4 ms·

"Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80

"Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%. IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults." I don't think 50-80% heritability should be hand-waved away as "slight variance". I think what you're talking about is the manifestations of the intelligence (i.e. you can't be a rocket scientist if you never had the chance to learn about it), but not the intelligence itself.

RC_ITR 4y ago
We disagree on the predictive power of twin studies. Also please cite actual studies rather than Wikipedia. You’ll capture more nuance. We conclude that there is now strong evidence that virtually all individual psychological differences, when reliably measured, are moderately to substantially heritable For example, citation 6 implies nearly every personality trait is inherited, which seems aggressive to me. Citation 7 is a book about how the genetic links get stronger with age, which seems also odd to take at face value. Citation 4 is a study of 3k white (they excluded non-white people intentionally) British people born in the 1920's titled "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic," but their results could be restated as 'distant members of the same family clan (in a society famous for inter-generational class structure) score similarly on aptitude tests, but we can't explain it with our data.' Anyway, as great a source as Wikipedia can be, I wouldn't take its summaries at face value, the three above examples lead me to believe (like in a lot of social sciences) there's still a lot of work to be done to actually get to answers. But, again, circling back to the problem here - even if 'smart' people lead to 'smart' children, society as it stands is awful at actually identifying and rewarding smart people (i.e. jobs aren't doled out via IQ tests).

RC_ITR 4y ago

We disagree on the predictive power of twin studies. Also please cite actual studies rather than Wikipedia. You’ll capture more nuance. We conclude that there is now strong evidence that virtually all individual psychological differences, when reliably measured, are moderately to substantially heritable For example, citation 6 implies nearly every personality trait is inherited, which seems aggressive to me. Citation 7 is a book about how the genetic links get stronger with age, which seems also odd to take at face value. Citation 4 is a study of 3k white (they excluded non-white people intentionally) British people born in the 1920's titled "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic," but their results could be restated as 'distant members of the same family clan (in a society famous for inter-generational class structure) score similarly on aptitude tests, but we can't explain it with our data.' Anyway, as great a source as Wikipedia can be, I wouldn't take its summaries at face value, the three above examples lead me to believe (like in a lot of social sciences) there's still a lot of work to be done to actually get to answers. But, again, circling back to the problem here - even if 'smart' people lead to 'smart' children, society as it stands is awful at actually identifying and rewarding smart people (i.e. jobs aren't doled out via IQ tests).