For those who don't click the link. This is getting to really dangerous territory. Political correctness wants to remove genetics altogether from the study of the human condition. Blank-slate cultists are scared of what research will find.
The folks who have objections to this sort of research aren't actually existentialists when you push them even a tiny bit on their beliefs. The tabula rasa is just used as a rhetorical tool to deflect from criticism with regards to certain uncomfortable genetic questions.
It's a philosophy of convenience, easily discarded when one needs to argue in favor of, for instance, certain forms of equity.
All "heritability" research is just an analysis of correlations between genes and expressed behaviour. On these grounds a scottish accent is highly heritable, since the accent correlates extremely highly with some genes.
We do not have the means to create new human beings with different genetic profiles and observe them accross many environments, as they develop, to determine if "somehow" a gene causes anything so macroscopic like "intelligence".
So, quite literally: we cannot do science. We cannot create experiments to test hypotheses.
Genes have no plausible mechanism to "cause" intelligence. If they play a significant role, it is a very large number of genes building tissues which are completely opaque (brains, etc.) whose interactions with the environment are completely opaque.
Heritability research, and "psych-genetic research" of this kind is, necessarily, pseudoscience. It's adhearents are the poorest statistians and have the least understanding of the scientific method you could hope for.
We have no scientific theory of intelligence which provides causal variables that we can experiment with; we have no theory of biological mechanism, likewise; we have no theory of genetic mechanism --- all we have are some aging loons with stats software content to put iq-test-scores (ie., people competing patterns of shapes...) and Genes into it.
Whatever can be found by these loons isn't worth a scientist finding. "Data" isnt innocent, it is collected and used for a reason; and pseudoscience isnt innocent.
Correlating genes with ESP ability is likewise nonesense, and that has as much scientific merit.
To give a simple example, one of the best tools is comparing identical twins to non-identical ones. If the correlation between the fraternal twins is substantially less than the correlation between the identical twins then we can know a genetic factor us in play.
Your argument is also too general in that it labels all observational science as pseudoscience. Is astronomy pseudoscience? You don't need to be able to manipulate the environment to do science, just have a hypothesis and a way I'd getting new observations that would probe/disprove the hypothesis.
Twin studies assume a model of environmental variation which cannot be evidenced, because the relevant target of study (a human being in its environment) cannot be experimented on to evidence anything. Twin studies are not RCTs (which are themselves the minimum an experiment needs to be to count as science).
Indeed, the assumed model of the interaction between genes and the environment is *plainly false* (namely, that "equality" between environments exists and that it has linear non-feedback, non-cyclical effects).
Twin studies on star signs would likewise produce as compelling evidence that star signs cause personality. (Can you see why that would be?)
Science requires such experiments take place. No amount of post-hoc analysis of correlation can produce a causal explanation. One must control causes to do so.
Hence, much of this abuse of statistics is unreporducible pseudoscience; it is well known to be outside these fields by anyone with any credible understanding of statistics.
Every chemist will defend physics; and every chemist, biology. And every biologist neuroscience.
Can you cite me anythihg other than the abject horror of real scientists outside these fields on reading their reports?
I'm sorry to break the news: this is peudoscience in the tradiiton of pseudoscience which was invented by psychology's repurposing of statistics for post-hoc analysis of correlation on human data (ie., the most complex systems known to exist) which fails even basic tests of scientific credibility.
Complex systems resist study by the use of the scientific method, and require the best minds in modelling and statistics to even produce "rule of thumb" models (eg., consider the climate).
What we have in heritability, psychometric, etc. research is loons studying the climate (ie., analogously, humans) by putting thermometer readings into GUI stats software and publishing the results.
They're fools. Neo-homeopaths, whose lab coat is "statistics"/.
You're very confused about how a lot of things work on fairly fundamental levels which would take hours to disentangle, so all I can do is recommend learning more on philosophy of science and read some more papers on heritability. Maybe this one picked not entirely at random: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Holland-2/publica...
I am presently researching a PhD in the philosophy of science and causal analysis; I have two degrees in physics, and I have spend the last nearly 10 years with major lead researchers and data scientists across many industries.
My opinions here are a summary of a talk I recently delivered at a conference on issues applying "ordinary statistical methods" to complex systems, esp. those with profound hysteresis, such as people. But likewise, my opinions arent rare amongst people with similar experience to me: psychmetrics, psychology, heritability research, and so on -- are widely regarded amongst my peers as pseudoscience.
It's unlikely I've made a basic mistake.
His argument as I understand it, is that the MZ twins have a different environment in ways such as being treated as more similar by their parents. This means that high similarity in one respect (such as appearance or temperament) can contaminate the natural experiment by making people assume they are more similar in another respect (such as intelligence or learning style) and treating them the same where that second trait is relevant, thus making the second trait more highly correlated than they would be by genes alone (e.g. you assume they're equally intelligent and thus give them the same education).
This has some merit but is quite far from a knock-down argument.
My previous talks with a professor studying genetics in Oxford has given me the impression that heritability is settled science and theres a huge volume of papers in the area, so I'm not going to change my mind based on an anonymous comment and a paper by a non-academic with an axe to grind without first going back and consulting with her.
Given your statements here I am quite confused as to how you can have a degree in physics while dismissing science where you can't make interventions... did you study astronomy at all in your degree?
I'm also confused as to how you state that genes do not cause intelligence, do you think a mouse is less intelligent than a human due to its lack of soul or something?
[1] https://geneillusions.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/twin_2002_...
My issue with something like a human being is that the state space is going to be non-linear, in the sense that suppose we have an explanatory model of the human in their environment, state = h(x_env, x_body, t, ...)
This makes controlling, really in any sense, those variables is going to be nearly impossible. So close values in `x` space, eg., two environments that look nearly-identical, are going to have radically different values in state space.
Psychologists, using linear "mereological intuitions" based on classical physics, will deny this. A physicist however, would not make this mistake. In cases of hysteresis and complexity, we're well-aware tiny variations in an environment can produce radically different paths thru' state space.
(And I think people are more complex than magnets!).
The fundamental issue with the field of studying human behaviour with scientific methods, is that (imv), we dont have scientific methods. We shouldn't expect science to provide us a method which works in every env.
I have, perhaps, high standards on what counts as science; it's esteem imv comes from disciplines that can meet those standards. Everyone else is rent-seeking.
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Edit:
> genes do not cause intelligence
If there's an infinite number of possible people P, our genes make a subset of those impossible because they're not "biologically possible".
There is a narrow sense of "cause" which therefore says that genes play a causal role.
I was taking a more robust sense, in which (one plausible view), is that the set of effects we call "intelligence" are gounded in the body, but a cause of the environment.
Splitting these issues out is very subtle however.
One simple way of making this clear: most possible bodies arent intelligent; they dont speak; they dont think; etc. And all those are biologically possible.
Just as genes dont cause English speaking, they dont "obviously" cause intelligence. Most biologically possible people are basically unable to think, never having been developed in a social environment.
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Not only they tell us genetics doesn't exist, but we can't say it's shitty science because they're the ones telling us what's shitty science and what's not! Brilliant!
It's not as if the research caused these people to have the views they have; they use it as a post-hoc justification. And more importantly it's not as if they can't do their own research, even if it's bad quality (or even fake). By remaining intentionally ignorant yourself you won't have a strong answer, and let the "MAGA and similar organisations" take the initiative and control the debate.
Besides, it's not as if reality is going to change just because we don't research it, and if we understand reality better we can maybe do better by everyone.
Given that SO many women and minorities actively support and vote for these groups and candidates, and this is a democratic system, is this really such a bad thing in this case?
In short, if groups of people actively and happily vote against their own best interests, and to keep themselves oppressed, is it wrong for them to be oppressed? Or, in this case, is democracy even a system we should be upholding? And if not, what is the alternative? A system where a group of unelected, unaccountable elites run society because they know what's best? I honestly don't have the answer here.
What do you mean by this?
FWIW as far as I can tell, the OP is correct in that 55% of white women, 36% of hispanic men, and 30% of hispanic women voted for trump. It was also telling that in the 2020 election support for the republican party from all minority groups increased by a few percentage points. I think that counts as "SO many". It's not a majority, but I don't think the OP claimed that.
>Do you take issue with the premise? Do you consider the finding not to be meaningful?
Just wanted some elaboration. It's a bold claim given with no data.
"SO many," if defined as less than 50%, is irrelivant given a democratic sysyem with only two parties. Therefore "SO many" must refer to more than 50%.
Hitler was elected by a minority of the population, but American liberals seem to have forgotten that. It's becoming easy to see how leaders like Hitler come into power. If Trump had been much more competent and destructive than he really was, the US would be really screwed right now, while American liberals would still be sitting around whining about how "gerrymandering" got him elected by a tiny, tiny, tiny minority. (Yes, I know gerrymandering only affects elections for the House members. American liberals don't: they routinely blame gerrymandering for governor's elections and Senatorial elections.)
Seems like a bit of a jump to assume they're distributed the same way and start making conclusions based on that.
The answer is yes. And in fact that's how fascism typically rises to power.
I feel like this is a paradox.
If we're voting on dinner, and I say I'm not going to eat at any restaurant with an F health inspector rating, we can still vote.
Democracy always has to accept that we must set limits on choice. I can't vote for a foreign national to be our president. But honestly, I'm not that broken up about that limit. Just like I wouldn't be that broken up about limiting the ability to elect fascists.
Ok, and who sets those limits? If an unelected group sets the limits, then what you have is not a democratic system at all; it's more like a 1-party state where you can vote who whomever you want, as long as The Party has approved them.
That doesn't replicate the conditions of national elections which are monopolistic and repeated. You can't opt to participate in a different group and you have to play all your games with the same rules - if you refuse to eat at F-grade restaurants you may end up starving.
In "real" elections you end up without the ability to set those convenient limits consistently or usefully.
>Note that none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences. Apparently, NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.