There is a less happy story in which the attempts at ubermensch are mentally disabled. That they will remain so for quite some time, considering the moral horror potentially involved in the experiments, until the errors we make allow us to gain a fuller understanding of the system sufficient to know which changes are wise to make.<p>The article seems to take for granted that it is possible to make alterations to a complex system &#x27;improve this set of genetic loci&#x27; (paraphrasing), without harming that system. But it gives us no idea what the complexity of improving them is. It may well turn out that the brain is a very fragile piece of spaghetti-coded wet-ware. That if you alter a few of genes even relatively subtly you stand to introduce errors.<p>Faults in only a few genes have been known to cause undesired phenomena in nature, it would be odd if by purposefully altering them without a reasonable understanding of the system we could avoid those faults.<p>Machines will probably be &#x27;smarter&#x27; in 2050. They will be so next year and this trend has been the case for quite some time. Even if you&#x27;re prepared to burn through the... consequences... of experimenting with genetic engineering on human cognitive ability, there is no such guarantee for humans.