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> You are arguing that intelligence is primarily trained and not primarily a physical trait, no? No I'm not. Not as stated. You are correct in that the more t
by Xirdus 1mo ago
> You are arguing that intelligence is primarily trained and not primarily a physical trait, no?
No I'm not. Not as stated.
You are correct in that the more trainable intelligence is, the less people care about IQ. Coincidentally, people's caring about IQ has been falling drastically the last couple decades.
> What is a naturally gifted child prodigy, if not evidence of physical traits?
It's evidence that it's not a physical trait at all. At least not the kind that scales with size (and therefore would have a relatively narrow variance among adults with both the median and the modal value in the dead center between 3rd and 97th percentile, while undergoing a massive change around the time of puberty, so much so that reaching average post-puberty score before puberty is near impossible).
Obviously everything ultimately comes down to neural connections powering the brain. Knitting, bull riding and playing piano are just as much physical attributes as intelligence. We live in a physical world after all. But that makes the term "physical trait" quite useless. So instead, I'm choosing to interpret physical trait as anything that is almost entirely determined by measurable aspects of a person's physical body. And intelligence just isn't it.
Did you mean to say "intelligence is primarily genetic" instead? That I would agree with.
- dahart 1mo ago> Did you mean to say “intelligence is primarily genetic” instead? That I would agree with. Perhaps I did mean to say child prodigies are evidence of the heritability of intelligence; that it suggests intelligence has a large, possibly majority, genetic component, if kids are outliers without much training. Okay, so you’ve been objecting to ‘physical traits’ but agree with ‘genetic’… What is the difference in your mind between those? I see them as, broadly speaking, the same thing. Physical traits are phenotypes, no? Genetics is the biological component I’ve been talking about all along, and heritability is defined as that which is genetic, i.e., not explained by the environment or chance, i.e., not due to training. Knitting, bull riding, and playing piano are neither intelligence, nor are they physical attributes. They are learned skills. It seems some people may have genes that may help them learn these skills faster than other people, but these are not ‘physical traits’ in any way shape or form, and your commentary on that term isn’t making sense to me right now. If you think piano playing is a ‘physical trait’, that could explain much of the miscommunication in this thread.
- Xirdus 1mo agoBut musical skills are largely genetic. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4073543/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4073543/ I still refuse to call playing piano a physical trait.
- dahart 1mo agoI must have misunderstood you above, we completely agree there; piano playing is not a physical trait. We are finally getting somewhere, it’s too bad this got too deep before finding a basis for productive conversation. The paper you linked is very interesting, I would just note that your strong claim with the qualifier “largely” in your statement is not supported by the paper. The paper does not demonstrate musical skills are primarily or ‘largely’ genetic, it only suggests there may be some heritability of music perception. At least some of genes it mentions are nothing more than hearing anatomy, so of course they affect music, but they also affect basic speed and any audio. It’d be wise to not overstate what that paper is saying.
- Xirdus 1mo agoI could link to a bunch more studies that find more direct genetic links to musical aptitude in particular rather than musical perception in general. But I'd rather skip the busy work and jump straight to the point where we both agree to the following. 1. Musical talent is hereditary to a significant degree. 2. Musical talent is NOT a physical trait. 3. Therefore, being hereditary is not a proof of being a physical trait, despite the literal physical differences in DNA sequence. Deal?
- dahart 1mo ago#1 is not a justifiable statement as written, #2 is true, #3 needs better terminology. Genetics does determine physical traits (physical traits are defined as phenotypes), heredity is about genetic variation. If you agree musical ability or intelligence are significantly genetic, then it follows that musical ability or intelligence must be attached to, associated with, or correlated with physical traits of some kind. In light of your acceptance of intelligence having a significant genetic component, I wanted to re-evaluate the discussion from the top. You pushed back on my attempts to discuss genetics and made strong claims about training being important for intelligence, and now you’re making strong claims about genetics being important. I don’t know where that leaves us. My original point, recall, was that genetic variation doesn’t support the popular high-IQ narrative of so called super geniuses. Genetics cannot explain your claim of 100x difference in intelligence, and the only thing we’ve talked about that does explain it is training, which is not genetic, and, we both agree, boring.