I realize I’m about 4 months late to this conversation so you’re likely the only one who will ever read this. But enhancing IQ or other traits is actually quite feasible with our current technology. Shai Carmi’s paper “Screening Human Embryos for Polygenic Traits Has Limited Utility” used predictors that were already two years out of date by the time he published and are even more out of date now. You could raise IQ by 2-8 points in expectation today, with the exact amount depending most on the age of the mother, number of egg retrievals completed, genetic ancestry of the parents, and quality of the IVF clinic.
The effect size for type 2 diabetes and height is even larger because our genetic predictors for those traits are better.
The main thing preventing us from getting to +10 IQ points right now is lack of data. We have all the genomes we could ever need. But no one has phenotypes them; we don’t have IQ test scores, or some highly correlated proxy like SAT score.
I realize I’m about 4 months late to this conversation so you’re likely the only one who will ever read this. But enhancing IQ or other traits is actually quite feasible with our current technology. Shai Carmi’s paper “Screening Human Embryos for Polygenic Traits Has Limited Utility” used predictors that were already two years out of date by the time he published and are even more out of date now. You could raise IQ by 2-8 points in expectation today, with the exact amount depending most on the age of the mother, number of egg retrievals completed, genetic ancestry of the parents, and quality of the IVF clinic.
The effect size for type 2 diabetes and height is even larger because our genetic predictors for those traits are better.
The main thing preventing us from getting to +10 IQ points right now is lack of data. We have all the genomes we could ever need. But no one has phenotypes them; we don’t have IQ test scores, or some highly correlated proxy like SAT score.
I wrote a whole post about this on LessWrong if you want to learn more