PROMOTING POTENTIAL 293dromic repeats;” it is Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year” for
2015), allows for DNA to be cut at desired points and pasted with replace-
ment sequences, using selected enzymes, or “molecular scissors.” Th ese
techniques are currently under study in clinical trials in humans, but
only with ge ne tic diseases that have, as yet, no other cure.^4
However, these developments have led to some rather imaginative
construal in psy chol ogy. For example, Plomin’s colleague Stephen Hsu
has an article in the online magazine Nautilus with the rather long title:
“Super- Intelligent Humans Are Coming: Ge ne tic Engineering Will One
Day Create the Smartest Humans Who Have Ever Lived.” In the article
Hsu says, “If a human being could be engineered to have the positive
version of each causal variant, they might exhibit cognitive ability which is
roughly 100 standard deviations above average. Th is corresponds to more
than 1,000 IQ points.” Suggesting that thousands of genes may be in-
volved, he explains that this “would require direct editing of the human
genome, ensuring the favorable ge ne tic variant at each of 10,000 loci.
Optimistically, this might someday be pos si ble with gene editing tech-
nologies similar to the recently discovered CRISPR/Cas system that has
led to a revolution in ge ne tic engineering in just the past year or two.”^5
As mentioned in chapter 1, the Imperial College team is also hopeful
that genes have been discovered that could be manipulated to boost in-
telligence. It is such ideas and models that excite the media and lead some
parents to won der about designer babies. Th ey are classic input → output
mechanistic models, and they are hugely naive. Apart from the obvious
practical prob lems (e.g., a teacher being confronted with myriad unique
learning chips— how they are to know what will work?), the ideas con-
tain huge ge ne tic fallacies.
Learning, or intelligence, and variations in them, are not due to simple
sums of single good or bad genes. Th ey almost certainly involve thou-
sands of the genes, and those that are involved do not “act” as if autono-
mous agents. Nor are they involved in development and individual
diff erences as if in de pen dent of one another, with eff ects of “good ” or “ bad ”
alleles just adding together to form a total gene score. Instead each gene is
utilized according to its ge ne tic background— the whole genome—by
a dynamical metabolic system, in an ever- changing environment. As
described in chapter 4, aside from rare, well- defi ned disorders, ge ne tic
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