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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34920 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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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.

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.

Erm, I think your links present a very clear alternative hypotheses. To quote the Vince Buffalo tweet thread you yourself linked:

On the Clark paper: correlation functions often decay over various distances (genetic, environmental, spatial, etc). Observing a correlation that varies over genetic relatedness is not evidence that the cause is genetic, since many other processes create correlations that decay.

Fitting a parametric model for the rate of decay, as he does, is one way to check the plausibility of a model. However, many correlation functions have very similar forms. A good fit is not evidence of the right causal model.

His model has 2 degrees of freedom: heritability (h²) and corr. due to assortative mating (m). The genetic trait correlation function ρ(k) = h²((1+m)/2)ᵏ will fit data from many different non-genetic processes very well, which we know would also be decreasing over distances.

So, my take is the dataset is interesting, and yes the "genetic" model fits. But so would many, many alternative models that aren't in the paper. That the genetic model fits is not evidence genetics is the cause of the good fit. Many models with 2 df fit decay in correlations.

To put it bit more bluntly: If I measure how many Christmas postcards people send to each other (during 90s when people sent Christmas postcards), I would be surprised if I did not observe excellent fit for a genetic model with two free parameters for correlations of much postcards people send to each other: parents and children send more frequently postcards to each other, siblings quite and grandchildren and grandparents quite often , uncles and aunts less, cousins and other more distant relations less, decaying more and more as relations become more distant. It is not due to genetics causing postcard-activity (in a Platonian state, where children won't know their parents, sending postcards to them would quite difficult indeed!). It is because we intentionally organize ourselves socially in a way that closely mirrors our genetic relationship (for various good reasons), barring some random accidents.

Or here is what Turkheim says:

"Except for wealth"? Isn't wealth the alternative hypothesis? And that is what the modeling does: observes surprising persistence of family effects out to fourth cousins, for which there are at least two hypotheses: environmental family effects (C) and assortative mating (AM). /1

The models don't include C, by fiat. They just show that if you are willing to push AM up high enough, you can get a genetic model that fits the data. Kind of like doing a twin study, observing rDZ=rMZ, and concluding that it fits an additive genetic model with enough AM. /2

Assortative mating covers a huge amount of territory here, basically lumping all stratification processes-- genetic, environmental or phenotypic-- under a single rubric with an implausibly high value. Ignoring family environment is justified post hoc. /3

If you had told me a year ago that 2023 was going to bring a wave of maximalist genetic explanations of social structure, I would have said you were alarmist. Now? In a progressive era of surprisingly thin GWAS findings? But here we are. More soon. /end

To be scientifically more convincing, the study would need is a setup that could falsify a genetically determined environmental explanation. Lack of it is quite surprising because the object of the study is social status in the UK. Social status of king Charles is hereditary, yet not caused by any action attributable his genes themselves. I am surprised hereditarians would put so much stock on this study -- there are much better other evidence for a hereditarian positions, such as GWAS studies which usually attempt to control for this sort of thing (usually including principal components of genotype as covariates in regression models, which doesn't necessarily always work convincingly but probably results in directionally better estimates than no control at all). The Clark study, despite the impressive N, is quite weak evidence: if there is other more convincing evidence (that can rule out genetically-correlated social environment), then it is only confirmatory observation. If there is no such evidence, it won't convince a critic on its own merits.

Yeah I was a little taken aback by the lack of attention paid to wealth in this. He says wealth has a stronger implied generation to generation persistence then his other metrics of social status but he doesn't show whether or not wealth correlations changes as a function of genetic distance like he does for the other metrics.

He does show that wealth is asymmetrically hereditary in that the paternal grandfather predicts wealth but the maternal grandmother does not. If social status is produced by wealth, and wealth is inherited by sons then wouldn't we expect other status measures to be less correlated with the female line than the male line?

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