Motus Mentis

A young researcher in China has begun a project to find the genetic basis for the heritable components of human intelligence.

We shouldn’t be surprised to see that this is happening in China, and not in the West, where most of the academics I know are of the opinion that there’s no such thing as quantifiable intelligence, that intelligence-testing is rendered worthless by cultural bias, and that even to the extent that there may be a genetic component to “intelligence” (with the implication that there may be racial and sexual differences in its distribution), investigating it is research that shouldn’t even be done at all, because of the possibility of discrimination.

The Chinese are much franker and more realistic about these things than we are. They also don’t seem to share the West’s post-war horror of eugenics. Don’t be surprised if this becomes rather an important topic in the not-too-distant future.