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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

the SAT is an IQ test, btw. who would have thought that could lead to better results in cognitive fields? shocked. shocked!

Now that there is some grudgin recognition of this idea, it might do to remind people that high SAT scores on Verbal are correlated, and salient in non STEM subjects.

and that there is no known way to increase scores significantly, neither from early intervention nor sustained practice. And, depressingly from an egalitarian perspective, there is a strong genetic correlation.

You could read more about the measured statistics, the "mainstream science on intelligence" and "bell curve"s, but sadly the scientists studying it have been cancelled by people who did not like the results.

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> And, depressingly from an egalitarian perspective, there is a strong genetic correlation.

No, there isn't. Hope that helps your mood!

Yes there is. Stop drinking the woke-aid.

Look at where advanced civilisations started, and it's clear as night and day.

Is molecular genetics woke now?

(Or are you just trolling me? If that's what it is, I have it coming, but I can't tell.)

Egypt in Africa? Mesopotamia aka modern Iraq? India? China?

Looking at that you'd have to wonder how ever it ended with Whitey on the Moon.

Maybe there are other factors at play.

It is indeed awfully difficult to explain the genetically determined part of European civilizational dominance given that we were getting our asses handed to us by the Abbassids less than an eyeblink ago in genetic timescales.

This doesn't have that much to do with the genetic heritability of intelligence, which is a measurement in proportion to environmental variability. Civilizations with farming, metallurgy, etc. showed up independently in many places although at highly varying times due to human dispersal. You can also see that intelligence isn't all its cracked up to be from an evolutionary point of view since it sometimes goes down. Has it gone up in most places over the last few thousand or ten thousand years overall. I think so, read the recent Reich paper (EDIT: this Reich https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/publications). But it doesn't only go up all the time.

Disease factors were probably the biggest factor in selection until very recently (and maybe now is just a temporary blip before a return to the historical pattern). Disease almost wiped out the Native Americans and strongly held sub-Saharan Africa back.

saying things doesn't make them true, but studying them informs what you should think and say.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927/

Intelligence — the ability to learn, reason and solve problems — is at the forefront of behavioural genetic research. Intelligence is highly heritable and predicts important educational, occupational and health outcomes better than any other trait. Recent genome-wide association studies have successfully identified inherited genome sequence differences that account for 20% of the 50% heritability of intelligence. These findings open new avenues for research into the causes and consequences of intelligence using genome-wide polygenic scores that aggregate the effects of thousands of genetic variants. In this Review, we highlight the latest innovations and insights from the genetics of intelligence and their applications and implications for science and society.

read what it says carefully: they've correlated genes to a small percentage of the heritability of intelligence. That means there is much more heritability than they have yet found a source for.

Life is an intelligence test. During the school years, differences in intelligence are largely the reason why some children master the curriculum more readily than other children. Differences in school performance predominantly inform prospects for further education, which in turn lead to social and economic opportunities such as occupation and income. In the world of work, intelligence matters beyond educational attainment because it involves the ability to adapt to novel challenges and tasks that describe the different levels of complexity of occupations. Intelligence also spills over into many aspects of everyday life such as the selection of romantic partners and choices about health care1. This is why intelligence — often called general cognitive ability2 — predicts educational outcomes3, occupational outcomes4,5 and health outcomes6 better than any other trait. It is also the most stable psychological trait, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.54 from age 11 years to age 90 years7. Box 1 describes what intelligence is and how it is assessed.

I don't even have to argue with your cite (and I'm not a Plomin fan), since the numbers he's giving drastically slash heritability estimates from just a few years prior. If we were having this discussion 5 years ago, the claim would be that intelligence is 80% heritable. Now the foremost academic proponent of hereditarianism arguably concedes it could be as low as 20%. Molecular genetics numbers put it lower, in the mid-teens, with rare-variant hypotheses capping it there; that is: it could get lower, but it can't get higher (unless you come up with a novel mechanism).

I want to add: I put as much effort into my original comment disagreeing with your claim as you put into your casual assertion that some people are genetically inferior to others. I feel comfortable with how this discussion has played out.

Where are you getting 20% from? That's not what Plomin is saying in what you are replying to. Are you confusing the fraction of GWAS estimate heritability out of total heritability (10/50 = 20%) with a top or bottom bound?

That's a good question. As I understand this paper (it's come up on HN before), Plomin takes the consensus of the literature† as establishing 50% heritability via twin studies (accounting for "half the variance in intelligence").

The project then is to use modern genetics to replicate that number and, as importantly, to identify the genes that contribute to that variance. Of course, he's unable to do so: this is the famous "Missing Heritability Problem", that large-scale genetic surveys, as methods have improved and deconfounding is applied, have only managed to associate specific genes with something like 15% of the variance.

In this paper (again, as I understand it) Plomin takes 10% of the total variance as established by GWAS, and then expects much of the rest of the "missing" heritability to be accounted for by rare variants that current GWAS methods can't pick up. But the math for that probably can't work (this paper is from 2018, though, and everything I've read about rare variant stuff has been in the last few years).

† I don't think he believes this, though; I think he's an 80%-er.

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