Beth Shapiro

They knew that at the time.

Yeah, but they don't know because they haven't been able to measure anything with these.

I mean, they're guessing that would have affected their brains at this point.

We'll know for sure.

This is what makes us smart.

It's been a thing that people have been trying to solve for a long time.

We're always looking for the one or two genes that figure out this.

Very few traits are encoded by one or two genes.

There are some hair traits.

Whether your lobes are attached or not, that's one gene that you can change.

I doubt that's true.

Do you know what's interesting about the efforts that have gone on to try to figure out genes that make people smart is that they can find associations between what we're classifying as smart.

And this is hard.

When you're saying smart, do you mean somebody who can have a conversation with another person and shut up so that you're actually listening to the other person?

Do you mean somebody who can solve a shitload of math problems and be a physicist or whatever?

Do you mean somebody who's just really fucking good looking, right?

I mean, what do you mean when you say is this thing?

And so you have to define that first.

And then once it's defined, if you look for associations between genes at high frequency with people who rank high on whatever your thing is that you're ranking them on,

It's different depending on which human population you're studying.