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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29719 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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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.

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:

My understanding is that "heritable" refers to both traits which are innate as well as those which are acquired from one's environment.

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.

Doesn’t that just mean “traits” if we combine “traits that are innate plus traits that aren’t”?

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:

My understanding is that “heritable” refers to both traits which are innate as well as those which are acquired from one’s environment.

Which doesn’t distinguish between “shared” and “non-shared”.

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