Seems like common sense. For thousands of years, we've been conducting assortative mating on our pets and livestock. Within a couple of generations, we've been able to produce dogs with whatever extremely exaggerated physical features, and even more tertiary features like aptitude for retrieving and herding that are desired. Dogs have pretty ridiculous phenotypic plasticity, but we've done much the same thing with cats, sheep, cattle, horses, goats, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and other animals.

My mother has been a home economics, and then a K-5 special education teacher in the same small school district for over 30 years. She's starting to get the grandchildren of some of her first students. She almost doesn't have to do the testing to label them, just look at who the parents and grandparents are. Looking at stories out of the Valley or Seattle about rates of high-functioning autism, and it starts to look like the first steps towards the Morlocks and the Eloi.

One of the more interesting Heinlein stories is Time Enough For Love[1], whose main character is part of an almost American Kennel Club-esque breeding program aimed at extending human lifespans through subsidizing assortative marriages.

People would scream eugenics and cry Nazi if anyone actually tried, but its interesting to think about what might happen if some insanely rich megabillionaire like Gates or Zuckerberg devoted their fortunes to a similar foundation, say, to get highly intelligent people to have more children and not wait into their mid 30s to start a family.

[1] http://amzn.to/1NM8g2g

Time Enough for Love. Robert Heinlein. http://www.amazon.com/Time-Enough-Love-Robert-Heinlein/dp/04...