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Genetics and Intelligence

Google TechTalks

349K subscribers • 4 videos on Rounds

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  • Recommended by 2 people, in Hacker News, across 2 different months.
  • Presented by Steve Hsu, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oregon, as the video describes them
  • Debated among experts. Its central claim is contested, so look for the other side.

Assumes interest and some biology. Education, not medical advice.

90K views15 years ago2 recommendations

Brain and nervesGenetics and genomicsMemory and learning

Steve Hsu discusses the heritability of cognitive ability, psychometric measurements of IQ, and genome-wide association studies.

Google Tech Talk (more info below) August 18, 2011 Presented by Steve Hsu. How do genes affect cognitive ability? I begin with a brief review of psychometric measurements of intelligence, introducing the idea of a "general factor" or IQ score. The main results concern the stability, validity (predictive power), and heritability of adult IQ. Next, I discuss ongoing Genome Wide Association Studies which investigate the genetic basis of intelligence. Due mainly to the rapidly decreasing cost of sequencing, it is likely that within the next 5-10 years we will identify genes which account for a significant fraction of total IQ variation. We are currently seeking volunteers for a study of high cognitive ability. Participants will receive free genotyping. Speaker Info: Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oregon and Director of its Institute of Theoretical Science. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and Assistant Professor at Yale before moving to Oregon in 1998. He is also the founder of two Silicon Valley software startups in the area of information security. He serves as Scientific Advisor to the Cognitive Genomics Lab of BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute), one of the leading genomics research centers in the world.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an informative talk on the genetic basis of human intelligence and cognitive ability.

peterfireflyin Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Bright Students Left Behind”

…ant to get to the bottom of it, I can heartily recommend Ian Deary's "Intelligence: A Short Introduction" as a place to start. link (Who knows, if you dig around a bit you might even be able to find a PDF, perhaps at Emil Kirkegaard's website.) You can also choose to spend an hour on this talk by Stephen Hsu who does research on IQ and genetics: link to this video You can read some of Plomin's stuff -- he is very much into genetics: link There's a paper I can't find at the moment that looks at almost 4000 non-related people, give them an IQ test each + scan their DNA for typical SNPs with a DNA chip. That gives us almost 8,000,000 pairs where we know how similar their IQ score and DNA was. That giv…
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vox_mollisin Hacker News • Recommends

On “What happens when a culture is driven by the need for money to make more money”

Steve Hsu giving a talk @ Google on the topic, with myriad citations: link to this video Four studies cited on this handy chart: link It's very well-established science that you could have easily googled, but downvoting unpopular research, pointing and shrieking "eugenics!" is a better argumentation technique, I suppose.
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eknsin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence”

I recall seeing this Google Tech Talk by Steve Hsu on how they are in the process of finding out basically all the additive genes that contribute to intelligence in China at the BGI research institute: link to this video They would take roughly a thousand people who are >=3 standard deviations smarter than average and compare their full genomes against people who are of average intelligence. This way they expect to find out all the "easy" genetic determinants of intelligence.
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sadrisin Hacker News • Mentions

On “The world is losing the war against climate change”

> Education is what needs to be innovated. We need more kids becoming scientists. Some people cannot just "become scientists". Without the intelligence, even an infinite amount of education would be pointless: link to this video
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bordercasesin Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Breeder's Equation”

Remapping intelligence to certain cognitive performance parameters, many of which can be measured in a very metrical and objective way, still tends to produce correlations. See Figure 3 of this article: 0 - there is a mix of simple perceptual tasks and more complex reasoning ones, which on the surface appear independent. The paper admits at the end that intelligence isn't one kind of task, but instead many kinds of systems used together. That still doesn't prevent their ability to construct a version of g-factor. And very simple metrics, taken alone, seem to inter-correlate well with IQ scores, like reaction time.1 This correlation increases with age, suggesting a biological factor in pr…
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tresilin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Does Education Matter? Tests from Extensions of Schooling in 1919-22, 47 and 72”

I am growing more disturbed in recent years by how true this statement is in our current society. While not all behavior is hereditary, genetics plays a massive role. I wish it were not taboo to talk about this more openly. While I have found few, at least there are some people attempting to give this subject more consideration: link link to this video
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