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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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I strongly disagree, and think that this disagreement is a 'crux' for the race-iq disagreement. Obviously if genes play no role in individual intelligence for the median individual, it plays no role in group difference.

Otherwise the "noise" of individual environmental factors is inevitably going to overwhelm whatever "signal" there is that can be drawn from genetics

You are/were engineer of some sort, right? Imagine you're buying parts for a series of machines at a factory. One brand fails in an average of 3 years, another brand fails in an average of 4 years. These are the only two possible choices, and they both have the same price. But - the standard deviation is .7 years! Does the "noise" overwhelm the "environmental factors"? In one sense, yes, for any individual washer it's tough to guess which brand they came from. In another sense, no, you know which brand you're choosing. And if you see a washer last 7 years, its' probably from the second brand (depending on the distribution).

The point is that whether the environmental 'noise' washes out the gene 'signal' depends on how large they both are. If genes cause +.1 stddev, then they don't matter in practice. If they cause +1 stddev, they do. Different natural histories for humanity could give us alternatives either way. If we took my gene editing suggestion - in a hundred years - probably environment would suddenly become the best way to improve human intelligence again (well, ignoring AI). But we have to measure how strong both are.

And that takes us to science.

Intelligence is a core construct in differential psychology and behavioural genetics, and should be so in cognitive neuroscience. It is one of the best predictors of important life outcomes such as education, occupation, mental and physical health and illness, and mortality. Intelligence is one of the most heritable behavioural traits. Here, we highlight five genetic findings that are special to intelligence differences and that have important implications for its genetic architecture and for gene-hunting expeditions. (i) The heritability of intelligence increases from about 20% in infancy to perhaps 80% in later adulthood. (ii) Intelligence captures genetic effects on diverse cognitive and learning abilities, which correlate phenotypically about 0.30 on average but correlate genetically about 0.60 or higher. (iii) Assortative mating is greater for intelligence (spouse correlations 0.40) than for other behavioural traits such as personality and psychopathology (0.10) or physical traits such as height and weight (~0.20). Assortative mating pumps additive genetic variance into the population every generation, contributing to the high narrow heritability (additive genetic variance) of intelligence. (iv) Unlike psychiatric disorders, intelligence is normally distributed with a positive end of exceptional performance that is a model for ‘positive genetics’. (v) Intelligence is associated with education and social class and broadens the causal perspectives on how these three inter-correlated variables contribute to social mobility, and health, illness and mortality differences. These five findings arose primarily from twin studies.

Essentially, when you try to measure whether the signal or noise is higher with twin studies, the signal is stronger. We can also do GWASes, where we estimate the effect of individual genes on a trait like intelligence. Each gene has an extremely small effect, but when put together this can predict (some of the time - genetics-based heritability estimates are lower than those from twin studies, because many genes + small effect is hard, but it's increased over the past five years) which of two siblings will score higher on intelligence tests just from their genes.

This is also intuitively true. Clarence's son with another lawyer will be smarter than random joe. If Mahomes marries the daughter of another great football player, they'll be a better athlete than joe.

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