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by runarberg 1161 days ago
No I don’t agree that heritability of IQ is well established.

First of all I do not believe that IQ is a good metric for intelligence, nor that intelligence is a useful scientific construct.

Secondly, there are whole subthreads here that go into the nuances of what heritability means for measured IQ. From what I’ve gathered is that findings which assign 50-80% of the variance to inheritance neglect to account for covariance, or use very biased assumptions about G×E correlations or G×E interactions which skewes the results in favor of genetic explanations, i.e. they are biased.

1 comments

> No I don’t agree that heritability of IQ is well established

> Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component ...

You have written both statements ...

I don’t understand? The second statement is a quote from wikipedia, and does not match my believes. It does not go into the nuance of what heritability entails, nor does it assign the large percentages which IQ advocates do. My believe can very well be:

It has been shown from biased studies that IQ has a large hereditary component, where these studies failed to account for genetic × environmental interaction and covariation.

By the way the wikipedia article it self goes into these nuances and caveats. Reading it, it is pretty clear that there may be a large inheritance factor to IQ, while at the same time large IQ differences between individuals have no genetic basis.