Good Morning John, First, your video make everyone
I know laugh very hard. So good job on that.
In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a lot of conversation I think because
of the release of the book Code Breaker, about Jennifer Doudna, one of the
pioneers of CRISPR gene editing, about whether and how and should we edit
the genomes of people. And also of people who don’t even exist yet.
Usually the conversations go something like this, should we edit people so they
don’t have diseases? Yes. And then we continue down the path as it’s getting
hairier, what about height? Should we allow people to edit their children to
be taller so they can be better at sports? But then at some point you get to intelligence.
And often times the defense is, well we all benefit if there are more super smart
people to solve hard problems. That sentence doesn’t make sense
and I want to talk about why. It is not that intelligence is to some
extent genetic. Studies show that it is. I just don’t think that we have wrapped
our brains around what the heck it is we mean when we say intelligence.
I’m not even sure if I have blonde hair. We’re arguing about whether a
hot dog is a sandwich. Do you think we can figure out what intelligence is?
But here’s a thing we know. Two identical twins are more likely to have more
similar scores on intelligence tests than two fraternal twins. We’re talking
about two people who share the exact same environment, they were born
at the same time, raised by the same parents, they were in the same womb.
And the ones that are genetically the same have closer together intelligence
scores than the ones that are fraternal or less similar. But environment versus
genetics is a really hairy thing that’s kind of hard to continue to wrap your
mind around. So, an example. Let us imagine a precocious, over
confident young man who has ADHD and sensory processing issues and will
never in his life read faster than an 8th grade level. And let’s assume
that all of that stuff is 100% genetic, if that child is born at the right moment,
and with the right support, all of those things might influence each
other in a way that will result in the acquisition of intelligence. And if
identical twins share those traits, grew up in the same house, and
had all that same support, they would test similarly on the same test.
But if any one of those traits was a little bit different, and I’m talking
about 5 traits here when really there’s hundreds, or if their environment
was different, if they had less support, if people indulged in their
overconfidence a little less, those same traits, instead of
helping a student, might hinder a student. The potential was
genetic though complicated and reinforced by lots of different factors.
The ability to capture the potential was environmental. But here’s what
I think is the most important thing here. Environment isn’t just across an
individual society. And it’s not just across various cultures. It’s also across time.
We don’t know right now what traits are going to be useful to the people
of the future because their world is going to be different from ours.
I would have had a very different path in life if it were not for computers.
I have a sensory processing disorder, I have ADHD, I do not read as fast
as the average 9th graders, but with a combinations of luck and being born
at a time when the right tools existed and support, what might have been
liabilities at another time at another place, turned into assets.
Intelligence really is more about what we need right now from
people than it is about any particular innate thing. I think of it as
being well suited to the world in which you happen to have been born
into. Not, as some people seem to imagine, some kind of on-off
switch that’s genius, not genius. Genius, not genius. As a species
we do not yet understand the genetics of eye color. The idea
that we could genetically modify a child to be more intelligent isn’t just,
wild hubris. It is also, I think, a dangerous misunderstanding of what
intelligence is. If we design people to be good at living in the world
as it is now, we do 2 things. First, we deny the reality that the world
needs lots of different people with lots of different kinds of abilities.
But worse, if we’re designing people to be good at living in the world as it
exists in one moments, we’re depriving ourselves of the diversity that will
allow us to have people that will be good at living in the world as it
will exist in the future. And that is not just a lesson we need to before
genetically engineering new humans, it’s a lesson we need to learn for
educating, enabling, and appreciating humans now. John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.