shaunbwilson

At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation’s intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. Within a couple of generations, competing with the Chinese on an intellectual level will be like challenging Lena Dunham to a getting-naked-on-TV contest.

How will the research be applied?
Once you’ve got that information and a fertilized egg that’s divided into a few cells, you can sample one of the cells to figure out the expected intelligence if it’s implanted and becomes a person. 

What does that mean in human language?
Any given couple could potentially have several eggs fertilized in the lab with the dad’s sperm and the mom’s eggs. Then you can test multiple embryos and analyze which one’s going to be the smartest. That kid would belong to that couple as if they had it naturally, but it would be the smartest a couple would be able to produce if they had 100 kids. It’s not genetic engineering or adding new genes, it’s the genes that couples already have.  

And over the course of several generations you’re able to exponentially multiply the population’s intelligence.

Right. Even if it only boosts the average kid by five IQ points, that’s a huge difference in terms of economic productivity, the competitiveness of the country, how many patents they get, how their businesses are run, and how innovative their economy is.

A recent example made a telling distinction between active and passive Facebook use (Burke et al., 2010). Passive Facebook use includes scrolling through other people’s photos and reading their updates while active use includes updating your status and writing private messages. Perhaps you’ll be unsurprised to learn that the active kind is the good one for increasing social bonding.

In a similar vein, there’s a new study looking at Facebook use and loneliness. It examines the old question about whether being online makes us lonely which, I’ve discussed along with other bugbears here.

Instead of doing a survey, though, they carried out an experiment (Deters & Mehl, 2012). They wanted to know if Facebook status updating could cause you to feel less lonely. Long story (as it must be nowadays) short; in the group they studied, it did. 

When participants made more Facebook updates, they felt less lonely and this was caused by feeling more connected to their friends on a daily basis. Surprisingly it didn’t depend on whether their friends replied or not, or how they replied, just reaching out had the effect of reducing loneliness. 

Now this won’t be the end of the argument about whether Facebook or the Internet in general is good for us, but it’s a great start and at least it asks the right questions. It looks experimentally at a specific aspect of Facebook usage, status updating, to look at the effects on loneliness.

The RunPee app tells you when there’s a 3-5 minute gap in the movie you’re watching that you won’t miss anything if you run to the bathroom. The curators of the site look for these gaps starting 30 minutes into the movie and stop looking for gaps with about 20 minutes left in the movie.