Genetics Of Genius

The Wall Street Journal published an interesting article titled “A Genetic Code for Genius?” by Gautam Naik in the Review section on 2/16/2013.

BGI – An Acronym To Remember

Formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute located near Hong Kong founded in 1999 is reported to be the only developing world research institution that contributed to the famous Human Genome Project. It is a leading institute of its kind in China and one of the biggest genomic research centers in the world.

According to the article, BGI has endeavored on a study to analyze the genomes of humans with IQs of 160 or higher and to compare those to average IQ humans. Intelligence is probably a complex genetic issue requiring perhaps 1,000s if not 10,000s of individual genomes. It is expected that by this summer, BGI will publish the first results. Something to look out for.

Zhao Bowen – A High School Dropout

He is the director of the cognitive genomics unit at the BGI in charge of the research into the link between the genes and intelligence who “has been described as China’s Bill Gates”.

Mr. Bowen hits the bull’s eye when he points out that “People believe it’s a controversial topic [genetics of intelligence], especially in the West. That’s not the case in China.” From my own experience, I fully agree, the Chinese are not constraint in such a way, but in the West we have too many self-made taboos or Denkverbote (ban on thinking or more recently called politically correct). Why should we not strive hard to make everyone more intelligent one day?

Outlook

As I said before in an earlier blog post it is high time that the ancient civilizations of Asia (in particular China and India) compete with the West on science and technology to the great benefit of mankind. For too long these civilizations were lagging behind. The faster they catch up or even exceed the better for all of us.