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by johnrichardson
2996 days ago
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I don't see the word 'IQ' mentioned anywhere in that article. And yet, it's the single biggest determinant of lifetime success. Unfortunately, it's also highly heritable, so environmental interventions have a fairly marginal effect on it. |
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(a) The Flynn Effect demonstrates that IQ is quite responsive to environment.
(b) The heritability of a trait is not a measure of the degree to which that trait is genetically determined: Highly heritable traits can be environmently malleable. (The heritability of height is 0.8, but nutrition, childhood sickness, etc. have a huge effect on height.) Conversely, traits with low heritability can be strongly determined, genetically. ("Number of eyes" is a trait with low heritability, for example.)
(c) The measured heritability of IQ isn't especially high. It's usually found to be in the vicinity of 0.3.