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Thinking positively: The genetics of high intelligence

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136 points gwern | 2 comments | 01 Nov 15 23:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.012s | source
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danieltillett ◴[02 Nov 15 09:50 UTC] No.10490915[source]▶
I would be very surprised if high intelligence was anything other than the extreme edge of a normal distribution of the human population. For it to be anything other than this it would require people of high intelligence to be a sub-population that did not breed with the rest of humanity.
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apalmer ◴[02 Nov 15 17:17 UTC] No.10493248[source]▶
Your second sentence is not logically implied by the first sentence.

It is not uncommon to have phenotypes that are expressed only rarely although the genes that code for the phenotype are widely dispersed. Many well known genetic diseases fall into this category.

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danieltillett ◴[02 Nov 15 19:51 UTC] No.10494637[source]▶
Intelligence is like height in that it is multi-genetic (on the order of thousands of genes). Any trait that is determined by thousands of genes is going to show a normal distribution.
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1. apalmer ◴[02 Nov 15 20:55 UTC] No.10495164{3}[source]▶
I understand the reasoning behind that... however the whole point of this study was to put this logical assumption under the rigors of actual science...

because this is an 'assumption' not a logical 'conclusion'.

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2. danieltillett ◴[02 Nov 15 23:30 UTC] No.10496175[source]▶
I just said I would have been surprised if the result was anything other than they found, not that the study was not worth doing. For something as important as intelligence it is worth checking all of our assumptions.

This study does support what previous studies have found from when people looked for genes that had a large positive effect on intelligence and failed to find any.