why adoption instead of IVF?
Add to that, the usual HN phenomenon that we're observing how the world and our countries (USA & Korea) seem be going down the toilet, and that makes us feel hesitant to bring a new human being into the world, especially when there are kids already here that could use a loving family.
That is, one kid per woman halves the population. If the axiom is at least maintaining, ideally growing the population, every woman needs to give birth to at least two and ideally three or more kids.
Of course, this isn't to say I'm telling other people what to do regarding offspring, because I hate that kind of intrusive attitude. I've already decided I'm having no kids, because fuck the human world; and anyone who comes bitching at me about it one way or another can take a hike and pound sand. So I'm not going to be hypocritical and turn around and tell other people what to do in the bedroom.
But if the purpose for all the noise behind childbearing is to take population count trends out of the negatives, advising "one kid" not only doesn't help solve the problem but actively makes it worse.
As for what decafninja (or any individual for that matter) decides upon in the bedroom, that's for him to decide and his business alone. I'm not going to comment because it's none of my business.
I'm just pointing out that in a wider discussion of "oh noes population decline oh noes low birth rates", it's not constructive to be talking about having 1 kid when there's a hard minimum of having 2 kids and ideally more.
If people voluntarily self limit the size of the population that is a good thing because it means we won't need to shoot each other if it turns out we are straining the earth too much.
My point was that there is no “we” when we speak of humanity as a broad aggregate this way. There are specific constituencies—for instance, Bolsenaro and his supporters in Brazil—who are blocking the policies that most of us want to implement to stop climate change. It’s not “we” who are the problem, it’s “them”.
If you blame humanity in the aggregate you misdirect your energies and misidentify the solution.
The thing to do is to apply the appropriate political levers to weaken and oppose the constituencies who prioritize status-quo fossil-fuel energy policies over civilizational stability and the well-being of life on Earth. Blaming all of humanity is the equivalent of giving up and doing nothing, and makes the problem worse.
Thankfully, in our case, our parents don't care, and neither do we.
I'm also an only child, as is my wife, so this means both our branches of our families' genetic bloodlines are effectively ending (albeit the onus for this is on the male side). But again - we don't care.
The true reason for valuing lineages is more about social rank/class protectionism.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/distinctive-habsbu...
"no value" here is probably in tens, maybe hundreds of trillions of dollars in the present time PPP basis.
I am hoping Sapolsky's latest book may shed some light on the subject without the Wade/Murray "bell curve" implications.
The thought has occurred to me. I would describe both my wife and I as being stable mannered and not prone to rash decisions. Odds are a biological child of ours might resemble that personality.
I also acknowledge a child we adopt may have had biological parents with very different personalities than us, and therefore the child may be very different from us in personality.
At the same time, I don't believe that just because the child's biological parents might have been wild and crazy, the child is doomed to the same fate even with our care.
Tell me you haven't read many behavioral genetics papers without telling me you haven't read many behavioral genetics papers :).
But I do believe nurture can help to prevent or exacerbate those issues
However the main risk factor for trying and then abusing opioids, for example, is trauma, typically but not only in childhood. Basically, it’s both nature and nurture, as most things are. Where the percentages lie for both, I don’t think we know yet.
For instance parents who have genes that increase impulsivity are more likely to e beat their kids exposing them to trauma, the kids are more likely to do dumb things that expose themselves to trauma, and the kids are more likely to do impulsive things like try drugs.
So it's hard to disentangle what portion of the effects of trauma are direct and which are confounds.
Is the number of human toes genetic? How heritable is the number of toes on a human being?
Is wearing a dress genetic? How heritable is whether or not you wear a dress?
Heritability isn’t proof that a trait is genetic, but it’s strong evidence once you start addressing confounding factors. As I recall, the IQ heritability research was done with twin studies.
This is like shocking to me we’re even debating this. I would have assumed it’s conventional wisdom.
Traits can trivially be minimally heritable and totally genetically determined. The number of fingers on your hands is genetically determined by your Hox genes. But the variation in the number of fingers on your hand (more precisely: across the population) is overwhelmingly not genetically determined. Genetically determined, low heritability.
Traits can trivially be maximally heritable and not at all genetically determined. Whether or not you wear lipstick is largely decided by XY vs. XX. But there's no gene for wearing lipstick; if the cultural ball had broken a different way, we might all be wearing lipstick, or none of us. Genetically unencumbered, high heritability.
So: you haven't said anything. You're not even wrong. All you pointed out was that you can do a study and determine that population variations in intelligence (or bad driving, or social trust, or fear of dentists) are traceable to genetic variance. That doesn't mean that genes literally encode the outcome.
Heritability isn't "strong evidence". It's barely evidence at all. It's literally just a framing of the question, which your argument simply begs. Irresponsibly, at that. None of this should be news to you.
I don't even have to take a position on the blighted question of whether intelligence is genetically determined (or whether we can measure it meaningfully at all, or whether it's fixed at birth or fluid, or whether outcomes in intellectual performance are epigenetic). And I'm not. I'm just pointing out that your argument, the one I replied to, was literally vacuous.
No, it wasn't. Such a set up is impossible because of lack of samples and sampling bias.
All that "IQ is X% heritable" means is that they ran a linear regression on a large data set and saw that the variance error in the regression reduced by X% when they plugged in parental IQ as a covariate in the regression.
This is a correlational study as causal studies are impossible. Correlational studies are inherently spurious and ignore lots of confounding factors. Nevertheless, we can say that what we routinely observe in real life - smart parents having smart kids, has been grounded in real data.
For getting effect of race on IQ you plug in race as a covariate. Typically, most of the race based IQ research remove parental IQ as a covariate. All of these regression based studies are dubious and there is no real way to correct it. A large data set of twins who were separated at birth could help, but there are caveats there as well.
As an aside, Jordan Peterson seems to love these race IQ regression models and likes to call them hard undeniable science. He immediately switched sides when talking about climate models and how these models can't be trusted, because the simple choice of covariate included creates absolutely unreliable and biased models.
For eg, if you take Einstein's kid and let wolves raise him, we can expect the kids IQ to be somewhat lower.
I would guess IQ is primarily genetic, but these heritability studies don't show that.
https://www.newsweek.com/identical-twins-raised-apart-differ...
There was a 16 point IQ difference between twins. Nurture had a strong impact on IQ in this case.
Not that we don't change as we age obviously, but it's definitely not a blank slate by a mile.
We do know some friends that were though, and did do exactly that.
Also IVF is significantly cheaper in Korea? We know some friends who are low income that had the procedure done there.