For example, evolving smaller animals from larger animals (by a given factor) is an order of magnitude faster process than evolving larger animals from smaller animals. ( http://news.ucsc.edu/2012/01/body-size.html ). I think you wouldn't disagree that it would be far quicker to breed a 50 point IQ drop than 50 point IQ rise?
But what does that have to do with breeding for our objective purpose? It may be easier to destroy functionality than create it, but evolution is creating functionality for living in the wild and doing something like hunting mice while we're interesting in creating functionality to do something like understand human social cues and trading off against things like aggression and hostility towards the unknown. In both cases, functionality is being created and trading off against something else, and there's no reason to expect the change for one case to be beneficial for the other. Border collies may be geniuses at memorizing words and herding sheep and both of these feats required intense selection, but both skills are worse than useless for surviving in the wild as a wolf...
I guess you refer to those studies on intelligence genes which flood the popular media, which tend to have small effect sizes and are of exactly the kind that is very prone to superfluous results.
The original studies, yes, the ones like candidate-gene studies where n rarely is more than a few hundred, but the ones using proper sample sizes like n>50000 and genome-wide significance level seem trustworthy to me. They seem to be replicating.
Well, my point was that you can't expect the same rate of advances from some IQ breeding programme that we get when breeding traits arising via loss-of-function mutations.
They seem to be replicating.
They don't seem to be replicating very well...
Sure, there's a huge genetic component, but almost none of it is "easily identified".
Generally you can expect that parameters such as e.g. initial receptor density at a specific kind of synapse w...
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.