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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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IIRC, the consensus from twin studies is that intelligence is ~80% heritable, though also note that much of the remaining 20% is due to non-shared environmental effects which are likely near impossible to modify via environmental enrichment.

I'm not actually sure most of these people understand the "heritability" that twin studies are measuring. The way the math works, the heritability of number of legs is close to 0 (because there is basically no variation in leg count), even though we are quite sure that number of legs is 100% determined by genetics. And the equation we use spits out different heritability numbers under different social arrangements: the heritability of literacy is different in places where women aren't educated vs. where women are.

And I honestly lost a lot of faith in Twins Reared Apart studies when I learned a lot of them allow for a shared environment until the age of 8 - it isn't all just twins separated at birth (because there are not enough such twins for most studies.) 8 years is a long time in childhood development, and while I think the Classical Twin Design of looking at identical and fraternal twins raised together is slightly better, I still don't think we can rule out that identical twins end up with more similar "environments" because they look more like one another (and like it or not appearance matters for humans.) I think a lot of the missing heritability between twin studies and GWAS studies is probably explained by weaknesses in twin study design.

One of my friends recently "came out" to me as an HBD person, and I was honestly unimpressed with a lot of his examples (though I don't expect every random HBD person to be a Motte-caliber racial scientist.) He seemed completely dismissive of things like parasites and disease burden as a partial explanation of Subsaharan African low IQ, seemed to not fully grasp at all times how averages and standard deviations worked (since a decent portion of African Americans will end up with IQs of 100+ or 115+, and yet he seemed to reason as if they were all dummies, even if he was perfectly willing to acknowledge "outliers"), and I just didn't think he applied the rigor I know HBD people are capable of in general. (He never brought up GWAS studies or polygenic scores even once!) HBD is an interesting hypothesis, I just want to see well-constructed arguments for it.