4 ms·

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02585-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02585-6 25% of the variance in sexuality is genetic or heritable.

by lldbg 6y ago

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02585-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02585-6 25% of the variance in sexuality is genetic or heritable. Compared to approx. 80% for intelligence. A small genetic component, but it seems as if experiences are the major deciding factor for sexuality.

andy_ppp 6y ago
I’m very skeptical about intelligence being as high as 80%, how do they remove environmental factors it seems almost impossible.
- lldbg 6y ago
  By having lots and lots of good data. 80%+ is what the current corpus of scientific knowledge says. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/ Here's a somewhat good primer on the topic, but the wikipedia page on heritability of intelligence (and it's sources) is also somewhat good.
  - greatgirl 6y ago
    There is no wikipedia page on heritability of intelligence, only heritability of IQ. It makes me consider whether the rest of what you've said is actually incorrect since you made such a conflation. Intelligence is a notoriously hard thing to define and measure, and I think it's more easily predicted by environmental factors than genetics. The idea that smart people breed and have smart children and that's why some people are smart and others are dumb, is more of a cop-out, since predictors of success that tests like IQ try to explain are more accurately explained by socio-economic factors. Basically this has no real world implications. I realise this isn't the argument you were trying to make necessarily, you were just pointing out a perceived 'fact', but it lacks a lot of nuance that could lead to dangerous assumptions about the real world, especially since you related it to sexuality.
    - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
      If people demanded as much rigor for other subfields of psychology as they require for psychometrics of intelligence, the whole word would simply get rid of all psychology departments. People have no clue how much more rigorous these studies than anything else in the field and adjacent fields.
      - greatgirl 6y ago
        Of course I demand rigor in a subfield that exists almost entirely to inform policies like segregation, eugenics, welfare, education, etc, and I find studies based on IQ tests and the g factor to be very much inadequate at being socially relevant.
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > Did you know that there is also a strong correlation of intelligence between parents and adopted children? Kind of puts the OP's claim to bed a bit. Only in young children. The correlation vanishes as the children age. You were wise to delete this remark from your comment. > Don't think I'm not aware of the history and research of this area. Heh.
        greatgirl 6y ago
        You replied only to the parts i deleted, unfortunately. Neither of your responses even dispute my points.
        mhuffman 6y ago
        > Neither of your responses even dispute my points. First you try to insinuate that IQ is not related to intelligence and even if it were intelligence has not practical application in the "real world". Your first point was disputed by the comments related to how rigorously this subject is studied and documented, due to it being a third-rail area of academia. I am going to dispute your second point myself. That rigorous study and documentation associates IQ with intelligence and intelligence with 'g' which, although not precisely defined, is associated with (at least) higher problem-solving ability. So now your argument reduces to "higher problem-solving ability has no practical application in the 'real world'". And so I will just dispute that statement out of hand because problem-solving ability is what has allowed humans to become the dominant animal on Earth.
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    Presumably the only good data can come from siblings who were raised in environments dramatically different from each other and the ended up with similar IQs? It must be extremely hard to know what factors in the environment might contribute to IQ... saying the data is great sure, but I need examples of how environmental factors are removed.
    - lldbg 6y ago
      Go look up eg the sources on the wiki article, and you can see for yourself how they controlled for nurture.
      - andy_ppp 6y ago
        I looked into it and the actual answer as with everything it’s extremely complicated and you’re original pithy 80% of IQ is heritable seems to be dependent on how much culture is involved in the testing methodology... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-heritability-of-intelligence-not-what-you-think/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-her... I think the idea that we can control properly is extremely unlikely and IQ will turn out to be a lot difficult to extract from learning/society/environment than you might think, especially as findings with epigenetics and intelligence start to be shown. https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/research/epigenetics-and-iq-a-new-study-uncovers-one-of-the-mechanisms-behind-environmentally-induced-effects-on-cognitive-performance/ https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/research/epigenetics-an...
        lldbg 6y ago
        Your first link is a blogpost about someone's doctoral dissertation, and your second link is even more of a stretch (the title of the paper ends with a question mark). That is fringe research, and not the established position. You get what you search for. As for cultural loading in intelligence tests, maybe you could expand on that? How do you measure how much culture was involved in the methodology, and how it affected the results of the tests?
- bsanr2 6y ago
  You're right to be suspicious. The studies that this figure are drawn from are generally twin studies based in wealthy Western nations. Heritability tends to increase with wealth, economic equality, and ethnic homogeneity, all of which are unfortunately selected for in the formation of these trials. This paradigm is thought to be a gold standard, as it reduces independent variables, but it fails to capture the effects of intergroup environmental disparities in a profound way. The range of SAT scores at a US prep academy populated with the progeny of relatively closely related families will be substantially determined by heritable differences between individuals. Outside of that, it's disingenuous and irresponsible to throw out that 80% figure as a general measure of intelligence heritability. In fact, not even the studies say that: 80% is the measure for middle-aged and senior adults. For everyone else, even their measures are substantially lower.
  - Thorrez 6y ago
    >The range of SAT scores at a US prep academy populated with the progeny of relatively closely related families will be substantially determined by heritable differences between individuals. Can you explain that more in depth? To me that is counterintuitive. If there is a group of closely related people, I would expect their differences to be due to environment, rather than genetics, because they have similar genetics.
    - bsanr2 6y ago
      The opposite. They're closely related compared to the rest of the world, but still come from different families, while living in substantially similar environments, which in many way have "maxed out" advantageous factors (health, stability, stimulation, etc.). Remember that the heritable component of intelligence is polygenetic; it'd not determined by the presence of a single SNP, and two people could have similar intelligence originated in very different genetic profiles. People who are relatively closely related will have similar profiles that interact with the similar or shared environments in similar ways, meaning that the effect of small genetic differences will be more pronounced. Someone with the same "potential" for IQ, but from a different set of intelligence-related genes, interacting with the same environment might be said to have had the heritable component of their IQ become less efficacious. For example, nutrition is a component in IQ. Everyone at this school is able to drink milk and benefit from the nutrition value-add. Someone less related to the other students also attends the school; they're lactose-intolerant, but benefit from eating certain fruits native to their homeland. The school doesn't serve such fruits, but it does serve milk. The student subsequently tests at a lower IQ. I would say at this point that variation between the LP students' intelligence is likely to be more related to genetics than is the variation between their IQ and this lone student's, which has a more substantial environmental component.

by lldbg 6y ago

andy_ppp 6y ago

I’m very skeptical about intelligence being as high as 80%, how do they remove environmental factors it seems almost impossible.

lldbg 6y ago
By having lots and lots of good data. 80%+ is what the current corpus of scientific knowledge says. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/ Here's a somewhat good primer on the topic, but the wikipedia page on heritability of intelligence (and it's sources) is also somewhat good.
- greatgirl 6y ago
  There is no wikipedia page on heritability of intelligence, only heritability of IQ. It makes me consider whether the rest of what you've said is actually incorrect since you made such a conflation. Intelligence is a notoriously hard thing to define and measure, and I think it's more easily predicted by environmental factors than genetics. The idea that smart people breed and have smart children and that's why some people are smart and others are dumb, is more of a cop-out, since predictors of success that tests like IQ try to explain are more accurately explained by socio-economic factors. Basically this has no real world implications. I realise this isn't the argument you were trying to make necessarily, you were just pointing out a perceived 'fact', but it lacks a lot of nuance that could lead to dangerous assumptions about the real world, especially since you related it to sexuality.
  - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
    If people demanded as much rigor for other subfields of psychology as they require for psychometrics of intelligence, the whole word would simply get rid of all psychology departments. People have no clue how much more rigorous these studies than anything else in the field and adjacent fields.
    - greatgirl 6y ago
      Of course I demand rigor in a subfield that exists almost entirely to inform policies like segregation, eugenics, welfare, education, etc, and I find studies based on IQ tests and the g factor to be very much inadequate at being socially relevant.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > Did you know that there is also a strong correlation of intelligence between parents and adopted children? Kind of puts the OP's claim to bed a bit. Only in young children. The correlation vanishes as the children age. You were wise to delete this remark from your comment. > Don't think I'm not aware of the history and research of this area. Heh.
        greatgirl 6y ago
        You replied only to the parts i deleted, unfortunately. Neither of your responses even dispute my points.
        mhuffman 6y ago
        > Neither of your responses even dispute my points. First you try to insinuate that IQ is not related to intelligence and even if it were intelligence has not practical application in the "real world". Your first point was disputed by the comments related to how rigorously this subject is studied and documented, due to it being a third-rail area of academia. I am going to dispute your second point myself. That rigorous study and documentation associates IQ with intelligence and intelligence with 'g' which, although not precisely defined, is associated with (at least) higher problem-solving ability. So now your argument reduces to "higher problem-solving ability has no practical application in the 'real world'". And so I will just dispute that statement out of hand because problem-solving ability is what has allowed humans to become the dominant animal on Earth.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  Presumably the only good data can come from siblings who were raised in environments dramatically different from each other and the ended up with similar IQs? It must be extremely hard to know what factors in the environment might contribute to IQ... saying the data is great sure, but I need examples of how environmental factors are removed.
  - lldbg 6y ago
    Go look up eg the sources on the wiki article, and you can see for yourself how they controlled for nurture.
    - andy_ppp 6y ago
      I looked into it and the actual answer as with everything it’s extremely complicated and you’re original pithy 80% of IQ is heritable seems to be dependent on how much culture is involved in the testing methodology... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-heritability-of-intelligence-not-what-you-think/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-her... I think the idea that we can control properly is extremely unlikely and IQ will turn out to be a lot difficult to extract from learning/society/environment than you might think, especially as findings with epigenetics and intelligence start to be shown. https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/research/epigenetics-and-iq-a-new-study-uncovers-one-of-the-mechanisms-behind-environmentally-induced-effects-on-cognitive-performance/ https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/research/epigenetics-an...
      - lldbg 6y ago
        Your first link is a blogpost about someone's doctoral dissertation, and your second link is even more of a stretch (the title of the paper ends with a question mark). That is fringe research, and not the established position. You get what you search for. As for cultural loading in intelligence tests, maybe you could expand on that? How do you measure how much culture was involved in the methodology, and how it affected the results of the tests?
bsanr2 6y ago
You're right to be suspicious. The studies that this figure are drawn from are generally twin studies based in wealthy Western nations. Heritability tends to increase with wealth, economic equality, and ethnic homogeneity, all of which are unfortunately selected for in the formation of these trials. This paradigm is thought to be a gold standard, as it reduces independent variables, but it fails to capture the effects of intergroup environmental disparities in a profound way. The range of SAT scores at a US prep academy populated with the progeny of relatively closely related families will be substantially determined by heritable differences between individuals. Outside of that, it's disingenuous and irresponsible to throw out that 80% figure as a general measure of intelligence heritability. In fact, not even the studies say that: 80% is the measure for middle-aged and senior adults. For everyone else, even their measures are substantially lower.
- Thorrez 6y ago
  >The range of SAT scores at a US prep academy populated with the progeny of relatively closely related families will be substantially determined by heritable differences between individuals. Can you explain that more in depth? To me that is counterintuitive. If there is a group of closely related people, I would expect their differences to be due to environment, rather than genetics, because they have similar genetics.
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    The opposite. They're closely related compared to the rest of the world, but still come from different families, while living in substantially similar environments, which in many way have "maxed out" advantageous factors (health, stability, stimulation, etc.). Remember that the heritable component of intelligence is polygenetic; it'd not determined by the presence of a single SNP, and two people could have similar intelligence originated in very different genetic profiles. People who are relatively closely related will have similar profiles that interact with the similar or shared environments in similar ways, meaning that the effect of small genetic differences will be more pronounced. Someone with the same "potential" for IQ, but from a different set of intelligence-related genes, interacting with the same environment might be said to have had the heritable component of their IQ become less efficacious. For example, nutrition is a component in IQ. Everyone at this school is able to drink milk and benefit from the nutrition value-add. Someone less related to the other students also attends the school; they're lactose-intolerant, but benefit from eating certain fruits native to their homeland. The school doesn't serve such fruits, but it does serve milk. The student subsequently tests at a lower IQ. I would say at this point that variation between the LP students' intelligence is likely to be more related to genetics than is the variation between their IQ and this lone student's, which has a more substantial environmental component.