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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2655 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 7, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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On the other side, how "heritable" is "wealth?" The answer depends on your population sample, but often it is "very heritable!" Why? Well, in most places around the world, wealth is inherited (indeed, the word "inherit" originally referred to certain rights, long before we understood genetics) by operation of law. If wealth is concentrated in a few families (which is true in many human populations), then you would actually see a very tight correlation between the variation in genes and the possession of wealth, giving wealth a high heritability coefficient. Now it may well be that "making money" is something downstream of some genetically-affected trait, but still it seems unlikely that creating a clone of Donald Trump would guarantee you a being destined to inherit millions of dollars.

Thank you! That was the key to my confusion. For some reason I thought the comparison that is being made to figure out the degree to which genetic variance is responsible for phenotypical variance is always between siblings (which is of course one of the ways in which you can isolate the effect). I did not think about comparing two randomly chosen individuals.

I don't know what it means to be a "latent construct" in this context.

Unless I am confused again, that's an independent variable you suspect is responsible for change in dependent variables but one which you cannot measure directly.

Yeah, I guess the steelman of his position, as I understand it, would be it's very difficult to compare populations, in part because the very process of population selection involves a choice. It's not that "everything is heritable" (armedness isn't!) but more like "a lot of high-heritability stuff is clearly not genetic, a lot of low-heritability stuff is clearly genetically determined, and your methods for selecting populations for analysis already have a variety of biases built in to them, so all you're really doing is laundering those biases through complex math."

Could you give an example of what you mean by population selection here? Would Turkheimer argue that the populations we observe differences in are already subject to extremely potent social forces and it is therefore impossible to isolate genetic effects? But what about, e.g., twin adoption studies?

Whether you buy that argument is probably going to depend a lot on your own priors re: how much intelligence seems genetic, in the same way that armedness seems genetic. It's an oversimplification to be sure, but if you think "Bobby is smart" is more likely the result of the processes that make Bobby wealthy, or the result of the processes that make Bobby have two arms, you will very likely draw different conclusions about whether the heritability of intelligence (which is, undisputedly, quite high!) says something about the genetics of intelligence.

The mainstream opinion among geneticists seem to be that genes define the potential, the environment the degree to which it is reached. I don't think Turkheimer disagrees with that, only with the argument that in-between group differences are genetic.

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