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There is a world of difference between "is a physical trait" and "is attached to, associated with, or correlated with physical traits". The way I see it, saying
by Xirdus 1mo ago
There is a world of difference between "is a physical trait" and "is attached to, associated with, or correlated with physical traits". The way I see it, saying that intelligence is correlated with physical body features is admitting that intelligence is not a physical trait itself after all.
The first reason I insist on the difference is because absolutely everything indirectly depends on physicality of the biological body. Spirituality aside, there isn't a single thing about humans that doesn't depend on the shape or size or chemistry or electrical charge of something somewhere. This makes "physical trait" an utterly useless category, one that clearly includes playing piano, and I really don't like that.
The second reason I insist on the difference is because the correlation doesn't have to be linear. There's no reaso why it can't be quadratic or logarithmic or exponential or hyperbolic or whatever. Being a literal physical feature imposes normal distribution with tight variance. Merely being correlated does not. If you still want to argue geniuses are not that much more intelligent than average people, you'd need more evidence than simple hereditability.
When you say "intelligence is a physical trait", I hear "there is a part of parts of the brain that have a certain total volume/mass/density/number of neurons/synapses/neural pathways/etc., and that number is the literal definition of intelligence". It's how it works for every other thing that we call a physical trait. If you didn't mean it like that, maybe you should have used a different terminology from the get go.
Now excuse me while I go looking for 10-15 more citations on the genetic component of musical ability that you're definitely not going to dismiss as irrelevant for one reason or another.
- dahart 1mo agoIt seems like you maybe missed the part in the middle of the thread where I said you’re right about IQ scores and what we call intelligence not being a so called physical trait. I’m not arguing that at this point and haven’t been for a while, because it became clear we are talking about different things. I’m looking for more mature terminology at this point, established phrases and concepts we can agree on, because this is too sloppy of a discussion. You’re making assumptions and jumping to a weird conclusion about what ‘physical traits’ means and I don’t agree that it’s useless, other than that the term has somewhat poisoned this discussion and is preventing progress. Physical traits are phenotypes, and phenotypes are an extremely useful notion in a discussion of genetics vs environment vs chance. Your statement about correlation being an admission of not being a physical trait sounds naive to me; it’s ignoring the existence of polygenic traits. Another source of terminology confusion here is the difference in what we mean by ‘intelligence’, and it’s probably way more important than what ‘physical attribute’ means. I really meant something different by ‘intelligence’ than you mean, and that’s my fault for not clarifying I was trying to focus on heritability and factor out learned skill. I would love to see additional references about music and heredity, I’m looking forward to it.