Intelligence genes discovered by scientists

Here's a rule of thumb when reading articles written by journalists: they tend to exaggerate as a way to attract attention.

The scientific reality is far, far more complex than the simplistic "gene = intelligence" assumption. And there's also basic defintional and perspectival biases that may frame intelligence in general or narrow ways.

Intelligence, as any self-respecting neuroscientist will tell you, is a distributed and multilayered process involving interactions between subcortical life sustaining processes in the brain-stem and vagus nerve, with more complex social-emotional neural areas like the amygdala, hippocampus and hypothalamus, and the cortical executive and perceptual areas which allow us to "act upon" our emotional or bodily states.

Take the lowest level of intelligence: the intelligence of survival. Cells are intelligent because they discover ways to interact with the environment that allows them to sustain their existence in a thermodynamically stable way. At higher and more complex levels of evolution, intelligence grows in becoming predatorial. The first 'predators' were cells which ate other cells (phagocytes). Thus, a primitive flight system in the form of flagella that allow 'swimming' away in one direction, and then free floating (or tumbling, as its called by biologists). The flight towards what benefits the organism is intelligence, and indeed, frames the 'intelligence' of our higher system.

Emotional attachment and emotional resonance is 'intelligent' because it has brought members of the same species into a sort of symbiotic unity. In humans, this symbiosis occurs in the form of "shared intentionality" or "collective intentionality" (the developer of this idea, Michael Tomasello, has used both terms to describe this basic idea) which acts sort of like a blackhole in the center of a galaxy (such as our own). Just as the black hole sucks the solar systems around it into an orbit, so too does shared intentionality such human mind into its orbit. Shared intentionality is fundamentally an issue of motivation. How are we humans motivated? What does it mean to be a human, to have human feelings and to have human perspectives? To really get at this issue, you need to be aware of your own bodily affects - the feelings that arise in you as you interact with some external or internal object. The 'affect' or feeling that arises, as you will slowly discover, is itself the basis of where our minds become oriented. A 'negative affect' will generate a negative perspectival frame that itself "calls up" past memories of how I thought in such a situation. So the body is a 'cue', or a deeper layer of processing, totally and unflinchingly directed towards survival - such as the basic impulse of approach or withdraw, or the tenuous feeling of indifference. Once started, the conscious mind 'glides' along the frames, thoughts and beliefs that are generated. Without knowledge of a larger context, the self can indeed be bobbing back and forth without the aid of a larger reference.

So our basic intelligence is the intelligence of evolutionary processes. That our species, and our own conscious minds and unconscious feelings, is itself an expression of this intelligence, can be a difficult thing to get out minds around. So much so that we tend to prefer simplistic definitions of 'intelligence' so that we can then enjoy the assertion of saying "we've found the genes for intelligence".

Cognitive functions are 'intelligent', yes, but they are guided by an underlying emotional logic. If particular genes relevant to the processing of certain neurons implicated by neuropsychological testing to be involved in abstract reasoning were found, that is interesting. But it is not yet known what they do, beyond saying that they modulate processes occurring deeper in the brain. Yet something on a smaller scale, and in a slightly different way, is also occurring deeper down.

My main point is, intelligence is a full-body, organism wide phenomena. That emotions both serve to guide our consciousness in thinking about the world, organizing bodily processes, and containing an 'existential' quality that itself inspires connection, speaks to different levels of 'intelligence' - of world-organism connection, organism bodily homeostasis, and self-world connection - that somehow cohere in the same bod.