A Thousand Chinese Einsteins Every Year - if they are Jewish
Great minds do not come from Genetics. If it did, we would have heard great things from Albert Einstein, Jr. and all the other Jr's of geniuses from our past. Who knows if Einstein's entire genius did not come from a simple observation when he was 5 years old: Albert's father showed him a pocket compass. Albert then realized that some force in empty space was moving the needle.
A recent article about some scary future possibilities lends the first half of the title to my present post:
TCS Daily,
2 Oct 2007,
A Thousand Chinese Einsteins Every YearHumankind may be changed radically by the recently developed technique allowing the safe gathering of thousands of immature eggs from a woman's ovarian tissue. This technique combined with cheap DNA sequencing and embryo selection will soon allow parents to multiply their newborn children's intellectual potential.
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Embryo selection gets even more interesting when we consider how a nation such as China might use it. Imagine that in ten years China forces all its college students to get genetic tests. Students with intelligence genes in the top 1% of the top 1% of humankind are then forced to donate sperm or eggs. China then uses the sperm and eggs to create a billion embryos each year. The genetic intellectual potential of all these embryos is checked. Those in the top 10,000 are implanted into women. Each of these embryos has the intellectual potential to be in the top one-billionth of humankind. Now because of environmental factors many of these embryos won't turn into intellectual titans. But let's say that one in ten does. This means that each year 1,000 people with the scientific ability of Einstein will be born. By 2035 they will become adults and start doing scientific research. I imagine these Einsteins will be rather helpful to China's economy and military.
If the secret was merely one of polling billions of babies, China should have the majority of Nobel Prizes. It does not. With over a billion people there are only 6 Chinese Nobel laureates. Jews with barely 19 million souls has 24 times as many Laureates as China does.
So I'm not worried that the Chinese will try to cherry-pick their geniuses from a genetic pool. What makes geniuses is an environment and atmosphere that is favourable to the development of genius. My guess is that being brought up Jewish leads to a fertile ground for greatness. I would be worried if the Chinese mandated that all children should be brought up Jewish. No problem getting a minion of geniuses then.
Related blogs:
Sadly No,
Ain’t Nobody Stealin’ My Sperm, HomeboySee, this is what I don’t understand about the sort of "libertarians” who write at TCS. They scream like freshly-neutered puppies if anyone tries to raise their taxes, but they have zero problem with having the government force people to donate their sperm and eggs to create an army of hyper-intelligent Over Men:
Women's Lens,
28 Sep 2007,
The Guy Who Dared to tell Chinese They're Jewsstarting around the 11th century. Jewish merchants from Persia traveling the Silk Road passed through the city, capital of the Song Dynasty (960-1279).
Some stayed. They built a synagogue in 1163 and took Chinese surnames. At its peak around the 1600s, Kaifeng's Jewish population was about 5,000. Then, isolation, intermarriage, war, poverty and floods decimated the community and culture. Today, only a few hundred Kaifeng residents (who look Chinese) identify themselves as Jewish. They have little knowledge of Judaism and its traditions.
