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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2675 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 7, 2023

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I think twin adoption studies that control for socioeconomic class show heritability cannot be boiled down to environmental stuff the parents do.

So, Wikipedia defines heritability as "a statistic used in the fields of breeding and genetics that estimates the degree of variation in a phenotypic trait in a population that is due to genetic variation between individuals in that population. The concept of heritability can be expressed in the form of the following question: "What is the proportion of the variation in a given trait within a population that is not explained by the environment or random chance?"

But in every single HBD discussion, there is someone claiming that heritability and genetic influence are not identical. They usually bring up something clearly environmental, such as "having books at home" and claim that this would also be heritable. I do think it has something to do with how many environmental circumstances such as parental behaviour might themselves be influenced by the parents' genes. But this doesn't seem like a refutation of genetic impact to me.

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