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You should take seriously that a vast amount of research of this kind is pseudoscience, and that there isn't much science that can be done from it. All "herita

You should take seriously that a vast amount of research of this kind is pseudoscience, and that there isn't much science that can be done from it. All "heritability" research is just an analysis of correlations between genes and expressed behaviour. On these grounds a scottish accent is highly heritable, since the accent correlates extremely highly with some genes. We do not have the means to create new human beings with different genetic profiles and observe them accross many environments, as they develop, to determine if "somehow" a gene causes anything so macroscopic like "intelligence". So, quite literally: we cannot do science. We cannot create experiments to test hypotheses. Genes have no plausible mechanism to "cause" intelligence. If they play a significant role, it is a very large number of genes building tissues which are completely opaque (brains, etc.) whose interactions with the environment are completely opaque. Heritability research, and "psych-genetic research" of this kind is, necessarily, pseudoscience. It's adhearents are the poorest statistians and have the least understanding of the scientific method you could hope for. We have no scientific theory of intelligence which provides causal variables that we can experiment with; we have no theory of biological mechanism, likewise; we have no theory of genetic mechanism --- all we have are some aging loons with stats software content to put iq-test-scores (ie., people competing patterns of shapes...) and Genes into it. Whatever can be found by these loons isn't worth a scientist finding. "Data" isnt innocent, it is collected and used for a reason; and pseudoscience isnt innocent. Correlating genes with ESP ability is likewise nonesense, and that has as much scientific merit.

concordDance 4y ago
I think this post reveals a lot of ignorance in how scientists study heritability. To give a simple example, one of the best tools is comparing identical twins to non-identical ones. If the correlation between the fraternal twins is substantially less than the correlation between the identical twins then we can know a genetic factor us in play. Your argument is also too general in that it labels all observational science as pseudoscience. Is astronomy pseudoscience? You don't need to be able to manipulate the environment to do science, just have a hypothesis and a way I'd getting new observations that would probe/disprove the hypothesis.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  I'm very well aware of how "heritability" is studied. It is defined to be a correlation, so twin studies do not estimate heritability. They attempt to estimate how much heritability is explained by gene expression being the cause of the relevant behaviour. Twin studies assume a model of environmental variation which cannot be evidenced, because the relevant target of study (a human being in its environment) cannot be experimented on to evidence anything. Twin studies are not RCTs (which are themselves the minimum an experiment needs to be to count as science). Indeed, the assumed model of the interaction between genes and the environment is *plainly false* (namely, that "equality" between environments exists and that it has linear non-feedback, non-cyclical effects). Twin studies on star signs would likewise produce as compelling evidence that star signs cause personality. (Can you see why that would be?) Science requires such experiments take place. No amount of post-hoc analysis of correlation can produce a causal explanation. One must control causes to do so. Hence, much of this abuse of statistics is unreporducible pseudoscience; it is well known to be outside these fields by anyone with any credible understanding of statistics. Every chemist will defend physics; and every chemist, biology. And every biologist neuroscience. Can you cite me anythihg other than the abject horror of real scientists outside these fields on reading their reports? I'm sorry to break the news: this is peudoscience in the tradiiton of pseudoscience which was invented by psychology's repurposing of statistics for post-hoc analysis of correlation on human data (ie., the most complex systems known to exist) which fails even basic tests of scientific credibility. Complex systems resist study by the use of the scientific method, and require the best minds in modelling and statistics to even produce "rule of thumb" models (eg., consider the climate). What we have in heritability, psychometric, etc. research is loons studying the climate (ie., analogously, humans) by putting thermometer readings into GUI stats software and publishing the results. They're fools. Neo-homeopaths, whose lab coat is "statistics"/.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    That post cements that you do not understand the fundamentals of the scientific method or how we do scientific analysis. E.g. that we assume "that "equality" between environments exists" You're very confused about how a lot of things work on fairly fundamental levels which would take hours to disentangle, so all I can do is recommend learning more on philosophy of science and read some more papers on heritability. Maybe this one picked not entirely at random: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Holland-2/publication/313227507_Estimating_and_interpreting_heritability_for_plant_breeding_Anupdate/links/5c1a4d41299bf12be38b26cc/Estimating-and-interpreting-heritability-for-plant-breeding-Anupdate.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Holland-2/publica...

concordDance 4y ago

I think this post reveals a lot of ignorance in how scientists study heritability. To give a simple example, one of the best tools is comparing identical twins to non-identical ones. If the correlation between the fraternal twins is substantially less than the correlation between the identical twins then we can know a genetic factor us in play. Your argument is also too general in that it labels all observational science as pseudoscience. Is astronomy pseudoscience? You don't need to be able to manipulate the environment to do science, just have a hypothesis and a way I'd getting new observations that would probe/disprove the hypothesis.

mjburgess 4y ago
I'm very well aware of how "heritability" is studied. It is defined to be a correlation, so twin studies do not estimate heritability. They attempt to estimate how much heritability is explained by gene expression being the cause of the relevant behaviour. Twin studies assume a model of environmental variation which cannot be evidenced, because the relevant target of study (a human being in its environment) cannot be experimented on to evidence anything. Twin studies are not RCTs (which are themselves the minimum an experiment needs to be to count as science). Indeed, the assumed model of the interaction between genes and the environment is *plainly false* (namely, that "equality" between environments exists and that it has linear non-feedback, non-cyclical effects). Twin studies on star signs would likewise produce as compelling evidence that star signs cause personality. (Can you see why that would be?) Science requires such experiments take place. No amount of post-hoc analysis of correlation can produce a causal explanation. One must control causes to do so. Hence, much of this abuse of statistics is unreporducible pseudoscience; it is well known to be outside these fields by anyone with any credible understanding of statistics. Every chemist will defend physics; and every chemist, biology. And every biologist neuroscience. Can you cite me anythihg other than the abject horror of real scientists outside these fields on reading their reports? I'm sorry to break the news: this is peudoscience in the tradiiton of pseudoscience which was invented by psychology's repurposing of statistics for post-hoc analysis of correlation on human data (ie., the most complex systems known to exist) which fails even basic tests of scientific credibility. Complex systems resist study by the use of the scientific method, and require the best minds in modelling and statistics to even produce "rule of thumb" models (eg., consider the climate). What we have in heritability, psychometric, etc. research is loons studying the climate (ie., analogously, humans) by putting thermometer readings into GUI stats software and publishing the results. They're fools. Neo-homeopaths, whose lab coat is "statistics"/.
- concordDance 4y ago
  That post cements that you do not understand the fundamentals of the scientific method or how we do scientific analysis. E.g. that we assume "that "equality" between environments exists" You're very confused about how a lot of things work on fairly fundamental levels which would take hours to disentangle, so all I can do is recommend learning more on philosophy of science and read some more papers on heritability. Maybe this one picked not entirely at random: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Holland-2/publication/313227507_Estimating_and_interpreting_heritability_for_plant_breeding_Anupdate/links/5c1a4d41299bf12be38b26cc/Estimating-and-interpreting-heritability-for-plant-breeding-Anupdate.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Holland-2/publica...