"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
- Jay Gould
"Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading."
He certainly misrepresented data in Mismeasure of Man:https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
I do find it amusing how people who claim intelligence is 100% environment are also terrified of letting others select for intelligence. It is almost like they know, deep down, that it will work. That intelligence, like almost every other trait we have measured, has a very large heritable component: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
>"That intelligence, like almost every other trait we have measured, has a very large heritable component"
The problem is what do you mean when you say "intelligence". We can easily measure physical traits like height, weight, strength, etc. But intelligence is practically impossible to measure and define in any meaningful way. IQ tests have been thoroughly debunked as highly dependent on cultural biases and assumptions of learned knowledge. There is no one single measure you can look at and determine the intelligence of an individual which could possibly be predicted by genetics alone.
See this letter to the editor if you want to see what the giants of evolutionary biology thought of Gould:
John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, recently summarized in the NYRB the sharply conflicting assessments of Stephen Jay Gould: "Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists." (NYRB, Nov. 30th 1995, p. 46). No one can take any pleasure in the evident pain Gould is experiencing now that his actual standing within the community of professional evolutionary biologists is finally becoming more widely known. If what was a stake was solely one man's self-regard, common decency would preclude comment.
But as Maynard Smith points out, more is at stake. Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory" -- or as Ernst Mayr says of Gould and his small group of allies -- they "quite conspicuously misrepresent the views of [biology's] leading spokesmen."[1] Indeed, although Gould characterizes his critics as "anonymous" and "a tiny coterie," nearly every major evolutionary biologist of our era has weighed in in a vain attempt to correct the tangle of confusions that the higher profile Gould has inundated the intellectual world with.[2] The point is not that Gould is the object of some criticism -- so properly are we all -- it is that his reputation as a credible and balanced authority about evolutionary biology is non-existent among those who are in a professional position to know: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html
>IQ tests have been thoroughly debunked as highly dependent on cultural biases and assumptions of learned knowledge.predicted by genetics alone.
They really, truly have not been debunked. If you are willing to read a short book on the topic, I would recommend this one which has an epub version here: https://archive.org/details/IntelligenceAllThatMatters/page/...
If you are interested in the truth, I ask you to approach this subject bloodlessly, as you would a programming problem. Read the book I linked to. Then re-read Measure of Man, if you must.
But before you do, allow yourself to consider that bio-determinism is allowed to be true. There is no god or law of physics that prevents this from being the case. Imagine that these were just brute facts. If they were, your actions may change but your normative commitments do not have to.
I think if you read the literature neutrally, you will find g-factor is basically coherent and well-motivated, and intelligence is heritable. But when reading on matters touched by ideology, I think it is important to allow yourself to believe you can be persuaded.
We'd sooner use gene editing to make people more empathetic, briefer in their words, less absolutist, less looking at things as "programmer problems," less engineery. Higher "EQ."
The fallacy is made clear if you look at something less charged like hight. Clearly, in your town, height variance is mostly due to genetics. However, in genetically similar groups over time, heights have been gradually increasing over the generations. This increase is not because heights are being genetically selected for but because the genome codes for an organism that can grow taller or shorter in different conditions, and these places (e.g. Europe) are providing the "grow tall" conditions. Places that aren't providing these conditions are not seeing their children grow them taller.
Now, height is a lot easier to measure than intelligence, and a lot less politically weighted by the various movements to promote racial inequality. But the conceptual fallacy is the same.
Note that Gould is explicitly attacking a "races are genetically different in some substantive intelligence fashion" movement of his time, using the oddly similar movements from prior times. This eugenics thru biotech argument is not currently racially motivated, but western cultures have suffered thru a number of "eugenics by positive means -> eugenics by racism" shifts in the near past, so we are a bit twichty about it.
tldr: No studies about individual variation will tell you about between non-random subgroup variation.
Can you explain how you know this? Taller people, in general, are often considered more desirable mates. Wouldn't this lead to such people having more children which would lead to, well, average increases in height?
It is a fact that I had a hard time accepting, considering that it flies in the face of my beliefs about merit, hard work and the importance of education. These things are important, but genes play a huge role too.
Given the tight coupling between culture and IQ tests, it's not necessarily proof of inheritability.
Twins raised in the same household have nearly identical cultural exposure.
(Unless the control is an adopted child of the same age, raised in the same household...)
It’s well understood that complex traits are polygenic (no single gene or sets of causal variants) but quite easy to predict such traits when looking at the full genome (I agree the resolution of prediction is still not there — but we are in the infancy of this field).
I recommend learning more about some of the polygenic risk scoring methodologies that are popping up in research: https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/giant-study-finds-rare-i...
We have DNA and (partly) heritable traits just like tomatos and wheat. The only reason modification (eg CRISPR) was done later in humans vs other organisms was due to ethical not technical reasons.
We have easily obtained metrics that work as a proxy for intelligence like IQ, educational attainment, elite professional success, number of patents, publications etc.
As for having many genes being responsible for a trait, Fisher showed in 1918 you can perform selection even if there were an infinite number of loci involved, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitesimal_model
None of these are meaningful measures of intelligence.
You can't just sequence people who have accomplished great things and are widely recognised as geniuses as there aren't enough of then and they're busy.
We need huge sample sizes. Ideally, you'd sequence a million people and have them sit rigorous tests, interviews etc. But it's way cheaper and faster to have them tick boxes on forms.
You're going to have to provide meaningful evidence to back up the assertion that numbers of patents (as well as the other criteria listed) actually correlate to higher intelligence.
This is how science works, humanity learns more and progresses. Just because something is complex to you today doesn't mean it will still be complex to you 50 years from now.