Dalton Conley
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dalton Conley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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something like intelligence how that works is that the genes give your brain a machine learning algorithm like an ai algorithm it says go out and get data train this algorithm on data it'll refine this algorithm and we see that happen in that the genetic influence on iq is very low in early childhood it's like about 20 percent and it rises to about 80 percent by age 35.
So the genetics blossom through more exposure to the environment, more feedback, interaction, asking questions in school, choosing harder classes, reading more, getting more information, training your mind. All the genes give you is, like I said, an algorithm for interacting with the world. And that second step of the interacting with the environment is really crucial for IQ to become genetic.
So ironically, as you get older and more experienced in the environment, the random aspects of the environment matter less and your genes selecting your environmental inputs and interactions matter more. And IQ ends up being about as heritable, meaning as genetically determined as height. But it's a very different pathway to get to that 80 or so percent. Your genetics alone,
just inside your brain or inside your skin aren't going to be determinative. They need to interact with the environment to come to fruition.
So imagine two sisters that one is born with perfect pitch, the other is not. And that's a highly genetically influenced trait. The parents are just going to invest more in the kid with perfect pitch in terms of musical training.
the kid without perfect pitch is not going to want even to go to a musical summer camp or go to conservatory because it's not fun to do something you stink at it is fun to get positive reinforcement and that's happening within the family it's going to happen in the wider world that would be a rational example of gene environment interplay like if you have the nate talent for something you get more investment
But it might be that there's a third sister and she has perfect pitch too, but she's not as attractive as the first sister who has perfect pitch. And she gets less attention and less investment from her parents. They even think that she doesn't quite sound as good. And that's unconscious bias based on her looks, which are genetically determined as well.
Another example of how this can be kind of pernicious sometimes is a study we did looked at African-American siblings. And we looked at whether or not one was born with lighter or darker skin than the other. And we found that the sibling born with darker skin is more likely to get hypertension. than the one with lighter skin, presumably because they get more stress and discrimination.
They're treated differently based on their skin tone. And genetic effects can work in all sorts of ways. Skin tone is controlled by your genes. Eye color is controlled by your genes. And people react to you differently based on those physical characteristics. So it doesn't have to be necessarily a sprinter getting good training because of their talent.
It can be something like that as well, unfortunately.
I have two older children that are adults now, and I raised them before I really knew the power of genes. And I thought that I had a lot more power over how they were going to turn out than I did. I'd recognize that as a parent, you're not in control. You're being parented by your kids' genes, at least as much as you're parenting them.
But then I had a third kid 20 years later, and I was in the thrall of genetics at that point. We were doing IVF to conceive him, and I thought of, wow, we could optimize it. Among the embryos, we could choose the one with the highest polygenic scores for certain traits or the lowest for other traits. What about that? We turned out not to do that.
And I'm, of course, glad we didn't because I'm really, I love the kid we got by chance. And I also now realize that using that kind of simple genetic prediction idea ignores the fact that we've been talking about genes and environment are braided together. And I can control the environment of my child a little bit in response to their genes. So to give an example of that,
If I found out that my son had a musical talent, which would be quite a shock to me because I have zero, I would expose him to instruments and to lessons from a young age and see if they took and could start that forward-feeding snowball. If he had tested to be off the charts for the PGI for opioid addiction...
I would try to make sure that if he breaks his arm or if he has a surgery, he's not prescribed opioids as a painkiller after that or that he's aware of that as he gets older and makes his own medical decisions.
One of the important things I'd like to sound the alarm on is this genetic genomic revolution that's happening right now under our noses. In the last 15 years, this new tool I mentioned, the polygenic index has come on the scene and has become more and more predictive of outcomes. They're still in their infancy. They're noisy. They predict poorly, but they're getting better every year.
And they're going to radically transform society. We have a lot of talk about the promise and perils of AI. We've had a lot of public discussion about CRISPR gene editing as a potential revolutionary technology. But I think the polygenic index is just as revolutionary as those other two and is here already. Genetic prediction... is going to soon be taken up by insurance companies.
Like if you want to apply for a life insurance policy or a long-term care insurance or even car insurance, they might soon ask for a swab of your cheek, a saliva sample or a blood spot and analyze your DNA to make better pricing of your premiums. Are people okay with that? IVF clinics, some IVF clinics already offer what I had thought I wanted seven or eight years ago.
The polygenic screening for embryos to select which one you want to implant. So people are going to be optimizing babies long before there's going to be genetically modified babies running around preschools. Sperm and ova banks might use this genetic prediction algorithms to screen donors or to offer clients different samples based on their price point of how good a genetic sample they want.
That's just a few of the examples of how this area of genetic prediction is going to sweep across society. And we have had no discussion about it. I think we should keep in mind, it's not a blueprint. It's an algorithm. And it depends on the environment and the environmental landscape.
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