Professor Henry Greely comments on the idea of genetically engineered intelligence for The California Courier. 

Seems like everybody’s talking Chinese genomics and the art of engineering genius babies these days. But the nation that’s more likely to breed a generation of super-smart, problem-solving kids isn’t the global economic giant currently engaging in a complex, sinister-sounding genetics program-it’s Armenia, a tiny landlocked nation, pop. 3,000,000, that’s still mired in the shadow of a devastating genocide. And it’s going to do it with chess.

First, let’s look at China’s alleged plan. Vice recently ran an uber-popular interviewwith evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, who believes that the Beijing Genomics Institute is essentially looking for a way for China to breed more intelligent children. Super babies, if you will. And it’s the largest such effort in the world. More specifically, BGI Shenzen has “collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence.”

If they’re successful in finding them, Miller believes it could pave the way for embryo screenings that would eventually help boost the IQ of children by 15 points per generation, in aggregate. But after the article went viral, there was some significant pushback from the scientific community. Many scientists say IQ is too complex, too reliant on the interplay of genes and environmental factors, to “engineer” for, given our current capabilities. Slate’s Will Oremus collected quotes from a number of skeptics who shared this view, including Hank Greely, director of Stanford’s Center for Law and the Biosciences.

”I think it’s pretty clear that intelligence-if it even exists as an entity, which remains controversial among psychologists-involves a boatload of genes and genetic combinations, all of them substantially mediated through the environment,” Greely told Slate. “The chances that genetic selection is going to lead to really substantial increases in human intelligence in your lifetime are low.”