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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   31325 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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I want to talk about genetics. Scott Alexander has a new piece out about Missing Heritability, basically going through the issues with twin studies:

Twin studies suggested that IQ was about 60% genetic, and EA about 40%. This seemed to make sense at the time - how far someone gets in school depends partly on their intelligence, but partly on fuzzier social factors like class / culture / parenting. The first genome-wide studies and polygenic scores found enough genes to explain 2%pp1 of this 40% pie. The remaining 38%, which twin studies deemed genetic but where researchers couldn’t find the genes - became known as “the missing heritability” or “the heritability gap”.

Scientists came up with two hypothesis for the gap, which have been dueling ever since:

Maybe twin studies are wrong.

Maybe there are genes we haven’t found yet

He goes through a TON of research literature, basically describing how the entire scientific apparatus in genetics tried to figure out why twin studies couldn't be confirmed via actual genetics. To me, it sounds like an extremely robust way to prove that the twin studies were wrong. However, his ultimate conclusion appears to be:

So how heritable are complex traits, and why can’t different methods agree on this?

I think the twin / pedigree / adoption estimates are mostly right. They are strong designs, their assumptions are well-validated, and they all converge on similar results. They also pass sanity checks and common sense observation.

Although polygenic scores, GWAS, GREML, RDR, and Sib-Regression are also strong designs, they’re newer, have less agreement among themselves, and have more correlated error modes in their potential to miss rarer variants and interactions. Although it’s hard to figure out a story of exactly what’s going on with these rarer variants and interactions, there seems to be some evidence that they exist (again, see 1, 2, 3)15, and it seems easier to doubt this new and fuzzy area than the strong and simple conclusions from twin / pedigree / adoption work.

So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."

To me, this assertion is evidence of the glaring blindspot which materialist rationalists such as Alexander have - they assume that materialism / genetic determinism is right, and then reason backward in order to make their fundamental assumptions fit the data. While the genetic framework is clearly helpful and has had some limited success in new medical breakthroughs, it's beyond obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that compared to the hype in the early 2000s, the new branches of genetic science have been a massive let down.

Overall I'm very curious where the life sciences will go. Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary as well as other books, makes some interesting comments in a recent post where he excerpts his own book:

As David Bohm commented in the 1960s, it is an odd fact that, just when physics was moving away from mechanism, biology and psychology were moving closer to it. ‘If the trend continues’, he wrote, ‘scientists will be regarding living and intelligent beings as mechanical, while they suppose that inanimate matter is too complex and subtle to fit into the limited categories of mechanism.’[9] He was not mistaken.

Nonetheless, in the first half of the twentieth century, many philosophically minded biologists, including such eminent British figures as John Scott Haldane and his better-known son, J.B.S. Haldane, as well as Conrad Hal Waddington, moved decisively, like the physicists, away from the machine model. Less renowned, largely by his own choice, but no less distinguished, was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the great Austrian biologist and polymath who originated general system theory. In 1933 he wrote: ‘we cannot speak of a machine “theory” of the organism, but at most of a machine fiction’.[10]

Despite this encouraging development, a more or less abrupt reversion to the seventeenth-century Cartesian model came over the life sciences with the rise of molecular biology, and its language of ‘programmes’, ‘codes’, and so forth, in the twentieth century’s second half. According to Carl Woese, writing in 2004, ‘biology today is little more than an engineering discipline’.[11] And Woese was no embittered outsider. His pioneering work revolutionised mainstream biology; he was one of the most influential and widely honoured microbiologists of all time, described by a colleague as having ‘done more for biology writ large than any biologist in history, including Darwin’.[12] But he was disturbed by what he saw.

We'll have to see if biologists are actually able to move beyond the mechanistic model and into a more complex, realistic view of life. The obvious CW implications here are how the scientific/materialist worldview and the religious worldviews continue to interact. Right now, the Left seems to be mostly materialist, whereas the right is (nominally) religious. If we can work to merge these two views, we may find more political unity or at least a new set of combinations for our political approaches.

materialism / genetic determinism

What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.

It seems like you want to associate these things because you want to strike a blow against materialism, but it’s just unrelated.

The former is a foundational axiom of the latter. People latch on to genetic determinism as "obvious" and "true" because they reject the validity of non-material/non-quantifiable explanations.

It’s not though. A universe containing non physical things could very easily contain organisms with wholly genetically determined intelligence. They just don’t have anything to do with one another.

Imagine a purely material universe with species A that is intelligent and has its intelligence completely determined by genetics. Now imagine that one day in that universe species B evolves and has souls (just an example of non physical things, it could be anything you like that is non physical). Nothing has changed for species A, they are still genetically determined.

I feel like you are conflating neccesary and sufficient conditions. A non-materialist model of the universe can readily accommodate physical elements. But a materialist model can not readily accommodate the non-physical.

The strong arguments for heritability being purely genetic are premised on the assumption of a deterministic universe. The existence of non-material causes would cast doubt upon this premise, and by extension the conclusion.

This is wrong for two reasons:

  1. Genetic determinism does not require a deterministic universe. At this point, I don't think many people who are aware of quantum mechanics think we live in a deterministic universe, and it is totally reasonable to believe in genetic determinism WRT intelligence anyway. While intelligence can be measured, it can't be measured down to the planck length. There's a level of precision that's just impossible to achieve, and so long as genetics determine intelligence closely enough, it's fine if the biological processes are a little fuzzy because of quantum uncertainty or whatever your preferred source of non-determinism is.
  2. A non-material universe is orthogonal to its materiality. There is no reason that non-material objects need to be non-deterministic. For a great example of this, consider the various "hard magic" systems in fantasy books that have clear and well defined rules for magic, but contain obviously non-material objects like souls.

To be honest, I don't much care for the term "genetic determinism" in this context. I have yet to encounter a serious IQ hereditarian who believes that the environment plays no role. In my experience the debate is between hard core blank slateists, who deny the impact of genetics at all because they understand that it would wreck the foundation of much of their worldview, and hereditarians who think that there is a mix of genetic and environmental factors. "Genetic determinism" is generally leveled as a slur against hereditarians because it's pretty silly to think that genes are the only thing that matters and that your exposure to lots of words and symbols as a kid has zero impact. Can you point to someone making a "strong argument for heritability" that really says things are 100% genetic?

Niether of those manage to refute anything ive said. Again i feel like you are mixing neccesary with sufficient and trying to control the conversation by controlling the null hypothesis. Asserting that because i have not shown x i must accept y but i am under no such obligation.

I have yet to encounter a serious IQ hereditarian who believes that the environment plays no role.

Then you must be new here (that or The Motte doesn't meet your criteria for "serious") because i have had precisely that argument multiple times here in the last 6 months, including with at least one user active in this very thread.

Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia.

Just wanted to drop a quick correction here: “qualia” does not mean “non-physical”. Qualia just means “conscious experience”. The word is entirely neutral regarding the question of what conscious experience actually is or what causes it. It could be physical, or it could be non-physical. But it’s still a qualia all the same.

I say this because the word “qualia” has gotten a reputation in some circles as being a “woo word” which causes people of a more materialist bent to nope out of the conversation whenever it comes up, and I really don’t think that has to be the case. It’s just a convenient word for describing the, well, actual conscious-experience part of conscious experience, as opposed to say its objectively observable behavioral or neurophysiological correlates. It’s just a handy word for talking about a phenomenon we’re all intimately familiar with. That’s all.

I'm not sure I understand what would it mean exactly for qualia to be physical. Isn't it like...obviously something fundamentally distinct?
Mainstream secular stance of "conscious states trace material configurations" feels more like soft-dualism where the mind part plays the junior role, but it's still there

Well, the problem is that some people have the exact opposite intuition! They can’t see why qualia should pose a problem for physicalism at all. Thus the debate carries on interminably.

Yeah totally agree. Before I believed in god, I was a superveniance functionalist (now I’m confused). I think qualia are just one more superveniant thing in that frame.

A lot of people who are not materialists and also don’t believe in god cite qualia as the reason why, so I was trying to make the case in a way that would appeal to those people. It was sloppy and I regret the error, since I don’t actually think that makes sense.

What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.

Typically the standard materialist/scientific worldview sees most things as genetically determined, as far as I'm aware! That may be changing.

I agree that you can believe in genetics without necessarily adopting a materialist frame.

I don’t think that’s true at all. There are plenty of materialists who think things are environmentally determined. This is liberal blank slateism in a nutshell. The opposite of genetic determinism is environmentalism in almost all debates on intelligence. This is actually the first time that I’ve encountered someone saying that variations in intelligence originate from something non-physical like the grace of God (this seems like what you are saying, but maybe you mean something else, it does seem like an odd thing for God to do to me).

Okay, mea culpa!

Perhaps history's most infamous materialists were also dogmatically blank slatists.

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