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> Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable? IQ is heritable. There's over 50 years of psychometric research

> Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable? IQ is heritable. There's over 50 years of psychometric research showing that. > If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ? The same thing that stops the reality of weapons being a defense of murder. The saddest things about education today is that it purposefully suppresses information because it might be seen as justification for racism or sexism. The result is a generation that is largely ignorant about psychometrics and various other fields.

light_hue_1 10y ago
The idea that IQ is heritable, as in the genes from your parents have a substantial effect on your IQ (leaving aside diseases), is far from established and most cognitive psychologists would violently disagree. Any effect from your parent's genes is drowned out by socioeconomic status, the environment, pollution, time, education, etc. For example, the correlation between your IQ and your cousin's IQ is almost negligible (the correlation between your parents IQ and yours is a bit higher but still small) and something as pervasive as the Flynn effect is an order of magnitude more meaningful. It's not even clear how verifiable these correlations are because they tend to change substantially over time. If you don't believe me head over to your local university and talk to some of the faculty, see what they think. To round it all off. The correlation between IQ and anything useful like say.. income is absurdly weak and most of the correlation happens at the low end where it really accounts for people with some pathology. So no. It's not sad that people aren't being fed fake racist or sexist "facts" these days. It's good that we don't place value on things that don't matter and it's sad that people hold on to racist ideas from 100 years ago that have no basis in modern science.
- golemotron 10y ago
  Wow. You need to read some behavioral genetics. Let me know if you care to. I'll give you references. They've found g heritable in primates other than humans as well. The amount of work we do to believe that biology is not a factor is stunning. This is what a 'cultural taboo' looks like.
  - light_hue_1 10y ago
    I've read quite a bit. I have a PhD in a broadly related field. I tried to explain that you're just confused about what heritability means in this context, what the relative effect sizes are of environmental factors vs parents, that these studies have crazy confounds, and the fact that these things aren't settled and are highly controversial in academic circles but clearly that's not working. I'll repeat something from my previous post because it's very important. When scientists talk about heritability they don't mean it the layman's sense of "these people have low IQ and that is conserved over time unless they go and breed with others". There's 0 evidence for this even if you look at a small and until recently fairly isolated population like that of Iceland. The correlation between your IQ and your cousin is almost non-existent even if you're part of the same cultural group in the same village. You're simply misinterpreting headlines without taking the time to understand what people mean. There's no "cultural taboo" here. Scientists want to find the truth and we all work very diligently at it. We're just lucky that reality doesn't back up racist and sexist viewpoints and that the scientific evidence is clearly not on your side.
- killbrad 10y ago
  Did you mean "vehemently disagree"?
  - light_hue_1 10y ago
    I meant violently, although politically not physically. People are quite aware that science was perverted once to justify racism and sexism and that scientists everywhere did inhuman things to subjects even very recently (at small scales some unscrupulous scientists continue to do pretty evil things that harm subjects but nowhere near the kinds of things that used to happen). Every student that runs human subjects experiments has to take a mandatory course about this now so that we don't go down this route again (at least in the US, I assume Canada/EU have the same rules but I don't have firsthand experience). People would be quite upset if someone started to justify racism or sexism with science once more. Take the example of Larry Summers who had to resign from his position as president of Harvard because of a lunchtime talk where he made reference to science that he interprets to support a sexist position that women are inferior to men. That's a (at least politically) violent (and in my opinion correct) reaction. So it's not that people would just disagree. They would happily damage or end someone's career over it.
- projektir 10y ago
  Can you link some papers or articles on this side of the debate?

light_hue_1 10y ago

The idea that IQ is heritable, as in the genes from your parents have a substantial effect on your IQ (leaving aside diseases), is far from established and most cognitive psychologists would violently disagree. Any effect from your parent's genes is drowned out by socioeconomic status, the environment, pollution, time, education, etc. For example, the correlation between your IQ and your cousin's IQ is almost negligible (the correlation between your parents IQ and yours is a bit higher but still small) and something as pervasive as the Flynn effect is an order of magnitude more meaningful. It's not even clear how verifiable these correlations are because they tend to change substantially over time. If you don't believe me head over to your local university and talk to some of the faculty, see what they think. To round it all off. The correlation between IQ and anything useful like say.. income is absurdly weak and most of the correlation happens at the low end where it really accounts for people with some pathology. So no. It's not sad that people aren't being fed fake racist or sexist "facts" these days. It's good that we don't place value on things that don't matter and it's sad that people hold on to racist ideas from 100 years ago that have no basis in modern science.

golemotron 10y ago
Wow. You need to read some behavioral genetics. Let me know if you care to. I'll give you references. They've found g heritable in primates other than humans as well. The amount of work we do to believe that biology is not a factor is stunning. This is what a 'cultural taboo' looks like.
- light_hue_1 10y ago
  I've read quite a bit. I have a PhD in a broadly related field. I tried to explain that you're just confused about what heritability means in this context, what the relative effect sizes are of environmental factors vs parents, that these studies have crazy confounds, and the fact that these things aren't settled and are highly controversial in academic circles but clearly that's not working. I'll repeat something from my previous post because it's very important. When scientists talk about heritability they don't mean it the layman's sense of "these people have low IQ and that is conserved over time unless they go and breed with others". There's 0 evidence for this even if you look at a small and until recently fairly isolated population like that of Iceland. The correlation between your IQ and your cousin is almost non-existent even if you're part of the same cultural group in the same village. You're simply misinterpreting headlines without taking the time to understand what people mean. There's no "cultural taboo" here. Scientists want to find the truth and we all work very diligently at it. We're just lucky that reality doesn't back up racist and sexist viewpoints and that the scientific evidence is clearly not on your side.
killbrad 10y ago
Did you mean "vehemently disagree"?
- light_hue_1 10y ago
  I meant violently, although politically not physically. People are quite aware that science was perverted once to justify racism and sexism and that scientists everywhere did inhuman things to subjects even very recently (at small scales some unscrupulous scientists continue to do pretty evil things that harm subjects but nowhere near the kinds of things that used to happen). Every student that runs human subjects experiments has to take a mandatory course about this now so that we don't go down this route again (at least in the US, I assume Canada/EU have the same rules but I don't have firsthand experience). People would be quite upset if someone started to justify racism or sexism with science once more. Take the example of Larry Summers who had to resign from his position as president of Harvard because of a lunchtime talk where he made reference to science that he interprets to support a sexist position that women are inferior to men. That's a (at least politically) violent (and in my opinion correct) reaction. So it's not that people would just disagree. They would happily damage or end someone's career over it.
projektir 10y ago
Can you link some papers or articles on this side of the debate?