If Smart is the New Norm, Stupidity Gets More Interesting

Here's the opener to my My Oct 22, 2012, column at at the New York Times:

If Smart is the New Norm, Stupidity Gets More Interesting

Few of us are as smart as we’d like to be. You’re sharper than Jim (maybe) but dull next to Jane. Human intelligence varies. And this matters, because smarter people generally earn more money, enjoy better health, raise smarter children, feel happier and, just to rub it in, live longer as well.

But where does intelligence come from? How is it built? Researchers have tried hard to find the answer in our genes. With the rise of inexpensive genome sequencing, they’ve analyzed the genomes of thousands of people, looking for gene variants that clearly affect intelligence, and have found a grand total of two.

One determines the risk of Alzheimer’s and affects I.Q. only late in life; the other seems to build a bigger brain, but on average it raises I.Q. by all of 1.29 points.

Other genetic factors may be at work: A report last year concluded that several hundred gene variants taken together seemed to account for 40 to 50 percent of the differences in intelligence among the 3,500 subjects in the study. But the authors couldn’t tell which of these genes created any significant effect. And when they tried to use the genes to predict differences in intelligence, they could account for only 1 percent of the differences in I.Q.

“If it’s this hard to find an effect of just 1 percent,” Robert Plomin, a professor of behavioral genetics at King’s College London, told New Scientist, “what you’re really showing is that the cup is 99 percent empty.”

But is the genetic cup really empty, or are we just looking for the wrong stuff? Kevin Mitchell, a developmental neurogeneticist at Trinity College Dublin, thinks the latter. In an essay he published in July on his blog, Wiring the Brain, Dr. Mitchell proposed that instead of thinking about the genetics of intelligence, we should be trying to parse “the genetics of stupidity,” as his title put it. We should look not for genetic dynamics that build intelligence but for those that erode it.

Read the whole thing at the Times. 

Enough With the 'Slut Gene' Already: Behaviors Ain't Traits

crossposted from Wired:

Earlier this week, WBUR's Here and Now ran a a taped interview with me about "Beautiful Brains," my recent National Geographic article on teen brain and behavior. (You can listen to the interview here.) It's only six minutes long, but nicely edited to highlight, from a high-altitude evolutionary point of view, what distinguishes adolescence, when we peak in our pursuits of risk, novelty, and same-age peers even as our brains consolidate gains while remaining especially plastic. Not, as researcher Jay Giedd likes to say, a defective adult brain, but a nicely tuned teen brain. The show also squeezes in some Shakespeare, some fast driving, and a bit of Steve Jobs. Not bad for six minutes.

A couple of the write-ups about the show, however, carry headlines that make a mistake too often made about behavioral genetics:

Reckless Teen Behavior May Be Evolutionary Advantage | Here & Now

Know a risky teenager? Evolutionarily speaking, that's good behavior | PRI.ORG

I don't want to beat up too badly on these press releases; doubtless they were written quickly, and in any case the headlines are the worst of it. But perhaps because they were written quickly, they offer a teachable moment by embedding a common misconception. They mistake behaviors for traits.

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