The Ongoing Mystery of How DNA Affects Intelligence
We know genes affect intelligence, but we’re years away from understanding how
It’s the stuff of which sci-fi dystopias are made: Scientists have come up with a blood test for smartness.
Until the past few years, the best science available would have been hard-pressed to reliably identify a snippet of DNA associated with something as complex as human intelligence. Today, thanks to recent advances in behavioral genetics, you can spit into a tube, send it off to a lab, and get a number known as a “polygenic score” that gives your rough odds of having high or low intelligence.
The emerging science of genomics and intelligence has alarmed skeptics outside the small world of behavioral genetics, and for good reason. The history of research into how genes affect intelligence is littered with error, forays into eugenics, and, in some cases, outright atrocity. So it comes as little surprise that present-day science is currently being twisted and weaponized as fodder for racist demagoguery, whether geneticists like it or not.
The newfound ability to look into a person’s genome for markers of intelligence promises — or maybe threatens — to bring about new futures. Some are darkly dystopian: “designer babies” bred for intelligence, children…
