Correlation is not causation, but the timing of the descent is suggestive. It apparently started just as polite society decided it was a good idea to put a small interactive screen into each and every fist, from toddlers up. “Interactive” here is a bit of a misnomer. In fact, we abandoned freewheeling conversational back-and-forths for intermittent jabs at glassy surfaces, only vaguely in control of the deluge of content hitting our retinas. We also swapped staring into the middle distance and thinking hard for posting links that made it look like we were thinking hard. Still, it all felt gratifyingly cool and sci-fi at the time.

It’s not like some people didn’t see it coming. In 2011, Google’s then CEO, the frantically boosterish Eric Schmidt, was keen on saying with some relish that children had only two modes: “asleep or online”. Yet even he worried that “nobody’s getting what comes from the deep reading of a book”. Neurophysiologist Susan Greenfield predicted that constant clicking would leave the mind “more child-like, reactive and dependent on the behavior and thoughts of others”. She also wrote a book on the subject, though few could concentrate for long enough to read it properly.

A more succinct and memeable take came from the late playwright Richard Foreman, describing people with “cathedral-like” personality structures who are now being eclipsed by the “pancake people”. The endangered type is a “highly educated and articulate personality — a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West”. The pancake people, in contrast, are “spread wide and thin”. Thanks to “the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’”, we are facing “a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality”.

I think Foreman was correct to worry; and now we are out of the frying pan and into the fire. But another train of thought, emerging around the same time, said there was nothing to fret about. What became known in philosophy as the “extended mind thesis” told us to enjoy the collapse into flatness. It urged us to think of the new smartphones and tablets and their data as literal extensions of our minds: integrated cognitive mechanisms on a par with frontal lobes, neurons, and gray matter.

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“My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me,” wrote one of the thesis’s chief architects, David Chalmers, in the foreword to a book by its other chief architect, Andy Clark. The phone’s memory is part of your memory; its capacity to gather and sort information can legitimately be claimed as your mind’s, too. Or, as Clark argued in the same book, “the activity of brain-meat” is not the whole of human thought. “Cognition leaks out into body and world.” Big thinkers used to have their heads in the clouds; now the cloud is in their heads instead.

That’s all very well, you might think: but what if the cognition leaking out of your eardrums leaves you with a mostly empty skull? What if abilities that used to flourish in brain-meatspace are negatively affected by excessive dependence upon search engines? Writing his foreword in 2008, Chalmers didn’t seem concerned — “I am not worried by… the threat that the core role of the brain will be lost” — though that was before there was good evidence for our deterioration. But 17 years later, in an article published this month, Clark considers the possibility that, thanks to the internet and AI, “[w]isdom suffers, collective self-plagiarism looms, and human creativity becomes all but obsolete”. And he doubles down.

We can remain relaxed about this prospect, he says, as long as we remember we are “hybrid thinking systems defined (and constantly re-defined) across a rich mosaic of resources only some of which are housed in the biological brain”. We should therefore reframe the narrative. Emerging evidence of “brain-bound” deficits “need not be shrinkage and loss so much as the careful husbanding of our own on-board cognitive capital”. In other words: since our minds are already extended into surrounding technology, deficits between the ears don’t really matter much, as long as the technology keeps coming up with the goods. And in fact, from the perspective of the point of thinking, outsourcing this way is often quite efficient.

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There are many skeptical questions you could ask about this, including about what happens when the national grid fails or a cyberattack hits. Presumably we continue to gaze slack-jawed at our former oracles, dully poking their inert screens from time to time, while our homes get plundered by digital detoxers and passing members of the Bruderhof. But the bigger issue is about what exactly Clark thinks minds do. The danger is that, in expanding the concept of a mind to fit in phones and tablets as part of its native furniture, academics with tech fetishes are consigning valuable aspects of conscious mental life to the bin.

Clark holds that the main point of thinking is to be good at prediction. The mind creates a mental model of the world as efficiently as possible, in order to move about, solve problems, and complete goals. The model updates only when information comes in from the environment suggesting it has got something wrong. Entities around you that reliably help achieve this core function can be counted as part of your mind too.

As you’d probably expect from a philosopher of cognitive science, this is all quite abstract, impersonal stuff. It makes little reference to personal-level, social aspects of human thought and personality: cleverness, funniness, creativity, playfulness, quirkiness, or having an astonishing memory, for instance. Yet these are qualities which we appreciate in others and often feel proud of in ourselves. They are central to social life: how we appraise people, what jobs and roles we assign to them, whether we warm to them or not, what we feel we can talk to them about. To use Foreman’s image, these capacities are part of the cathedral. When our dependence on technology reduces their presence, we lose ornate columns, flying buttresses, and quite a bit of height.

As the tide of internet dross gradually erodes our brain-bound stock of information and the habit of making new connections within it, we will be less able to make intellectual leaps between disparate topics; invent quick-witted jokes on the fly; lie in bed running through the lines of a memorized poem; stare at a crossword clue until light suddenly dawns; create a new sonnet or song that ingeniously bends the rules of the game, and have others recognize what it is we accomplished. The fact that AI could have searched for the poem, invented the song, or given us a cheat on the crossword clue is completely beside the point.

And if we carry on staring at screens all day, these qualitative losses to a rich life of the mind won’t be the only casualty. Perhaps it is true that with the help of developing technology, humans are becoming better at solving problems and completing goals. But put like that, the truism is incredibly vague. If we lose our critical faculties along the way, how are we supposed to tell which goals and problems are the right ones to pursue in future, given what else we also care about? It’s a comforting fantasy that humans might outsource their ultimate aims and objectives to the machines too.

In his fabulously entertaining, book-length ramble You Are Not A Gadget, early virtual reality guru Jaron Lanier argued that: “Whenever a computer is imagined to be intelligent, what is really happening is that humans have abandoned aspects of the subject at hand in order to remove from consideration whatever the computer is blind to.” For Lanier, “every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous” — did the machine really get cleverer, or did we make ourselves more stupid to fit with it? It seems to me that is exactly what tech lovers do when they rebrand great losses from the personal-level life of the mind as efficiency-seeking victories. We must try to put the machines back in their boxes, before we get squashed quite flat.

Except, of course, you can’t. Or, at least, it’s not as straightforward as you might think. Decades of studies have showed that our personality, and specifically our self-control – our ability to override impulses to do pleasurable things now, in order to gain reward later – is heavily influenced by our genes. But there was wide variation in how much. Now, a fascinating meta-analysis has taken lots of studies on the topic of self-control and heritability and combined them, to see what, taken together, they all said.

These were all studies in twins: either identical (“monozygotic”) or non-identical (“dizygotic”) twins. Identical twins are genetically identical; non-identical twins share 50% of their genes, just like normal siblings. The studies measured how similar each set of twins was on some measure of self-control, usually a questionnaire filled out by either the twins themselves or a parent.

If identical twins were more similar than non-identical twins, then there was some genetic role; but if they were less than twice as similar, then there was some role for the “shared environment”. The shared environment is all that stuff that siblings go through together: parenting, schooling, neighbourhood, the stuff we think of when we think of “nurture”. Everything that’s not genetics or shared environment is known as “non-shared environment”, a technical term that essentially means “random stuff”.

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The finding was that the average correlation among identical twins was 0.58 (on a scale of -1 to 1), while the correlation among non-identical twins was 0.28. That is: the study found that about 60% of the variation in our ability to control our impulses is genetic. And the identical twins’ score was twice that of the non-identical ones, so the shared environment seems to have “little influence”. It appears to be essentially genes plus random stuff.

This isn’t the final word; for one thing, the paper hasn’t been through peer review yet. For another, no one study, even a meta-analysis, is unvarnished truth. But it’s in line with expectations.

And it’s worth thinking through the implications. We criticise people for laziness, but laziness is a manifestation of poor self-control; an inability to overcome the urge to do nothing. People with low impulse control find it harder to resist psychoactive substances – drink, drugs, tobacco – and to resist high-calorie foods. They also may struggle to resist violent or aggressive impulses, and be more likely to face trouble with the law.

People look at this the wrong way, sometimes. They reject genetic explanations for social problems, such as obesity or drug addiction or violence, because they think it implies that when someone is obese or addicted or violent, it’s their fault. But it’s the opposite. It implies that it’s absolutely not their fault, any more than it’s a short person’s fault that they can’t reach fruit on the high branches of a tree.

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For instance, in the case of obesity. Coincidentally there’s another study out, about the genetics of obesity, and it finds that – unsurprisingly – there is a strong genetic component to whether we are fat or lean. Again, that’s confirming something that we largely already knew. But what might be more surprising is that previous research has found that many of the genes that are relevant in obesity are genes that control the brain, not the metabolism.

The neuroscientist Stephan Guyenet’s book The Hungry Brain details how our brains govern our weight; people differ in how attractive they find high-calorie food, and in how able they are to resist the impulse to eat it. And our brains try to keep the level of fat in our bodies stable, but are especially worried about losing fat. So if we end up fatter – because highly palatable modern junk food attracts us even when we’re not hungry – and then try to lose some weight, our brains make us extra hungry to get the food back on.

What’s interesting, though, is how that manifests. Previous experiments had showed that people on severe calorie-restricted diets – starvation diets, essentially – became obsessed with food: they talked about little else, they dreamt and fantasised about food, they “became fascinated by recipes and cookbooks, and some even began collecting cooking utensils”, writes Guyenet.

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What was interesting, was that severely obese people who lost large amounts of weight in laboratory settings, but who were still obese and still eating more than enough to sustain life if not weight, exhibited the same symptoms. Their brains ramped up the obsession with food.

OK, you might think. But you still can resist the impulse to eat. It’s still free will.

Think, though, about other impulses in your life. For instance, as Jeff Friedman, a geneticist at Rockefeller, pointed out, you can consciously resist the impulse to breathe – for a while. But eventually that impulse will overwhelm your conscious control and there is nothing you can do about it. “The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty,” writes Friedman. That is the sort of impulse that obese people have to resist, constantly, to lose weight.

That’s how all these drives must feel. It’s not that laziness manifests itself as a conscious decision to sit on your arse playing Call of Duty rather than going to do your job. It manifests as a powerful resistance to doing something, as though action is almost literally painful. It’s not that drug addiction feels like you’re weighing up the pros and cons of robbing a house to pay for heroin; it’s a drive like starvation, or oxygen deprivation.

Some people are genetically lucky enough to have a greater ability to resist those drives. But that’s winning a lottery of birth, not something morally praiseworthy.

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Our society uses the term “meritocracy” quite a lot. It’s a word born of satire, but we use it earnestly. People who pull themselves up by their bootstraps deserve the better life they achieve.

But that’s just not how it can possibly be. There may be unavoidable practical reasons why we give people who work hard greater rewards (on average) than those who don’t, just as we give people who are intelligent greater rewards (on average) than those who aren’t – we need to attract and incentivise hard-working, intelligent people to do the jobs we want doing.

But those people who are able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps will, usually, have attributes – intelligence, self-control – that are as much a lottery as being born rich in the first place.

If you think I’m saying this means that the people who didn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps are to blame for that failure, then you’ve missed the whole point. I’m saying no one should be blamed or praised for their personalities. This is not the same as saying that everyone who’s successful is clever, and that we don’t need to work to address social injustice.

As the Marxist blogger Chris Dillow points out in the analogous case of IQ, being intelligent is helpful in any social structure, but that structure can still be immensely unjust. “You needed cognitive skills to climb the USSR’s bureaucracy or to pass the civil service exam of medieval China”, he writes, but that doesn’t make them egalitarian paradises.

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Just as that is true of intelligence, it’s true of self-control. Being born rich is lucky; being born intelligent is lucky; being born with good self-control is lucky. None of these things makes you a better or more valuable person. Society needs to look out for people who were born with attributes that aren’t suited to modern life, rather than blame them for not fitting in.

The neuroscientist David Eagleman talks about “neurolaw”; rethinking the justice system in the light of the fact that we’re not all equally capable of resisting impulses, and thinking in terms of crime prevention rather than blame: some people might need to be imprisoned for crimes because they’re likely to reoffend, but not for reasons of punishment. Comparably, we need to accept that there are people in society who are born with less ability to work hard, and less ability to control their eating and their substance use, than others.

For a start, this understanding supports the case for taxes on fattening foods or restrictions on advertising for addictive substances – the libertarian case against that is undermined if we are not all equally free to resist them.

And, like the understanding that not everyone is equally intelligent, it implies that society ought to be more willing to provide for people who are less capable in the world of work. Perhaps that means a greater social safety net, more money taken from people who have been lucky enough to be born rich, clever, or hardworking, and given to those who aren’t; Dillow suggests a universal basic income, so that no one is forced to rely on luck to survive in the first place.

But the most important thing that needs to flow from it is a more forgiving approach. You wouldn’t (I assume) believe that people born tall, or good-looking, are morally superior. You should stop thinking that about people born hard-working or slim, too.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future, as Niels Bohr may have said. But that doesn’t stop people making them. May’s deal will get through, say some. She doesn’t have the votes, say others. Of course, if we do crash out, then the crystal ball gets even murkier. We might have to stockpile medicines. Energy prices might skyrocket. We might run out of Mars Bars.

Niels Bohr was right. Predictions are hard, and people are spectacularly bad at making them. But there are, also, some simple things you can do to get better at making them, in order to mitigate the consequences of whatever the future holds. I went on a workshop last week, with a bunch of senior and important people from various major banks and intergovernmental agencies, to learn how to do it better.

It was run by an organisation called the Good Judgment Project. The GJP was set up by Philip Tetlock who, in 1984, had noticed something. The young psychologist had joined an expert committee set up by the National Academy of Sciences to help prevent nuclear war. The experts were divided. Conservatives wanted to maintain a tough line against the Soviet Union; liberals thought that line was strengthening Kremlin hardliners.

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When, a few months later, Mikhail Gorbachev took office and started opening the USSR up, Tetlock was surprised to see that everyone thought this showed they’d been right all along. The conservatives thought the tough line had pushed the Kremlin into action; the liberals thought it would have happened anyway, and that the hard line had just slowed things down. People all thought they were right, whatever had actually happened.

So Tetlock set up an experiment to see how good experts were at predicting the future. First, he had to tie them to falsifiable predictions. Pundits had, and have, a tendency to vague answers that don’t really pin them to anything: “Food shortages could be likely”, and so on. Tetlock gave them specific questions with clear dates: “Will the yen be higher than it is now against the deutschmark in one month’s time?” He then asked the pundits to give percentage values for how likely that was: there is a 75% chance that this will happen, a 60% chance, etc.

He had nearly 300 pundits make an average of 100 predictions each, and then saw how well they did over the coming months. If your 60% predictions came in 60% of the time, and your 35% predictions came in 35% of the time, you were “well calibrated”. You were also given points for being confident and right – 90% guesses got a higher score than 50% ones – but punished for being confident and wrong.

What he found was that pundits’ calibration, on average, was no better than random guessing – or, as Tetlock described it, “than a dart-throwing chimpanzee”. But some were significantly better. What predicted who was better was not whether they were conservative or liberal, or even, particularly, their expertise in the field, but how they approached the problem. People who assumed the world was simple and had simple solutions did badly; people who thought it was complex, who realised they could be wrong, and who learnt from mistakes did better. It also helped if you were good with numbers, and good at spotting patterns, as in IQ tests.

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Tetlock would later set up the GJP, which runs tests to find the best forecasters and enters them in forecasting competitions against teams from intelligence agencies and universities. Teams of these “superforecasters” outperformed the best of the rest by a huge margin, even CIA analysts and academic experts.

The workshop that I attended couldn’t make everyone superforecasters. There is some inherent talent involved in being the best. But the one of the supers who ran it pointed out that not everyone can ever play at Carnegie Hall, but almost everyone can learn to play the violin. Practising the right skills can make anyone better.

This is a useful thing to do. Being a better forecaster, if you’re a major financial institution, lets you make better bets with your money, and so turn it into more money; if you’re a national security agency or an intergovernmental organisation, it lets you direct resources towards things that are likely to happen, and keep the world safer.

Some of the things you could do were obvious: invoking the “wisdom of the crowd”, for instance. The “ask the audience” option on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire comfortably outperforms the Phone A Friend option; more generally, if you ask 1,000 people to guess something, any one of them will probably be wrong, but on average they’ll all be wrong in different directions, so the average guess is usually close. And if you’re in a big group, you should take the median average, and then readjust your predictions, and take the average again. Doing so gives you a real, measurable improvement in forecasting.

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Another is to use the sort of precise, numerical terms we talked about above. The superforecasters were highly critical of things like Sadiq Khan’s claim that no-deal Brexit is “more likely than ever” or Sir Vince Cable’s that the same was “highly improbable”. These don’t really tie you to anything: more likely than ever? How likely was it before? How likely is “highly improbable”? Is it a 5% chance? 10? Instead, write down a real percentage, and then revisit it afterwards, and see how it did. Otherwise you’ll find a way to convince yourself you were right all along, and you’ll never improve.

A third is to use the “outside view” as well as the “inside view”. For instance, say you’re at a wedding, and someone asks you how likely it is that the couple’s marriage will last until one of them dies. You look at them, they seem very happy, and you know them to be well-matched, so you say “90%”. That’s the “inside view”: looking at the specifics of the situation in front of you.

But taking the “outside view” involves looking at the whole class of similar events. So you might first think “About 40% of British marriages end in divorce,” and use the inside view to adjust your estimate from there, by taking into account other details that might change it from the base rate – social class, educational level, how long they stared into each other’s eyes when making their vows.

Fourth, you might break down the problem into smaller parts. How likely is it that we’ll have a Labour-led government before June next year? Well, the Government feels like it’s teetering on the brink at the moment, so you might think it’s pretty likely, so you might say 60%.

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But if you break it down, Parliament would have to vote for a new election, which would probably mean at least some Tories voting for an election they could well lose, and then it would mean Labour forming the largest party. If you think how likely each of those things are individually – I’d say an election before June next year is at best 50% likely, and that Labour’s odds of winning aren’t much better than 50% either – and then multiply them out, you get 25%. That’s called a “Fermi estimate”, and again, using this has been shown to improve accuracy.

There are a few other things that help – I won’t list them all, but one is, if you have a group, to try to make sure that it’s got diverse viewpoints, so it’s not just teachers or financial analysts (or just liberals or just conservatives), but a mix of many types. You also ought to make sure that the loudest or highest-status person in the group doesn’t dominate, so that the “wisdom of the crowd” doesn’t get drowned out.

We weren’t a bunch of superforecasters. We were just ordinary people, albeit some of us (not me) from some quite important financial, academic and governmental organisations. But we had a stab at it, and put best-guess estimates on some things, and then shared them and readjusted them as we were supposed to. And, after doing all that, in answer to the question “Will a Brexit withdrawal agreement obtain the consent of the European Parliament by 1 April 2019?” – a specific and falsifiable version of the question “Will Britain agree a Brexit deal?” – we figured that there was a 60% chance.

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That seems scary enough to me – that there’s a 40% chance of either a no-deal collapse or another referendum. And when we did it, our guess roughly matched that of the superforecasters. They wouldn’t tell us exactly what their numbers were, because it’s all privileged information, but I’m told we weren’t far off their guess.

That was over a week ago, though. Since then, the deal has been unveiled, Cabinet ministers have resigned, the ERG has unsuccessfully launched a leadership challenge, and the Democratic Unionist Party have all but ended the deal with the Tories that gives May her majority. Again, I don’t know exactly what the superforecasters’ numbers are, but that 60%-ish figure that we came up with now looks deeply optimistic.

The three main options – leaving with a deal, leaving without a deal, and not leaving at all, by 1 April 2019 – are all, I understand, roughly equal in probability. The Good Judgment Project is, verifiably, the best forecasting outfit in the world, but even for them it is, pretty much, a complete tossup.

So, yes. Predictions are hard, especially about the future. You can find ways of making it easier. But it looks like when it comes to Brexit, we really are all in the dark.

And we’re going to get better at it. That means that, as a society, we’re going to have to make big decisions on this, soon. As it stands, we know many bits of DNA that are involved in intelligence; we have the technology to select embryos for them, or to (crudely) edit embryos to include some; and while Britain has stringent legal oversight of genetic research and its clinical applications, that is far from true everywhere.

Here’s how it works. First, stop talking about “the gene for” intelligence. Genes are ‘coding’ regions of the chromosomes: the bits that tell your cells to make specific proteins. There are about 20,000 of them.

Genes, though, only make up about 2% of your actual genome. The other 98% doesn’t code for proteins, but can have profound effects. Nowadays geneticists are much less likely to talk about “genes”, and much more likely to talk about changes to the individual building blocks of DNA anywhere on the genome. The different forms of those building blocks are called “single nucleotide polymorphisms” or SNPs, pronounced “snips”.

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Also, for almost all complex traits, it’s not “a” gene or SNP, it’s absolutely loads of them. For instance, one big study looked at 1.1 million people’s genomes, and found 1,271 SNPs relating to intelligence. It estimated that those SNPs explain about 11% of the variance in educational attainment and about the same in cognitive ability. (The “variance” is a measure of how spread-out the scores are around the average.) A review in Nature Genetics this year estimated that our current knowledge allows us to explain about 20% of the overall variance in intelligence in terms of specific SNPs.

We know, from twin studies, that intelligence is at least 50% heritable, so there’s a lot more to find. But still, that’s a big deal. For comparison, the impact of (non-negligent, non-abusive) parenting on IQ is probably essentially zero; the most generous estimates put it at 10%.

So, we know lots of SNPs that are involved in IQ. Using statistical techniques, we could predict quite effectively which of two people was more intelligent simply by looking at their genomes.

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And, right now, we can look at the genomes of embryos before they’re implanted during IVF. It’s already done for various diseases caused by single mutations – it’s called preimplantation genetic diagnosis. At the fertility clinic, a couple might have 10 or so viable embryos; the clinicians would test them all, and if one of them were to have the gene for cystic fibrosis or sickle-cell anaemia or Huntington’s disease, you throw that one away and implant one of the ones that doesn’t.

But now we can do it for the complex, ‘polygenic’ conditions. Things like diabetes, many cancers, and depression are heavily genetic. There’s no one SNP that causes them, but you can estimate an embryo’s risk by looking at the whole genome.

That’s easy, now. Less than 20 years ago, it took the Human Genome Project more than a decade and over a billion dollars to sequence one single genome. Now you can do the same thing for about £1,000 in less than 24 hours. There’s at least one company offering to do exactly this with “type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease” etc and so on. This isn’t, necessarily, selling snake-oil to idiots: a new study thinks you can identify people at a greater than 50% risk of diabetes from their genetics alone.

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You could do exactly the same thing with intelligence. You could sequence the genomes of a couple’s embryos prior to implantation and select the one with the selection of SNPs most correlated to intelligence. And this is before we get onto the possibilities of actually editing the genome, with tools such as CRISPR

There’s an objection some people make at this point. We can’t select for intelligence, they say, because we don’t know what intelligence is. IQ tests, they say, only measure how good you are at IQ tests.

That’s not really true. How well you do at IQ tests is highly correlated with how well you do at school and work, and how much you earn, to your physical and mental health, to your reaction time, even to your per-year risk of death. It also correlates with all the many different ‘kinds’ of intelligence, such as emotional intelligence. (All this holds even after you control for race and social class: this isn’t, or isn’t simply, about posh white people making a test that posh white people do well at, in a society that makes it easy for posh white people in general.) There have been awful misuses of IQ research, but it is clearly measuring something real. And it is clearly highly genetically influenced.

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So there are incentives for parents to test their embryos for the SNPs correlated to IQ. One statistically minded blogger I follow estimates that, with current knowledge and technology, selecting the highest-scoring embryo from 10 would correlate to about a 3-point bump in IQ. Nick Bostrom of Oxford University says that research finds that each 1-point gain in IQ roughly correlates to a 1% increase in income. It’s not huge, it’s wildly variable, and it may be that the causal direction isn’t as straightforward as that, but it’s certainly not negligible.

If you look at a national level, though, things get interesting, if controversial. While individual IQ scores are only fairly predictive – someone with a high IQ is more likely to have a high-paying job, but there’s lots of variation and a bad score on an IQ test definitely does not mean you’re going to have a terrible life (lots of professors have below-average IQs) – national IQ effects are much stronger. One, admittedly controversial, study suggests that a 10-point jump in average IQ correlates to a doubling of the size of the national economy.

But how accurate is that? Many people have argued against it, others in support of it. It’s also likely that the causation is complex: a bigger economy leads to higher IQs, as well as the other way around. But even if the figure is off by an order of magnitude, and a 10-point jump in IQ merely leads to a 10% increase in GDP, that is still big. You’d need to do a lot of genetic engineering for it to have an effect – it would probably have to be state-supported – but over a few generations it could be dramatic.

In the West, we’re wary about human genetic engineering. A recent survey found that 80% of Americans opposed editing an embryo’s genes to improve its intelligence. There are concerns over its safety, which presumably will reduce as the technology matures.

But there is also a fear of ‘playing god’ and interfering with nature. More seriously, to my mind, people worry, not unfairly, that it could lead to the creation of a genetic underclass; with rich people able to afford cleverer children, poorer people not.

Where you stand on all this will be largely a matter of temperament: different people will have different feelings about the same evidence. But arguably, everything humans have done since the invention of the flint axe is ‘playing god’, and everything that humans do is easier for rich people to do. In fact, rich people have traditionally been able to boost their intelligence through better nutrition and education. Genetic editing at least has the advantage that the benefits will be in the gene pool for everyone, and as it gets cheaper it’ll be more accessible for lower earners, just as food and education has become.

And the advantages are obvious. Smarter countries are happier, richer, and longer-lived. Being smarter is correlated with being happier and longer-lived. My own feeling is that – with due attention being paid to the caveats, the risks and the downsides – genetic selection for intelligence (and other traits) will probably be, on balance, a good thing, Brave New World notwithstanding.

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By Isabel Hilton

In any case, it’s going to happen whether we like it or not. China is heartily embracing the possibilities. The facility at BGI Shenzhen is the largest genetics research centre in the world and does huge amounts of research into human intelligence. The Chinese population is less wary of genetic engineering than Western populations are. And while “germline” editing – editing the DNA in our eggs and sperm that would be passed on to our children and their children – is banned in many Western countries, including Britain, it’s not in China (or several other countries). China was the first country to edit human embryos, back in 2015.

Essentially, we can’t stop this sort of genetic engineering. The incentives, at national and individual level, make it inevitable. China is simply going now where we’re all going to follow later. It would be better to acknowledge the reality and try to shape it – rather than try to hold back the flood.

Further reading

The book the tech titans love

By Mark Piesing

Given that it is such an important question, simply leaving the subject on the floor doesn’t seem a responsible thing to do. So I picked it up with him in London.

Clearly, at their edges all political systems – like all religions – have the capacity to go awry. In the 20th century the political Right and Left went awry for different but often complementary reasons. As Jordan says at one point in our discussion, we are currently in the state of having perhaps almost learned half of the lessons of the 20th century.

The half we have not even slightly learned – as shown by the extraordinary percentages of people in the West (particularly Millennials) who are utterly ignorant of its consequences – is where the Left went wrong. Today’s ignorance of the crimes of communism is staggering, a point which I covered to an extent in the documentary I made for UnHerd last year. And unless the subject of what led to those crimes is addressed, there remains a significant (and far from hysterical) possibility that at some stage precisely those same experiments will be tried again. Leading to similar, if not identical, outcomes.

But the issue of political extremes isn’t straightforward. And nothing demonstrates that more clearly than the fact that our understanding of where the Right went wrong in the 20th century is also limited. Obviously this could be a subject of an entire book and a lifetime’s contemplation. But some boundaries have been located.  And some lines have been drawn beyond which the Right deems it necessary to expel an element of itself.

Watch the conversation

Test article

By Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson

What does raise the alarm on the Right is when there is an over-emphasis on in/out group dynamics. Specifically, in/out group dynamics when it comes to issues of race. We know what a steep and dark slope lies here, and it is precisely why people tread with such care, even when they are hoping only to stare over the precipice and look at what is down there.

This is why I wanted to bring our conversation onto the issue of IQ. As I said in the video, it has become plain to me recently that the question of IQ – and racial IQ differentials in particular – has a possibility of coming back with a vengeance at some point in the future. It might already be doing so. It is an issue which, in almost any country I visit, there is a growing interest. Of course, some people find subjects attractive not in spite of their danger, but because of their danger. And that may well be (like leftists flirting with communist memes) one of the things that is going on here.

But it is finding a way back. It is almost a quarter of a century since Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. The ferocity of the response to that book and the fact that Charles Murray is to this day (Herrnstein having had the foresight to die just as the book came out) hounded almost wherever he goes, may have succeeded in teaching a generation of people that if you dabble in the science of IQ differentials, you will not be argued with, or debated with. You will simply be shouted down.

And yet the facts and discoveries bubble away. The literature on this is – as Jordan says in our conversation – dark and utterly terrible. There are groups whose IQ appear to be on average higher than average (Ashkenazi Jews is one example). But this means that there are also groups which rank lower on average. Here we enter the nightmare which a growing number of people appear to be happy to wade through.

It seems to me that there are a number of attitudes you can take about this. You can try to cut down the research and shut down the discussion – though that is becoming increasingly difficult. Of course, apart from the threat to free speech and free inquiry, this also shuts off the idea that there might be anything to learn from this research – or any way to improve the IQ of various groups. It could ignore the debate of the role diet plays over time, for instance. Or any number of other factors. Ignoring the subject entirely has the risk, in other words, of cementing as unchangeable something that may yet prove otherwise.

But the cordon around the subject exists for an obvious reason. And this is what I described to Jordan as the “manner” in which some people approach this type of research. For there are those who approach terrible facts about the world in a spirit of concern and even piety, and there are those who can approach them with glee. Specifically there are those who will embrace negative findings about certain groups in order to justify and embed existing prejudices, or even to create new ones.

My own fear concerning this whole discussion, is not just the question I have had since the Bell Curve – which boils down to “What are you going to do about it?”. I have two other concerns.

One is that any ‘science’ of the kind which IQ differentials approximates is liable to present itself as the supreme matter of importance in the lives of people. And it may well be important. But, it’s not the whole picture. A very low IQ person may be one of the greatest friends imaginable, and a very high IQ person may well be the world’s biggest shit. Many of us are able to provide examples which fit such archetypes.

There is also another major concern. Which is the fact that potentially immutable and unchangeable characteristics do not exist in a vacuum. They exist at a time when other things are moving. And of particular concern here, is the fear that the sanctity of the individual is presently suffering some form of metaphysical dislocation. Many people believe man is sacred in God’s eyes. But our societies are trying to work out under what circumstances, at what age and for how long they are sacred in the eyes of man.

Listen to the Communism audiodocumentary

Why don't we remember the victims of communism?

By Douglas Murray

Anyone who has studied the debates on abortion and euthanasia will have some inkling of the concern that both religious and non-religious people might have in this regard. So for me the concern is the potential an over-emphasis on IQ differentials has to bring us, in this century, to a position that would have embarrassed the last century.

The IQ debate is fraught with controversy, even though it exists in an area where there is the widest possible agreement that the 20th century went horribly wrong. It gives you an idea of how hard it is going to be to address similarly difficult questions on the Left. It won’t be easy, but we need to think and talk about these issues not only so that we learn as many lessons as possible from the 20th century, but also to ensure that we do not repeat its mistakes.