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Comment by sjducb | Hacker News Reader

It seems surprising that IQ would not be heritable. Literally everything else is heritable.

Height, skin colour, sporting ability, body weight, eye colour, cancer risk, most disease risk, beauty.

Why would IQ be mostly random when other things are very heritable?

Occums razor says pick the simplest hypothesis that explains the data. The onus is on the blank slate crew to find some good data to demonstrate that IQ is not mostly heritable.

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IQ is not "mostly random". It's highly correlated with the quality of your education. Kind of like how height is highly correlated with childhood nutrition, and sporting ability is highly correlated with practicing sports.

The article is about how hard it is to tease these confounding factors apart. A highly intelligent parent is likely to prioritize their children's education. A hypothetical study that concludes "intelligent parents raise intelligent children" could easily be construed in favor of either the heriditarian or blank-slatist perspective.

Then be surprised, because we have comparative numbers (across a variety of different methodologies) for basic phenotypical traits like height and complex behavioral phenotypes like intelligence and educational achievement, and they do not line up. You're not supposed to use that razor to blind yourself.

Of course IQ is heritable to a certain degree. Why do you pretend to see blank slatism where there is none?

Another strawman from someone who DNRTFA.

No one here, including the author linked, is suggesting what you propose.

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