The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate A simply great summary of the recent controversy on heritability over at ACX.
…the bad news is that they can’t agree which one
The hereditarians declared victory (Cremieux on X, Emil Kirkegaard on Substack)
But the nurturists declared victory (Sasha Gusev on Substack)
I have leaned toward the former view for years, but want to get this right. Cremieux and Emil Kirkegaard claim that their opponents are wrong because of initial bias and not wanting to look at the data. Sasha Gusev claims that his opponents are wrong because they are pig-headed fools and generally stupid. Longtime readers know where I am going to put my trust on that one.
But still, I want to get it right, and Scott Alexander explains it to me in terms I can understand. I commented there.
2 comments:
Nurturists is SA's word, but the old school nuturists aren't really around anymore. How much of variation is explained by heredity may be up to debate, but in the developed world pretty much none of the rest is explained by identifiable environmental differences, it seems to be for all practical purposes random.
I don't really understand why twin studies are considered so much better than adoption studies. My understanding is that adopted children resemble their biological parents almost as much as children who are not adopted on almost every trait you can measure, and resemble their adopted parents scarcely at all.
You are correct in your first paragraph, but it is still an extremely unpopular idea in many fields. It is flat out not allowed in some education journals to credit more that about 10% to genetics. Lip service is given to "OF COURSE genetics plays a role," but as soon as you turn your back they forget they have said it. Flat dishonest, really.
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