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Hyperventilate all you want. If China actually creates an effective eugenics program (which is what I assume the end-goal of this is), the rest of the world is

Hyperventilate all you want. If China actually creates an effective eugenics program (which is what I assume the end-goal of this is), the rest of the world is curtains. Look at the title of this guy's book: The Genius In All Of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong Well, what I've been told is that everybody who discusses Genetics and IQ honestly are effectively Nazis and should be driven from public life. Will his book disabuse the world of this notion...or, does it merely repeat it? http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385523653 http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=978038... DNA does not make us who we are Well, I guess that explains why humans so frequently give birth to squirrels.

quizbiz 17y ago
But identical twins are very different people despite the same DNA.
- daniel-cussen 17y ago
  The identical twins I know are very similar to each other. Just my two cents of a data point.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    I have nieces who are identical twins (they were tested for monozygosity after being born). But they are not even identical in appearance--I'm decent at telling them apart, and their mom does that very well. Professional geneticists are aware of cases of monozygotic twins being quite discordant in height, IQ, or various other phenotypical characteristics of interest. Some of those cases are reported in detail in the better textbooks on human genetics.
    - miked 17y ago
      But they are not even identical in appearance--I'm decent at telling them apart, and their mom does that very well. That rather sounds to me like they're very similar in appearance. In any case, it's brains and personality that count the most.
    - byrneseyeview 17y ago
      Professional geneticists are aware of cases They are also aware of statistics, and confirmation bias, right?
      - tokenadult 17y ago
        How would confirmation bias tend to run on this issue?
        byrneseyeview 17y ago
        Depends on how many people grew up watching Sesame Street and listening to NPR, compared to how many people grew up watching... uh... all those mainstream media sources that take the yes-there-is-human-biodiversity side of the human biodiversity debate.
        tokenadult 17y ago
        I referred to professional geneticists, persons who enter a graduate program of study of genetics and gain a Ph.D. and academic position in that discipline. From above: Professional geneticists are aware of cases of monozygotic twins being quite discordant in height, IQ, or various other phenotypical characteristics of interest. Some of those cases are reported in detail in the better textbooks on human genetics.
- mynameishere 17y ago
  Twin studies say otherwise. Not sure why you would think this.
- Devilboy 17y ago
  Identical twins are amazingly similar - even when they're separated at birth. In fact identical twins reared apart are much more similar than fraternal twins reared together. Check out the wikipedia page on this, they have some nice charts of various traits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    they have some nice charts of various traits. I suppose you are referring to Figure 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Twin-concordances.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Twin-concordances.jpg in the Wikipedia article you kindly linked. What that chart shows, of course, is that twins can be quite DISCORDANT in a variety of socially important traits, even though they share a common genome. That should alert us to the fact that more than genes matter in human development. (Pretty nearly everyone agrees that genes matter for something, but the issue is how much expression of genes can be influenced by nongenetic influences on human development.)
    - Devilboy 17y ago
      Well yes, I don't disagree with you there. If you plant two seeds with identical DNA but only give one of them enough water and sunlight then of course they're going to be different heights and weights after a few weeks. But you'll probably not find identical twin brothers where one becomes a NBA pro and the other a jockey.
      - tokenadult 17y ago
        I should have jumped right in while posting my first comment to mention the pair of twins (tested for monozygosity, which no one would believe without testing) whose photograph appears in one edition of the Vogel-Motulsky textbook on human genetics. They are very discordant in height, and one is thin enough to be a horse-racing jockey (but maybe not strong enough for that) while the other is within the height range of professional basketball players, I think. People who read the literature on the subject find amazing examples (which serve as counterexamples to what people in the general public might guess) of all kinds of interesting phenomena of genetics.
tokenadult 17y ago
what I've been told is that everybody who discusses Genetics and IQ honestly are effectively Nazis and should be driven from public life. Who told you that? Someone here on HN, or someone somewhere else? Just yesterday, writing a review of a different book, I came upon this interesting quotation from Thomas Sowell: "The taboo against discussing race and IQ has not left this an open question. On the contrary, it has had the perverse effect of freezing an existing majority of testing experts in favor of a belief that racial IQ differences are influenced by genetics. No belief can be refuted if it cannot be discussed." Agreeing with Sowell on the endorsement of open inquiry, I would love to have people discuss carefully, thoughtfully, and without name-calling what they mean when they talk about genetic influences on human intelligence and all other influences on human intelligence. This is a much-researched issue, and I have taken care to meet some of the eminent researchers in person and to read the peer-reviewed journal articles and major monographs of many more researchers on the issue for more than a decade. Facts are established by careful observation and experimentation, and the implications of those facts are discovered by considering yet more facts.
- mynameishere 17y ago
  Sowell is an extreme outlier. Anyway, the "nature vs. nurture" argument invariable avoids a simple fact: Nature has a one-time cost, nurture has an infinitely-ongoing cost. I mean: Even if the left is right about schools, institutions, teachers, practices, education, etc, etc, being able to equalize the differences between people, you are essentially dividing the population into two parts: 1. Those who naturally meet a standard, and 2. Those who require 500,000 dollars worth of state intervention to meet the same standard.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    1. Those who naturally meet a standard, and 2. Those who require 500,000 dollars worth of state intervention to meet the same standard. What is your proposal for determining which group a person belongs to, if we accept the existence of two such disparate groups? How would your proposal take into account such known facts (from psychometric psychology) as 1) error in estimation in IQ testing, 2) individual variability in IQ over the course of childhood, 3) the influence of personal drive and motivation (acknowledged by ALL psychologists) in the expression of IQ as academic achievement, 4) the known malleability of IQ under less expensive interventions in some experimental studies of individuals and across whole societies over recent generations?
yters 17y ago
The real problem is thinking that IQ and reason are the same thing. Just because someone can process fast does not mean they process correctly, and the latter is the most important quality.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Just because someone can process fast does not mean they process correctly, and the latter is the most important quality. Yes, this is the emerging consensus in psychological research, informed by many interesting experiments in cognitive science and behavioral economics. http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1 http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1

quizbiz 17y ago

But identical twins are very different people despite the same DNA.

daniel-cussen 17y ago
The identical twins I know are very similar to each other. Just my two cents of a data point.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  I have nieces who are identical twins (they were tested for monozygosity after being born). But they are not even identical in appearance--I'm decent at telling them apart, and their mom does that very well. Professional geneticists are aware of cases of monozygotic twins being quite discordant in height, IQ, or various other phenotypical characteristics of interest. Some of those cases are reported in detail in the better textbooks on human genetics.
  - miked 17y ago
    But they are not even identical in appearance--I'm decent at telling them apart, and their mom does that very well. That rather sounds to me like they're very similar in appearance. In any case, it's brains and personality that count the most.
  - byrneseyeview 17y ago
    Professional geneticists are aware of cases They are also aware of statistics, and confirmation bias, right?
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      How would confirmation bias tend to run on this issue?
      - byrneseyeview 17y ago
        Depends on how many people grew up watching Sesame Street and listening to NPR, compared to how many people grew up watching... uh... all those mainstream media sources that take the yes-there-is-human-biodiversity side of the human biodiversity debate.
        tokenadult 17y ago
        I referred to professional geneticists, persons who enter a graduate program of study of genetics and gain a Ph.D. and academic position in that discipline. From above: Professional geneticists are aware of cases of monozygotic twins being quite discordant in height, IQ, or various other phenotypical characteristics of interest. Some of those cases are reported in detail in the better textbooks on human genetics.
mynameishere 17y ago
Twin studies say otherwise. Not sure why you would think this.
Devilboy 17y ago
Identical twins are amazingly similar - even when they're separated at birth. In fact identical twins reared apart are much more similar than fraternal twins reared together. Check out the wikipedia page on this, they have some nice charts of various traits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study
- tokenadult 17y ago
  they have some nice charts of various traits. I suppose you are referring to Figure 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Twin-concordances.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Twin-concordances.jpg in the Wikipedia article you kindly linked. What that chart shows, of course, is that twins can be quite DISCORDANT in a variety of socially important traits, even though they share a common genome. That should alert us to the fact that more than genes matter in human development. (Pretty nearly everyone agrees that genes matter for something, but the issue is how much expression of genes can be influenced by nongenetic influences on human development.)
  - Devilboy 17y ago
    Well yes, I don't disagree with you there. If you plant two seeds with identical DNA but only give one of them enough water and sunlight then of course they're going to be different heights and weights after a few weeks. But you'll probably not find identical twin brothers where one becomes a NBA pro and the other a jockey.
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      I should have jumped right in while posting my first comment to mention the pair of twins (tested for monozygosity, which no one would believe without testing) whose photograph appears in one edition of the Vogel-Motulsky textbook on human genetics. They are very discordant in height, and one is thin enough to be a horse-racing jockey (but maybe not strong enough for that) while the other is within the height range of professional basketball players, I think. People who read the literature on the subject find amazing examples (which serve as counterexamples to what people in the general public might guess) of all kinds of interesting phenomena of genetics.

tokenadult 17y ago

what I've been told is that everybody who discusses Genetics and IQ honestly are effectively Nazis and should be driven from public life. Who told you that? Someone here on HN, or someone somewhere else? Just yesterday, writing a review of a different book, I came upon this interesting quotation from Thomas Sowell: "The taboo against discussing race and IQ has not left this an open question. On the contrary, it has had the perverse effect of freezing an existing majority of testing experts in favor of a belief that racial IQ differences are influenced by genetics. No belief can be refuted if it cannot be discussed." Agreeing with Sowell on the endorsement of open inquiry, I would love to have people discuss carefully, thoughtfully, and without name-calling what they mean when they talk about genetic influences on human intelligence and all other influences on human intelligence. This is a much-researched issue, and I have taken care to meet some of the eminent researchers in person and to read the peer-reviewed journal articles and major monographs of many more researchers on the issue for more than a decade. Facts are established by careful observation and experimentation, and the implications of those facts are discovered by considering yet more facts.

mynameishere 17y ago
Sowell is an extreme outlier. Anyway, the "nature vs. nurture" argument invariable avoids a simple fact: Nature has a one-time cost, nurture has an infinitely-ongoing cost. I mean: Even if the left is right about schools, institutions, teachers, practices, education, etc, etc, being able to equalize the differences between people, you are essentially dividing the population into two parts: 1. Those who naturally meet a standard, and 2. Those who require 500,000 dollars worth of state intervention to meet the same standard.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  1. Those who naturally meet a standard, and 2. Those who require 500,000 dollars worth of state intervention to meet the same standard. What is your proposal for determining which group a person belongs to, if we accept the existence of two such disparate groups? How would your proposal take into account such known facts (from psychometric psychology) as 1) error in estimation in IQ testing, 2) individual variability in IQ over the course of childhood, 3) the influence of personal drive and motivation (acknowledged by ALL psychologists) in the expression of IQ as academic achievement, 4) the known malleability of IQ under less expensive interventions in some experimental studies of individuals and across whole societies over recent generations?

yters 17y ago

The real problem is thinking that IQ and reason are the same thing. Just because someone can process fast does not mean they process correctly, and the latter is the most important quality.

tokenadult 17y ago
Just because someone can process fast does not mean they process correctly, and the latter is the most important quality. Yes, this is the emerging consensus in psychological research, informed by many interesting experiments in cognitive science and behavioral economics. http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1 http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1