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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   17379 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.

A first impression: If we take a lot of leftist dogma as being true and discard obvious analogs to reality and claim they might be inaccurate, then we might just be able to explain why our ideology is seemingly not mapping on to the world around us.

Now queue the arguments through analogy, 'what if's' about reality, and a mountain of research motivated entirely by a need to collapse all genetic gravity into a neat environmentalist fold.

Scott Alexander seems to have a good eye for strategy. The article is effectively just an advertisement for a few plucky anti-hereditarian rebels who want to expose the fatal flaw of the hereditarian Death Star. Scott speaks highly of the effort, but obviously signals that he is going to wait until the rebels actually fire a torpedo into the thing. And there in lies the problem for the rebels.

For every alleged fatal flaw exhaust shaft that the hereditarian Death Star has, environmentalism has less than nothing. Every proposed theory has failed to explain the big problems. So... What's the point? What exactly are we doing here?

The fundemental problem the hereditarians face is that thier entire edifice rests on an assumption that biology, psychology, and anthropology are not only rigourous and mechanisistic, but sufficiently understood that outcomes can be manipulated in a near deterministic manner. This is manifestly not the case.

Sure biology may be more rigorous than psychology which is in turn more rigourous than anthropology, but none of them are even in the same zip code (much less the same ballpark) as electrical engineering.

The fundemental problem the hereditarians face is that thier entire edifice rests on an assumption that biology, psychology, and anthropology are not only rigourous and mechanisistic, but sufficiently understood that outcomes can be manipulated in a near deterministic manner. This is manifestly not the case.

It's also not required. No manipulation is necessary to observe heritability.

It is required if there are numerous potential varieties/mechanisms of heritability other than genetic.

Why? If IQ is determined through spooky undetectable woo that is inherited rather than genes, it's still heritable.

It matters because if "spooky undetectable woo" or even "ordinary detectable woo" such as cultural affiliation, economics, or social status can be demonstrated to have an effect, it will (at a bare minimum) weaken the genetic hypothesis, and if the effec sizes are large enough wreck it outright.

The "ordinarily detectable woo" is classified under "shared environment" and has already been examined. Postulating spooky undetectable woo that is heritable doesn't weaken anything.

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