The Trustworthiness Deficit in Postgenomic Research on Human Intelligence

In the past, work on racial and ethnic variation in brain and behavior was marginalized within genetics. Against the backdrop of genetics' eugenic legacy, wide consensus held such research to be both ethically problematic and methodologically controversial. But today it is finding new opportunistic venues in a global, transdisciplinary, data-rich postgenomic research environment in which such a consensus is increasingly strained. The postgenomic sciences display worrisome deficits in their ability to govern and negotiate standards for making postgenomic claims in the transdisciplinary space between human population variation research, studies of intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. Today some researchers are pursuing the genomics of intelligence on a newly grand scale. They are sequencing large numbers of whole genomes of people considered highly intelligent (by varying empirical and social measures) in the hope of finding gene variants predictive of intelligence. Troubling and at times outlandish futurist claims accompany this research. Scientists involved in this research have openly discussed the possibility of marketing prenatal tests for intelligence, of genetic engineering or selective embryo implantation to increase the likelihood of a high-IQ child, and of genotyping children to guide their education. In this permissive and contested environment, what would trustworthy research on the genomics of high intelligence look like?