The Breeder's Equation

I’d expect if we find the kids of professors to be more likely to be National Merit Finalists that we’d find a non-zero upbringing/educational correlation. Sure there’s a genetic component, but I’d be fairly shocked if “being good on academic testing” has no correlation with “being raised by academics”.

Wouldn't the 120 IQ subpopulation also have some people whose IQs are "genetically" more like 130 but they've gotten unlucky with environmental factors, pushing the genetic average a bit towards 120? It would be smaller than the number of 110 people who got lucky, but non-zero. Is this baked in to h^2?

"And of course the breeder’s equation explains how average IQ potential is declining today, because of low fertility among highly educated women."

In the Heinlein universe, the Howard Foundation runs a voluntary eugenics program by paying people with particularly long lived ancestors to mate with each other. Protagonist Lazarus Long is a product of this.

The author is saying that this would work as expected, with offspring gaining around 50% of their parents' extra longevity.

I'm a firm opponent of any kind of coercive eugenics. But it seems like it would be a good use of a billionaire's fortune to establish such a foundation for the promotion of intelligence, by paying very smart people to make babies together.

But in Heinlein, the "Howards" became reviled and were forced off of the planet. If we do create a particularly smart population by eugenics, perhaps their primary task should be to find a way to protect themselves from us normals, a treatment for tall poppy syndrome. Of course, the first resort is secrecy. So we wouldn't know if they already exist.

In the first example, their IQ of 120 is from a mix of factors and the author estimates some percentage that is due to the environment outside genetics, and that is what is lost in reverting to the mean of the environment. In the second example the author assumes that the environment of the desert island contributes nothing to genetics and so the offspring get the full 110 (heritability is 100%).

It's odd to me though because it wasn't clear that the environment was meant to be affecting the parent and not the child too- the trick is the author treats the heritability parameter different for the parent and the child. Also, I don't think the desert island would actually have no effect on the 110 generation's IQ, or their upbringing outside of it, but I guess I can accept it as a thought-experiment-only place that does that by definition and not a literal desert island.

An IQ is just a number coming out of a test. Whether or not that correlates to something useful for humanity, or even the individual being tested, is a different question. Surely the majority of useful discoveries are made by people with above-average IQs, but would juicing the numbers through eugenics really make much of a difference?

How many extra Isaac Newtons would it take to make controlled nuclear fusion work? Because if we don't have an estimate for that, why would we expect an intelligence-focused eugenics program to be useful at all?