5 ms·

Yeah this is a good point. I guess genetic determinism is just the contemporary scientific justification for a mentality that’s existed in some for a long time

Yeah this is a good point. I guess genetic determinism is just the contemporary scientific justification for a mentality that’s existed in some for a long time or indeed forever. (I’d be interested to know if other human cultures were more and accepting and supportive of personal growth.)

pas 3y ago
Explanation or justification? Does current scientific consensus (let's say there's one) say that this mentality is okay or that it's a bias that we should be aware (and try to correct against)?
- tomhoward 3y ago
  I see genetics being used as a “just so” explanation for all kinds of things that the science doesn’t really support, by people with different ideologies depending on the thing they’re trying to justify. We take obviously mostly-genetically-determined traits like height, eye/hair/skin colour, facial features etc, then extrapolate to argue/assume that all kinds of other things must also be genetically determined, like cognition, behavioral patterns, emotional patterns, for which there is far less evidence of them being hard-coded in DNA. This will be confounded by the fact that we can often see commonalities in these factors from parents to children and between siblings, and assume these commonalities exist due to genetic coding, not recognizing that there are other forms of inheritance/conditioning that can explain these commonalities, but that even if these inherited patterns are deeply ingrained, they can be altered via the right practices (emotional “letting go” being the most important in my experience).
  - concordDance 3y ago
    Are you actually aware of the evidence on these matters? There have been studies on adopted children and identical twins. What are the results? Here's a random study on criminality I was looking at a bit ago: https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/frisell2010.pdf https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/frisell2010.pdf
    - astrange 3y ago
      Genetics is not a credible science, ie, it's just another one of the many sciences that thinks correlation is causation. This is because it can't do experiments, so it can't really show causation. (Identical twins are close to a natural experiment but not a very good one as even they don't have the same genetics.)
      - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        Genetics experiments are quite commonplace these days, for example in vaccine development, plant engineering, and many other applications
        astrange 3y ago
        I mean on humans.
        ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        Your claim that genetics, a science affecting all life, is not a credible science, doesn't mention humans at all, so I doubt you did. If you have to limit it to "humans only", the claim falls apart anyways, because genetics isn't human-specific
        astrange 3y ago
        Your idea of an argument is to say that people don't know what their own posts mean?
        ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        Who are you to tell us to not trust our eyes? When you're wrong at trivia, can you just claim "I meant [the right answer]"? If that's what you meant, perhaps you would have said it, but if you would had said it, it would have ruined your argument. Simply put, you haven't made a convincing case that genetics, a science affecting all life, not just humans, is "not a credible science", despite indeed involving experiments all the time. Below is where you can make that case.
  - astrange 3y ago
    This is a bad defense because you're using "genetically determined", which is either meaningless or not true. Height is not genetically determined unless you add "in an environment where nothing else that affects it happens". Like, say, someone cutting off your legs. And the same goes for every other trait.
    - zlg_codes 3y ago
      The only other thing to affect height is nutrition. Assuming the same nutrition, certain ethnicities will trend taller than others. Denying that is just straight stupidity because you can observe the trend just by going outside.
      - astrange 3y ago
        > The only other thing to affect height is nutrition. And puberty blockers, pituitary gland diseases, and lack of sleep. …and cutting your legs off. > Assuming the same nutrition, certain ethnicities will trend taller than others. See, one thing about statistics is they're not necessarily valid for individuals, because eg not all statistical distributions have any values at their averages.
    - jamilton 3y ago
      Saying something is genetically determined is not necessarily the same as saying it's completely genetically determined. And it's not meaningless, because there are things that aren't genetically determined at all, or at least are only genetically determined to such a small amount that they wouldn't be described as being genetically determined.
      - astrange 3y ago
        Nothing is "not genetically determined at all" because part of the causation of every human trait involves you being a human. But you should be clearer than that about what your theory of causation is.

pas 3y ago

Explanation or justification? Does current scientific consensus (let's say there's one) say that this mentality is okay or that it's a bias that we should be aware (and try to correct against)?

tomhoward 3y ago
I see genetics being used as a “just so” explanation for all kinds of things that the science doesn’t really support, by people with different ideologies depending on the thing they’re trying to justify. We take obviously mostly-genetically-determined traits like height, eye/hair/skin colour, facial features etc, then extrapolate to argue/assume that all kinds of other things must also be genetically determined, like cognition, behavioral patterns, emotional patterns, for which there is far less evidence of them being hard-coded in DNA. This will be confounded by the fact that we can often see commonalities in these factors from parents to children and between siblings, and assume these commonalities exist due to genetic coding, not recognizing that there are other forms of inheritance/conditioning that can explain these commonalities, but that even if these inherited patterns are deeply ingrained, they can be altered via the right practices (emotional “letting go” being the most important in my experience).
- concordDance 3y ago
  Are you actually aware of the evidence on these matters? There have been studies on adopted children and identical twins. What are the results? Here's a random study on criminality I was looking at a bit ago: https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/frisell2010.pdf https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/frisell2010.pdf
  - astrange 3y ago
    Genetics is not a credible science, ie, it's just another one of the many sciences that thinks correlation is causation. This is because it can't do experiments, so it can't really show causation. (Identical twins are close to a natural experiment but not a very good one as even they don't have the same genetics.)
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      Genetics experiments are quite commonplace these days, for example in vaccine development, plant engineering, and many other applications
      - astrange 3y ago
        I mean on humans.
        ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        Your claim that genetics, a science affecting all life, is not a credible science, doesn't mention humans at all, so I doubt you did. If you have to limit it to "humans only", the claim falls apart anyways, because genetics isn't human-specific
        astrange 3y ago
        Your idea of an argument is to say that people don't know what their own posts mean?
        ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        Who are you to tell us to not trust our eyes? When you're wrong at trivia, can you just claim "I meant [the right answer]"? If that's what you meant, perhaps you would have said it, but if you would had said it, it would have ruined your argument. Simply put, you haven't made a convincing case that genetics, a science affecting all life, not just humans, is "not a credible science", despite indeed involving experiments all the time. Below is where you can make that case.
- astrange 3y ago
  This is a bad defense because you're using "genetically determined", which is either meaningless or not true. Height is not genetically determined unless you add "in an environment where nothing else that affects it happens". Like, say, someone cutting off your legs. And the same goes for every other trait.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    The only other thing to affect height is nutrition. Assuming the same nutrition, certain ethnicities will trend taller than others. Denying that is just straight stupidity because you can observe the trend just by going outside.
    - astrange 3y ago
      > The only other thing to affect height is nutrition. And puberty blockers, pituitary gland diseases, and lack of sleep. …and cutting your legs off. > Assuming the same nutrition, certain ethnicities will trend taller than others. See, one thing about statistics is they're not necessarily valid for individuals, because eg not all statistical distributions have any values at their averages.
  - jamilton 3y ago
    Saying something is genetically determined is not necessarily the same as saying it's completely genetically determined. And it's not meaningless, because there are things that aren't genetically determined at all, or at least are only genetically determined to such a small amount that they wouldn't be described as being genetically determined.
    - astrange 3y ago
      Nothing is "not genetically determined at all" because part of the causation of every human trait involves you being a human. But you should be clearer than that about what your theory of causation is.