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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32863 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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In the world as it is now, you have situations like "kids with fetal alcohol syndrome are more likely to grow up to abuse alcohol, and thus to abuse alcohol during pregnancy, and thus to have kids with FAS". Even if susceptibility to alcoholism has no genetic causes, we would still expect it to have nonzero heritability.

A world that resembles our own in which HBD is entirely false could look like one where there were many behaviors that were passed down in that way. We would expect to see substantial differences in outcomes within different subcultures of the same group in such a world, but I don't have a rigorous idea of how much more than one where the heritability of outcome-correlated stuff is due to genetics vs behavior.

Even if susceptibility to alcoholism has no genetic causes, we would still expect it to have nonzero heritability.

Pretty sure that's zero heritibility, using the technical definition.

Indeed, Falconer's formula would give an estimate of 0 for heritability in the above situation.

So I suppose the concrete answer to "what does the world in which genetics don't play a significant role in determining outcomes look like" is

  1. The children of alcohol abusers are more likely to abuse alcohol themselves

  2. This remains true even if the children are adopted at birth.

  3. The correlation in the rate of alcohol abuse is the same between identical and fraternal twins.

3 is something that it should at least in principle be possible to check in our world. At the very least I would be surprised if nobody has done it for height and BMI.

That is quite a clever metric, thanks for pointing it out.

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