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Unless we have a complete picture of "success", which means: - How much of our behavior, habits, intelligence and success comes from the environment ? - How m
by nyrulez 8y ago
Unless we have a complete picture of "success", which means:
- How much of our behavior, habits, intelligence and success comes from the environment ?
- How much of stuff like education levels, income levels come from birth, social and environmental factors?
- How epigenetics shapes our life in a dynamic fashion? This field is pretty new, and we have just begin to understand it.
- What is intelligence or success in the first place ? How do you measure it that is all encompassing and diverse ? I have never seen a solid definition of that. Should we care about their definition of success? Can there ever be one definition of success for all groups? My own personal definition has changed over the years.
- Is Gene state correlated state or unchangeable predictors (which I extremely doubt in light of above points)
- Has there been a complete study of exceptions?
all of this is extremely reductionist at best and trying to push a malicious self serving agenda at the worst which can cause havoc in hands of any stupid policy makers.
From what I understand, we are very far off from getting a full picture of these questions. At least decades away if not more.
- kiliantics 8y ago> all of this is extremely reductionist at best and trying to push a malicious self serving agenda at the worst which can cause havoc in hands of any stupid policy makers. First thing that came to mind for me was eugenics. This kind of pseudoscience is very dangerous.
- asianthrowaway 8y agoPoints 1 2 and 4 are pretty well studied in academia concerning intelligence. Intelligence is defined as "g", and it's 60 to 80% heritable depending on the study (leaning towards 80%). More info for the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
- fjsolwmv 8y ago"heritability" is a mix of genetics and environment.
- asianthrowaway 8y agoNo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability. Perhaps you meant that at any given time, the heritability of a trait depends on the "state" of the population, and that heritability values can change over time. This is true, but I don't understand why you'd bring it up.
- nabla9 8y agoIt's easy to misunderstand what heritable or even genetically heritable means. Consider just few hypothetical ways genes can increase g-factor: * Metabolic trait increases nutrition intake in high calorie low nutrition junk food environment. This leads to faster brain development. * Improved immune system against certain parasites that makes individual healthier and leads to statistically higher g-factor. Genes that improve intelligence can change from generation to generation and be different in different geographic areas.
- asianthrowaway 8y agoHuh, what? Are you talking about the appearance of new genetic mutations? I think evolutionary timescales are a bit longer than a few generations. Anyway, I don't understand how this is supposed to explain what heritability is...
- nabla9 8y agoNo. I was talking about existing genes interacting with rapidly changing environment.
- nyrulez 8y agoThe article is pretty interesting and I didn't read the whole thing. The correlations are positive but not 1, sometimes less than 0.5. So it shows genes are positively correlated, but very different than saying it's an exclusive factor? So the problem with this is that even if something is correlated at 10% (for arguments sake), it can have predictive power. But that doesn't mean it can become the sole basis. Thats the cognitive jump most folks are incapable of and these discussions often lead to very wrong outcomes. Indeed this bias has led to many horrific examples of discrimination. Also the heritability seems to be put at 0.5, not a sure thing? So it obviously can be heritable, but that doesn't rule out that it is only heritable and no other avenues for it exist?