The claim this article is rebutting has been relentlessly promoted for over a hundred years, and can be summarized as: Societal outcomes for human beings are ge

The claim this article is rebutting has been relentlessly promoted for over a hundred years, and can be summarized as: Societal outcomes for human beings are genetically determined. There are a lot of co-claims that go into this, such as intelligence being genetically determined, and that there's a competitive natural selection process that results in the most intelligent humans acquiring the most monetary wealth and political power and hence ending up atop the social pyramid. If you go back a few more centuries, you'll find essentially the same argument, but presented as religious determinism, i.e. the divine right of kings. This implied the obligation of the kings to be 'wise rulers of their people' as well as their right to absolute power, and that such rights would be passed on to their children: (Burgess 1992) The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered, Oxford Historical Review https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/574219 https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/574219 It's not hard to see that the concept of inherited divine rights in the religious era has been passed on to the concept of inherited genetic superiority in the rational science era - both being arguments in favor of the status quo when it comes to the structure of existing social power/wealth pyramids. Now, the converse argument supported largely by Marxist theory in the 20th century is: Societal outcomes for human beings are socially determined. This is widely derided in right-libertarian circles as the 'blank slate' ideology, and it's true that the likes of Lysenko used this ideology to push really poor agricultural and scientific policies in the Soviet Union that entirely ignored the realities of natural selection and basic genetic concepts in plant breeding: (Borinskya et al. 2019) Lysenkoism Against Genetics... Oxford Historical Review https://sci-hub.se/10.1534/genetics.118.301413 https://sci-hub.se/10.1534/genetics.118.301413 > "Progress in genetics and evolutionary biology in the young Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was hindered in the 1930s by the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who believed that acquired traits are inherited, claimed that heredity can be changed by “educating” plants, and denied the existence of genes." Those are roughly the two poles of the debate, and as usual, reality falls somewhere in between. Plants may not be all the 'educatable', but human beings certainly are. There also seems to be such a thing as 'innate human ability' at the upper end of the spectrum of physical and mental prowess - i.e. if we take the same human cohort, and supply them with identical training and educational opportunities, some will do better than others. However, the notion that 'IQ tests' are a reliable measure of inherited genetic intelligence is utter nonsense. In reality, children of wealthy parents tend to have far more access to educational opportunities than children of poor parents do (with outliers on both sides related to parental involvement as this article notes), so what we see in reality is highly skewed - not so much by genetic determinism, but by unequal opportunities and parental input. This seems like a solid, rational viewpoint.