There is a lot more debate, or at least debate between people I have heard about, on hereditatrianism. It is getting rancorous and I am finding that part unpleasant. There is no practical reason why I need to follow the debate, I am just fascinated by it and have been for a few decades. But I am also only in it for pleasure now, and can drop it if it is less...fun...entertaining...something. I don't need the grief. But I will continue following it for now. I usually put up posts on controversial topics if I mostly agree with them, less often if they are simply interesting new looks. But I am duty bound to post more of both sides on this one now, because of my own uncertainty. I will say that there is not only new evidence, but new arguments on the field, and keeping up will mean some updating for everyone.
I won't hit you with all of them at once. There was ACX on 12/3, two mixed in today and 2.5 tomorrow. After that we'll see.
The return of psychiatric eugenics Thomas Reilly at Rational Psychiatry shows how it is not only a hateful idea, it won't won't work. It's been tried. Sasha Gusev, who I have not been fond of, gets this one exactly right, so perhaps I am on my way to revising my opinion about him.
Twins Reared Apart Do Not Exist Another essay attacking one of my central hereditarian beliefs. We'll see if the ground continues to shift.
Europe is Under Siege I wanted to argue with parts of this, but some of it is uncomfortably true.
Of course motherhood drives the gender wage gap by Ruxandra Teslo. Lyman Stone gives credit to Camille Landais and Henrik Levin rather than Claudia Grondin for the heavy lifting on this, even though Grondin won the Nobel Prize for it.
5 comments:
I'm glad you report on the blow-by-blow so I don't have to read the originals. My main observation is that the environmentalists are more fanatical than the hereditarians and this suggests more politics and emotion on the environmentalist side. Hereditatians since Galton have admitted a substantial environmental contribution, and hereditarian purists are extremely rare. Environmentalists since Boas have been, as I read them, far more absolutist in their claims. I also note that many hereditarians admit that they would like to be wrong because environmentalism gives more grounds for hope, but I have never once heard an environmentalist say that he wishes hereditarianism was true.
As I understand it, Besis's story of g is exactly backwards-ass wrong. Pearson didn't whimsically combine various cognitive abilities into one g factor, he devised what he thought were tests of separate mental abilities, and discovered that they correlated strongly with one another. To the extent we have sub-intelligences, I think we don;t even have names for them, much less reliable measures of them. Whatsisname's "theory of multiple intelligences" isn't about breaking down g into components, it's about taking things that don't have anything to do with g and labelling them as "flavors of intelligence".
"The Nazis tried it and failed" isn't really an argument that it can't be done. They were using 30s and 40s tech. And when you think about it, how was murdering schizophrenics and others with severe disabilities supposed to help clean up the gene pool, when most of them weren't going to reproduce in the first place?
It's the 21st century dude, and we have 21st century tech. Zeeb's son was the first human to be fully sequenced in the embryo, but I suspect pretty soon it'll be common. And the day after governments try to ban abortions based on selection is the day eugenics tourism becomes an industry.
It would have been interesting to see the distribution of delta-IQ vs IQ for the twin studies. Many of the confounders he cites are harmful.
WRT eugenics and the marriageability of people from families with problematic members--I remember reading of people worrying about "bad blood."
@George - It was Martin Gardner, who I otherwise admired a great deal. But yes. Musical ability is musical ability. Athletic ability is athletic ability. Rather than getting us out of the "intelligence is everything" hole, I think it embeds us further. If you can't call it some kind of intelligence, then it's worth less? That's crazy, once you remember that discretion, honesty, kindness, patience and a dozen other qualities are of enormous importance.
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