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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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On The Studied Irrelevance of Indian Schools

A note: this essay began its life as a reply to the wider discussion about Freddie deBoer and his god-awful takes on disciplinary standards inside schools downthread. I followed the link, encountered the paywall at speed. My prose went completely off track, sprawled out of control, and I've given it standalone status.

I would be more upset about all this if I believed my future kids stood to benefit from schooling. I cannot rule that out entirely, but I do not intend to start a college fund on their behalf unless the next five to ten years deviate sharply from my expectations. That isn't the same thing as not saving money on their behalf, which I absolutely do. Remember, money is fungible, and can be exchanged for goods and services.

I do not live in the States either, though some of these concerns map onto the British system, as dim as my understanding of that system happens to be.

My experience with the Indian education system, which I have more familiarity with than I would have wished, has left me with what I'd call a hot-take if most people back home wouldn't tacitly or vocally agree with me.

Bluntly: the schools you attend before college did not really matter. A prestigious name-brand private school could be expected to give you a marginally better education, but most parents who choose them are buying prestige and peer composition. The middle class and above does not send its kids to a government-run school if they can help it. The students at government schools are not particularly awful or ill-behaved, and we don't have the disciplinary problems Western schools deal with. Government schools are grossly under-resourced, and they serve a population whose parents cannot afford the parallel education system. Your kids would come out of it with an inferior social network, worse English, and a sense of shame. It's almost unheard of to pick one if you can afford better, even if that accordance requires severe tightening of physical or financial belts.

Why? The real answer is that nobody expects the teachers to actually teach you much in class. Including the teachers themselves. I am being serious about that. Even the best teachers at the prestigious school I attended knew, with the placid certainty of a thermodynamic law, that their star pupils and everyone else would be attending private coaching sessions outside school hours.

That's what you have to understand to make sense of anything that follows. School is the credentialing and networking layer. Coaching is the education layer. The two have been functionally decoupled for decades, and the entirety of Indian society organizes itself around the assumption.

You want numbers? I've got numbers. India's private coaching industry was about Rs 58,000 crore (about $7 billion) in revenue as of 2022, with projections to hit Rs 1.3 lakh crore (about $16 billion) by 2028. That's a parallel education system roughly the scale of a respectable national economy. In a country with around 250 million students in K-12, comprising almost 25% of the world's school-going children, that represents a lot of household income diverted from other purposes. Somewhere in the ballpark of 7.5 million students are enrolled in formal coaching at any given moment, with Kota alone drawing more than 200,000 annually.

The terminus, the thing all this preparation is for, is a small handful of murderously selective exams. 1.4 million students sit JEE Main each year for entrance to engineering colleges, of whom roughly 250,000 qualify for JEE Advanced, of whom around 17,000 actually get into one of the 23 Indian Institutes of Technology. The Computer Science seats at IIT Bombay close out around rank 60-70 in the country. Roughly one in a hundred thousand students gets a CSE seat at IIT Bombay. NEET, the medical-school entrance, runs on comparable arithmetic: over 2.3 million students sit the test annually for around 110,000 MBBS seats, of which fewer than 60,000 are at the more affordable government colleges. Harvard's acceptance rates are only slightly lower than the odds of getting any medical seats in India.

This is what your kid is competing for, and this is why your kid is in coaching from age fourteen, or twelve, or ten, or, occasionally, five.

I have my own theory about why parental coaching enrollment ages keep dropping. It's not a particularly original one, since it reduces to the logic of any arms race. If the median competitor starts at twelve, the marginal advantage of starting at ten is large. Once enough people start at ten, the advantage shifts to eight. There is no obvious floor, until we've reached toddlers still crawling there. ThePrint recently profiled a five-year-old in Jaipur who attends two hours of tuition after a five-hour school day, carrying eleven books in his bag. His mother has already decided he will be a doctor. He might struggle to count to thirty. I strongly suspect that we won't be recruiting doctors by the time he turns twenty.

Back to the school itself. Why don't the teachers care?

Several reasons, layered on top of each other, mutually reinforcing.

The first is selection. A physics or biology teacher actually good at teaching physics or biology can run their own coaching center. This pays better by a significant multiple and selects for higher-functioning students who actually want to learn. The teachers who stay in regular schools are typically the ones who cannot, or will not, make that jump. A few of my schoolteachers moonlighted as coaches on weekends, and the fact that they could not sustain it full-time tells you where they stood in the talent pyramid. The very best teachers I encountered were either independent coaches or worked at the apex coaching institutes.

The second reason is incentive. Schoolteachers are paid the same whether their students learn or do not. A coaching center operates on something closer to a results-based payoff structure. Parents pay a coaching center for performance on entrance exams, and they will pull their kid out and switch institutes if results are bad. It's much harder for the school to lose your tuition this way, because admission to a desirable school is itself a scarce good. Parents pay for the brand and for the peers. They do not pay for instruction. They pay out the nose for that elsewhere.

The third reason is information. Everyone in the system knows everyone else knows. The teachers know the students are getting taught elsewhere. The students know the teachers know. The parents know everyone knows. School ends up being an attendance requirement, a social environment, and a credentialing function. Nobody with their a functional frontal lobe mistakes it for the place where the learning happens.

Imagine this scenario: you're an Indian parent, and dear Ramesh (I had to pick a maximally stereotypical name, because my skin color allows me to get away with it) can't solve the Riemann hypothesis. He can't even prove the transcendental nature of pi! You accost his school teacher, and harangue him on the deficiency of his didactic approach. He is genuinely shocked. “But madam, I gave him the homework exercises. I told him it'll come on the test. I scribbled hastily on the blackboard and rapped knuckles, including his. I made sure nobody was snoring in class, or using their phone. What more can you expect of me?” You deflate, and feel suitably chagrined. You are overcome with shame, you grab Ramesh by the wrist and drag him off to whatever sprawling network of coaching centers is in vogue today. I haven't quite kept up.

The end result is a level of self-aware double-bookkeeping that I do not think most Western observers fully grasp. When you ask an Indian student "did you learn this in school?" they will laugh, albeit internally. The real answer is that they learned it in their evening coaching, with a private tutor, or by self-studying their books.

The coaching layer functioned as its own form of tracking. The smarter, harder-working students would study on their own or get more intensive and dedicated tutoring. The smart but constitutionally lazy ones, like me, attended too, probably with worse results. My ADHD was at the time unacknowledged and unmedicated, which I now realize accounts for considerably more of my misery than I appreciated at the time. Lucky for me, my parents ensured I had 1:1 private tutoring for most subjects for most of my life. It's hard(er) to daydream or procrastinate when someone is watching you like a hawk for two consecutive hours. Thanks, mom and dad? I suppose it worked.

There was also more explicit tracking, which I expect that American educators would find appalling. The duller kids got diverted into the humanities by 8th or 10th grade. Kids from mercantile backgrounds who wanted to stay in the family business opted into commerce. The would-be engineers, doctors, and professionals took the science track, with some discretion over whether to include biology, programming, and so on. Maths, physics, and chemistry were core and immutable. English literature and a native language rounded things out. I'd like to claim I did History and Geography until 12th grade, but it has been long enough that I genuinely cannot remember. On reflection, the answer is probably yes.

I have younger cousins, and I vicariously observed a rather interesting trend through them. An increasing fraction of Indian parents have recalibrated on the importance of sending their kids to the “best” schools, or at least have decided that the return on investment isn't worth it. So it went with them. They moved, around 10th grade, to a “worse” school. Why? Because that institute had subtly advertised that it did not give a hoot about in-person attendance metrics or regular grades. The understanding was that the students enrolled only as a legal formality, they were expected, even encouraged to not show up to class and instead spend that time studying on their own or attending private coaching. A remarkable innovation, really. I wish it had been around in my time. I'm surprised it took so long to show up, that's what every incentive leant towards.

After high school: well, bud, better give the college entrance exams your best shot. Your future hinges on them. For the sufficiently wealthy, paying out to put your kid in a private institution was an option, though it came with a degree of stigma. Everyone knew that the kid who got into a government-run engineering college like an IIT had more intellectual horsepower than the best private alternatives. I will set aside the affirmative action issue, partly because I do not want this essay to be about that, and partly because anything I say about it will infuriate someone. Same went for medical schools, law schools, business schools, the entire prestige hierarchy. Government meritocratic top-tier sat at the apex, followed by a long tail of private institutions of variable quality, some genuinely excellent and some basically diploma factories.

The dimmer kids? Too bad. Barring their parents, nobody expected much of them. Did they learn anything in class? Who cares. Did they learn anything from the extra coaching? If the answer was no, that was on them.

I should admit I do not have great visibility into what happens to the genuinely subpar in academic terms. Even the dullest tools in my school shed came from reasonable wealth. They probably had a sinecure waiting for them in a family business, a comfortable middle-management slot somewhere, or some equivalent arrangement. The default outcome for those not quite so lucky is probably a dead-end job and a long slog. You cannot expect better from a poorer nation. They manage. They have to, because there are hundreds of millions of them.

Disciplinary measures were far stricter than in the West. Expulsion for unruly behavior was a rare but real possibility. If you were a bad student, you had better be a well-behaved one while lessons were happening. I’m just about old enough to remember going from corporal punishment being the norm to mostly frowned upon. Mostly. The legality of it was never the primary concern for anyone involved, including the parents who knew it was happening and either silently approved or tolerated it as the cost of having their kid in a serious institution.

Reading the Freddie deBoer discourse from a distance, I am consumed with cynicism, mostly because I perceive it as charitably misplaced idealism. The Western debate around discipline often proceeds as though the alternatives are "strict enforcement with consequences" versus "permissive chaos," and we are arguing about which moral failure to commit. After serving time inside the Indian system, I observed that strict discipline turns out to be the easy part. It isn't hard to produce a quiet, orderly classroom through any number of methods, some humane and some less so. The hard question is what happens inside that quiet, orderly classroom. The answer in India is: surprisingly little, by design, or by tacit acceptance.

Do I think this is a good thing, something to advocate for? Oh god no. I find it depressing. I'd like to claim that better schooling inside the schools would help, but surely you've understood that this is another Red Queen race right? You run as fast as you can just to stay in place, and making everyone faster doesn't change the composition of those making a podium finish.

Kota, the city in Rajasthan that has long been India's largest coaching hub, makes the Indian news with depressing regularity because of student suicide. A handful a month, from memory. There would be more, if they weren't incredibly strict about preventing them. If you imagine they achieve this by improving living standards or reducing the load? There's no hope for a quokka like you. They just make it harder to kill yourself, including through the kind of anti-suicide measures usually seen only in in-patient psychiatric wards, combined with draconian surveillance. The students are teenagers, sent away from home to live in hostels and crammers, with the expectation that they will spend two years of their lives doing nothing but preparing for one exam. Most of them will fail. A small number will pass and go on to lives of unevenly distributed satisfaction. The wager their parents made on them, financial and emotional, will turn out to have been a bad one in the median case. They were never going to be in the top one percent. Almost nobody is. The maths doesn't math.

If I had to place this in wider context: imagine something halfway between the laissez-faire approach of the West and the all-consuming grind of East Asia. Thankfully it was not quite that bad. I am not fond of the system at all. It almost chewed me up and didn't quite spit me out again, and the only affirmative defense I can make of it is that the chewing has not stopped since I left, despite my having moved far, far away. It is just not as bad as it could be, which I say while noting that explaining why sacrifices were made to Moloch is a different exercise from condoning the practice or wishing it to perpetuate into the future. We burn our children to prepare them for the flames ahead. The fires do not really cool off once you are out the other side. The forms of suffering reorganize themselves around your changing life circumstances, and that is roughly the most many of us can hope for.

What I can say is that I had some slack. I had opportunities to be a child rather than meat slurry waiting to be packed into a mold. The front-loading of suffering arguably bought me optionality for the future, though I am no longer fully confident this is true. Well, it's the thought that counts.

As someone who was on the local equivalent of a pre-med track, I might have spent between two and four hours after a full school day with private tutors, but the real pressure ramped only up after 10th grade. I can't blame my parents for that either. They weren't tigers. They were on the slightly upper end of strict by upper-middle-class Indian standards, largely because they had gone through the whole ordeal themselves and knew the value of higher education in a country where higher education is the one ticket out of a great many situations. I would do the same with my kids if I had to. I do not expect to have to. If I have kids, I hope they grow up somewhere the pressure is not nearly as bad.

Then again, it is hardly that much better in the West. An aspiring American doctor better start working on extracurriculars well before finishing high school. In the US, even more years of their limited life get spent in pre-med coursework, after which they apply to medical schools that admit a small fraction of applicants and that publicly weight non-academic considerations heavily. All you have done is trade the legible, harder-to-fake signal of excellent grades for excellent grades plus sob stories about digging wells in Africa, plus the presidency of the Underwater Basket Weaving Society, with an added interest in supporting weavers from under-represented minorities, which should help look past the uncomfortable fact that you yourself are not an under-represented minority.

The Indian system is more legible and crueler about it; the American system is less legible and crueler about hiding it. I'd have to be a touch daft to claim that the former is superior to the latter, I know which one I'd choose for my kids, warts and all.

It could be worse! South Korea has roughly 75% of students enrolled in around 100,000 cram schools nationwide, and Japan has over 65% of ninth-graders attending juku. India's coaching enrollment is enormous in absolute terms but smaller as a share of total students, largely because most Indian families simply can't afford the fees. Our middle class might out mass the entirety of the United States (albeit not in a literal weighing setup; gotta wait for the Ozempic to kick in to make that a fair fight), but there are a lot of poor people here. They never had a chance.

There are games where the winning move is not to play. Those Indians should consider themselves lucky that they can't afford to play them, at such a scale. Somehow, I doubt they'd feel comforted if I were to tell them that. In fact, I strongly suspect that they'd get angry at me.

At the end of the day, schools (or education in general) are a selection device for a tiny number of slots in professions that pay disproportionately well in societies where most professions do not pay nearly as well. As long as those differentials hold, you can expect parents to pour everything they have into making sure their kids end up on the right side of the divide.

Good thing all of it is about to be moot anyway. I am writing this in 2026, after all, and you know what I expect of the near future. I will not belabor the point. Anyone reading this knows what I am referring to. If you don't, well, you have other things to worry about than your kid's MCAT score, and this essay is not the place to acquaint you with them.

God. It sucks to grow up and realize that your parents, despite their flaws, loved you and wanted what was best for you. That the pressure they put you through, or the pain they expected you to endure, was for your own good. Positive expected value, at minimum.

It would be easy to rail at my parents. I have, on bad days, indulged the temptation. I would have done the same in their shoes, however, and I would have hoped my kids forgave me for it later. The forgiveness comes easy now, long after I have passed the stage of needing my parents to shove me out of the nest, and discovered the entirely different qualia of suffering that is charting your own path while holding yourself accountable. I am told that some people find this easy. Good for them. I will settle for prescription stimulants and a regularly-examined internalization of parental expectations, which turn out to be remarkably portable and follow me wherever I go, whether I want them to or not.

I do not much like that fraud, Freud, but this is classic super-ego stuff. Where’s my suspiciously penis-shaped cigar? I could use a smoke after letting all of that out. Or, given the times, at least a good puff on a vape.

At some point, defenders of this form of meritocracy must ask themselves:

Is the occasional smart ‘poor’ kid [actually a middle class kid with tiger parents] who tries really hard getting an “elite” job really worth ruining the lives of tens of millions of children?

Why did you, the child of a doctor, have to work so hard to get the same job your father had and so would for fundamental genetic and cultural reasons likely also perform well at? Why did I have to work so hard to get into the same business as my father? And despite this, half the doctors I know come from medical families and half the people I work with also have or had a parent or both in finance. What a waste of everyone’s time.

This also has nothing to do with, as is sometimes mooted, the risk of socialism or the movement for workers rights (a product of 1890-1950, whereas popular PMC meritocracy is a product largely of 1985-present). The working classes cared about well paid jobs, working conditions, being able to buy a decent home, not about whether their kids could become investment bankers or ambassadors. If you speak to them today they still don’t really care about the latter, so it’s not even to placate them as some have suggested.

If I had to explain it, I’d say I think it’s about highly paid people wanting to justify to themselves that they got there fair and square. They are willing to hurt their own children for this, to feel like they operate in a “fair” system, or have helped create one. To me this has always felt particularly evil, and I use that word rarely.

Is the occasional smart ‘poor’ kid [actually a middle class kid with tiger parents] who tried really hard getting an “elite” job really worth ruining the lives of tens of millions of children?

I question the premises here. They're faulty.

  1. What do you mean by the "occasional" smart kid? Numbers? It's convenient to use tens of millions while eliding that one.
  2. I didn't enjoy schooling, but I'm not against the idea. It depends on the school and the system it's embedded in. I don't think education is entirely credentialism, and my essay showed that the education/learning was still happening, just not primarily at the schools.

Why did you, the child of a doctor, have to work so hard to get the same job your father had and so would for fundamental genetic and cultural reasons likely also perform well at? Why did I have to work so hard to get into the same business as my father? And despite this, half the doctors I know come from medical families and half the people I work with also have or had a parent or both in finance. What a waste of everyone’s time.

Your sampling is not representative.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322895020_Characteristics_of_Medical_Students_with_Physician_Relatives_A_National_Study

-Self-administered questionnaires were sent to 960 third-year U.S. medical students from 24 U.S. allopathic medical schools in January 2011. We asked respondents whether or not they had a physician parent or grandparent. We also tested associations between physician relative status and demographics, educational factors and career intentions. Results Response rate was 61% (564/919). Among the respondents, 124 students (22.0%) responded that they had a physician relative

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10174736/1/Joanne%20Harris%20EdD%20thesis%20final.pdf

Medicine is described as one of the most heritable of professions. Data from the Labour Force Survey compares the professions of individuals with their parents and shows that those whose parents are doctors are 24 times more likely to be doctors than people whose parents did any other type of work (Friedman & Laurison, 2019). This same report showed that individuals were 17 times as likely to follow parents into the law profession and only twice as likely to become accountants if the parents were in this profession, showing that medicine has high levels of heritability compared to other professions (ibid.). These findings are also apparent in other European countries, where between 12 and 16% of medical students had one parent who was a doctor (Hansen, 2005; O’Neill et al., 2013).

From what I can tell, in the US and UK, somewhere around one in eight to one in four medical students/applicants have a doctor parent or close relative. In Indian samples, the figure looks similar, probably one in seven-ish, possibly higher in some cohorts.

That is very, very far from 50%. We are grossly overrepresented, but we are far from the majority. The actual data doesn't support claims that we could just give up on selection and admit them by default.

(a product of 1890-1950, whereas popular PMC meritocracy is a product largely of 1985-present).

Sui Dynasty China? You're off by 1400 years. Meritocracy is not new. The pains are not new. I'm swallowing the bitter pill.

Why did you, the child of a doctor, have to work so hard to get the same job your father had and so would for fundamental genetic and cultural reasons likely also perform well at?

You do recall that essay where I said that my dad didn't come from a pedigree of doctors right? That he was a refugee without two rupee coins to rub together? That meritocracy lifted him out of the gutter? I hope you do. After all, it was the largest salvo I've fired in our ongoing debate about meritocracy. You should realize that this standard, applied honestly, would mean that he never became a doctor, and that I wouldn't be here because of it.

I did not enjoy the selection process required to become a doctor. I have been vociferously complaining about the further selection required for me to become a shrink. I still support strong meritocracy, because my commitment to my principles is stronger than my desire to make my life easier for myself.

It's the same reason I never bothered to apply for reasonable accommodations on my exams. I'm fully eligible, because of the ADHD. Call it a chip on my shoulder, call it a struggle with impostor syndrome or an inferiority complex, psychoanalyze me the way I psychoanalyze everyone else (look at what I'm doing here). I don't mind. I'd rather suffer in a fair system than flourish in a biased one.

If I couldn't hack it as a doctor? Too bad. If I can't hack it as a psychiatrist? That would suck. But while I have a laundry list of issues with the way British psychiatry pipelines work, the meritocracy isn't one of them.

With narrow-sense heritability of intelligence in the 0.5 to 0.7 range, children of two parents at +2 SD will average around +1.2 SD, with substantial variance. So even in your preferred world where you select by parentage, you'd need a filter to catch the kids who regressed below the competence threshold. Otherwise you get incompetent doctors who happen to have a doctor father. And I know a lot of fail-sons and fail-daughters of doctor parents. I was always scared of becoming one. I still am, even with all the objective evidence against it. Mostly because the further I go, the stiffer the competition becomes.

Do I really have to dig out the citations on the strong correlation between intelligence and performance for doctors? Or simply grades (which are IQ+conscientiousness)? I have the Paper B. You've nerd sniped me already. I can't afford the time, but I'm here nonetheless.

If heritability did all that you claim, the children of doctors would breeze through medical entrance exams and the selection would be costless. The fact that they don't, that even doctor-parented children grind in coaching alongside everyone else, is itself evidence that selection does something beyond filtering for pedigree.

My dad worked his ass off (and still does) so he could give me a headstart. The money for extra tuition. The general support and comfort of knowing what the hell you're supposed to do in a med school. I consider these entirely legitimate advantages, because I had to sit the same tests as everyone else. He also didn't hand me as many of his SNPs as I'd like, or perhaps he waited too long and his swimmers became senescent. ADHD with above average intelligence is an unpleasant combination.

I intend to do everything I can for my kids. Money. Emotional support. A proper childhood. Hopefully a smart partner so they get another helping of the alleles that contribute to intelligence (and maybe better looks). I am happy with that. I am tolerating the pain of the struggle to get there, because I'm dangerously close to preferring death over hypocrisy.

If heritability did all that you claim, the children of doctors would breeze through medical entrance exams and the selection would be costless. The fact that they don't, that even doctor-parented children grind in coaching alongside everyone else, is itself evidence that selection does something beyond filtering for pedigree.

The folk conception of biology and evolution that people have is still very Lamarckian in this way. Even among intelligent families, children are still very much a crapshoot. I’ve wondered at times though whether you can breed out some of the most fundamental characteristics in humans.

In any population, you can select for a certain trait and by encouraging its reproduction within the population, greatly increasing the frequency of its heritability and expression. Could you theoretically do the opposite? Take say a trait from the big 5 like neuroticism. If you outright banned the reproduction of all highly neurotic people, could you with time extinguish that feature of human personality entirely or merely suppress the strength of its intensity and the frequency of its appearance?

Looking at other animals, how many species could you confidently express have “personality” in a way that’s as discernible with what you find in humans?

You're looking at polygenic selection, which would be significantly slower than selecting for traits dominated by a handful of genes. But in principle? Absolutely. It would just be a massive pain in the ass, but we've done it for dogs and cattle. There is evidence for weak selection for specific personality traits over human evolution, but I forget the specifics.

CC for @Tretiak below.

When it comes to trait-based selection, whether a trait is polygenic, monogenic—or anything in between—the genetic architecture doesn't matter for the response to selection. Only thing that matters is heritability and selection differential (how "drastic" your selection is).

Breeder's Equation for a quantitative/continuous trait (e.g., neuroticism) is R = h^2 * S, where R is the response to selection, h^2 heritability, and S the selection differential (how different the mean of the selected parents is relative to the general population).

Heritability would be the dominant form of the equation, but you also can’t factor out the epigenetic influence (I would think) unless gene expression itself can be further reduced to strict biological determinants. Which is to say gene expression is also heritable. I understand what you’re saying here but I’m still unsure as to whether it answers the question or not. Or maybe it’s a poorly formed question. I probably don’t have the background here that you do.

Incidentally what does the equation say about people of exceptionally gifted talents that have no known biological pedigree found within their family ancestry?

Heritability would be the dominant form of the equation, but you also can’t factor out the epigenetic influence (I would think)

In the 2000s and 2010s there was massive hype and hopium around human epigenetics being A Thing, largely to fight against the crimethink that the variance in traits such as cognitive ability could be primarily explained by heritability. This hype and hopium had already mostly died down by the late 2010s/early 2020s.

Incidentally what does the equation say about people of exceptionally gifted talents that have no known biological pedigree found within their family ancestry?

It doesn't directly nor does it need to. The usual parent-offspring equation (Y = a + bx + e, basically almost the simplest linear regression one can think of) and the normal distribution describe it well. Exceptionally gifted parents tend to have more gifted children, on average, than unremarkable parents. However, unremarkable parents far outnumber exceptionally gifted people. Thus, it'd be no surprise that exceptionally gifted people sometimes come from unremarkable families.

I remember that time as well. Quite well in fact and immediately knew it was being over hyped and sold by the media; probably on purpose.

Only 2%-3% of genes code for traits. The rest you can resign to the scrap heap, whatever else (which is still an enormous amount) is involved in genetic expression (epigenetics). That’s all I mean to emphasize. I’m not at all taking the form of an argument produced for the target audience you’re referring to. But even so, the argument does nothing to rebut the importance of epigenetics, properly understood.

The side note about gifted children I meant more about the emergence and origin of these traits from a lineage of unremarkable people. Are they simply dormant or latent because of epigenetic suppression? If you look at a Michael Jordan for instance, there was nothing to suggest in his biological lineage that he would’ve been the kind of person he was. Just in raw genetic factors alone his brother was 5’8, which is quite the contrast. Same with a LeBron James. So what gives in that instance?