[throwaway1984zz]

> traits are extremely heritable (not so much the case with children!)

This has been conclusively debunked.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf

> All psychological traits show significant and substantial genetic influence

> Most measures of the “environment” show significant genetic influence

> These are “big” findings, both in terms of effect size and potential impact on psychological science

[arrel]

Here’s a nice takedown of Plomin’s theory. I’m not a geneticist, but there seem to be a lot of holes in it. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06784-5

[throwaway1984zt]

I just read the whole thing, how is it a takedown? Plomin's paper is a meta-study which discusses results that are robustly replicated because there is a crisis of reproducibility in this domain and replication is the arbiter of the scientific method. This article you linked is essentially an opinion piece about Plomin...

edit: Did I get shadowbanned for this?! Post not showing up on different device..

[mcguire]

It's a review of Plomin's book, Blueprint, including putting it into context with the history of similar works.

"Like much of that literature, Blueprint plays fast and loose with the concept of heritability. Sometimes Plomin treats it (correctly) as a variable property of a population in a given environment. As population geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out in a scathing critique of Jensen’s approach in 1970, in times of plenty, height is highly heritable; in a famine, much less so (R. C. Lewontin Bull. Atom. Sci. 26, 2–8; 1970). But elsewhere, Plomin, like Jensen, treats heritability wrongly as a property inherent in a trait."

...

"The most troubling thing about Blueprint is its Panglossian DNA determinism. Plomin foresees private, direct-to-consumer companies selling sets of polygenic scores to academic programmes or workplaces. Yet, as this “incorrigible optimist” assures us, “success and failure — and credit and blame — in overcoming problems should be calibrated relative to genetic strengths and weaknesses”, not environmental ones. All is for the best in this best of brave new worlds.

"Plomin likes to say that various components of nurture “matter, but they don’t make a difference”. But the benefits of good teaching, of school lunches and breakfasts, of having textbooks and air-conditioning and heating and plumbing have been established irrefutably. And they actually are causal: we know why stable blood sugar improves mental concentration. Yet Plomin dismisses such effects as “unsystematic and unstable, so there’s not much we can do about them”."

[samatman]

you did, I vouched for it.

I wouldn't jump straight to foul play. New throwaways are probably pretty sensitive to downvote/flagging/etc, it's unlikely you were moderated out of existence.

[michaelkeenan]

I wish that writer had spent fewer words describing Plomin as undemocratic, insidious, discredited, simplistic, and regressive, and more words actually explaining why he thinks Plomin is wrong.

[mcguire]

Well, the history of the idea that your ancestors determine who you are does have a certain smell to it.

[sbierwagen]

Smell is also not a terribly good argument for Plomin being wrong.

[awaythrowgang]

Someone sent me this screenshot and asked to post to see if this was some kind of spam filter or if HN mods are actively hiding it (trying to invoke the Streisand effect I guess). She said the first post was also hidden until it re-appeared with your response. I am now also very interested because as far as I can tell this doesn't violate rules, just makes some people uncomfortable or something.

https://imgur.com/T7GzfeE