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Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

>found that kids living in households just above the federal povertylevel had gray matter volumes that were 3 to 4 percentage points below the norm for their age group. The lower volume was concentrated in the brain's frontal and temporal lobes, regions that are implicated in behavioral and learning problems. Among kids living below the federal poverty line, gray matter volumes were 8 to 10 percent below the norm. On average, these kids performed 4 to 7 points worse on standardized tests.

A partial explanation could also be that they grew up in poverty because their parents were too genetically stupid to earn good cash / living within their means. I think this hypothesis is supported by adoption studies.

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A partial explanation could also be that they grew up in poverty because their parents were too genetically stupid to earn good cash / living within their means. I think this hypothesis is supported by adoption studies.

And a partial explanation for why you believe this is that you've been indoctrinated and propagandized and peer-group socialized into believing this. See the studies that compare incomes between adopted and biological children and adoptive and biological parents. Environment is by far the determninant.

Genes are by far the most important factor. If you've bred animals, you'll understand this. Take a couple of poor animals and breed them. They'll have poor offspring. You can do all you like in their environment, but they'll still be poor. Select high quality parents, and you'll have high quality offspring. Selective breeding works extremely well to produce the best quality animals/plants.

I have no idea why we're in an age where it's so un-politically correct to say this about humans. Some people just seem to have their fingers in their ears when it comes to inconvenient facts that don't mesh with their "everyone is equal!" agenda.

edit: Downvote away. I'm sure that'll change the obvious biological facts.

Genes may play a factor, but they are certainly not the most important one, or even a significant one in this context. If you grow up in a poor family / poor neighborhood, you won't have access to the same education as those who grow up in middle-class areas. Education is far more important to what we consider "intelligence" in this context. Basic math, financial literacy, or even reading comprehension is far more a result of your education than it is of your genetic material.

It's easy, as a product of good education and a safe environment, to look at people in poverty and say "I guess they're not as smart as me." This hides a far more uncomfortable truth, which is that everyone who doesn't grow up in poverty has access to better education, better opportunities, and a better environment than those in poverty. Try as you might to claim that people in poverty are just "stupider", it's simply impossible to make this comparison given that people on opposite ends of the financial spectrum grow up in totally different environments. It's short-sighted to attribute this to genetics and nothing else.

I'm just going to hazard a guess that you didn't grow up in poverty, am I right? If you had, I'm sure you would have a very different idea about how difficult it is to grow up without all the advantages of a middle-class upbringing.

I don't think it's correct to say one way or the other what the critical driver is, as to my knowledge we don't have the necessary data to make such statements. Both genetics and environment likely play a role. We as a society have decided that it is unethical / not in our societal best interest to perform the experiments necessary to further investigate the mechanism, and so we should focus our efforts on alleviating environmental drivers of the problem. With that being said, to write off theoretical heritable causes of poverty or low intelligence just because they makes us uncomfortable would be bad science. We should be transparent about the limitations of our data and admit that as a society we are content with not knowing the answer to this question.

The other issue is that society has become so detached from nature that a lot of people are completely oblivious. If you breed animals, questions like this are pretty obvious and easy to answer.

I grew up in a reasonably poor household. We certainly weren't wealthy. I couldn't care less about poverty or not poverty, it's irrelevant. I was incredibly lucky to have good parents, with 'smart' genes.

Well obviously because this is how the pro-eugenics conversation begins. After all, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons have a place in society.

They seem to have accounted for that: > These differences weren’t present at birth, Wolfe says. “We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same, regardless of whether or not they were growing up in a poor family. But then as we traced them to age 4, we found areas that were developing more slowly among infants in low-income families.”

I don't think anyone discounts genetics completely. I just think for something like your mental capacity as a human will vary dramatically by your upbringing and teachings.

Take your 'high quality animal' and starve it occasionally. Wake it up with sirens. Beat it regularly and capriciously. Injure it. Compare that to one that is treated well but 'poor quality'. Also are we testing these animals in a maze or just size, speed, strength?

“We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same, regardless of whether or not they were growing up in a poor family."

What does that show? I'm sure if you checked the sperm and egg you could say "they're basically the same". All that means is the brain isn't fully developed before the age of 1. Big whoop.

> Environment is by far the determinant.

That's not my impression of the literature. It seems like income is highly heritable and shared environment explains very little. See for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3592970/ or https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/38881/HECER....

If you know of some papers that support your view, I'd be interested to see them.

Did you read these papers? I only skimmed them, but it seems that the first of them basically concludes that there's not enough data, and the second one only contrasts non-identical twins (so their conclusion is that shared environment doesn't influence lifetime income), where a better option would be comparing twins that were separated and grew up in poor/rich families.

As I said, I only skimmed the studies, have I missed anything essential?

I'm not aware of any studies on this topic that look at separated identical twins, but the sample sizes would have to be terribly small wouldn't they? Parents who adopt children are also not randomly selected, and almost never live in poverty, so I'm not sure whether you could trust the results even with a decent sample.

I don't quite understand your point about shared environment not being meaningful. The thesis of the original article is that the environment that a poor kid grows up in can cause physical changes in the brain, which cause them to be poor as an adult. One alternate explanation for the correlation between parent and child poverty is that some people are poor for genetic reasons, and those genetics are passed on to their children, who also end up poor. Distinguishing between the effect of shared environment and genetics on adult income is exactly what you need to decide between those two explanations.

Well, that's what I'm trying to say, proving this is really difficult, which is why I'm not inclined to believe it. It might be easier to do a study with kids of poor (genetic) parents that were adopted (immediately after birth) by rich parents.

> I don't quite understand your point about shared environment not being meaningful.

I'll have to think about this one more, I'm not sure it really matters.

This seems to be what you're looking for: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21409. But I can't find an ungated version.

Thanks! Well, according to the abstract, the findings of this paper suggest that environment is more important than genetics.

> Our findings suggest that wealth transmission is not primarily because children from wealthier families are inherently more talented or more able but that, even in relatively egalitarian Sweden, wealth begets wealth.

Try this: Is Financial Success a Product of Inherited Genes? [0]

[0] http://ineteconomics.org/ideas-papers/blog/is-financial-succ...

The studies cited in this article were observational, not mechanistic. What they found was that there was a correlation between being poor and having less grey matter development, not that being poor caused less grey matter development. They then speculated as to possible causes driving this correlation, but did not prove any of them in a controlled way. It would be incorrect based on the evidence they provided to say that there is definitive proof that environment is the determinant.

I would be willing to change my mind if you had a good argument.

After checking around a little I'll give you the reference "Genes and behaviour" in "Principles of neural science" by Eric R. Kandel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Neural_Science)

edited to be nicer.

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