There are papers showing the common variants associated with intelligence. For example myelin sheath variants linked to intelligence as it increases fatty insulation around nerve fibers which speeds up transmission. But ones like that are surface level. This matters, but it isn't the only thing and for me the more interesting is the meta of what these have in common (besides often related to the brain).

The real problem is that most historical papers look for single SNPs. But a gene could have dozens of variants that do the same thing or you could have a genetic path where a major variant in any gene on that path results in the same outcome. These papers overlook this.

So you have to step back and asking: What are the principles of intelligence? and how would I expect to see them in human biological or other biological systems? (And related, why does humans have intelligence "now"?)

For this crowd, if I take an LLM and make it bigger is it intelligent? Obviously a key component of intelligence is raw stuff. Someone with fattier myelin sheath's straight up has more/faster "brain stuff". You might say ChatGPT 4.5 is "smarter" than 3.5, but not intelligent. There are two other key attributes missing. For those following along with the arc-agi you might already have a hint what those are simply based on what is moving the needle forward. Now even with all three and you are close and simply need to provide an environment for self-replicating with a selection pressure and energy constraint. For one definition (others will have a different definition) I have had a primitive AGI for 13 months now and regularly put it to work on sub problems of mine.

This really took off when I was reading genetics files like books and noticed I was reading files that are very similar, but some were Mensa level folks and others were more just "smart". Didn't take too much longer to piece together the key paths and differences and even went tracing back through Neanderthals DNA (How cool is it these days that we can simply poke around Neanderthals DNA!).

So it isn't forbidden, but more like I know what to look for and people are super sensitive around saying someone is probably smarter or not from a genetic file so I usually don't comment because of the Gattaca problem.

P.S. If you have a bio/genetic background and are playing around with AI I would love to chat. There are so very few of us. DeepMind is thinking of some of this, but they are in the UK. (It would be fun to give a meta talk to them explaining why their smartest engineers are smart.)