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by pyrocat 3876 days ago
> better-supported-by-evidence

hah, ok, go ahead and make that claim with zero links to back it up. Please, tell me more about eugenics.

2 comments

Steve Hsu giving a talk @ Google on the topic, with myriad citations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jZENi1ed8

Four studies cited on this handy chart:

https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/iq-heritability-...

It's very well-established science that you could have easily googled, but downvoting unpopular research, pointing and shrieking "eugenics!" is a better argumentation technique, I suppose.

Your post should be submitted here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10545689
Saying genes contribute to intelligence is not eugenics. Here's the first link I saw: http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v20/n1/full/mp2014105a.html

From the abstract: "Intelligence is one of the most heritable behavioural traits."

Native language is an almost perfectly heritable trait, but that does not imply it is genetic.

(However, it is true that saying that genes contribute to intelligence isn't eugenics. Eugenics is a methodology where you attempt to selectively breed humankind by broader intent, rather than by emergent properties of human tendencies. A proposed trait to optimize is often intelligence, but similarly frequently it's attractiveness and things like that. Genetic influence on intelligence is simply a hypothesis whose testing would have consequences on the practice of eugenics.)

------- edit ------- I see your reply to the other comment. I think a quote from the article that makes your point far better is "[...] studies have consistently shown that genetic influence on individual differences in intelligence is substantial." I negligently assumed you were specifically talking about heritability.

I can't say for sure, but I think at least in biological sciences, heritability specifically refers to genetics.

From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability): "Heritability is a statistic used in breeding and genetics works that estimates how much variation in a phenotypic trait in a population is due to genetic variation among individuals in that population."

Heritability is a relative measurement. You need to know what environmental factors you are controlling for in order to measure it. Because we live in societies that are highly stratified based on attributes that are genetically linked there can be environmental effects on intelligence that are difficult or impossible to correct for that create a correlation between genetics and intelligence.
I know, that's why I linked to an article written by scientists that understand that, with hundreds of references to actual studies. The article goes into a lot of depth about what they mean by heritability, what genes are involved and how they are involved, what studies have led to these conclusions, etc.

The section titled "Intelligence brings (some) genetics to ‘social’ epidemiology" addresses your concerns about environmental factors.

I don't think it's very controversial to say genes contribute to intelligence. Genes contribute to everything, how could they not affect intelligence? This isn't eugenics, nobody is saying we should (or could) use this information to selectively breed humans, and nobody is saying intelligence can be correlated to race.

I get what you're saying. I don't think it's contentious to say genetics influence intelligence. One thing that I strongly disagree with about the way intelligence research is done is that it seems highly based on tests of individual intelligence. There's no IQ test for groups of people.

We know that selection happens at the level of genes, not individuals. You can't measure the fitness of genes by evaluating their effects solely on individuals because their effects may involve ensembles of individuals. Since humans are highly social beings, I'd expect our genes to be selected for intelligence at the level of cooperating brains as well as individual brains. There doesn't seem to be much research on measuring this aspect of intelligence.