| Okay, I'm going to try one more time, despite your belligerence. From my link on heritability: > Heritability is a statistic used in the fields of breeding and genetics that estimates the degree of variation in a phenotypic trait in a population that is due to genetic variation between individuals in that population. As best as I can tell, you are pointing out that children often speak the same language as their parents, therefore the language spoken is heritable. But that is an exceedingly naive interpretation, because the result is confounded by the fact that children inhabit a very similar environment to their parents. Somehow you need to remove the environmental confound. What I am saying is that there are natural experiments where this has happened, as I outlined above. Black Americans who are descended from slaves have very similar genetics to their African ancestors (despite some admixture with Europeans and Native Americans). Yet the prevalence of African languages among black Americans who are descended from slaves is 0. Therefore the heritability of African languages is 0, since African genetics has zero relationship to African languages once you control for environmental confounds. Now lets look at the German language. According to this[0] Wikipedia article, there are 44 million American who trace their ancestry to German immigrants. Yet, according to the link you shared on languages in the United States, there are 0.91 million fluent German speakers, just 2% of those descended from Germans. In this case, again, it is clear that genetics play an exceedingly small role, if they play any at all, in the prevalence of spoken German. For Polish, there are 9.5 million Americans descended from Polish immigrants[1], but only 0.54 million fluent speakers of Polish. Again, that points to, at best, extremely low heritability of the Polish language. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Americans |
The natural experiment was conducted by Omniscient Statistician? This was published somewhere?
You do realise that heritability has no sense outside particular time, particular controls and particular populace? There is no number to heritability (in particular not 0) unless you precisely specify on what probe (and that number is only valid to that specific probe). These are not constants but relative variables being measured.
Let me illustrate that with Flynn's effect of IQ increasing over the last century. A today's IQ test administered on 1950's populace would average below 100. In populace today heritability of IQ test-taking was measured to be something. If one were to combine these two populaces, the distribution's variance partition would change (the distribution would become bimodal, with new environmental factor: whether someone is from today or the 50's). Suddenly heritability would be severely diluted by the new environmental factor. Does that make existence of heritability suspicious? No. Does that invalidate your estimates? Yes.