at least some people, even if not Hitler, were using cognitive differences to justify restrictive immigration policies and also potentially supremacy over other groups. So you can think of the British Empire and, you know, why should the French have colonies? Why should the British have colonies? Well, we're smarter, we're better than them, that sort of thing. I- I'm not French or, or British by the way, but, you know, there's at least the sense that they could be misused for these things, and, and, and sometimes they were. And so I think what happened after the Second World War is not just that IQ was shunned and the genetics of IQ, but really genetic explanations for any group differences and even for individual differences, because it became part of a dangerous package whereby you could use this research to mistreat groups of people.

Can you just explain, uh, group differences and individual differences, what that means in a genetic context, how it's different?

Sure. I mean, look, we all understand first of all what intelligence is, broadly speaking. I should just say that, um, intelligence is roughly the ability to creatively solve problems. It's not just memory, it's not just recall, it's the ability to kind of draw conclusions from evidence and so on. And we recognize it in, in dogs, we recognize it in cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are some of the brightest animals on Earth, which is why I don't eat them, by the way. (laughs) Um, that's a kind of species of octopus. And so we, we all know that there are individual differences in intelligence. We see it in our dogs, we see it in cuttlefish, we see it in people. And obviously the genetics of this is just such that, you know, there, there are genetic explanations for why people differ in height, in weight, in muscle mass, and in intelligence. And that's not to say that the environment doesn't matter, that you can't get better, for example, at taking IQ tests or solving cognitive problems, but there are pretty strict genetic limits on that, right? You're not gonna train your way into becoming Einstein. And so that, that's individual ins-, uh, differences in IQ. Um, there's clearly a mostly genetic basis, it's true across the animal kingdom, and it's probably gonna be true across groups too, um, whether we wanna talk about that or not. I mean, it s- it seems obvious, just like height, there are height differences, there are speed differences. Right now we're all watching the Olympics, and y- you do see patterns, right? Ethiopians tend to be really good at long-distance running and West Africans tend to be really good at short-distance running. And so there are gonna be these differences between individuals and groups, and genes are gonna have something to do with it.