Single Gene Can Boost IQ By Six Points 199
ananyo (2519492) writes "People are living longer, which is good. But old age often brings a decline in mental faculties and many researchers are looking for ways to slow or halt such decline. One group doing so is led by Dena Dubal of the University of California, San Francisco, and Lennart Mucke of the Gladstone Institutes, also in San Francisco. Dr Dubal and Dr Mucke have been studying the role in aging of klotho, a protein encoded by a gene called KL. A particular version of this gene, KL-VS, promotes longevity. One way it does so is by reducing age-related heart disease. Dr Dubal and Dr Mucke wondered if it might have similar powers over age-related cognitive decline. What they found was startling. KL-VS did not curb decline, but it did boost cognitive faculties regardless of a person's age by the equivalent of about six IQ points. If this result, just published in Cell Reports, is confirmed, KL-VS will be the most important genetic agent of non-pathological variation in intelligence yet discovered."
First post! (Score:2, Funny)
Guess I got that gene!
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But those with it would guess not.
Re:First post! (Score:5, Informative)
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I must be SOOOO smart (Score:5, Funny)
A single gene can boost IQ by six points? I've got something like 24,000 of them!
"boost"??? (Score:3, Insightful)
TL;DR, but I presume statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
My guess would be that two groups, those that express the gene and those that do not have a 6 point difference in IQ on average, in favor of those with the gene.
Re:TL;DR, but I presume statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
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clearly an enhanced version of this technology was used in the K.I.T.T. program.
turbobooooooooost
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Take a drub the changes the expression, and then you IQ would be boosted.
". things just start out that way and stay that way."
hmmmmm. maybe
Re:TL;DR, but I presume statistics (Score:5, Informative)
My guess would be that two groups, those that express the gene and those that do not have a 6 point difference in IQ on average, in favor of those with the gene.
That is part of what they did. They looked at a group of 718 people, about 20% with the gene. Those with the gene scored, on average, 6 points higher. But they went further. They also inserted the gene into otherwise genetically identical mice, and the mice with the gene did significantly better on a range of cognitive tests.
Re:"boost"??? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:"boost"??? (Score:4, Informative)
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Not really... that's just another verb that still suggests it somehow can change within a given individual.
How about this then: People who lack this gene on average, for a given population, are measured to have an IQ that is 6 points less than those who do.
I think that the reason why the word "boost" is used is because they are working on developing a gene therapy that would "boost" IQ in people who don't have the gene. In that context, it's perfectly acceptable.
Personally, I wouldn't sign up for the first version of such a drug as most IQ tests only measure certain skills such as memory, logical,and spacial t
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
I'm even better than the gene at making you smarter. :-p
Re:"boost"??? (Score:4, Funny)
Also if it's the length of life, they took the wrong goddess, not Clotho but Lachesis is responsible for that.
Standard Deviation (Score:2)
Isn't the standard deviation of IQ 7 points? Is 6 points actually statistically significant?
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Isn't the standard deviation of IQ 7 points? Is 6 points actually statistically significant?
Additionally, a lot of people have mistakenly embraced these "IQ" tests to calculate a physical property in thinking the way a scale measures one's weight.. They're only a study indicating a comparative awareness of others within the same environment -- something the French social scientist that created it originally stressed when Americans were redefining its use.
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Re:Standard Deviation (Score:4, Interesting)
According to various IQ tests, I'm smarter than Einstein.
IQ tests are bullshit. Mostly because you can easily train them and gain 20-30 "points" fairly easily. Especially if you start out fairly "intelligent" already (read: share the way of thinking and the train of logic of those that design these tests) because once you play in the 150+ league, what matters is concentration and speed. Finding the logical pattern quickly and then being able to track various variables at the same time is usually the key.
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If you were smarter then Einstein then you would have figured out the he never took an IQ test.
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So I guess IQ tests are the bullshit I claim them to be.
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Your signature is oddly ironic for this particular subject.
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It can take a bit more than two hours depending on the specific test, but yes. Quite a few times actually. It's turned into one of the odder hobbies of mine, it's like playing a game again and again for a better high score.
And nobody can tell me that my IQ improved by almost 40 points over the course of the past 20 years.
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Well, I can empirically prove that I'm quite certainly not smarter than Einstein. I did not present a paradigm shifting theory in any field of studies, I did not change my field of studies inside out, hell, outside a few people who happen to have met me nobody really knows me. If I was as smart as Einstein, don't you think someone would've noticed that by now?
What IQ tests measure is basically how good you are at solving IQ tests. I'm obviously pretty good at it. Which comes as no surprise, I am pretty good
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For someone so smart....
You're making an invalid leap to think that just because someone is smarter than Einstein, they would HAVE to accomplish more than Einstein. Why can't someone be smart & lazy simultaneously?
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They're only a study indicating a comparative awareness of others within the same environment -- something the French social scientist that created it originally stressed when Americans were redefining its use.
If you can prove this, you will be a rich person.
IQ has been studied intensively for decades. And the result is... nobody really knows.
They know they're measuring something, because it is measurable, and it is fairly consistent for a given individual.
But exactly what it is, few people with any sense claim to know at this time. The likelihood is that it is a combination of factors.
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I see now though that I had misunderstood.
Re:Standard Deviation (Score:4, Informative)
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Anything within a single standard deviation is rarely considered statistically significant unless the distribution is extremely flat.
That is nonsense. For basic statistical tests (e.g., t-tests), statistical significance depends on the sampling distribution of the statistic, which is a function of both sample size and the source population distribution. For example, a difference in means that is less than the standard deviations of the source populations can easily be statistically significant if the sample sizes are large enough. If you don't believe me, I suggest you try running some simple numeric simulations for normally-distribut
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Nope. Sample size can correct for that. A large enough test group can find differences within your standard deviation.
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Old age brings a decline? (Score:2, Flamebait)
I work with people across the entire working-age spectrum who are blithering idiots so I don't think it's just age which reduces ones mental acuity.
Maybe this process can help them as well. Let's start with programmers followed by the executive staff for starters.
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It's likely that age itself doesn't reduce mental acuity at all. It seems the tests that purport to show age related decline in cognition have been wrongly interpreted. http://www.newscientist.com/ar... [newscientist.com] (paywalled, but the first couple of paragraphs are available for free.)
Single Gene needs to step up his game (Score:3)
Dial back the cologne a little.
Look women in the eye.
Learn to dance with confidence, even if it is only the white guy shuffle.
Sure some women dig a smart dude, but if that 6 points is a significant improvement for you maybe the women aren't into you for your brains.
Buy a pump.
SNP#? (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I understanding properly that the "KL-VS" variant of KLOTHO is Rs9536314 [snpedia.com] with genotype "T;T"?
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More data: Haplotype "KL-VS" refers to the V and S alleles of the SNPs respectively. It contains six sequence variants in complete linkage disequilibrium, two of which result in amino acid substitutions F352V [expasy.org] (rs9536314 [nih.gov]) and C370S [expasy.org] (rs9527025 [nih.gov], not on 23andme btw). It is present in 15% of Caucasians.
Drug... (Score:2)
Note, I personally would hypothesize that such a drug would NOT work in adults, but instead would have to be given to children, something we are much less likely to agree to do. Mainly because I think intelligence has more to do with how your neurons are organized rather than what chemicals are in your blood.
Young blood experiments (Score:2)
Combine this with infusions of blood from your grandchildren [ajc.com] and you'll be good to go.
Klotho? (Score:2)
So what is the downside? (Score:2)
If all this gene achieved was less cardiovascular diseases and higher intelligence, we would (nearly) all have it by now due to selection. So the question is, what else does it do which counterweights this?
Re:So what is the downside? (Score:5, Informative)
If all this gene achieved was less cardiovascular diseases and higher intelligence, we would (nearly) all have it by now due to selection. So the question is, what else does it do which counterweights this?
Not really. Cardiovascular disease generally kills long after the age of reproduction. The number of people who would have been born if not for parental death by cardiovascular disease is likely pretty small. Also, those with higher intelligence tend to reproduce less.
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Also, those with higher intelligence tend to reproduce less.
That may be true today, but it clearly wasn't always (or mankind would be getting steadily dumber, and there is ample evidence to the contrary), and this is most likely a temporary situation. Right now, only the better-educated classes grasp just how tight the situation with the world's water, food, and energy resources has become, and they adjust their reproductive behavior accordingly, while the more ignorant parts of our species continue to pass on their increasingly unwarranted optimism to their many ch
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Also, those with higher intelligence tend to reproduce less.
Only in the rich world of today where we confound intelligence with university educations, thereby delaying children during a span of high fertility. That is surely a recent trend. Intelligence correlates with general health, especially in a more rough and tumble world of uncertain nutrition. Above average intelligence is a wonderful positive indicator for mate selection.
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Also, those with higher intelligence tend to reproduce less.
Only in the rich world of today where we confound intelligence with university educations, thereby delaying children during a span of high fertility. That is surely a recent trend. Intelligence correlates with general health, especially in a more rough and tumble world of uncertain nutrition. Above average intelligence is a wonderful positive indicator for mate selection.
Rate selection and number of offspring is not the same thing.
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hmmmm (Score:2)
Soooooo....are there any foods that have this protein?
No, just no... (Score:2)
If this result, just published in Cell Reports, is confirmed, KL-VS will be the most important genetic agent of non-pathological variation in intelligence yet discovered.
IQ != intelligence. If you want to study variations in IQ score, fine. Not saying it can't yeild interesting results. But can we please stop pretending that there is anything approaching a useful scientific definition of intelligence, nevermind one that reduces to a single number. That ways lies the kind of idiocy that will end up with people fucking up their kids genetic structure trying to engineer "intelligence" without even understanding what that is.
Steroids for your brain (Score:2)
But it might be just as dangerous as the other kind.
In related news ... (Score:2)
Explain Flynn Effect then. (Score:2)
Even if this allele was sweeping through the population for the last one hundred years, working its way to get "fixed", it would only explain a tiny fraction of the Flynn effect. What it really tells us something simple. It is exceedingly hard to come up with new original
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Your numbers are saying the person of average intillegence in 1930 would be in the bottom one or two percent today. While there have been increases in IQ, they have not been anywhere near that extreme. One or two points per decade, and the rate has been slowing for the past 30 years. Still significant, but nothing like what you are describing.
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What population carries this gene? (Score:2)
Or, specifically, which ethnic groups are mostly likely to have it or not?
I can imagine the researchers refusing to study that aspect of it because of the potential 'justifying racism' accusations.
I would laugh at all the white supremacists if it ended up being exclusive to blacks tho.
(My personal opinion is that any so called 'pure' race is just a lesser form of inbreeding. Believing in 'miscegenation' is just a couple steps away from having sex with your own sister.)
Self Parody? (Score:3)
Is the headline "Single Gene Can Boost IQ By Six Points" a self parody? It should be "Single Allele Can Boost IQ By Six Points". The thing I love about irony is that it knows no bounds - there's an endless supply of it.
Hell, I Can Give 20 Points With A Kick In The Ass (Score:2)
Just ask my employees, who are getting smarter every day!
Gimme (Score:2)
I'm gonna need some of this gene after reading the articles on alien encounters and noncomputable consciousness. Me dumber now.
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No good, I've know too many pilots.
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It's not really a myth, but using single number can be misleading.
Kind of like how that on average, a human being will have 1 testicle. It's stastically true, just not very useful.
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Not only that, but the average child has fewer than two legs. Ain't that just sad?
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less then 1 testicle, actually.
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Re:wow, people still believe in the IQ myth? That (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't really believe in evolution. It's just the only theory out there how human came into existence that doesn't resort to wizards in the sky working magic. If you have a better one, I'd like to hear it. Just leave wizards and wonders, dungeons and dragons, out of it.
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no way.. that kind of creation myth sounds like great fun. that it also describes 'The Hobbit" is just a coincidence.
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Yeah, but when I move the bibles in the book store over to Tolkien's books I get tossed out...
Re:wow, people still believe in the IQ myth? That (Score:4, Informative)
Erh... yes? Your argument with my statement above would be what exactly?
To clarify: I don't believe in evolution. It is "only" the only scientifically acceptable theory concerning the development of life that we have currently. But that's independent of my faith in it. It simply is. There's little I could accomplish by believing in it.
Unless someone can come up with a competing theory that deserves the name there's not really an alternative to it. It is also a quite acceptable theory, supported by what we know about how life developed and not contradicted by anything I could think of currently.
My problem is with the term of believing. Believing something requires some kind of faith, believing someone requires some kind of trust. Neither has anything to do with science.
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My problem is with the term of believing. Believing something requires some kind of faith, believing someone requires some kind of trust. Neither has anything to do with science.
Uh...are you sure about that? [stanford.edu] Just read the first sentence.
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Sorry, it's just that believe in a science setting ruffles me the wrong way. The next thing you usually know is that some idiot feels the urge to butt in with something along the lines of "Oh you believe in evolution, and how is that different from believing in God".
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No doubt you're born with some talent for that just like for everything else, but just like you can choose to be a gym rat or couch potato with your body it's also whether you train to use your mind. They try to separate skill from innate intelligence but from what I've understand education changes the IQ score significantly and training for the tests even more so. The IQ tests were used as proof that some races were inferior until they started comparing people with the same access to education, then the di
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Well that's easy to explain. The phrase "intelligence is not heritable" is a simplification of "the bulk of intelligence is not heritable and (barring serious medical genetic conditions) the environment has a much larger impact than the genes you inherit." The aspect of inherited intelligence is only visible and applicable when you have a large enough sample size that the environmental "noise" is averaged out and you can observe the evolutionary trend. To a lesser extent this also applies to muscles and hea
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(1) Intelligence is 80% heritable
Neat. I think you're talking about this stuff. [wikipedia.org] It says researchers have put the heritability of IQ between 0.5 and 0.8. However, Turkheimer (2003) found that for children of low socioeconomic status heritability of IQ falls almost to zero. CITATION, BITCH. [sagepub.com]
See the link to heritability [wikipedia.org]:
Heritability measures the fraction of phenotype variability that can be attributed to genetic variation. This is not the same as saying that this fraction of an individual phenotype is caused by genetics. In addition, heritability can change without any genetic change occurring (e.g. when the environment starts contributing to more variation). A case in point, consider that both genes and environment have the potential to influence intelligence. Heritability could increase if genetic variation increases, causing individuals to show more phenotypic variation (e.g. to show different levels of intelligence). On the other hand, heritability might also increase if the environmental variation decreases, causing individuals to show less phenotypic variation (e.g. to show more similar levels of intelligence). Heritability is increasing because genetics are contributing more variation or because non-genetic factors are contributing less variation; what matters is the relative contribution.
Key point: Heritability goes up and down depending on the environment. The environmental variation is completely dominant for the poor. Go figure, it sucks being poor and it's hard to go get your life on track.
But hey, I'm sur
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I love talking to people who are adamant that intelligence is not heritable
I love talking to people who have no clue what the OP said.
Hint: he said nothing about intelligence, and nothing about heritability.
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Intelligence is a difficult thing to quantify, and there are environmental factors that come into play when measuring the intelligence of an adult.
It'd be more accurate and appropriate to say that behavioral tendencies is genetically inherited. It's also accurate to say that what those tendencies lead to is non-trivially dependent on environment.
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Depends if you think that hardware is more important than software.
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When I ask how we evolved from presumably less intelligent ape-like ancestors without intelligence being heritable, I can almost see the gears grind to a halt.
Average intelligence (100 on the IQ scale) has been increasing steadily over the decades.
It gets normalized back to 100 every once in a while or we'd all be above average.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect [wikipedia.org]
TLDR: We don't really know why, but maybe education, nutrition, and disease reduction are why we've been getting smarter.
All of which is to point out that intelligence doesn't *need* to be heritable, it may be an innate property that only requires proper nurturing.
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You moved from intelligence to smart. Which do you mean?
Some aspect of intelligence are culture based. Others are inherited. Really, you need to be more specific. :) OR if You went back in time, there is a chance they would consider you stupid, becasue you couldn't do common things.
For example. if you were raised by Homo ergastor, you wouldn't be nearly as smart..also, dead.
Also, evolution isn't a belief, it's a fact.
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Ah, so talking to stupid people who don't understand the word 'culture' makes you feel superior
Not to point out the obvious, but if you're capable of understanding something that someone else isn't capable of understanding, then by definition it makes you superior (in that aspect). Unless you are attempting to claim that intelligence offers no objective benefits?
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'tard with a "mythical" IQ of 80
I love posts like yours. Mental retardation is defined as an IQ of 70 or less.
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Yes, good catch, kudos to you, mea culpa.
Though as an aside, you make my earlier point quite nicely - How, exactly, do we define a clinical term as having a certain score on a mythical scale?
/ Charisma as the dump stat, FTW!
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How, exactly, do we define a clinical term as having a certain score on a mythical scale?
The scale is real - the myth is that it's a terribly good measure of intelligence. It's such an objective and repeatable test that you can increase a kid's intelligence by offering them ice cream if they do well.
So how can you justify using it as part of a DSM diagnosis? They had to put something in there. Many, if not most DSM diagnoses are subject to "interpretation", which is a black art that psychiatrists get paid a lot of money for. Ask a parent of a kid who is MR or some other sort of mental handicap
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It's not a myth, no at all.
Misused and incorrectly presented by the media? yes..
Re:Six whole points?! (Score:4, Funny)
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And let's not forget the test itself and how it is made up. The order of the questions alone can already easily move that final score by more than those 6 points.
Re:Six whole points?! (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but it's six points for a single gene.
If you buy 100 of those genes you get 600 points! You'll became a geneius.
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Look up the gene on open access GWAS databases and see for yourself.
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What about Africans ... are they lacking this gene?
What about people who are too stupid to understand that sub-Saharan Africa has a larger number of groups with significant population genetics differences than anywhere else? Oh, that's right, you just categorize them as dark skinned folks, as though that were a terribly significant genetic difference. Why not throw Australian Aborigines into that mix too, and ignore that they're the people who have the greatest genetic difference from most African groups.
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For the record, I believe wholeheartedly in evolution. The Theory of Evolution definitely exists. It's real, and has an impact on our daily lives (this /. thread, for
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They thought it was ok to marry your sister as long as both of you have the KL-VS allele.
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I disagree:
http://goo.gl/virbDE [goo.gl]
What?
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It's both. It's not hard to understand. Why people like you insist it's one or the other is baffling.