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Gregory Clark published The Inheritance of Social Status: England, 1600-2022. You can find breakdowns of the results and methodology by geneticist Alexander Young and Cremieux in Twitter threads. The main takeaway is that a model of genetic inheritance and assortative mating nearly perfectly explains social status across nine different measures.
This builds on previous findings that dramatic changes in social structure or wealth transfers are often only temporary setbacks for elite families. In China, the Cultural Revolution, perhaps the single biggest upheaval in social structure and wealth redistribution in human history, saw the pre-communist elite families spend one generation below median income/education before outearning and outlearning other households by 16% and 11%, respectively, in the second generation. A similar phenomenon is seen in the American South following the Civil War, where it took antebellum elite families one generation to regain equal footing, with the second generation surpassing their counterparts in income and education.
Critics of the hereditarian hypothesis have posted critiques of the study, but, to my knowledge, no clear alternative hypotheses or explanations for the genetic model fitting basically perfectly.
It’s fascinating that even Turkheimer, one of the most prominent anti-HBD academics in this debate (and one of the most prominent academics in the space in general) barely gets 30-40 retweets in his commentary on a huge paper like this. It kind of shows how, even on the anti-hereditarian side, academic opinions don’t really matter. Sure, Vox might quote Turkheimer in an article on why group genetic differences are supposedly bullshit, but his views have nothing to do with why the article was written, they could be omitted or he could have never replied to their email and the article, save for the quote, would have been exactly the same. Turkheimer is useful to bolster the ‘mainstream’ narrative, but his role is narrow.
Arguing for hereditarianism is like being an economist in the Soviet Union in 1950 and arguing, using complex economic models and a lot of math and comparative data, that free markets could be better than centrally planned economies. The amount of data you have is completely irrelevant; your faculty peers of the establishment position might halfheartedly attempt a rebuttal as an intellectual exercise, but in truth everyone knows that the reason your paper isn’t going to lead to any big policy debate is because the Party has its ideology and intends to keep it and, most importantly, does not justify its maintenance of the current system on the grounds of an ongoing scientific enquiry. Marx and Lenin performed the scientific analysis, by definition socialism follows capitalism, by definition a reversal is undesirable and morally and thus politically wrong.
Likewise in this case. The right has the strange idea that progressive universalism, perhaps because the scientific revolution was coterminous with the emergence of many liberal ideas, is grounded in some kind of (flawed or misguided) scientific analysis. Certainly it has aspirations to that effect. But progressivism as ideology was never founded on ‘science’, it was founded on feeling and on sentiment, and so no scientific evidence can challenge it.
HBD arguments are persuasive to the people who can be reached. Eventually it will undermine the narrative.
By the 1980s, Marxism-Leninism was a spent force. Even though apparatchiks emptily repeated the slogans at party conferences, few true believers remained. How many KGB agents didn't secretly wish they had been born in the West?
Likewise, the empty platitudes of wokism will become more hollow. To me, and to anyone who is paying attention, HBD is true and obvious. The believers in blank-slatism will start to look more and more deranged, much like a Soviet functionary who actually believed in Marxism in 1980 (so cringe). Sure, one still can't say the true thing out loud. But passionately supporting the dogma will start to look pretty silly as well. The eye rolls will increase.
The intellectual arguments come first. Everything else follows.
Is this really true in the case of HBD? Almost all of the new evidence is validating what were previously commonplace beliefs.
This paper is just strong evidence in support of Ronald Fisher’s additive genetic model. Plenty of hereditarian work is just validating Galton.
The intellectual arguments were widely accepted, and then rejected following World War 2, despite the evidence still supporting them. I wouldn’t be so confident that theories rejected while having the weight of evidence will be adopted because the evidence, which was already pretty clear, becomes even more overwhelming.
You're not wrong here, but I think an important thing to note is that "evidence" was in fact assembled and constructed to prop up the new consensus. Even though that evidence can't stand up to interrogation, actually trying to interrogate it was largely taken as evidence that you're a witch/believe lightning precedes thunder. The strategy wasn't to just go "Ok just ignore all evidence, science doesn't apply here and you just have to accept what the societal elite say the science is", but to actually assemble a convincing facsimile of evidence and say that doubting it gets you removed from polite society.
That people have now removed the figleaves and essentially demonstrated that tabula rasa is a polite fiction adopted for social rather than scientific reasons matters, and absolutely will have an impact on how these theories are interpreted by society.
I’d be interested in learning or reading more about this. My impression is that it really was just: “ignore all evidence, science doesn't apply here and you just have to accept what the societal elite say the science is" until Arthur Jensen and William Shockley attempted to remind everyone that hereditarianism is true, and that the blank slate consensus was fabricated.
The post war period had things like the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, but that really wasn’t evidenced based. It is a pure moral document (that many scientists refused to sign because it lacked evidence).
Only in the late 70s and 80s did figures like Lewontin and Gould emerge to try to claim that it was evidence-backed. This could be a blind spot for me, but that’s my understanding of the timeline.
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