Designer Babies

Those who promote such sperm banks, as well as those who buy their services in order to produce child geniuses, are misinformed. For instance, Graham himself reports that 70% of the population possesses mediocre intelligence or less. He should take a course in statistics. If mediocre is defined in terms of the population mean plus the standard deviation times some unspecified factor, it should not be surprising that 70% of the population is of mediocre intelligence. This would be true even if the mean were an IQ of 200. The statement ranks right up there with a speaker in a radio broadcast a few years back, who pronounced with alarm that 50% of the population is of below-average IQ.

W. A. Sauvageot

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