[flagged]
Citation desperately needed.
How can you prove that empirically? What is your methodology for controlling for environmental factors in making that assertion, including factors associated with access to resources, tutors, having a full belly every morning, and not being constantly flooded with stress hormones as a result of grappling with the daily reality of living in poverty?
It's quite a leap to claim that immigration is the cause of the US IQ decline. The best explanations seem to be that it's environmental [2]. The general decline in IQ is impacting several countries.
0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Environmental factors Of China have been changing in the past 3 decades leading to extraordinary gain in IQ. This re normalizes the IQ every year which leads to what appears to be a decline in IQ in the US.
Genetics plays a part because with the economic infrastructure of China supporting students to their maximum potential it brings the playing field on par with US. China no longer has to deal with poverty effecting IQ scores.
This with environment in parity the only thing left is really genetics.
I'll bet you 3:1 odds embryo selection works. If you're serious about your anti-hereditarian position, take me up on my offer.
So, no, of course I'm not going to take you up on that bet. It's like betting against Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is a farce but I'm not dumb enough to short it.
I'm not an "anti-heriditarian". I think there's probably a lot of value, long term, in embryo selection for things like disease avoidance. I also believe there's natural variability in cognitive ability; I don't believe all people are "blank slates"; that's a caricature (or, if you like, a deliberate wrong-footing of people who reflexively reject psychometrics and genetics for ideological reasons) of the actual concern I have.
Finally, I don't know what anything you said has to do with what I said. I said, very simply, "heritability != DNA". That's an objective, positive claim. Was this bet your attempt at rebutting it?
I'm sure you've read Gwern's essay on polygenic trait inheritance. I'm not sure repeating the literature would be productive here. We have every reason to believe that embryo selection and genetic engineering more generally won't just "cure disease" but make us taller, smarter, more beautiful, and longer lived -- and there's nothing wrong with that.
Of course there's a lot of variability. At some point technology will improve to the point that denying the effect exists will seem ridiculous, although I'm sure plenty will try.
I will say, though, that downplaying trait inheritance and the way genetics is the mechanism for this inheritance produces models that don't predict reality nearly as well as models that incorporate hereditary via genetics, and especially when it comes to education, we're throwing public money down the toilet as long as we make policy using inaccurate models.
I don't know what any of the rest of this has to do with what I said. I ask again: are you writing all this by way of declaring that "heritability == DNA"? That's a straightforward discussion we can have. Why avoid it?
The “IQ is BS” meme mostly comes from misunderstandings and misuse. People often assume IQ is meant to measure all kinds of intelligence when it really focuses on certain reasoning and problem-solving skills. Early tests had cultural biases, and while modern versions address this better, that history sticks. It’s also been used for discriminatory purposes, which has left a bad taste even when the measurement itself is valid. Critics are right that IQ doesn’t capture creativity, emotional intelligence, or practical skills—but psychologists never claimed it did.
In short, IQ is a valid and reliable measure for a specific set of cognitive abilities. It’s not the whole story of intelligence, but dismissing it outright ignores a large and consistent body of evidence.
Also, that replication crisis, that was in psychology, was it?
The replication crisis doesn't apply. IQ is one of the most studied and replicated statistics in psychology. IQ IS in fact the exception to the replication crisis. Your beliefs are a myth.
Wealthier parents tend to be smarter (that's how they got wealthy or managed to keep inherited wealth) and tend to have smarter kids... who then tend to up on the wealthier side of the spectrum.
It's very unfair. It's also very real. Your fantasy is not real.
Your fantasy is not real.
Existence of a correlation is enough reason to break down any analyses by demographic data to have a clearer picture of what's going on. That's just basic data science.
Yet through some black magic that same genetics that allows a person to be taller then another person and that makes a human more intelligent then a fish, this same genetics doesn’t touch intelligence between different humans.
Makes sense.
It’s not immigrants. Immigrants are in general more intelligent than people from the US.
I’m saying the average IQ of people outside of the US has risen and that is a huge part of the declining IQ in the US.
IQ is normalized every year and if the IQ of say China rises significantly every year that would appear as if the US IQ is lowering even if everything in the US actuality stayed the same.
If anything immigrants heighten the IQ of the US. Look at the proportion of Faang engineers. These companies essentially require IQ tests for entry. There’s a reason why these companies are overloaded with immigrants or people with origins from abroad.
A lot of people making stupid assumptions about what I said in this thread. I am in fact really remarking on China. The economic rise to power makes IQ tests originating from China influence the normalization of IQ in a big way.
It’s still offensive to people but I believe on average IQ is generally higher for China than the US. The bell curve is essentially a bit more to the right for China.
Also try not to get offended. These are statistical facts. I feel immigrants got offended but really what I’m saying should be offensive to white people.
The most elegant proof of IQ being linked to genetics:
The same person taking an IQ test twice has mean correlation of 0.85 or above in their scores. Identical twins reared together: 0.86 Identical twins reared apart: 0.76 Biological parent and child: 0.42 Adoptive parent and child: 0.19 And of course, any two random people will have a correlation close to 0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlation...
If you do not believe this, then I would have to hypothesize you are succumbing to motivated reasoning out of a deeper value system placing equality above all other values. This is a well known pattern of belief amongst leftists, where they think humans are infinitely malleable blank slates and all inequalities can be rectified given enough social engineering. They deny objective group differences because they want a utopia where everyone is equal. This is clearly unrealistic, but furthermore it contradicts their value of diversity, where if people are diverse, then you would expect variation in all traits, intelligence included.
How is this proof of IQ being linked to genetics if adoptive parents can have 1/2 of the correlation that identical twins have? I think this proves that genetics only has a minor part, and upbringing/environment seems to be the most important factor.
Second of all, correlation coefficients do not scale linearly. A correlation of r=0.85 means r^2 explains 0.72 of the variance, while a correlation of 0.19 explains 0.03 of the variance. In other words, adoptive parents have 0.03/0.72=4% of the effect on IQ as being an identical twin does.
But leaving aside things like Trisomy 21, your evidence here is twin study heritability. Heritability is not genetic determinism; it's almost a category error to claim otherwise, since "heritability" is really just a way of framing the question of whether something is genetically determined --- you still have to answer the question! There's a whole big research field controversy about this, "missing heritability", exploring (in part) why molecular genetics results, especially when corrected for things like within-family bias, are returning such lower heritability estimates than classic twin studies.
I do not believe that any random child selected at birth has an equivalent potential to win a Fields Medal, given the optimal environment to do that in. But the "hard truth nobody wants to face", from the parent commenter, is subtextually about race --- and there the evidence is a wreck; extraordinarily unlikely to bear any fruit.
Is there any new reading here? I used to follow this stuff much more closely a decade ago, but came to the conclusion most scientists will go to great lengths to avoid saying some races (if they don’t barrage you with pedantry regarding what race is) are on average different in some axis than others. There were a few out there who were able to say the politically incorrect thing only because objective science was strongly in their favor, but they still had the full force of the consensus academia coming down on them.
I lost interest when, much like history, it became obvious the field was too political for any real truth to be found. Maybe in 100 years or so.
I think what some people are noticing is that there aren't splashy results to confirm, like, The Bell Curve. Yeah, that's because The Bell Curve was really dumb; it's from the phlogiston era of this science.
I’ll try again in 100 years :)
But keep fantasizing you're born in the best race in the world, lucky you