Things I Know I Know

We don't know as much as we think we know about intelligence, and positing that we do fails to address the mind-body problem and has a tendency to fall into the thinking that science explains all. That said, it's tough to deny that genetics plays a role in who we are and, at the least, how we do what we do. What generates a lot of talk is what we do with this information.

Calpundit asked awhile back:

There are dangers involved in genetic tailoring, and the technology is still decades away, but it strikes me that the potential for good vastly outweighs the potential for misuse. After all, what's the real objection to giving birth to children who are smarter, more compassionate, or better problem solvers? Since most of human progress has come from exactly those kinds of people, I'd think the more the better.

I say: because in the same way talent gets defined as 'skills I value right this minute,' we keep--wrongly--defining 'smart' as 'ways of thinking or knowing that succeed today.' We don't know the doors we'd be closing if we could suddenly select for this narrow definition of 'smart.' Intelligence can be different. How someone thinks can vary. How we value that thinking can change. Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton and the The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney are a couple of books I’d throw out from my recent reading that have interesting takes on this issue.

Charles Murtaugh adds another perspective:

Is there such a thing as quantifiable intelligence, and is it affected by the hardwiring of our brain and/or by genetic inheritance? This seems like an academic question, but for a previous generation of liberals it had obvious political implications; otherwise why would grandees like Howard Gardner and the late Stephen Jay Gould have spent so much energy trying to answer in the negative?

The answer is obviously race; as Gould pointed out, correctly, people with an unhealthy obsession about the intellectual capacity of blacks tended to be those most interested in the genetic basis of intelligence. There are all sorts of unwholesome reasons for this -- mainly because if intelligence was quantifiable and heritable, it could be distributed differently between whites and blacks, and this could back up racist claims about superiority and inferiority. Still, though, granting the ugliness of some participants' motives shouldn't suffice to end the discussion, and good liberals don't like to be seen closing down an argument purely for ideological reasons. So the move was made to deny that intelligence is real, or inheritable; an alternative strategy has been to declare that "race" has no scientific basis, but this approach is notably failing.

Calpundit follows up with a post about athletic ability, which I assume will also have a followup post later. It's an interesting place to go. I'm willing to jump in the deep end for the moment and say that there's no such thing as athletic ability, there’s 'being good at this particular physical thing' and sometimes there are a certain set of skills that give someone a broad talent in several athletic undertakings. There are also important non-genetic factors involved. In The Frailty Myth, Colette Downing talks about why girls so often 'throw like girls.' One huge factor is how long they've been throwing at all. Boys (and yes, this is changing rapidly and drastically, something Downing also discusses) start throwing balls sooner, throw them more, and get more coaching. When they don't, they often 'throw like girls,' too. Women's athletic records have changed more rapidly over the last thirty years or so than many men's records (and if the book wasn't at home, I'd post an example). The social aspect of women and athletic ability has been huge historically. It doesn't mean that genetics doesn't play a role in determining some undefined aspect of athletic prowess, but the political and social issues so outweigh the genetic that genetics isn't even really on the table yet (not least of which because we don't know which aspects are genetic and which are other).

Would I want to be more athletic or smarter if I could plug in a gene and go? Or, at least semi-realistically, if I could choose such for my non-existent children? Athletic, how? Smart, how? Would they be happier? Would they be more successful? There are whole worlds of 'smart' and 'happy' and 'successful' and we haven't yet found ways to reduce all this to formula without losing or devaluing something else in the bargain.

I think this is all very interesting and something I've thought a lot about, not so much in the context of manipulating future humans for the betterment of the world, but in the aspect of how we define intelligence and what it means for how we relate to each other and to other species.

I have a whole additional post I'd like to make on Intelligence and Rottweilers which no one will probably care about but me. But, hey, that’s the beauty of blogging. Maybe this weekend...