I wonder, though, how much of IQ's heritability is cultural.

It would work like this: My parents were poor, and had lower IQs. They didn't have time to read to me or talk a lot to me or spend a lot of time with me. They were too tired, just trying to make enough money to keep us all fed.

Now I've got kids, and I'm repeating the same pattern, partly because I'm tired from working too hard, and partly because that's the pattern I saw growing up, and so it's the default behavior for me.

Note well: This account is fictional, not my actual experience. It's not even anecdotal evidence for my position. It's a hypothetical explanation of how cultural baggage could be inherited between generations in a way that could affect IQ.

The scenario you describe is really one more common to the modern world of just the past couple generations.

Intelligence has been evolving and subject to inheritance far longer than that.

Believe it or not, the scenario you describe has occurred to researchers as an avenue of study, and they found it didn't amount to much(i.e. nature over nurture), see 'twin studies.'

This subject, intelligence, is really one of the triumphs of 20th century science, in that it has come to be quite well understood. It's understandable that you and so many others seem unaware of this, however, because to quote Steven Pinker, 'people hate the message.' https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/645301814955388930

Also, you may consider abandoning this notion of genetics and culture being in an uncorrelated relationship.

Cultures are simply people, that is they are emergent from the interactions of people, and since there are high IQ people and low IQ people, there are high IQ cultures and low IQ cultures.

IQ (g) is highly inheritable at the high end and less so at the low normal range. It is like height. Almost all tall people have tall, well nourished parents, but many short people in the world were malnourished as children.

On this note I have found that replacing g/IQ with height in any conversation about human genetics make for a more civilised discussion.

He so regularly offends people that he has wound up shadowbanned.

He is an interesting person. If you're curious, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer gives you a picture of his life's work and some of the challenges that he faces.

You make it sound like he unfairly pissed off the political correctness police. He's actually shadowbanned because he posted wanton, meaningless, racial-slur-filled rants that contributed nothing to the discussion, despite warnings.

He's schizophrenic. Sometimes he has something useful to add, because he's a talented hacker who's one of the few people in the world to have written an entire OS stack from scratch. Sometimes his disease writes the comments.

I have no sympathy for racists, and I think it's a difficult tradeoff to make here between making HN an inclusive and welcoming place for people who don't happen to know anything about the human behind TerryADavis, and not discriminating on the basis of mental illness, but I think your comment goes too far into frank ableism.

It's nothing to do with ableism; it's everything to do with the garbage frequently spewed by certain accounts. Not just offtopic offensive racist stuff, but also long wholly ungrammatical screeds.

That Wikipedia article is TERRIBLE, and badly mistakes the research on the topic (which I follow regularly in a journal club of behavior genetics researchers). Here is a better read on the topic, opposed by ideological point-of-view warriors on Wikipedia (I am also a Wikipedian):

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

If you click the timestamp of his comment there should be a [vouch] link. Clicking that should unkill his comment.

See this thread (and the sub it links to) for more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512

For starters it's not dead because of the content, view the history/google.

But second it's off topic anyway, if somehow it is on topic it would need to be explained better.

He was very likely hellbanned.

He has a condition that causes him to generate a large quantity of superfluous text, and append that to his posts.