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To be fair this sounds like a culture thing more than a race thing per se. My wife is black, but if we were to have children neither of us would accept it if our kids started acting stereotypically black (which is what it sounds like you mean?). But that's because we both have similar cultural values about how to behave properly.
Well that is the $64,000 question, isn't it? Is it more of a culture thing than a race thing? We know intelligence is heritable, along with alcoholism, propensity for various mental illnesses or personality disorders, religiosity, and many, many more dimensions of temperament. You take it for granted that either these things are uncorrelated from race, or "culture" which is mutable. I'm unconvinced.
My pure Ulster Scots nephews have significantly more rambunctious and violent behavior than either my Ulster-Scots/Anglo-Saxon kids (with my first wife) or my Ulster Scots/Black kid (with my second wife) which is anecdotal, but illustrative.
We Ulster Scots are renowned for our problematic behaviors ( Borderers et al) but we are white. Given how pale we often are we may be some of the whitest whites in fact. Is that behavior genetic or cultural?
Would a more (historically) masculine cultured (if I can put it that way) Ulster Scots parent be ok with the more rambunctious behavior from the mixed kid (if this is what your example was saying?) than a WASP parent even though they are both from the same (white) race? Which of them is correct in any case?
Is what you are seeing a racial dynamic or the result of more (historically) feminine behaviors and standards having become more common in middle class white American culture? My kids getting in a fist fight at school in the US is seen differently depending on if we are talking Blue Tribe or Red Tribe parents, let alone my Northern Irish relatives who would certainly see it as part of growing up, for boys at least.
I was in fights consistently in school, and it only escalated to parents getting involved very very rarely. The biggest differences I see across how kids are treated nowadays in my experiences in Northern Ireland/England and the US are not race based but generation and class based. My older Red Tribe neighbors are much closer culturally in that regard than the younger Blue Tribe academics I work with in the city, even though they are both primarily white.
Which makes me think that either you have to look at racial sub-groups or it is a matter of culture and upbringing, with Blue vs Red in the US sense being significant and the fact that Black culture (broadly) shares a lot of behavior in an honor/traditional masculinity sense with Red rather than Blue. My uncle praises his kids for taking a swing at another kid who insulted them and my dad did the same for me, despite the fact he was a teacher, but my Blue Tribe co-worker had to have a stern conversation with his son about words not being an excuse for violence and took them to a therapist for their anger issues when he did the same.
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African Americans are a pretty heterogeneous group, genetically- a mix of within-Hajnal Europeans, west Africans, East Africans, Irish, etc- and so my priors would be that behavioral differences which aren’t rooted in well-known genetic differences(like the IQ difference’s likely effects on time preference) are probably mutable through culture.
I assume that’s what your talking about, specifically, due to the context.
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My understanding is that "heritable" refers to both traits which are innate as well as those which are acquired from one's environment. So I don't think that your argument need be opposed to my observation.
More generally I think the HBD hypothesis is nonsense, so yeah of course I believe that this sort of thing isn't genetic. But even if we take it as a given the the HBD argument is true, surely you would not try to argue that there are literally zero behaviors which are learned rather than innate. So really we are talking about the degree to which race is a factor versus culture, not whether culture is a factor at all.
In biology, "heritable" specifically refers to differences due to genetic variation. Confusing name choice, right?
Nah that actually makes sense. The confusing part is that (again, to my understanding) there are many people using "heritable" to mean something other than that.
Can you blame them? It means something other than that, if you're using it in a legal sense rather than a biological sense. And the lawyers called dibs first, several hundred years ago; the biologists should have come up with a different word ... but they didn't, so here we are. When a scientist says something is heritable they generally mean "we found these genes" or "we did these twin studies" or something much stronger than just "we measured this correlation".
I must confess that I find it perplexing that this is a problem. My reflexive definition of “heritability” was something like “what proportion of a trait is inherited rather than due to chance or environment”.
Noting that my background is from biology/medicine, what other ways are people using “heritable” for? I really can’t imagine any other interpretation that remotely makes sense. Or say from @SubstantialFrivolity’s reply:
Is this a serious definition used by people? Is that the legal definition?? Doesn’t that just mean “traits” if we combine “traits that are innate plus traits that aren’t”? Is there no linkage or any association with words of similar etymology like inheritance or heredity or hereditary or heir?
Sorry if I sound angry or upset or anything, I am just extremely confused.
I think the implied meaning in context wasn't "heritable refers to every member of A and B" but rather "heritable can refer to members of both A and B".
The typical breakdown is "genetic" vs "shared environment" vs "non-shared environment", isn't it? The shared-environment part would be considered heritable in the colloquial sense but not the biological sense, the genetic part would be heritable in both, the non-shared environment part in neither.
I don’t think I’ve heard heritability ever being described like that, but that might just be because I’m mostly around people with some biology training most of the time; it makes sense if I think about inheritance colloquially, which is definitely not biological but nonetheless lol heritable lol.
I suppose my real eyebrow-raising moment was seeing this sentence:
Which doesn’t distinguish between “shared” and “non-shared”.
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