4 ms·

It's a very emotional subject. Maybe I'm unusual in that respect - genetic differences are not an emotional subject for me. My 3 siblings and I were adopted at

It's a very emotional subject. Maybe I'm unusual in that respect - genetic differences are not an emotional subject for me. My 3 siblings and I were adopted at birth, all from different parents. From birth, we had the same environment, but the differences between us in terms of intelligence, interests, education, career tracks, The Big 5 - are extremely dramatic. I'd prefer not to discuss my family too much here, so I'll leave an exercise for the reader instead: imagine the largest possible diversity in all of those categories. You would not be far off. The differences I've seen between my siblings are much, much greater than those I've usually seen between biological siblings. And the studies I've seen have yielded similar conclusions. My claim in my original post - that DNA and society both play some role in inequality - seems obvious and benign to me. Honest question: why do you want this to be false? Do you think we have social policies that promote kindness, tolerance, and charity only because we believe everyone is identical? Wouldn't it be insane to, for example, study the effect of something (anything) on mortality - without asking study participants if they smoke tobacco? How is adjusting for the tobacco confound moral, but adjusting for genetic confounds immoral? Wouldn't it be better to follow the truth wherever it leads?

aninhumer 10y ago
Of course genetics is a factor (and I think you're overplaying the rejection of that), but to what extent does it explain inequality? Now I haven't personally looked into it in detail, but I'm guessing that, since it's obvious as you say, some studies on inequality have indeed considered genetics. And I think that if the answer was "Yeah, poor people were all just born too dumb to be rich" it would probably have been a pretty big story, and brought up often in these debates. Since it hasn't, I'm guessing the answer is that it's more complicated than that. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

aninhumer 10y ago

Of course genetics is a factor (and I think you're overplaying the rejection of that), but to what extent does it explain inequality? Now I haven't personally looked into it in detail, but I'm guessing that, since it's obvious as you say, some studies on inequality have indeed considered genetics. And I think that if the answer was "Yeah, poor people were all just born too dumb to be rich" it would probably have been a pretty big story, and brought up often in these debates. Since it hasn't, I'm guessing the answer is that it's more complicated than that. Do you have evidence to the contrary?