Comment by elevatedastalt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elevatedastalt | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, heritability is a population statistic for specific traits. I don't think anyone is arguing that individuals have heritability, just like individuals can't be "diverse".

> Knowing how much a trait varies, or fails to vary, with genes tells you nothing about whether its inherited.

I am not sure what this is trying to convey. Because I think there's clear cases where stuff is inheritable, and clear cases where stuff isn't, and that's a very meaningful distinction to make from a sociological perspective.

For eg. consider skin color and accent. The former is fully inheritable, the latter is completely uninhabitable.

A Scottish kid raised by Africa foster parents in Nigeria will still look like his biological parents and have their skin complexion, while he will sound entirely like how people sound in Nigeria.

One would be an idiot for trying to force him to have darker skin, or to have a Scottish accent, because we understand that one is genetically controlled, and the other is socially / culturally controlled.

Now in these cases it was as absolute as you can get with these things. But can we not imagine that there's an aspect of genetic influence on many other aspects that can also be somewhat affected culturally?

I don't care what we call it, but can we at least agree that this distinction can exist and might be sociologically salient?

I don't think anyone is arguing that individuals have heritability

isn't saying that someone's character is inherited from their parents such a claim?

No it isn't. Here's it's not an individual that is being claimed to have heritability. It's their 'character', which is a trait, that is being claimed to be heritable.

For eg. if you have dark skinned parents, you are likely to be dark skinned yourself.

So 'skin color' is a trait that is being claimed to have heritability.

The point is that heritability is not inheritability. The former only tracks the latter in highly specific experimental circumstances that generally do not obtain.

Of course a scottish accent isnt inheritable. The point is that the heritability statistic is near 100%.

There is no statistics for inheritability. We have no idea, in general, what is inheritable and what isnt. It requires the kinds of experiments which are practically impossible or unethical.

What's the diff between heritability and inheritability?

They are entirely different. That's my entire point.

Heritability doesnt mean inheritability. A trait is "heritable" only if it varies with the genes of some population, so a scottish accent is nearly 100% heritable.

Heritability was a statistic invented for when the experimenter was in control of what genes were in what population (for breeding plants). It is meaningless when genes arent being controlled.

Heritability is the idea that if you control which plant has which gene, and the plants are different, then it's probably because of the gene. But its applied to cases where no one is in control of the gene, so it's meaningless.

When I said scottish accents are nearly 100% heritable, that's correct, as a matter of fact. If you compute the heritability stat for scottish accents it'd be nearly 100%.

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