Weirdos and Misfits

In an earlier post we left our hero, Dominic Cummings (the Prime Minister’s Senior Advisor), encouraging “weirdos and misfits with odd skills”, among others. to apply to become Whitehall Government advisors and officials in order to break the mould of an established Civil Service stuck in its ways and staffed by people from particular educational backgrounds all trained to think along similar lines. Brilliance, originality and intellectual diversity are what are now needed by a new administration intent on dealing with “some profound problems at the core of how the British state makes decisions”. In his extended job description for these genius-class spads (special advisors) and civil servants, Cummings states

·       “I don’t want confident public school bluffers,” (Like his boss?)

·       “If you play office politics, you will be discovered and immediately binned.”

One early appointment of this type last month, Andrew Sabisky, has already been binned. He certainly had unconventional views; for instance, in the past he had advocated: enforced contraception to prevent the creation of a permanent underclass; giving children performance enhancing drugs, "probably worth a dead kid once a year"; discussing the relative IQs of different racial groups; and the merits of eugenics. His background checks were clearly inadequate and his appointment must have caused the Prime Minister considerable embarrassment when a journalist asked him if he shared Mr Sabisky‘s opinions. Prompted by this story, I want to take a brief look at IQ and eugenics

The arguments about IQ are well rehearsed. To do well on a typical IQ test you need to have sharp numerical skills, a way with words in your mother tongue, and a logical facility for analysing abstract concepts and patterns; no doubt these are sometimes useful attainments for everyday life but they offer a very narrow view of intelligence. Emotional intelligence, social and psychological intelligence, physical and spacial intelligence are also important, but they make no contribution to the number on the printout that is your IQ. Qualities like patience, perseverance, resilience, stamina, tolerance and many more contribute to success and survival. My anthropologist son has studied a community of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. They are generally well-rounded human beings, sharp, humorous, sociable, polyglot and good with a bow and arrow, but it would be hard to imagine a test that could sensibly compare their “intelligence” with that of non-hunter-gatherers. Judging a human being and their worth to society by a simple number between 50 and 150 makes about as much sense as giving them a top job because they are quick at solving cryptic crosswords (although that skill might have helped you in Hut 8 at Bletchley Park during WW2).

The issue of eugenics has risen on the scale of ethical concern since the human genome was decoded two decades ago. (“Designer babies” is now the popular phrase for it in the Media.) At least we now know better than to try to identify a gene for this or a gene for that. Take for instance a simple feature like human height. It’s easily measured and unambiguous. Remarkably, it is now known that more than 600 genes contribute to it, some positively, some negatively, some in micrometres, some in millimetres, ignoring the effects of nurture such as diet, health and exercise.  But whatever intelligence is (other than the ability to achieve a certain numerical score on an IQ test), it’s certainly not as easily measured and unambiguous. While it is true that geneticists are getting better at identifying families of genes that work together to influence a particular trait and measuring their relative contributions, it is also true that a given gene may influence a spectrum of other characteristics, and if you engineer genes to produce a desired expression of one phenotype, you can’t know what its effects on other characteristics will be. There are many examples where our tinkering with the genes of domesticated animals over the centuries (that is to say. selective breeding) has led to undesirable and unforeseen results. Many dog varieties are known to suffer from its negative side effects; Labrador retrievers, for instance, bred for a placid temperament and trainability, often suffer from early-onset bone diseases such as hip dysplasia, in which the abnormal formation of the hip socket can cause crippling lameness and painful arthritis of the joints,. There is no doubt things can go wrong.

I am fascinated by the burgeoning science of genomics, its practical applications, and its implications for the future of the human race. If covid-19 doesn’t stay my hand, I want to discuss the subject in more detail in future posts.