The truth is that genetics is a very odd conglomeration of things. For example, one of the most desired traits for offspring is “intelligence”, a vague descriptor at best.
The truth is that what we call intelligence today is most likely a mutation, and one that comes with a lot of baggage. What we think of as intelligence might be a defect.
That is, in blackberries, the same gene that makes the berries delicious is also responsible for the plants thorns, oddly enough. In the case of intelligence, it may be associated with a weakened chromosome, the extreme version of which causes “fragile X syndrome”, one of the major causes of retardation.
So if you tamper with your children so that they might be intelligent, you place them at risk for being prone to other genetic problems.
Other genes are equally fickle. But most surveys stop with the simple question of if you could modify your child, what would you want them to be like? Only one followed it up with greater detail, and made a startling discovery.
Many parents want offspring with noticeably canine and feline features. This is because they think that people relate better to dogs and cats than they do each other; so if their children look more like dogs and cats, they will be popular.
The problem with the word ‘intelligence’ is that its meaning has been made complex by our increasingly polite society in a vain attempt to correct what they saw as an epithet in the making of its subset.
I have always thought that intelligence is simply an innate ability to learn.
Using that definition, one can still allow that a good teacher could then get 100% of what the student’s basic ability gives him. A personnel officer, a very good friend of mine, had to keep reminding managers that the positions they were trying to fill were attractive only to the people like them who kept complaining that the workers he sent them only had a 10% work output.
“Get 100% of that 10%, then,” he would tell them.