Thanks to better nutrition and disease reduction increasing human brain size and intelligence (the Flynn effect) we are seeing some of the greatest technological advances since the industrial revolution:

At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience starting November 11 in Washington D.C., two teams of scientists plan to present previously unpublished research on the unexpected interaction between human mini-brains and their rat and mouse hosts. “In the new papers, according to STAT, scientists will report that the organoids survived for extended periods of time — two months in one case — and even connected to lab animals’ circulatory and nervous systems, transferring blood and nerve signals between the host animal and the implanted human cells,” reports Inverse. “This is an unprecedented advancement for mini-brain research.”

The next step is to get mini-brains from a large sample of people of known IQs or SAT scores and then test the intelligence of the mice that carry them.  Would there be a positive correlation between the SAT score of the person from which the mini-brain is derived and how fast the mouse can run through the maze? If so, how high would the correlation be?

Maybe a smart person would get stuck with a dumb mouse, thus lowering the correlation, so each person could produce dozens of mini-brains for dozens of different mice allowing individual mice differences to cancel out.  Would the group of mice implanted with the high SAT person’s mini-brains average much faster maze times than the group of mice derived from the low SAT person’s mini-brains?

If so it would prove that the normal variation in human intelligence is not just correlated with DNA, but largely caused by independent genetic effects, debunking those who invoke reaction norms.

 

Advertisement