[Paedor]

I'm doing a comp-bio PhD right now, and the more I learn about the process of playing with genes, the further I think we are from expanding intelligence with them.

In the current state of the field, we simply don't know how cells work (in enough detail). We can't predict what cells do when genes are mutated, we definitely can't manufacture new genes that slot into the cell's existing machinery, and, for a lot of the proteins related to neurons in particular, we don't even know what they do.

If there is a breakthrough, it'll take luck at this point, and probably be something stupid, like realizing we can double production of some cell type without hurting the child *too* much. We're really not close to engineering anything, which might be a requirement for producing more intelligence without some very clumsy side effects.

Given the level of trial and error required for a lucky breakthrough, and the human cost of that error, we might just give up on this until the singularity anyways. That said, there's so much undiscovered now that there could be a perfect mechanism that just isn't known yet. And, indirectly, by just making sure people don't have allergies or a pre-disposition to heart disease... we might increase intelligence just by making people healthier.

[mlyle]

Heritability of intelligence is high, and there's a few genes already existing in the human population that are well correlated with intelligence.

You could just try turning a few known knobs and see what happens. The efficacy is probably moderate-- maybe 7 IQ points or so with the currently known genes. But a change of mean IQ by 7 is actually a pretty substantial advantage-- it's half a standard deviation, and predicts about $4k more income per year.

Yes, it's unethical and there's probably substantial human cost.

Or, there's even a shortcut of just testing for people with high IQs that also possess the best known genotypes (i.e. test both genotype and phenotype) and forcing them to breed.