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Comment by rafaelero | Hacker News Reader

What's missing here -- and in most of social sciences -- is the realization that adverse events is itself a product of genetics, and bad social outcomes are only weakly mediated through those events. Genetics is most of the story here and, although it's a depressing narrative, I'm sick of seeing people push a narrative that is not based on facts.

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I disagree with you but upvoted you. I think it's an important discussion to be had, because I have seen lots of conflicting data, but it's unfortunate the forum doesn't want to have it.

On what factual basis can you claim that adverse events are primarily driven by genetics?

On the face of it this seems ludicrous. A baby born to a mother living in a high-risk environment but then adopted by a low-risk family would likely do far better in their life than the inverse.

As someone who was on the adoption lists in California, we had to learn that statements like 'On the face of it this seems ludicrous. A baby born to a mother living in a high-risk environment but then adopted by a low-risk family would likely do far better in their life than the inverse.' were false. I don't know if it was right or wrong, but California in its mandated adoption (fostering) training courses thought that we should be disabused of the idea that taking in a child (even a newborn) would mean that the child wouldn't end up significantly like the genetic parent. There were several studies we had to read (don't have them) that supported this claim.

We didn't end up fostering, for unrelated reasons.

Do you remember the age ranges of those foster kids?

For us, because of our apartment we were looking at very young (less than a year old since we didn't have a separate bed room).

They showed us studies that even infant adoptees tended towards the educational achievement of their genetic parents, not their adopted ones, for example.

Again, I don't even know if it's right or wrong, but the agency we were working with thought we should know that.

EDIT: Okay, here's an example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/adoption-and-genetics-imp_b_4...

And reading that I'm reminded of the agency we were going with: PACT in Berkeley.

See for example the classic association between childhood maltreatment and future antisocial behavior [1]. As intuitive as it may seem that a child that is maltreated may develop negative externalizing behavior because of that, it looks like the true route of transmission is genetics, not environmental.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...

WTF? You are the product of your genetics AND your life experience. If anything, I've always felt that the latter, not the former, is the dominant factor. Granted, there are other biological factors apart from genetics that may disadvantage you at birth (e.g. exposure to alcohol / drugs / tobacco before birth). But to suggest that genetics is "most of the story" in determining your lifelong socioeconomic success, I find to be absurd.

> I find to be absurd

It's not intuitive, but it's what decades of behavioral genetics studies say. Adoptees have much stronger correlations with their biological parents than with the parents that adopted them (in all socially meaningful metrics: intelligence, income, etc.). Monozygotic twins correlate much stronger than dizygotic twins, etc.

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