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That Vox article is profoundly dishonest. The sentence immediately preceding the one you quoted is "Virtually none of the complex human qualities that have been
by defen 9y ago
That Vox article is profoundly dishonest. The sentence immediately preceding the one you quoted is "Virtually none of the complex human qualities that have been shown to be heritable are associated with a single determinative gene!"
That is the most ridiculous straw-man in the history of straw-men. No one thinks IQ is determined by a single gene. In reality it's probably caused by a large number of small-effect genes, leading to the characteristic "bell-curve" distribution. To oversimplify - within a population let's say there are a thousand genes or SNPs that each affect IQ by a small amount. If you have 500 "plus" (good) and 500 "minus" you end up with an IQ of 100 (average). If you have 450 "plus" and 550 "minus" you have 90 IQ. If you have 550 "plus" you end up with 110 IQ. If you have 800 you are Newton or von Neumann. The numbers are obviously simplified and made-up, but that's the general idea. Of course this is assuming the nutrition and environment to allow that IQ to develop.
Since the individual effect sizes are tiny, you need a large number of people in a study to find them. But as big data gets better, we're going to find them, and the anti-science left will have to figure out a way to deal with it.
- snowwrestler 9y agoThis is nonsense. Genes don't work by some sort of "total weight" principle like pebbles on a balance. And intelligence has noting to do with "right" vs "left". That sort of political framing language is an excellent smell test for bad scientific information.
- astrange 9y agoGenes work in whatever way is easiest for evolution to work, and linear improvements are pretty easy to find this way, so can you rule it out?
- snowwrestler 9y agoYes I can. The definition of a gene is unit of hereditary information that determines a specific characteristic of an organism. Inherent in that definition is that each gene, and the characteristic it encodes, is distinct. So when many genes are expressed simultaneously, you can get complex interactions between these distinct characteristics. But not a straight linear additive effect. If 5 genes all encode the same characteristic, then by definition they are actually just 5 copies of the same gene. Intelligence is not related to genetics through some simple scalar factor. It is far, far more complex than that.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- defen 9y ago> But not a straight linear additive effect. It mostly is when you're talking about "why person X has a higher IQ than person Y". It's not when you're asking why or how humans have intelligence at all, obviously. https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421 https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421