our brains, like everything else in our body, are built by our genes
picture a dog running across a lawn. How does your brain experience this image, how is it stored, how is it reproduced, which neurons are involved and how do they do it, how does it decide what the dog looks like and the perspective, how much is memory and how much is invention, how is it selected?
The answer is we don't fucking know.
And this is just one aspect out of hundreds we still just don't know when it comes to the brain. Out of everything we've encountered so far, the brain is the most complicated thing in the universe. Suns and planets are simple by comparison. It's had billions of years to evolve complication. And the genes that build it rely on a double or triple abstraction layers, where the dna encodes proteins which can then encode other proteins, which create cells and tell them what to be and exactly where to go, with the code not only transcribed by amino acid ordinal position but by the 3d shape of it's folding, that has different effects at different stages all through life and is responsive to environmental triggers. It's mind-boggling complex. It most likely involves the interplay of great clusters of different genes all performing various roles, rather than a few genes. And intelligence is a highly complex emergent property. So intelligence is heritable, we just have no idea how, what genes are involved apart from a tiny fraction that cause things to go really wrong, how those genes are distributed, what they do, and we dont know how the brain is networked, what memory is, what conciousness is, or even a general agreement about what intelligence is or what aspect of it are the most valuable. So I think there's still an awful lot of work to do before we start getting all eugenic about it. We're better but far from perfect at quantifying the enviromental effects, i.e. education, on intelligence
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Tue 7 Apr 2026, 13:17,
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