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I don't even have to argue with your cite (and I'm not a Plomin fan), since the numbers he's giving drastically slash heritability estimates from just a few yea
by tptacek 5mo ago
I don't even have to argue with your cite (and I'm not a Plomin fan), since the numbers he's giving drastically slash heritability estimates from just a few years prior. If we were having this discussion 5 years ago, the claim would be that intelligence is 80% heritable. Now the foremost academic proponent of hereditarianism arguably concedes it could be as low as 20%. Molecular genetics numbers put it lower, in the mid-teens, with rare-variant hypotheses capping it there; that is: it could get lower, but it can't get higher (unless you come up with a novel mechanism).
I want to add: I put as much effort into my original comment disagreeing with your claim as you put into your casual assertion that some people are genetically inferior to others. I feel comfortable with how this discussion has played out.
- fsckboy 5mo ago[flagged]
- tptacek 5mo agoYour claim is "a strong genetic correlation". You can look up what that means mathematically.
- fsckboy 5mo ago[flagged]
- tptacek 5mo agoI'm really not all that interested in whatever this is. You made an objective claim about the science that is false. That's all I care about.
- fsckboy 5mo agoagain you dodge providing citations for your "I wish" fever dreams about science https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7RgN9ijwE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7RgN9ijwE4 -- tptacek
- fsckboy 5mo ago[flagged]
- tptacek 5mo agoI don't see where any of these things you're talking about appear on this thread. I see you claiming a "strong genetic correlation" for IQ, and then presenting as your citation Richard Plomin --- look him up --- presenting a not-strong correlation. I point that out, and then you demand a citation for me. My citation is the post you provided. This doesn't seem complicated.
- slowking2 5mo agoWhere are you getting 20% from? That's not what Plomin is saying in what you are replying to. Are you confusing the fraction of GWAS estimate heritability out of total heritability (10/50 = 20%) with a top or bottom bound?
- tptacek 5mo agoThat's a good question. As I understand this paper (it's come up on HN before), Plomin takes the consensus of the literature† as establishing 50% heritability via twin studies (accounting for "half the variance in intelligence"). The project then is to use modern genetics to replicate that number and, as importantly, to identify the genes that contribute to that variance. Of course, he's unable to do so: this is the famous "Missing Heritability Problem", that large-scale genetic surveys, as methods have improved and deconfounding is applied, have only managed to associate specific genes with something like 15% of the variance. In this paper (again, as I understand it) Plomin takes 10% of the total variance as established by GWAS, and then expects much of the rest of the "missing" heritability to be accounted for by rare variants that current GWAS methods can't pick up. But the math for that probably can't work (this paper is from 2018, though, and everything I've read about rare variant stuff has been in the last few years). † I don't think he believes this, though; I think he's an 80%-er.