Boutique IQ Here We Come, -[One(Small)] Intelligence Gene Found!

In a study led by Dr. Sylvane Desrivières at King’s College in London, her team has found one of the first genes positively linked to Intelligence. …Maybe some day you Will be able to “Fix Stupid”?

Now NPTN wasn’t responsible for a lot of total IQ variance. -But its impairment Was correlated with an odd thinnness in the left half of the brain’s frontal+temporal cortexes;

Why that matters: In general, a thicker outer layer of “Grey Matter” is associated with higher-performance. Thin is not in.

 
And those subjects who didn’t have the reduction Did score better on intelligence tests in a statistically-significant amount.


Sadly, this is just a teeny-tiny Beginning for what is still considered a trait resulting of a Gargantuan sum of genes, Not Just One. -But that assertion may get refined and whittled-down as time goes by and more interactions are figured-out.


And though there are still thousands of genetic variants left to go, it will be interesting to see if some Tipping-Point/Leverage-Type changes in a few small elements Can in-fact propagate-out, Frodo Baggins-Style to huge repercussive-changes.

Or by counter-point, maybe too many other mechanisms will maintain them all in some kind of balance, the way many biological-networks seem to function, and that will keep anyone from getting smarter with anything short of a wholesale-DNA-recode?


But stranger things have happened. Even “Rainman” Kim Peek himself got his incredible ability as the result of a large Birth-Defect.

Check out the Links for more details:


Photo Credits:
“fiat lux 1”, by Robert Aichinger


Links:
• Source: KCL
• via: Telegraph UK
• Source Study: Molecular Psychiatry-Single nucleotide polymorphism in the neuroplastin locus associates with cortical thickness and intellectual ability in adolescents

• Counter-Point-ish:MolPsy-Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic