There is apparently a research group in China that has some solid results but I have not seen them and do not know if they are out yet.

HCH

Yes, of course. But remember that in science we are not in the business of "accepting" one thing of another. That is the domain of religion and politics. The only thing that matters is finding good hypotheses and testing them.

HCH

It must be simple in some way since it is so heritable. People with IQs of 90 and IQs of 140 both prosper and do fine. although there are lots of statistical differences between two such groups.

Other other hand if we take a trait like "propensity to learn language in childhood" this seems to me to be relatively invariable and fixed and so probably very complex.

Certainly one could breed for IQ and raise the population mean a lot. But what would we be doing to our children? People with 140 IQ seem to do all right but I would worry a lot about the kind of life a kid with an IQ of 220 would have.

My feeling is that the dichotomy between societies where males are threatening and violent and societies where males are submissive and not threats to each other is the most interesting social dichotomy we have. In some societies where males are threats there is a clear alternative niche like the Berdache on the Great Plains. In urban ghettos with drug dealers and street corner males there is a significant set of males who hold down jobs and, often, bring the proceeds to support their matrifocal families. How much such males reproduce is not clear. A wonderful description of this, with a zany analysis, is (Sharff, J. W. (1981). Free enterprise and the ghetto family. Psychology Today, 15, 41-8.)

There may well be stable distributions lurking in the social system but they are likely different everywhere: that for Bushmen would be quite different from that for Mundurucu.

Rulers do not always leave more descendants than proles. I highly recommend Gregory Clark's "Farewell to Alms", in which he shows that the medieval ruling class in Britain essentially all killed each other and have no descendants today. On the other end peasants and laborers did not reproduce themselves, so almost everyone in the UK today is descended from the medieval gentry, prosperous merchants, and so on.

I have heard discussion about the singularity on the web but I have never had any idea at all what it is, so I can't say much about that.

I do not think there is much prospect for dramatic IQ elevation without producing somewhat damaged people. We talk a lot in our book about the ever-present deleterious consequences of the strong selection that follows any environmental change. Have a look for example at the whippet homozygous for a dinged version of myostatin. Even a magic pill is likely to do the same thing. OTOH scientists don't have a very good track record at predicting the future. Now, I am going to hop into my flying car and go to the office -:)

HCH

It is an interesting puzzle. This was a secular rise in cognitive test scores well documented in a number of countries during the 20th century. It has stopped and even reversed in the last few decades. There seem to be several pausible ideas out there

One is that social changes have had the effect of "training" people for cognitive tests: more magazines, radio, chatter everywhere, advertising, etc. Hard idea to test. I do fieldwork in Southern Africa. Forty years ago there were no radios in the backcountry, no books, no magazines. Today radio, newspapers, magazines are everywhere. I expect that this changes people a lot but I have no evidence.

Flynn himself thinks nutrition got better but the data are not clear about that. I would favor as an explanation vaccination and antibiotics. Infectious disease and the inflammation associated with it does seem to damage people (Caleb Finch, Eileen Crimmins, others). We have cut the intensity of childhood insults way down everywhere.

My two cents........

Right, wolves pack-hunt which involves pretty complex management of prey herds including something like a "theory of prey mind" to predict what the prey will do.

There is a lot known about cape dog hunting because they are in fairly open country and can be observed. Not only do they predict where the prey herd will go, they coordinate and signal to each other with postures during the chase. It is absolutely beautiful to watch, like stop-action ballet.

HCH

You are even meaner than Shulman. We don't know how human intelligence evolved and we need to know it in order to answer your question I think. This is where evolutionary psychology and differential psychology (Am I using that term right?) must come together to work this out.

We think that we know a little bit about how to raise intelligence. Just turn down the suppression of early CNS growth. If you do that in one way the eyeball grows too big and you are nearsighted, which is highly correlated with intelligence. BRCA1 is another early CNS growth suppressor, and we speculate in the book that a mildly broken BRCA1 is an IQ booster even though it gives you cancer later. BTW Greg tells me that there a high correlation between IQ and the risk of brain cancer, perhaps because of the same mechanism.

But these ways of boosting IQ are Red Green engineering. (Red Green is a popular North American comedy on television. The hero is a do-it-yourselfer who does everything shoddily.)

On the other hand IQ seems to behave like a textbook quantitative trait and it ought to respond rapidly to selection. We suggest that it did among Ashkenazi Jews and probably Parsis. IQ does not seem to have a downside in the general population, e.g. it is positively correlated with physical attractiveness, health, lifespan, and so on. Do we get insight into the costs of high IQ by looking at Ashkenazi Jews? Do they have overall higher rates of mental quirks? Cancer? I don't know.

HCH

Yikes! This is worse than my PhD orals.

There have been some (tentatively) identified like the 7-repeat version of the D4 dopamine receptor, the serotonin transporter, and others that Greg will be able to dredge up from his memory.

We may have found others but not identified them. Imagine that it would be highly beneficial to have a little bit less of substance s. If so then a mutation that broke the gene producing s would be favored a lot and would sweep until people with two copies of broken s started being born. How likely is it now that two broken copies of s will still work? A lot of the sweeps identified from SNP scans seem to have stalled out at intermediate frequencies (as opposed to going to fixation) suggesting that heterozygote advantage is widespread.

If so the genome wide association studies ought to find them, and they find a lot, many of the findings are not replicable. So after all the above I have no coherent answer to your question!

That is a big and interesting question. I do not think that evolutionary biology needed more math at all: they would have done better with less I think. The only math needed (so far) in thinking about acceleration is the result that the fixation probability of a new mutant is 1/2N if it is neutral and 2s if it has selective advantage s. The other important equation is that the change in a quantitative trait is the product of the heritability and the selective differential (the difference between the mean of the population and the mean of parents).

The history is that there was a ruckus in the 1960s between the selectionists and the new sect of neutralism, and neutralism more or less won. Selectionists persisted but that literature has a focus on bacteria in chemostats, plants, yeast, and such. Neutralism answered lots of questions and is associated with some lovely math, but as we took it up we (many of us) lost sight of real evolutionary issues.

Milford Wolpoff, in a review of our book in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology points out that his student Dave Frayer collected a lot of data on changes in European skull size and shape that implied very rapid evolution. In other words we "knew it all along" but never paid attention. In fact Cochran and I "knew" it but never put it together with the new findings from SNP chips. John Hawks did, right away.

So fashion rules and we it is difficult to get away from it I suppose.