Fascinating article. I appreciate the nod to the malleability of IQ at the end of the article. This is actually a white pill as it provides hope for the billions of essentially retarded people worldwide.
There is in fact no evidence that adult IQ can be changed once basic nutrition and education are met. Childhood IQ is quite malleable but completely fades to the genetic profile by young adulthood. A well known problem called "fade out."
1. Fade out refers to the inefficacy of temporary interventions. Thus, a permanent nutritional/environmental intervention is still the best approach.
2. Even if adult IQ is not malleable, adults can perform below their IQ potential and be irritated or depressed due to nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxicity.
Your first point correctly identifies that IQ fade-out reflects the limits of temporary interventions. But your second point misleads. While severe toxicity or malnutrition can slightly depress performance, these effects are small (~5–9 IQ points at most) and rare in developed nations. They don’t explain large, persistent group differences.
Moreover, IQ is a latent trait, not just test behavior. Adults don’t perform 20 points below potential because they’re a little tired or low on zinc. And we know this because IQ remains stable across time, culture, and testing context. Race-based IQ differences remain even after controlling for SES, education, environment, and nutrition, which shows that the cause isn’t environmental “toxicity” but biology.
Once basic needs are met, IQ variance overwhelmingly reflects genetic differences, not transient hardship. Any effort to claim otherwise is either wishful thinking or a veiled political push to justify endless state dependency (which touches on the second half of your first point.)
My sweet uncle was a down's baby. He lived to 70 and took care of my grandmother when she was old and sick. He was the sweetest uncle as we were growing up. Rest in peace uncle Raymarshall.
Have you considered that there could be other factors causing increasing rates of Down syndrome such as advanced maternal age becoming more common? To the infertility point, I would also like to say that genetic disorders are not as simple as people with a given condition having babies that inherit the same condition—around 99% of babies with Down syndrome are born to genetically typical parents. It’s just that DS is thought to be due to a random error in cell division right after conception that alters the genes.
Maternal age as a factor can only make sense when viewed through the lense of metabolism, an accumulated stress load that creates an unfavorable environment for a fetus to healthily develop. Estrogen dominance, for example, has been shown to negatively alter cell water structure, which deregulates the proper division of chromosomes.
This is also why Blacks have lower rates of Downs. Earlier average reproductive age.
And rates spike significantly after around age 35. As more "girlboss" types put off motherhood until then, we unsurprisingly see an increase. Not to mention that population size has more than doubled during the graphed period, and that rate, not absolute number should have been used.
But as you might guess, this isn't an article representing credible science.
Amazing article, esp. for Americans trained in reductionist / determinist thinking about "IQ" (quotation marks intentional.) The pictures alone took my breath away: the changes affected even bone formation! As a parent, however, I witnessed something similar. Not only health and nutrition, but also love, genuine attachments and trauma resolution played integral parts in "IQ"... as well as physical attractiveness, coordination, and health. I wish every parent would read this.
Fair use notice: I am not a therapist, just a mom. Traumatized kids seem to respond better to physical/ somatic therapies. Some are EMDR with a skilled practitioner, sand tray therapy, and trauma informed Yoga. (TIMBo is largely for adults but there may soon be a modality for children.) Hiking or just playing outdoors, pref in a piece of wilderness with no electronics, is helpful all by itself. Allows the nerves to recover their patterns w/o the non-native frequencies scrambling them. Most of all, family attachments. Never an easy ride but I wish you luck.
Dr. Hamer, the German New Medicine guy, had similar anecdotes and photographs of individuals with downs syndrome becoming much more normal looking and acting. GNM doesn't even really use any drugs or supplements and is more of a psychological medicine.
Also I think this pattern is true of other hardcore genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis. You may never cure it, but the expression is quite a bit more flexible than people give credit.
"In my own decades of work with Down syndrome patients, I have discovered that these patients, with their severely deranged metabolic processes, also respond differently to vitamins D2 and D3 - the former leading to soft-tissue calcification, and the latter to bone development."
Marvelous article and great topic. Here is another one of Georgi's posts hits on the crux (the energy requirements for full differentiation): https://haidut.me/?p=1537
T3: What do you make (if anything) of the grain of Cytomel @ breakfast (as part of the "U" series protocol) as opposed to spread throughout the day (as seems to be in vogue among Peaters)?
And here are a few semi-pertinent quotes on the malleability of intelligence from Mind and Tissue to add since I’ve been reading it this past week:
Social support, including education, is considered to be the factor which causes great differences in creativity and intelligence, and not genetics. A genetic theory of intelligence is considered to be a mere rationalization for racist practices. [https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315171845]
IQ tests are not widely used in the Soviet Union, since the IQ is believed merely to reflect the level of social opportunity (which can be determined in other ways), but some very interesting studies have been done to determine the effect of socio-economic status on intelligence. Children in some asian-USSR towns were given IQ tests in 1929, and averaged about 35 points below normal. Recently children in these "retarded" areas were tested, and were found to be approximately equal in general mental ability to children in Moscow. In numerical and verbal ability they were slightly behind the moscovites, but in visual memory and interpretation of mirror images, they were superior. These differences are attributed to the continuing differences in their life situations. [https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315171845]
Racist geneticists to the contrary, there is no evidence that either intelligence or brain size is genetically inherited, since acquired changes are heritable, and since only one protein peculiar to the brain is known, at present. Other brain-specific proteins will probably be discovered, but despite a large effort in that direction, there is no hint of a molecular-genetic basis for "inherited intelligence." Glucose, hormones, stimulation and other factors significantly modify brain size and function.
How did you come to the conclusion that DS has become more prevalent over time? I’m looking at the study from which you pulled the graph located at the beginning of your article; it’s showing a steady birth rate (the lowest of the stacked areas, in teal). [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27608174/]
Regardless, if incidences of Down’s syndrome (or stunted IQs) are on the rise, that might suggest socio-economic conditions are declining, and I doubt any good Bolshevik would argue with that.
I think dividing T3 up throughout the day is still the best way to go, large doses of T3 have been used throughout many of the older studies with some good effect. I think this abstract might answer your question about the prevelance of DS, https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2008122. Thank you for reading!
Fascinating article. I appreciate the nod to the malleability of IQ at the end of the article. This is actually a white pill as it provides hope for the billions of essentially retarded people worldwide.
There is in fact no evidence that adult IQ can be changed once basic nutrition and education are met. Childhood IQ is quite malleable but completely fades to the genetic profile by young adulthood. A well known problem called "fade out."
1. Fade out refers to the inefficacy of temporary interventions. Thus, a permanent nutritional/environmental intervention is still the best approach.
2. Even if adult IQ is not malleable, adults can perform below their IQ potential and be irritated or depressed due to nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxicity.
Your first point correctly identifies that IQ fade-out reflects the limits of temporary interventions. But your second point misleads. While severe toxicity or malnutrition can slightly depress performance, these effects are small (~5–9 IQ points at most) and rare in developed nations. They don’t explain large, persistent group differences.
Moreover, IQ is a latent trait, not just test behavior. Adults don’t perform 20 points below potential because they’re a little tired or low on zinc. And we know this because IQ remains stable across time, culture, and testing context. Race-based IQ differences remain even after controlling for SES, education, environment, and nutrition, which shows that the cause isn’t environmental “toxicity” but biology.
Once basic needs are met, IQ variance overwhelmingly reflects genetic differences, not transient hardship. Any effort to claim otherwise is either wishful thinking or a veiled political push to justify endless state dependency (which touches on the second half of your first point.)
Don’t use that term
They’ll still be retarded if I allow you to police my language.
It isn't an insult when used correctly, as in this case.
It’s worse than using it as an insult actually because it shows you don’t see them as real people
False.
I concur, still using this term in 2025 is like SO retarted…
yeah, still using that term in 2025 is like SO retarted
Lmao! How many trillions of dollars have been spent again, to make brown kids function at the same level as white kids?
you article rendered me breathless.
My sweet uncle was a down's baby. He lived to 70 and took care of my grandmother when she was old and sick. He was the sweetest uncle as we were growing up. Rest in peace uncle Raymarshall.
The answers to some of the hardest problems are right in front of us.
It's wonderful and sad to know that so many have found answers so long ago only for them to be forgotten or hidden from us.
Good stuff, appreciate the emphasis on malleability and changibility that modern science either doesn't accept or still attribute to "randomness"
I truly wonder how much of the down syndrome phenotype can be reversed with a lot of t3, altitude, and the most powerful peaty interventions
What is peaty
Ray Peat?
Have you considered that there could be other factors causing increasing rates of Down syndrome such as advanced maternal age becoming more common? To the infertility point, I would also like to say that genetic disorders are not as simple as people with a given condition having babies that inherit the same condition—around 99% of babies with Down syndrome are born to genetically typical parents. It’s just that DS is thought to be due to a random error in cell division right after conception that alters the genes.
Maternal age as a factor can only make sense when viewed through the lense of metabolism, an accumulated stress load that creates an unfavorable environment for a fetus to healthily develop. Estrogen dominance, for example, has been shown to negatively alter cell water structure, which deregulates the proper division of chromosomes.
This is also why Blacks have lower rates of Downs. Earlier average reproductive age.
And rates spike significantly after around age 35. As more "girlboss" types put off motherhood until then, we unsurprisingly see an increase. Not to mention that population size has more than doubled during the graphed period, and that rate, not absolute number should have been used.
But as you might guess, this isn't an article representing credible science.
Amazing article, esp. for Americans trained in reductionist / determinist thinking about "IQ" (quotation marks intentional.) The pictures alone took my breath away: the changes affected even bone formation! As a parent, however, I witnessed something similar. Not only health and nutrition, but also love, genuine attachments and trauma resolution played integral parts in "IQ"... as well as physical attractiveness, coordination, and health. I wish every parent would read this.
What types of therapeutics do you use for trauma resolution?
Correcting thyroid would be the main thing, alongside vitamin B1 and B3.
Fair use notice: I am not a therapist, just a mom. Traumatized kids seem to respond better to physical/ somatic therapies. Some are EMDR with a skilled practitioner, sand tray therapy, and trauma informed Yoga. (TIMBo is largely for adults but there may soon be a modality for children.) Hiking or just playing outdoors, pref in a piece of wilderness with no electronics, is helpful all by itself. Allows the nerves to recover their patterns w/o the non-native frequencies scrambling them. Most of all, family attachments. Never an easy ride but I wish you luck.
Apparently there has also been some success in treating Down's Syndrome with DMSO.
Until this past year, I had no idea anyone had ever even attempted treating it; how marvelous.
My wife and I are trying this (DMSO) with our daughter.
There’s a very brief mention of this in Mind and Tissue:
DMSO apparently introduces some "hydrophobicity" into water, because of its strong hydrogen bonding oxygen and its methyl groups--at least it seems to lower the effective activity of water (Berezin, Ugarova, and Silaev, 1973)[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267188632_Investigation_of_kinetics_of_acidic_hydrolysis_of_uridine-2'3'-cyclophosphate_in_water-dimethylsulfoxyl_system_in_Russian]. This may mimic the resting state of protoplasm to some extent, since it seems to improve metabolic efficiency: Reducing inflammation and treating mental retardation are its best known (apparent) effects.
Dr. Hamer, the German New Medicine guy, had similar anecdotes and photographs of individuals with downs syndrome becoming much more normal looking and acting. GNM doesn't even really use any drugs or supplements and is more of a psychological medicine.
Also I think this pattern is true of other hardcore genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis. You may never cure it, but the expression is quite a bit more flexible than people give credit.
Very interesting!
Brilliant work.
Cheers
Fascinating. Thank you for sharing.
Very curious from Dr. Turkel's book [page 158]:
"In my own decades of work with Down syndrome patients, I have discovered that these patients, with their severely deranged metabolic processes, also respond differently to vitamins D2 and D3 - the former leading to soft-tissue calcification, and the latter to bone development."
Thanks for the informative article! Also appreciate the list of references.
The Rimland, B. (1994) reference led me to find the Turkel's DS book and article free for download: https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22Dr+Henry+Turkel+MD+-+Medical+Treatment+Of+Down+Syndrome+And+Genetic+Diseases%22
Hoping to delve more into his U-series, which has "normal" dosages throughout (to my surprise).
I linked the book in the article, the images posted are from there. Thank you for reading!
This is actually pretty interesting and fascinating!
Marvelous article and great topic. Here is another one of Georgi's posts hits on the crux (the energy requirements for full differentiation): https://haidut.me/?p=1537
T3: What do you make (if anything) of the grain of Cytomel @ breakfast (as part of the "U" series protocol) as opposed to spread throughout the day (as seems to be in vogue among Peaters)?
And here are a few semi-pertinent quotes on the malleability of intelligence from Mind and Tissue to add since I’ve been reading it this past week:
Social support, including education, is considered to be the factor which causes great differences in creativity and intelligence, and not genetics. A genetic theory of intelligence is considered to be a mere rationalization for racist practices. [https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315171845]
IQ tests are not widely used in the Soviet Union, since the IQ is believed merely to reflect the level of social opportunity (which can be determined in other ways), but some very interesting studies have been done to determine the effect of socio-economic status on intelligence. Children in some asian-USSR towns were given IQ tests in 1929, and averaged about 35 points below normal. Recently children in these "retarded" areas were tested, and were found to be approximately equal in general mental ability to children in Moscow. In numerical and verbal ability they were slightly behind the moscovites, but in visual memory and interpretation of mirror images, they were superior. These differences are attributed to the continuing differences in their life situations. [https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315171845]
Racist geneticists to the contrary, there is no evidence that either intelligence or brain size is genetically inherited, since acquired changes are heritable, and since only one protein peculiar to the brain is known, at present. Other brain-specific proteins will probably be discovered, but despite a large effort in that direction, there is no hint of a molecular-genetic basis for "inherited intelligence." Glucose, hormones, stimulation and other factors significantly modify brain size and function.
How did you come to the conclusion that DS has become more prevalent over time? I’m looking at the study from which you pulled the graph located at the beginning of your article; it’s showing a steady birth rate (the lowest of the stacked areas, in teal). [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27608174/]
Regardless, if incidences of Down’s syndrome (or stunted IQs) are on the rise, that might suggest socio-economic conditions are declining, and I doubt any good Bolshevik would argue with that.
I think dividing T3 up throughout the day is still the best way to go, large doses of T3 have been used throughout many of the older studies with some good effect. I think this abstract might answer your question about the prevelance of DS, https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2008122. Thank you for reading!