Re:The Global Fertility Crash
by hackinthebochs on Thursday October 31, 2019 @08:46PM
(#21415284)
It is long past reasonable to doubt that intelligence is at least 50% heritable.
It really isn't, by the simple question of: what does "50% heritable" even mean?
50% of what? (which is to say, you picked that number because 50% genetics 50% environment feels like a good split, and how do you even measure that?)
Re:The Global Fertility Crash
by concordDance on Friday November 01, 2019 @05:02AM
(#21417168)
> what does "50% heritable" even mean?
It means that if you plotted a graph of orphaned children IQs on the X axis and their biological parents IQs on the Y axis you'll get a messy and very bulgy line going up and to the right.
And this kind of thing is discovered by noticing that the IQs of identical twins are much more similar than those of non-identical twins.
Wikipedia has a fairly good overview: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Re:The Global Fertility Crash
by concordDance on Friday November 01, 2019 @04:55AM
(#21417139)
> Assuming intelligence can only be the direct result of genes is not supported in the literature.
Huh, guess I missed the news that we'd discovered human level problem solving abilities in sheep.
Since then the useful selective function for individual survival has been the ability to operate in a tribe and make the tribe successful.
Who's to say what that has really been selecting for? Intelligence may very well have almost no correlation with individual genes, and simply be an emergent phenomenon optimized for by pro-social behaviors, or activated by being in the presence of people who are already fulfilling that role. Maybe what we regard as individual intellect is repressed pathways only chemically triggered in childhood after the development cycle casts around to try and figure out the status of the tribe and specialize into the optimum addition?