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Heritability is a statistical concept, with established estimation methods. It's certainly reasonable to take issue with characterizing address as a phenotypic

Heritability is a statistical concept, with established estimation methods. It's certainly reasonable to take issue with characterizing address as a phenotypic trait, but the same can be said for "giftedness". Given that it is impossible to measure heritability directly, various estimation methods are the best that can be done. You can estimate the heritability of any trait, with or without twins. Applying those methods to geographic features will uniformly indicate that they are heritable.

gwern 9y ago
> It's certainly reasonable to take issue with characterizing address as a phenotypic trait, but the same can be said for "giftedness". No it can't. Twins certainly do differ in intelligence, personality, income, level of education, patent count, adult SES, or pretty much everything which could plausibly be lumped into a term like 'giftedness'. > Given that it is impossible to measure heritability directly, various estimation methods are the best that can be done. ??? Is it possible to measure anything 'directly', under your redefinitions of words? > Applying those methods to geographic features will uniformly indicate that they are heritable. They would indicate that there are between-family genetic differences, certainly. They would not indicate that they are heritable and it would be wrong or misleading to criticize heritabilities drawn from twin studies on this basis of gene-environment correlation. You can't simply lump together every kind of genetic pattern under your redefinition of the term 'heritability'.
- andrewprock 9y ago
  You appear to be quite confused on what heritability is, how it is estimated, and the assumptions that underpin those estimates. This article is a reasonable summary of the issues with heritability: https://academic.oup.com/ije/article-pdf/35/3/525/2195546/dyl064.pdf https://academic.oup.com/ije/article-pdf/35/3/525/2195546/dy... The tl;dr is that the people who trot out additive models of heritability as evidence of anything in particular are by and large those invested in the notion of genetic determinism.
  - gwern 9y ago
    Rose's ancient paper is balderdash and wrong and even Turkheimer wouldn't agree with his claims now. Heritability has been repeatedly vindicated empirically as a guideline to selective breeding, GWAS power and results, genetic correlations, evolutionary development of traits and split between additive & epistasis variance based on selective pressures, and so on. Even human sperm donor donations affect height of offspring exactly as predicted by the breeder's equation - which rests entirely on the concept of heritability! The results of projects like UK Biobank and SSGAC have been a vindication of the entire behavioral genetics research programme, not any kind of refutation.

gwern 9y ago

> It's certainly reasonable to take issue with characterizing address as a phenotypic trait, but the same can be said for "giftedness". No it can't. Twins certainly do differ in intelligence, personality, income, level of education, patent count, adult SES, or pretty much everything which could plausibly be lumped into a term like 'giftedness'. > Given that it is impossible to measure heritability directly, various estimation methods are the best that can be done. ??? Is it possible to measure anything 'directly', under your redefinitions of words? > Applying those methods to geographic features will uniformly indicate that they are heritable. They would indicate that there are between-family genetic differences, certainly. They would not indicate that they are heritable and it would be wrong or misleading to criticize heritabilities drawn from twin studies on this basis of gene-environment correlation. You can't simply lump together every kind of genetic pattern under your redefinition of the term 'heritability'.

andrewprock 9y ago
You appear to be quite confused on what heritability is, how it is estimated, and the assumptions that underpin those estimates. This article is a reasonable summary of the issues with heritability: https://academic.oup.com/ije/article-pdf/35/3/525/2195546/dyl064.pdf https://academic.oup.com/ije/article-pdf/35/3/525/2195546/dy... The tl;dr is that the people who trot out additive models of heritability as evidence of anything in particular are by and large those invested in the notion of genetic determinism.
- gwern 9y ago
  Rose's ancient paper is balderdash and wrong and even Turkheimer wouldn't agree with his claims now. Heritability has been repeatedly vindicated empirically as a guideline to selective breeding, GWAS power and results, genetic correlations, evolutionary development of traits and split between additive & epistasis variance based on selective pressures, and so on. Even human sperm donor donations affect height of offspring exactly as predicted by the breeder's equation - which rests entirely on the concept of heritability! The results of projects like UK Biobank and SSGAC have been a vindication of the entire behavioral genetics research programme, not any kind of refutation.