Steven Pinker: How Soon Will Genetic Enhancement Create Smarter Humans? | Big Think

Steven Pinker: How Soon Will Genetic Enhancement Create Smarter Humans?

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This video is part of a series on genius, in proud collaboration with 92Y's 7 Days of Genius Festival.

In the late 1990s, scientists thought they were close to locating specific genes that controlled for human intelligence in all its manifestations: musical genius, analytical acumen, physical prowess, etc. But the truth turns out to be more complicated, says Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker. There are many genes — perhaps thousands — that affect human intelligence, and while manipulating them may have predictable benefits, the adverse consequences remain unpredictable. Thus experimenting with our so-called intelligence genes will likely be met with high levels of skepticism in caution. It's proof, says Pinker, that technological advancement doesn't always march to the drum beat of inexorable forward progress.

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STEVEN PINKER:

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

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TRANSCRIPT:

Steven Pinker: I think it's unwise to make a confident prophecy in what technology will or won't eventually be able to do. I think that cuts both ways. That is it's people have looked foolish by saying that something will never happen, but they've also looked foolish by saying that something is inevitable. So there are things that we can accomplish technologically that we as a society have chosen not to, such as passenger supersonic air transport. I think if you were to say to someone in 1957 the speed of commercial jets now is going to be the same as th...e speed of the commercial jets in 2016, 60 years from now, they would say you're nuts. Technology goes up, up, up, up, but sometimes it doesn't. Because people don't like sonic booms and jet fuel got too expensive. Likewise, if you would've said in 1972 no one is going to set foot on the moon for another 44 years and counting, again. They would say technology always lifts us higher and higher, but sometimes it doesn't. The Cold War ended. People lost interest. There are all kinds of social and economic factors that in combination make the future of technology inherently unpredictable. And I think in engineering human intelligence, to say nothing of human genius, no one knows but I would put my money with no. For one thing, there are moral and legal taboos. People think that introducing traits into offspring is a form of eugenics and is on a slippery slide to Nazism. I happen to think that that is a bogus ethical argument, but it is by far the majority that's a cool argument and in many countries genetic enhancement is or will be illegal. And it's going to take a huge force to overcome that. Just as cloning is illegal in virtually every country, when Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1997 there were confident predictions that there's nothing you can do to stop human cloning. It was just around the corner and here we are almost 20 years later and it has not happened.

Also, the task of engineering high intelligence is turning out to be a lot harder than one might have thought. In the late '90s it was thought well sooner or later we'll find some high IQ genes; they'll give you three or four points. You'd put in a handful of them and you get a much smarter baby. There was going to be the gene for musical talent and the gene for athletic coordination. We have every reason to believe that those traits are substantially inheritable. We've known that for decades just because of twin and adoption studies. On the other hand, we also know that the genes responsible are going to, each one of them is going to have an incy wincy effect and there are dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of them. So making your child smart is not a question of putting in one high IQ gene, it may be a question of putting in a hundred genes or a thousand genes. Every time you monkey with the genome you are taking a chance that something will go wrong. Also, those genes, the ones that we have identified........

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