Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2025/10/genetics-intelligence-charles-murray/684544/?gift=43H6YzEv1tnFbOn4MRsWYp4a6DXeDrYtky6k7igmezs&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

(Above link is free, from an Atlantic subscriber)

...The bet’s premise was simple enough. Murray quoted himself on the podcast, arguing that “we will understand IQ genetically. I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks, but we’ll know basically what’s going on.” And he proposed that, in seven years, he’d sit through a lecture I gave on the topic: “Who Was More Right?”

It is now 2025, and I am here to declare that I was more right. (This article can sub in for the lecture Murray proposed.) We do not understand the genetic or brain mechanisms that cause some people to be more intelligent than others. The more we have learned about the specifics of DNA associated with intelligence, the further away that goal has receded. Even given a softer goal of predicting, rather than explaining, intelligence differences, we still can’t do it very well. If anything, we are further away now than in 2018 to knowing “basically what’s going on” with genetic influences on intelligence. (When I reached out to Murray for his view on this, he insisted that he is still right. “Of course I think I won the bet, and I will lay out my reasons for thinking that,” he wrote in an email. He told me he plans to do so in a few months, when he has more time.)

You win, so far.