Regarding the pessimism of genetic pre-determination and this congenital disadvantage: I think the real progress of society is how it learns to make lives of different people productive and satisfying. E.g. nerdy types had it hard in, say, 19th century Europe, but now they have a great and important niche in engineering. Same happened to many more predispositions of people that now lead to something interesting instead of pure misery.
So how will society adapt when specific genetic variants inevitably are tied to predisposition for intelligence and behavior?
ADHD, autism, BPD, as listed in the article, are not specific conditions, but rather represent a range of behavioral and intellectual tendencies that are better described as clusters in high dimensional personality space. If there are already 300 genes mapped which influence this handful of conditions, that implies that we already know of specific genes which effectively influence behavior by shifting psychology around these clusters.
And since genes are heritable, this has consequences for groups of people and their interactions in greater society. This may be an unpleasant question but if research proceeds in this field it is one that will have to be answered.
I don't think it will influence course of events much. Governments will reluctantly allow genetic treatment of debilitating heritable conditions (nothing else, for obvious political reasons). And then brain-computer interfaces will make heritable component of intelligence less important.
Best comment in this whole thread, everyone else is parroting the usual responses. People do not grasp the potential of neural interfacing technologies, I get the genetic component is important metric more for holistic metrics of a population of community but it's only one layer and when the body is made more machinic and commodified it won't matter much what quality of birth stock (for the average)you come from but how well you've been augmented regardless.
Brain-computer interfaces won't do much to the structure of motivation and other traits that make certain genetically "more nerdy" types better predisposed to certain types of mental work. Much like easy and cheap computer-based DAWs and musical instruments did not make everyone a musician or a composer on equal footing.
You can literally stimulate networks, you may even be able to chemically and topologically change networks with combined technologies. We are talking about brain interfaces of the future, obviously some of which may get more invasive yet safe, assuming that engineering around the sensitivity of the brain improves.
It is already known that there is some association between intelligence and, for example, race. The underlying causes, whether they're wealth disparities, cultural attitudes toward intelligence, or genetics, don't change whether it's right or wrong to discriminate by race.
You seem to be insinuating something unpleasant, so I would very much appreciate if you could be explicit about what consequences you think this will have.
The only insinuation is that I anticipate some people will squirm discussing this sensitive topic. But we are leaving a lot of science and philosophy on the table because of socially constructed boundaries. Are they appropriately positioned, or excessively constraining?
According to the newsletter I just got in the mail about the latest mental health research, the genes linked to various mental differences and pathologies are pretty much all the regulatory type, which if I'm not mistaken is what they were recently calling "junk DNA" and is most of the genome.
I don't think you can tell anything about what a branch or comparison instruction does by looking at the instruction itself.
>the genes linked to various mental differences and pathologies are pretty much all the regulatory type,
So are you suggesting that the "regulatory" type aren't inherited like normal genes? Why do we take it for granted that evolution stopped above the shoulders once we became homo sapien?
>I don't think you can tell anything about what a branch or comparison instruction does by looking at the instruction itself.
But you're not inheriting random branching statements, I imagine they tend to appear in certain regions of the genome and there influence similar pathways...which would make them valuable points of inference as well, just noisier.
"But you're not inheriting random branching statements, I imagine they tend to appear in certain regions of the genome and there influence similar pathways...which would make them valuable points of inference as well, just noisier."
What profession are you in? Do you think this concept works for debugging software, or are you a non-programmer in healthcare?
Twin studies are a thing and prove you have blinders on. For instance, identical twins raised apart are not always concordant for mental conditions, even, say, schizophrenia. Which is not to say that it's caused by upbringing, that's also an obsolete theory.
>For instance, identical twins raised apart are not always concordant for mental conditions,
The very same twin studies prove my point...no one is saying every person with Gene X behaves a certain way. But we do know for a fact that, say, person with Gene Y may be X% more likely to exhibit behavior Z.
They also strongly suggest that intelligence is heritible.
Do you also want to tell me that because twins don't look 100% identical that their appearances aren't correlated at all?
You might have heard that correlation isn't causation? It's a very common statement, that people think they know the meaning of. But the way it is always used is, this correlation isn't causation, because I don't like it, and that correlation is causation, because I do like it. In other words, special pleading.
If something is not causative, which you seem to acknowledge in your example of "gene X", then why exactly do you attribute a correlation to something other than coincidence? What is coincidence, anyway? Einstein said coincidence is literally the only thing anyone ever experiences, in a literal mathematical/physical sense.
Well if you consider all the entropy in the universe, our particular microstate is an indescribably rare coincidence...
It's a matter of probability. Each if the following, individually, you'll agree, is rather probably correct:
1. Genes control brain structure
2. Brain structure controls predisposition toward cognitive macrostates (we classify them as pathologies)
3. Macrostates like BPD, ADHD, and Autism are proxies for specific behavioral tendencies
4. Genes are heritable
Why this has taken so long to discern is the noise from 30-70% environmental influence. Point being there's far more than correlation here, there's a direct known mechanism.
Do you think there is "a gene" for being an asshole on the internet? Is there an instruction, or a group of instructions, responsible for a computer game being terrible? Can we learn anything useful from the THERAC-25 disaster by studying which instructions were linked to it in order to stop using software that has those instructions?
Talking about separating the noise or environmental influence is "not even wrong".
>Do you think there is "a gene" for being an asshole on the internet?
Well of course, there are multiple such genes that predispose people toward being "assholes" on the internet. One could argue that autism related genes increase the odds that a person will be called an asshole online.
>Is there an instruction, or a group of instructions, responsible for a computer game being terrible
Well you're kind of stretching with this analogy here...code doesn't sexually reproduce and lines of code don't typically have such global and complex functions.
>Talking about separating the noise or environmental influence is "not even wrong".
That's a little ridiculous, isn't it? Are you saying there's no reason to study the relationship between behavior and genes because there's too much noise? Is that something you think is true or something you want to be true?
"Are you saying there's no reason to study the relationship between behavior and genes because there's too much noise"
No, I'm trying really hard to express the idea that the question of whether there is/is not too much noise is a completely meaningless, wrongheaded question to ask.
If you did the analysis on a computer game that sucked, maybe you find that GPU related code was correlated? Does that mean less GPU code = less suckage?
You didn't respond to the THERAC-25 comment, which may have been the most targeted one to what I'm trying to communicate.
Well, in a sense, nothing is independent of genetics or upbringing, so how do you decide that something is caused by either one? Can it not be caused by either?
Regardless, the obvious implication is something developmental or environmental is important, after conception, but not particularly related to parenting behavior.
Regarding the pessimism of genetic pre-determination and this congenital disadvantage: I think the real progress of society is how it learns to make lives of different people productive and satisfying. E.g. nerdy types had it hard in, say, 19th century Europe, but now they have a great and important niche in engineering. Same happened to many more predispositions of people that now lead to something interesting instead of pure misery.
I think this process is not going to stop.