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I question the premises here. They're faulty.
Your sampling is not representative.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322895020_Characteristics_of_Medical_Students_with_Physician_Relatives_A_National_Study
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10174736/1/Joanne%20Harris%20EdD%20thesis%20final.pdf
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.
Sui Dynasty China? You're off by 1400 years. Meritocracy is not new. The pains are not new. I'm swallowing the bitter pill.
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.
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?
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.
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 1%-2% 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?
The molecular guys probably fucked that one up because 50>% of behavior variance is explained by genetic variance. They don't really have good evidence for that claim any more than psychologists have good evidence for anything they teach the teenagers. And of course we are not allowed to teach the teenagers quantitative genetics, which produces voting citizens with a knowledge base like you. But maybe the two facts are jointly true. I suspect though that the entire DNA being about 800 megabytes, means that 2% actually being code leave 4 megabytes, and I feel like a lot more than 4 megabytes.
… Eh. Are you telling me you weren’t aware that only between 1%-2% of genes in human beings code for proteins? This is something that’s taught in the intro chapters of almost every introductory genomics textbook I’ve ever seen.
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