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Notes -
Jayman's blog has a lot of more-recent information which you may find interesting. Be sure to check the sidebar for other stuff.
That said you're probably about to get chastised for a low-effort (and probably bad-faith) TLD and I can't say I disagree.
Thanks! What’s the sidebar? The closest thing I see in the drop-down are the rules.
What would a higher effort request for more information look like?
I suspect you have a page rendering issue, or maybe mobile is different. This is the sidebar.
Ah, you meant the sidebar of Jaymans’s blog, not TheMotte. Great resources indeed.
Have there been previous Motte discussions on this topic that are particularly noteworthy?
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Can you link me to literature on individual vs group contributions to cognitive ability ?
I've heard about regressing to the mean, where top percentile parents will the child's cognitive ability move towards their combined group means, rather than the parental mean.
IE, if:
Then what would a & b look like ?
Put simply,
If 2 geniuses from a low group IQ community have a child, then is the child less likely to be genius than children of other geniuses ?
If 2 normies from a group with high group IQ have a child. Is the child more likely to be genius than children of other normies ?
This is a misunderstanding of regressing to the mean. Regression to the mean after selection happens because some part of IQ is non-inherited, and it is IQ as a whole that is selected for. When you go to the next generation, the part of IQ which is non-inherited returns to baseline, while the inherited mean does not, so the next generation will have a lower mean IQ. There's no spooky group inheritance involved.
But the answer to both questions is yes.
So it is environmental.
Wait, wouldn't the contradict your point ?
If it is straight up regression to the mean, then the child of any 2 identical geniuses is just as likely to be a genius as the child of any other 2 geniuses. Because all children of geniuses will regress to the overall mean of mankind at the same rate. (assuming the same environment)
So the answer for both would be 'No'.
I'd phrase my statement as : "Once you control for parents + environment, is the avg IQ of the parents' groups completely irrelevant?".
or
"Obama and Michelle's kids, can be expected to be as smart as a Chinese Obama and Chinese Michelle's kids".
It could be non-linear genetic (like favorable heterozygous combinations), or it could be random.
You speak of "mankind" but bear in mind, that during last hundreds of thousand of years, there were different species of humans (like, say, Flores Hobbit) and divergence started from seemingly small differences at first like we see now in extant populations. ... for a simple one-gene example, think of probability of two dark-eyes Swedes to produce a light eyed child vs probability of two dark-eyed Nigerians to produce a light eyed child. These Sweden parents probably have one recessive copy of allele for light eyes, the Nigerian parents almost certainly don't.
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I mean this politely because I'm glad you're taking the time to understand, but you didn't quite grasp what he was saying.
Let me try to rephrase.
Each individual's IQ (really their g, which IQ measures decently for most purposes) is partly genetic and partly environmental. [EDIT: As I get to below, it's probably best here to understand 'environmental' as meaning 'random'.]
Say we want to define "genius" as starting at IQs of 140. Someone might naturally be at that level regardless of losing out on the potential environmental bonus. Someone else might genetically be somewhat below that level but still attain it because they got lucky on the environmental component. Either way they are 'geniuses' -- but one is substantially more likely to pass that trait on to their descendants, because they're that smart with or without the environmental portion.
With me so far?
Okay, so, imagine two populations. On average, one of them is smarter than the other. This one will produce more geniuses. The less-intelligent population may also produce geniuses, but these are more likely to be individuals who lucked out on the environmental factors. Put another way, some of them are genetically prone to genius, while others got lucky.
If you take the child of two geniuses from the first population, it's possible that those geniuses were also simply both lucky. But it's less likely than in the case of a child of two geniuses from the second population.
Does that make sense?
Now,
No, because there are substantial genetic differences between ancestral groups. The 'mean' in 'regression to the mean' is the mean of that child's ancestral group, and the more specific (say, only looking at the last few generations of ancestors) the more accurate. If an ancestral group has an average IQ of 110, the fact that people somewhere else have an average IQ of 85 doesn't somehow affect their children.
Also, I'm pretty sure that 'environmental' doesn't mean what you think it means here, but it's hard to say more without pressing you for details and either way it's too much to go into right now. I'll say that 'environment' includes all sorts of things like individual experiences and happenstance. Putting kids in the same house, school, and workplace doesn't result in identical kids. In fact at this level it would probably be more helpful for you to understand 'environmental' as meaning 'random' than anything to do with 'setting'.
That said, there are plenty of indications that even things we chalk up to as 'environmental' have their roots in heredity. Suppose someone gets in a fight in the wrong kind of bar and suffers some long-term psychological damage from what happens next. That's environmental, right? Could happen to anyone. But actually, even the tendency to be in such a situation is rooted in heritable personality traits.
No, it's not. Parents carry all sorts of traits which may not be expressed in their generation (their individual phenotype) but still express in their children.
As I understand the question, the answer is 'no' but I'll admit that I'm having a hard time understanding where you're coming from with the Obama thing.
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It is non-inherited. This doesn't mean environmental. It could be; it could be literally random.
No.
It is not, because the IQ of the parents' groups gives you some insight into the hidden variables. A genius from a family of geniuses most likely has a high inherited component to his IQ; a genius from a family of normies most likely has a high non-inherited component.
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