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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.
I used to think it was just a matter of reaching enough people, but I've now come to realise that evidence doesn't really matter for a great number people if it interferes with their ideology and/or personal interest.
The amount of people in the West who would be negatively affected if HBD became the dominant intellectual frame of reference is now massive. They have a clear personal stake at never allowing that to happen. Dispassionate scientific inquiry is in fact something very few are interested in. You can show them a thousand papers. It won't matter. They will only use it to indict you for heresy.
What does "HBD" actually entail? It's a term you never see used outside of this forum, afaik. All I know is that it stands for human bio diversity and means that you take seriously the findings that all sorts of tests like the SAT etc show in terms of group differences? What else?
Like anything, it's an imprecise cluster of beliefs, but the core belief is basically what you outlined. It's the belief that intelligence is real and can be measured even if imperfectly, and that our best current measurements indicate both that it has a significant genetic component and that if you take the average intelligence of everyone within various genetic groups of people, then that average is sometimes different when comparing between different groups. I think that's the minimum of what one has to believe for one to believe in "HBD."
Much is made of intelligence and for good reason.
But I'd like to add:
Parental investment
Impulse control
Self-confidence
Time preference
General aggressiveness
Hormonal balances (e.g. testosterone)
Industriousness
Sexual fidelity
Instinct toward hygiene
Propensity to certain diseases
Aesthetic preferences
And so many more!
Yes culture matters, but we have only to look to the animal kingdom for the obvious genetic underpinnings of all of the above.
My current working metaphor is something like, "Culture is a house built upon a genetic foundation. If the foundation, the capacity, is there then the culture can take hold. But for any individual, cultural constructs will collapse to their point of sound genetic foundation."
(And if you don't believe me, try teaching good financial habits to someone with a nasty FOXP2 mutation. Or for that matter a sturgeon.)
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