How much smarter would bred humans become?
I'm building a setting in a fictional Latin American country which is under military rule. The junta starts a breeding program in the late 40's with help from unscrupulous escaped Nazi scientists.
Assuming the breeding program starts with a population of 10,000 people with an average IQ of around 130, how much could could they raise the IQ in 5 generations?
45-60 => 1st, 60-75 => 2nd, 75-90=> 3rd, 90-05 => 4th, 06-? =>5th
The constraints are as below:
- There is a fund for keeping 10,000 people in the program only.
- No genetic engineering or any other other biological experiments.
- Children who don't fit the program's eugenic goals are given for adoption into selected couples of the general population.
- Scientists running the program decide who will breed with who. For example they could keep 10% of the boys and 90% of the girls if that gives them best results. All the other children are given for adoption to selected couples.
- The country has around 30 million people, the bred are very small part of it.
Note: (story related; might not be relevant to the question)
If it helps, my story happens in present age. The country finally democratizes and holds fair elections. The newly-elected president finds out about the secret breeding program. He also learns that the children given for adoption from the program are vastly over-represented among the country business & cognitive elite compared with their meager numbers.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/126844. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
You can definitely train for ability to score highly in IQ tests, so you should be able to breed for it. That's not going to make anybody "smarter" - all it will do is increase the ability to score highly on IQ tests. Even Mensa agrees that IQ is only an indicator of intelligence or ability to problem solve*
As pointed out by @F1Krazy, your group's median IQ will remain 100, but you will be able to raise median IQ as compared with outside the group, as even with the inclusion of environments less conducive to IQ, the improvement over time has been positive (see Flynn Effect) so providing an environment conducive to learning, personal development and support and an improvement in health should all contribute.
*I've been a member of Mensa for maybe 20 years and can categorically state that high IQ is not a consistent indicator of anything other than getting high scores in the Mensa test. Membership includes heads of business, unemployed plumbers, musicians, mathematicians...
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