It’s not clear to me and possibly other readers what level of research or speculative research you personally find worthwhile. (I don’t necessarily mean within the context of the grant program your post was discussing. Just with regards to the goal of biology winning or intelligence enhancement )
kanzure
Karma: 7
Well, I have some details regarding microbial nootropic evolution on my page. I’ll leave that for now but happy to discuss if prodded.
With regards to your comment about what has been tried before, you have to keep in mind that people generally have not tried to improve IQ so directly. There has been a lack of projects and resources in these areas.
For example many of the transgenic mouse experiments that have improved intelligence have been small projects that were one-off, focused on a single gene or mutation. To my knowledge there has not been a large-scale or directed project to seriously pursue the prospect of developing intelligence enhancement.
Even domestication projects have been rather limited, IIRC often resulting in lower intelligence(?).
Animal brain architecture is very similar to human brain architecture. There have been other surgeries for humans that have improved IQ in cases of severe debilitating disease. Naturally, nobody thought to try this on normal humans. … at least to my knowledge.
Developing higher intelligence is not unethical or immoral. I am very surprised to hear you say otherwise. I think that in a lot of these discussions people seem to go into them with some sort of base assumption that everything is going to be abhorrent and awful and terrible. I have given you no indication of that. I think it’s an uncharitable assumption to assume that developing higher intelligence through these methods is inherently unethical or immoral. Intelligence is extremely beneficial and extremely moral to develop. Also on the detail level I don’t actually believe that you would need to breed an animal population to human-level intelligence to benefit from this sort of project. I think that you would be able to learn many things that could be applied to humans even if the animal population is developed to a level that is below human intelligence.
I am interested in collaborating on proposals for human intelligence enhancement projects. I have several unusual projects and ideas documented here: https://diyhpl.us/wiki/nootropics including brain surgery, directed evolution of brain microbes, directed evolution and selective breeding of smarter animal populations, cell therapy (neurons from a smarter animal, inserted during fetal development, maaaybe post-birth), open-source software for brain implants (firmware etc), open-source software for brain surgery robotics, and, of course, human embryo genetic engineering.
I think that some ideas are born fragile and they need to be incubated and insulated before they are exposed to the horrors of politics.