Human Intelligence Enhancements

In response to my article on using embryo selection to increase human intelligence some people claimed that the genetics behind human intelligence is too complicated for humans to soon figure out. But I don't think that this can be true.

First, as Kurzweil writes in The Singularity is Near "The entire [human] genome consists of eight hundred million bytes, but most of it is redundant, leaving only about thirty to one hundred million bytes...of unique information (after compression), which is smaller than the program for Microsoft Word." So the instructions for building our brains (which must be simpler than our genome) must be simpler than the code for Microsoft Word.

Second, as Michael Anissimov has written "Humans share 98% of our genetic material with chimps, but the step from chimps to humans produced creatures that could walk on the Moon, exploit the power of the atom, and build skyscrapers."

Thus, less than 2% of our genome is responsible for the increase in intelligence we have over chimps. Consequently, the information contained in our genome that gives us this intelligence advantage over chimps can be no more than 2% as complex as the code for Microsoft Word. So once we have cheap DNA sequencing and the genomes of tens of millions of humans is recorded I suspect we will soon determine the genetic cause of our intelligence advantage.