Here is your error. You’re assuming that a physical difference in morphology is linked to behavioral or neural correlates. That’s not the case, since observed statistical- or group-level differences need not be driven by biology. You’re assuming biological determinism, and the evidence for direct genetic effects on behavior isn’t there.
Yes it is. There's an entire field for studying this called Behavioral Genetics.
The easiest evidence comes from comparing monozygotic and dizygotic twins (maternal vs fraternal twins). The variance in behavior is higher among the dizygotic twins who have different genomes.
Your parent is correct, the evidence for genetic effects only exist in pseudo-scientific fields using long debunked and flawed methodology. In other words, the “evidence” for behavioral genetics has failed to replicate.
How? And why do you think this completely invalidates their observations?
> We have also learned since the 1950s that your genes are not nearly as static as previously assumed
Aside from random mutations, your genes are essentially static for your lifetime. Genetic expression can change, but you don’t suddenly flip from being blue eyed to brown eyed because your genes change.
We already know that genetics predispose people to certain conditions like schizophrenia. We have ample evidence that behavioral traits are passed down via genes from centuries of animal breeding. How would anyone possibly conclude that genes have no impact on behavior?
If any of it was wrong not only, we would just not breed and select animals for specific traits but pretty much most of our civilisation wouldn't even exist as it does.
We got there precisely by selecting and using animals as tools and food security. Our farm animals are quite passive, precisely because we selected that trait.
There are some people who pay over 30K€ for the breeding of a specific horse in an attempt to create a race winner; and then we have guys like this, supposedly smart but who keep spiting nonsense and even pretend to have the authority of science behind him.
The evidence is right under everyone's nose. It is extremely hard to "prove" in a "scientific" (at some points statistics have too much interpretation behind them to be meaningful) way but anyone who is completely blinded by ideologies.
People who wouldn't be considered "smart" here have an old saying: "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree". They may not be smart but have infinitely more wisdom and what they say might be true more often than the "smart" peoples.
If you want to find more about what makes Behavioral Genetics such a terrible “scientific” endeavor and how the whole field is driven by ideology instead of science, there is a whole book dedicated to the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misbehaving_Science
The reason is pretty simple; it aligns with the sensibilities of the dominant ideology and not only do they want to believe the bullshit, in order to feel good and appear virtuous; they also use the bullshit to justify all kinds of policies and political nonsense. But it is fine by you I guess, why is that?
I agree that much of the research on genetics can potentially be used to justify some horrifying stuff. But it is not the role of science to avoid hard questions/answers just to please the political sensibilities of the people in power. In fact, dismissing the research without proper argumentation makes you look extremely suspicious and you end up being a hypocrite, playing politics for brownie points.
I don't doubt that some of the behavioral genetics research is complete bullshit but that's really not specific to this field of research, this is true for pretty much all of the research.
Newton famously spent a whole lot of time on alchemy research, yet he gave us classical mechanics. Darwin theories proved to be completely right, yet it took 20 years to be accepted by the scientific community and 50 years to be broadly accepted. You can still find religious zealots that will contest it today, the only reason it got accepted is because of the dwindling power of religion.
To me it feels like you want to keep the status quo of the "equality" religion and refuse to even look at the research seriously just because you don't like the implications.
The funny thing is that the system in place already has a selection process that is hiding in plain sight. How else do you justify that smarter people get to be paid more and some specific behaviors are rewarded while others are punished. And how come sociopathic people always find their way to power and get away with many horrible things?
When I was a child, my parents got a border collie. We had it very young, barely weaned and it never was in contact with any sheep, never worked on a farm, etc. Yet as it got older and we were hiking in some place with sheep herds, it would systematically run at them and try to "work" them. It was never educated to do so and was quite a pain in the ass sometimes precisely because it was never trained as a farm dog would have been. How do you explain this any other way than behavioral genetics? The answer is that you really can't.
The response from Behavioral Geneticists has been to simply lower the expectations, now we are looking at 100s of genes encoding a very complex behavior which is only visible if you measure 1000s of people, and is only if you account for the interaction effect with the environmental factors (E + G + E×G) in your model. This is in stark contrast with sociology which has proven it self very worthy as a science (despite the replication crisis mentioned above). We do not treat e.g. autism by isolating the “autism genes” and creating a drug to “cure” it, rather we learn about the symptoms, see which environmental factors trigger unease with autistic people and accommodate them. Unlike behavior genetics, sociology has been able to guide policy which actually helps people out of e.g. poverty, etc. It has been over 100 years since behavior genetics promised us the same, and some of us are done waiting for them to deliver.
> Darwin theories proved to be completely right, yet it took 20 years to be accepted by the scientific community and 50 years to be broadly accepted.
This simply isn’t true. Darwin’s work was immediately accepted. The origin of the species was a best seller, and his subsequent books were as well. There was some question whether natural selection was a strong enough mechanism to properly explain evolution, but that was pretty much it. If anything people like Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer took his theories too far by extrapolating them to sciences where they simply did not apply. If you are interested in this story I recommend reading some Stephen J. Gould he had a habit of setting the record straight for what natural selection wasn’t).
> How else do you justify that smarter people get to be paid more and some specific behaviors are rewarded while others are punished. And how come sociopathic people always find their way to power and get away with many horrible things?
The latter was pretty well explained by behaviorism. In capitalism your clearest way to success is by externalizing cost, if you push your costs onto others you will succeed, if you don‘t you will be outcompeted by those that do. In economics this is called perverse incentives. And is very accurately described using positive reinforcement. The former is explained in sociology where your biggest predictor of success (by far) is your generational wealth. People who are already wealthy are much more likely to succeed in various aspects of society. In sociology there is a point made how rich culture is rewarded in the education system (e.g. knowledge of Mozart is valued higher then knowledge of ABBA).
Sociology and Behaviorism are successful sciences who are constantly producing new predictions, offering new tools, and opening new questions (sociology much more then behaviorism though). Behavior genetics on the other hand has this age old prediction that there exist a gene for this and that, but consistently fails to find the gene that they claimed they would. There is no rich gene, and there is no psychopathic gene. Instead of offering new predictions, based off of new findings and opening new questions, behavior genetics simply scales down their initial claims, and says they will find some interactions between hundreds of genes which predict a slightly higher chance of something showing up in a large enough sample size. Meanwhile they hold tightly into a century old methodology of twin studies and the concept of heritability promising us that heritability actually means something and is actually a useful concept, we just need more time to see the results.
This is the behavior of a dying science. Science that hasn’t offered us anything of use for a long time, and is populated by dinosaurs desperately trying to make a point about a universe which simply doesn’t work the way they think it works.
Yes we can select a behavioral trade and breed animals that are more likely to behave in a certain way in a given situation. Those animals are usually also trained from birth to behave in that matter, demonstrating how important environmental interaction is to explaining behavior. Selective breeding is a proof that some behavior is heritable. But heritability does not mean that you can explain behavior with genetics, it just means that some behavior is more likely within some population, regardless of whether or not genes are the reason for the variety. Twin studies, even if they were valid and unbiased, fail to account for that, and are therefor not evidence for the wild claims of behavior genetics.
But it gets worse. Like I said before, twin studies are inherently biased and they don‘t actually show an accurate estimate of heritability as behavior geneticist claim. Twins are not a random sample of the population, twins share the same environment at least until the first minutes after birth (and quite often months or even years after birth), they often interact with each other, and even if they are separated soon after birth, they are more often adopted into similar (often high income) families. In short twin studies suffer from bad statistics resulting from junk-in junk-out.
And it gets even worse, because even looking past the fact that heritability does not offer any evidence for behavior genetics, and the fact that twin studies are fraught with bad statistics, the fundamental assumptions of twin studies are wrong. The human genome is not static throughout the live of the individual, our own genes only account for less then half of our genetic mass (the rest are from microorganisms some are there from birth, others leave and enter our bodies frequently, some we might even trade genes with, and a lot of them affect our behavior).
If you are interested, here is a 2014 report debunking twin studies as proof for behavior genetics: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9125.12036
EDIT: As for the claim that “[w]e already know that genetics predispose people to certain conditions like schizophrenia.”, that is not so clear either: https://slate.com/technology/2016/02/schizophrenia-genes-fou... and if you want an unopinionated review of the current status of the genetic theory of schizophrenia: this is a nice one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7465115/ and concludes:
> From the impressing 80% heritability stated by Sullivan, very little has been pinpointed and confirmed in live models or come even close to the ultimate goal of targeted therapy. [...] Many confounding variables still plague all levels of testing starting from sample sizes, absence of negative studies of insufficient follow-up for high credibility.
I have yet to see studies that demonstrate that different sexes, hormones or even ethnicities do not impact cognitive abilities or higher proficiency in different fields.
Whereas I've seen plenty that show that women, on average, demonstrate higher cognitive abilities linked to verbal proficiency, text comprehension or executive tasks. Women also tend to have better memory than men.
Facts are that there are genetic differences in how our brains work. And let's not ignore the huge importance of hormones, extremely potent regulators of how we function.
To ignore that we have differences that, at large, help explain statistics is asinine.
I merely stated that biology, should not be ignored when judging very large samples.
There are cross sex cognitive tests at which women and men tend to perform differently, such as spatial awareness or speed perception and many others.
What's the environmental or cultural factor behind the fact that a female's brain, on average, is able to judge speed much more correctly than a male?
It is not possible to rule out unfalsifiable hypotheses.