In other words - Junior should not be presumed to be smarter, fitter, more deserving, or destined for success, just because his parents did well. No matter how attractive that conclusion might sound, to people who consider themselves to be the "better" sort.
success has components of luck as in "right place, right time" for someone with the right qualities and connections, and many of the very successful are quick to admit this
I am a 3rd generation machinist along the paternal line, and although the machines I operate are in expensive labs, those my father and grandfather operated were probably just as challenging. Engineering also seems to often run in the family. How much is nature and nuture? "It varies" is a safe response
"That is, once you include the rare variants, the amount of genetic variation that “should” exist but doesn’t shrinks to only 12%. Plausibly an even bigger study, investigating even rarer variants, could shrink the gap further, all the way to zero."
Of course, even then heritability will not be 100%.
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/the-missing-heritabi...
Oh. Never mind. You rewrote your comment after I provided the cite. Well played.
The problem is most people's zealous desire to read socially self-serving conclusions into any data they can find on such subjects. And when they really like the Q.E.D. punchline, humans have very low standards for the "logic" used to reach it.
what planet are you living on?
also your comment was completely incorrect and missing the entire point of twin studies.
Ironically IQ is also popular amongst people in a very different situation, that is, people that aren’t actually successful “in the real world” but score highly on aptitude tests. Their high scores serve as an identity pedestal to look down upon others and set themselves apart from the masses. This seems to be the primary demographic of IQ-requirement organizations.
Now of course there are scientific studies on this topic, but let’s not pretend like this is a cultural meme because writers like Cremieux are just tirelessly searching for the truth, no matter what ideological consequences that may have. They quite obviously have a viewpoint first and then work backwards from there to justify it.
As a meta comment: the whole obsession with IQ as a kind of unchanging permanent quality seems very much out of tune with how biological systems actually work, and is kind of a remnant of a Platonic worldview. That is, it’s not dynamic/process/system oriented in the way that nature actually works, but instead is in search of eternal qualities á la Plato.
Being smart is a poor proxy for success, you have to have access to the right knowledge and resources at the right time, and often the “smart” move is short term.
It could be argued (and often is), that the reason intelligence is strongly predicted based on heritage (though of course: not guaranteed) is due to your parents interactions with you as a child.
like many things, I’m not qualified to answer.
Sufficed to say that some of the smartest people I personally know are more limited in their success than some of the confident yet much less intelligent people I know: who seem to be, in general, much more successful.
That said, the experiences of my youth in animal husbandry make me a strong believer in genetic determinism.
It is empirically practical to use breeding alone to predict cognitive abilities, behaviors, tendencies, and elicitable capabilities in animals, given identical rearing environments. Right down to nervous ticks, inherent fears, very specific nuisance behaviors, as well as predictable desirable behaviors, dispositions, and fascinations. Even preference for certain types and even colors (shades?) of toys over others. The fine grained nature of determinism in behavioral tendencies is remarkable.
There is so much overlap of structure and function within mammals that it is extraordinary to claim that apes are somehow exceptional by categorically fundamental properties rather than degree.
Great apes are much more adaptable and capable than most animals, and environment probably plays a much greater role in our development because of the power of our faculty for learning, but that does nothing to negate the underlying heritability of extremely fine grained cognitive traits.
Animals are in no way blank slates when they are born. Genetic or in-utero programming plays a huge role in cognitive processes, and cognitive capacity is a direct dependent of physical structure.
One does not predict the other necessarily, but there is still a difference between a partially full mug and an overflowing shot glass, even if they hold the same volume in practice.
We are born with unequal capacities in both physical and cognitive realms. It is an uncomfortable truth. We do ourselves a disservice when we try to pretend inconvenient things are not so just so we don’t have to face uncomfortable choices.
It also gives some valid argumentation to people who promote race theory... which is, obviously, a racist ideology.
It doesn't require any such thing. It doesn't take a super genius to understand the roles of chance and circumstance have on one's lot in life.
There aren’t a lot of billionaires out there acting in a way that shows this. At best, they give the idea some lip service.
What would that be?
From there, the sky is the limit. Directly helping underserved communities access the same networks/resources is another. A handful of billionaires have also donated their entire wealth, but the laudability of that depends on your ethical stance of course.
I doubt there's even a claim that this is right ethically or that you are not displaying a hipocrisy here. How far is your own wealth from the worldwide median?
That someone could be a billionaire, spend their time writing essays about how inequality is good, retweet and give attention to people insisting that intelligence and success are mostly inheritable – and yet also deeply understand that their success is largely dependent on chance? Uh, I guess such a person could exist, but it seems like you’re just nitpicking here.
And of course there is an obvious ethical claim here: that people who benefit from a system and become wealthy should feel some sort of ethical obligation to contribute to or improve access to that system. Or at least not actively try to deny that such a system helped them. This is a complicated topic which is why I said “depending on one’s ethical views.”
No idea what my personal situation has to do with this, but I assure you, I’m not a billionaire, nor am I wealthy, unless merely being born in a Western country implies that one is wealthy (a nonsensical claim.)
What’s particularly annoying is that this can so easily be proven false. No amount of heritable IQ points are gonna help if you’re born to a starving family escaping genocide in Sudan.
But also, “IQ” has been a useful characteristic for a few decades to maybe a few centuries at most. For most of human existence, pure physical strength was likely much more useful than the ability to do abstract thinking.
So even if we accept all these easily disproven ideas, it’s still clearly evident that the fact that they’re in a position to benefit from these supposedly heritable traits is only because they happen to be extremely fortunate to be born in a time and place where these traits are actually valuable.
Several 9s of humans that ever existed would have found an Einstein level of genius worthless
Substituting "generations" for "9s", whatever that is...
Citation needed.
How do you know it didn't take Einsteinian-level intelligence to first make the leap that fire can be controlled, or flint knapped, or ochre used to paint images?
I've never understood the idea that winning the genetic lottery somehow makes a person more "deserving" or "worthy" than another. To me, the whole idea of "meritocracy" is a moral abomination.
Ideally everyone would get the same chances to do valuable things but that's not how the world is setup. Unfortunately.
However trying to change that must be done with care as it's easy to increase injustice (looking at most communist systems)
I'm not fond of the term "rewarded." I understand how prices are determined by supply and demand in economics. Obviously in the labor market, some skill that is in high demand and/or short supply will bring a high price. However, economics are largely amoral. The economic system is not an ethical system to reward the worthy and punish the unworthy, just a method of distributing resources.
There's both an uncontroversial and a controversial interpretation of "meritocracy." Uncontroversially, those who are best qualified for a job should do that job, especially for life-and-death jobs like in medicine. This is how the argument usually starts, with the uncontroversial interpretation, but then it slyly shifts to the controverisal interpretation, that certain people "deserve" more money than others, often a lot more money, due to their qualifications. And while we may want economic incentives for the most qualified people to persue certain jobs, overall it doesn't appear to me that the economic incentives align with societal benefit. For example, we massively reward professional athletes and entertainers much more than doctors and nurses.
Ultimately, the controversial notion of meritocracy is used to justify enormous disparities of wealth, where a few people have so much money that they can buy politicians and elections, whereas others are so poor that they have trouble affording the basics like food, shelter, and medical care. And supposedly that's all based on "merit", which I think is crap.
Being able to correctly say, for instance, which of four options a "façade" is most like has nothing to do with inherent intelligence; it has to do with whether you were taught the meaning of the word "façade", and the four (often somewhat uncommon) words presented as the choices. The same is true for any of the questions that are, even in part, testing your vocabulary.
Presenting such a test to two people, one of whom was educated at a private school in New York City, and came from a family that highly valued reading and education, and the other at a public school in rural upstate NY, and came from a family that thought it was "too woke" for boys to read books, it is painfully obvious which one will do better, regardless of any genetic factors.
I agree that that could be a motivation. But I would also say that having a motivation for a given result doesn't preclude that result. That is generally true in science.
I'm not an expert. But there seems to be fairly overwhelming evidence that some significant amount of intelligence is heritable. That IQ is a reasonably good measure (or proxy) for intelligence. And that IQ correlates well with a lot of other things like educational attainment and income.
That doesn't mean that your genes determine your future. But it does suggest that some people are "born" in a better position than others -- aside from their socio-economic status.
This shouldn't be controversial. Height is well-known to be heritable. Being tall gives you a better shot at making the NBA. The same is true for many other things.
I don't understand why so many commenters here are arguing against a straw man. The article author does not and never did believe in the "blank slate" theory. The author has a "centrist" view that genes matter but are not the only determining factor.
> The author has a "centrist" view that genes matter but are not the only determining factor.
Nobody thinks genes are the only determining factor (that's a straw man on the other side :)
Most people agree it is somewhere on a continuum. Some people think it leans more one way; others the other way. Some people want it to lean more one way; others want it to lean more the other.
How so? You said, "This shouldn't be controversial. Height is well-known to be heritable. Being tall gives you a better shot at making the NBA. The same is true for many other things." But there's no indication that the previous comment was arguing the opposite of that. Rather, the previous comment was arguing against this idea: "Surely success and intelligence is just an inborn thing, and thus inevitable and unchangeable. There’s nothing they can do, and it was always going to end up that way. Inevitability erases any feelings or guilt or shame."
I'm sorry if I didn't get my point across in a way that satisfies you. But I suggest you take a step back and re-read what both of us wrote. Or maybe just move on.
My understanding is that the author thinks the heritability of IQ is somewhere between 30% and 50%, but not 80% or 100%, and not 20% or 0%.
Why would you decide to hold a position strongly based on a minuscule and extremely biased sample set and reject even considering data and studies outside of your immediate experience?
Unless you’re afraid your conclusion might be challenged? Wouldn’t it be interesting either way? Either to find out that your children are typical or to find out that you and they are special in some way?
I understand many people are not interested in or curious about science, but don’t understand people who are both disinterested but also strongly hold particular positions on scientific questions.
Isn't your question exactly that addressed by the (admittedly too long) article? That the graph Paul Graham presented proving the dominance of inheritance wasn't based on any science or data?
There are many studies of twins that try to determine if genes influence intelligence.
Some look at twins who are raised together. One [1] concludes that "MZ (identical) twins differ on average by 6 IQ points, while DZ (fraternal) twins differ on average by 10 IQ points".
Yes? I mentioned them because the article was about a bunch of studies? I was asking the poster why you would not be interested in the validity of such studies and just decide that "common sense" was enough to make a decision?
The question was asked with genuine curiosity as this forum is mostly filled with people who appreciate science and empiricism. And I was hoping there could be a reasonable discussion.
But I'm out. An interesting discussion should be possible here purely based on data and statistics but clearly - from the downvotes - that I've stepped into some toxic American identity politic minefield.
I learned quite a time ago that it's risky to raise certain scientific subjects with USAians including my US relatives: biological evolution, the science of climate change, renewable energy or justifications for gun control - without the conversation getting emotional and heated. But I still find it weird.
Centuries of success with empirical based science is a direct rejection of the approach of trusting "just common sense".
> Only someone without kids would boil this down to a "single data point".
Why are you personalizing this? I have a family and have observed children grow from emergence from the womb and I grew in a much larger family. I'm not sure what the relevance is to the points being discussed. This seems like argument by anecdotal fallacy.
> I also deny that I have do anything to prove heritability, how about you prove the opposite?
I didn't ask you to prove anything. I asked you why you have no interest in looking at a scientific question beyond "I trust my own observations and my conclusion"?
And this question seemingly misses the point - it not a binary question about whether traits are inherited or not but about the degree of the role of inheritance. The author of the piece emphasizes this point extensively.
The salient point of the too-long article was about flaws in a seminal paper on this subject where the author Bouchard presented carefully collected data for identical twins - showing remarkably low variance suggesting a high degree of inheritance. But he hid the data he had collected for non-identical twins, which would have provided us with a basis for judging the significance of the findings regarding identical twins.
> It's a conclusion that is so obvious to the impartial mind that to be confused about it is a sign of extreme ideological indoctrination.
Can we just discuss the science and statistics here?
I was raised with five siblings, yet only I got into fights at school, and made my mother cry on a regular basis. Each of my sibs is similar and each of us is strikingly different, too.
As opposed to holding on to a belief that has been reinforced via personal experience countless times until very strong evidence proves otherwise. You end up with a set of beliefs that have a much higher chance of being true this way.
Or, confirmation bias gives a much higher chance of you believing so.
People fight and die over beliefs reinforced via personal experience. It's not proof against incorrectness.
Another thing is that sometimes it might be beneficial to believe something that isn't true. If you knew for a fact that tomorrow 99% of population will suffer extremely painful death then from the point of view of an individual the correct move would be to commit painless suicide, but the survival of humanity relies on everyone believing they'll be all fine. This is obviously a caricatural example, but there are lots of such lies that keep the society going, and "we're all equal" is just one of them.
Personally, I find it extremely difficult to believe that we'd be born equal, because evolution works only if some individuals are better than others, and I strongly believe that evolution is a thing.
No, we don't.
> I find it extremely difficult to believe that we'd be born equal
This is not what the article author claims or ever claimed.
My father is adopted.
The comment you wrote really isn't a response to anything this article said.
But now you hear nothing about this study. I'm not sure if it's because the results are tainted by eugenics, or if the techniques they developed were wrong...
Height, skin colour, sporting ability, body weight, eye colour, cancer risk, most disease risk, beauty.
Why would IQ be mostly random when other things are very heritable?
Occums razor says pick the simplest hypothesis that explains the data. The onus is on the blank slate crew to find some good data to demonstrate that IQ is not mostly heritable.
The article is about how hard it is to tease these confounding factors apart. A highly intelligent parent is likely to prioritize their children's education. A hypothetical study that concludes "intelligent parents raise intelligent children" could easily be construed in favor of either the heriditarian or blank-slatist perspective.
No one here, including the author linked, is suggesting what you propose.
tptacek•2mo ago
Related, from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42200209