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A vigorous discussion has been triggered by the release of Gregory Clark’s The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. In this book, Clark details his work which shows a large transmission of status from generation to generation, all across the world, going back centuries. The discussion has raged on the mode of this transmission. How does it occur? Clark found that when you look at surnames, which trace paternal lineages, you find that the status of families today is related to their status centuries ago. That is, surnames associated with high status in the past are over-represented among high status individuals today, and vice versa. This pattern holds across much of the world, from England, to Sweden, to Japan, to Korea, to China, to Chile. The pattern goes back centuries – Normans surnames are still overrepresented among the English elite. The descendants of the samurai still dominate the Japanese upper classes. The intergenerational correlation of status – a measure that includes wealth, education, occupation, longevity, etc (i.e., the “good stuff” of life), was as high as 0.8 in Clark’s analysis. Clark did find that regression to the mean occurred; high-status families became less high-status with time and vice versa, but it took a very long time – 10 to 15 generations, to for them to get there.
See this talk by Greg Clark, where he explaining his findings:
But why does the pattern that Clark found occur? That remains a key point of debate. Does it occur because of genetic inheritance of traits that lead one to success or failure (which include IQ, determination, cunning, physical health, attractiveness, etc.)? Or does it occur because of the advantage (or lack there of) conferred by one’s family status (e.g., a leg up into prestigious schools, the direct effect of wealth, connections, etc.)?
Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending have both shared their analyses of the situation:
The Son Also Rises | West Hunter
Simple Mobility Models | West Hunter
Simple Mobility Models II | West Hunter
Cochran on it:
In the short run, from one generation to the next, luck plays a big role. In the longer run, the fact that the subpopulation being examined has a different genotypic average, one more likely to result in high status, means that regression to the mean of the general population is slow for the subgroup, essentially caused by gradual change in its average genotype, change produced by intermarriage with individuals who on average have a less favorable genotype. Other than high heritability, the other prerequisite for this pattern is highly assortative mating for moxie. If two groups have different average amounts of moxie, complete endogamy (as in Indian castes) would ensure that the between-group difference would continue indefinitely, disregarding selection.
So is that it? Is this long-term transmission of legacy genetic? It appears that way. The pattern that we see is much what one would expect of a lineage over time if, collectively, the additive genetic components of this success factor was largely passed on from one generation to the next. Indeed, it really shouldn’t be any different. The individual variation is caused by a variety of factors, including environmental “luck”, non-additive genetic effects, developmental noise, and spousal genetic contribution (which may help or hinder). But, the key point, when the whole clan is considered at once, all these sources of variance should more or less cancel out. The only thing that breeds true is the additive genetic variance, and, in any large clan, that should pass on fairly uninterrupted from one generation to the next. The whole clan’s short-term generation-to-generation variance can be caused by variation in local circumstances that may help or hinder the entire lineage. That too should, over the generations, cancel out, in good part. The success of the clan over time is then dictated by its evolutionary fitness and the degree of assortative mating.
Assortative mating is key to perpetuating this process. The more assortative mating there is, the more each clan (which, by the way, is a fitting term in this instance, even for NW European societies, where there are no “clans” in HBD Chick‘s sense) retains the genes for success (or failure) and the slower the regression to mean. Non-assortative mating is the hole through which genes leak out over time, hastening regression and familial turn-over throughout the ages.
So what of these genetic traits that are germane to success? What are they? IQ is definitely one of them, and perhaps the single most important. But there are others, physical health surely, attractiveness likely, certain personality traits, such as conscientiousness, as well as not so admirable traits, such as those on the Dark Triad(Tetrad) (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, sadism), especially Machiavellianism. Maybe we could describe an “m” (moxie) factor (analogous to the g factor) that underlies them all (and maybe this gives credence to the idea that there is a “general factor of personality”). Of course, as we know, a number of these traits (e.g., conscientiousness, attractiveness, health) are positively correlated with IQ, so there’s that.
After all, what gives us this pattern?
Courtesy Steve Hsu
That I will leave to others to hash out. For my contribution, I wanted to zoom in a bit on a more local level and look at our particular snapshot in time, and examine something that should give commenters on this matter (and everyone else with an interest in this) pause.
The idea that this transmission of status over time has been as Clark found it squares well with another facet I discuss frequently on this blog: the fact that parenting doesn’t have much of a lasting effect on children’s outcomes.
That’s right, all the things parents do for their children, beyond the incredibly demanding task of keeping children alive and healthy, doesn’t count for much in the long run. We know this because of the absence of shared environment effects on children’s outcomes: children do not resemble the people they grow up with once you subtract the effects of heredity. Yes, the similarity between parents and child relative to the environment as a whole is completely due to shared genes. See my posts All Human Behavioral Traits are Heritable and Taming the “Tiger Mom” and Tackling the Parenting Myth for more on the mechanics of this.
The interesting thing is that even the people who take me seriously on this point still believe that there’s something their efforts can do, beyond keeping their children fed, clothed, clean, and cognizant of the basic ways of the world. Steven Sailer frequently suggests that the outcome of poorer children, especially those of color (mostly Hispanics) would improve if they had fewer of them, and hence could afford to invest more in each, despite the fact that this doesn’t hold up in adoption studies.
And to be sure, parents play and have played an important role in passing on skills and knowledge to their children. This is often a long and highly involved process, but, as most any parent knows, a rewarding one. But though parents play this vital role, when it comes to how our kids turn out, it’s best to think of it as “you can lead a horse to water….” The child’s innate abilities and proclivities, plus whatever developmental luck he or she possesses, will guide his or her path through the world.
However, a lot of parents – especially in the West today – feel one of their biggest goals is to see that their children receive the best education possible. Education unlocks many of the goodies in society today, and as such, it’s typically best that a child maximize his educational attainment to do best in life.
This is something where parents – even those aware of the non-effect of parenting – often innately feel that they have a role to play. And they may be justified in thinking so.
A large meta-analysis of behavioral genetic studies of educational attainment (Branigan, McCallum, and Freese, 2013) performed across much of the developed world (Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Spain, and the United States) found a significant and fairly substantial shared environment component to adult educational attainment. They found that the shared environment accounted for, all told, 36% of the variance in adult educational attainment, and 24% when only people born after 1950 were considered.
Interesting, isn’t it? Very interesting, you might think. Some may be quick to declare that this invalidates all that have been saying about the non-effect of parenting. Since education is something that clearly “matters” so much in life, then parents should redouble their efforts, right?
Well, it actually turns out that it doesn’t quite work that way.
There are actually quite a few complications to this, and quite likely this doesn’t mean what it appears to mean. For one, “educational attainment” is often measured in these studies as either a quantitative variable (years of schooling completed) or a categorical one (degree attained). It doesn’t add in the obvious complication of where and how. A quick look at the previous chart of transmission of income by occupation should be one clue. Another clue is this chart by Razib Khan, that makes it abundantly clear not every bachelor’s degree is created equal:
See also this SAT to IQ conversion of various college majors. We see a big difference between physics, astronomy, mathematics, and engineering majors on one end, with average IQs in the 125-135 range, and social work, early childhood, student counseling on the other, with average IQs barely above 100. I’d wager that if you were to decompose the “rigor” of the degree attained by major and by prestige of the institution that awarded it, the shared environment component would disappear. I’ll leave this for a future project.
It’s also worth mentioning also that “shared environment”, while it would be where you’d look to find the effects of parents and upbringing, doesn’t necessarily mean parents. We see this with studies of smoking initiation (which often occurs in teenage years). The extended twin family design, which looks not just at twins, but their parents, grandparents, non-twin siblings, avuncular relatives, etc., can decompose the “parental” shared environment from the “non-parental” shared environment.
Edit, 1/22/16: [Here something I wrote on the matter previously (on a now defunct site) that I now quote here:
The “shared environment” can mean a lot of things, and in fact, it can be confounded by quite a few things. Normally, this is not much of a problem, because the shared environment is reliably zero for adult outcomes.
When we find a non-zero shared environment, then we have a problem. Beyond the normal “ACE” components of behavioral genetics (additive genetic; common, or shared environment; and unique environment), there’s other things, like non-additive genetic variance (D, or “dominance”, in behavioral genetic equations), and assortative mating (which would erroneously inflate the shared environment measure at the expense of the additive genetic measure).
And of course, “environment” in the shared environment could come from several sources. It could come from parents. Or it could be from peers (or “not parental shared environment”, broadly), as I have noted.
Fortunately, there’s a way of breaking all of these apart. The extended twin design looks not just twins, but their relatives, parents, children, grandparents, uncles, nieces/nephews, cousins, etc. This type of study is pretty hard to do right, and in order to get reliable measurements, especially when the trait in question is on the uncommon side, you need huge samples, ideally >20,000.
In this type of study, you can pull out all of these possible influences. You can measure non-additive genetic variance by seeing if the correlation between more closely related relatives reliably exceeds what you’d expect from their level of genetic relationship alone (MZ twins being much more correlated than DZ twins, for example). You can measure the effect of non-parental shared influence (e.g., peers) by seeing if the correlation between siblings is greater than the correlations between parents and children (it shouldn’t be). You can look at the effect of assortative mating by looking at the correlation between spouses of twins and their co-twins.
And there’s a paper that did just that for smoking initiation. See here [Maes, Neale, Kendler, et al, 2006]. The paper explains many of these analyses in detail.
And what did they find? The lion’s share of the variance comes from additive genetic factors (as usual), of which about 10% resulted from assortative mating (slicing that much off the shared environment). No non-additive genetic effects were found. As for the shared environment, most of it was from “non-parental sources”. Some of it was indeed twin-specific; the twin correlation was higher than the non-twin sibling correlation (as well, opposite sex DZ twin correlation was lower than same sex DZ twin correlation). These shine the spotlight squarely on peers as a key factor.
The idea of “cultural” transmission from parents doesn’t hold here, because, the correlation (less genetics) was actually considerably negative! Children tended to be considerably less like their parents than you’d expect from shared genes, especially men. Part of that is no doubt cohort effects (the enormous decline in smoking over time). But, those that like to think children rebel against their parents may have something to munch on here. ***End Edit***]
This study found that “cultural transmission” (i.e., from parents) couldn’t explain the pattern seen in children (indeed, the parent-child correlation was negative once you removed heredity). The non-parental environment explained the variance, suggesting that other influences, such as peers, likely explain the results.
Another major issue with the finding of a nonzero shared environment effect exists. This issue squares the matter with Gregory Clark’s results. That is, when you consider other facets, education per se doesn’t seem to mean much in the end. Apparently, you can’t teach moxie. This is revealed by the fact that every trait “going in” that shapes a person (and should be relevant to educational attainment) reliably shows absolutely no shared environment impact. This includes not just the most well-known example, IQ…
…but personality traits, and not just some “broad major personality dimensions”, I mean highly specific behaviors, and including one’s work preferences and interests, the presence or absence of mental disorders, and including the features of a person we think of as “character.” Parents leave no lasting effect on any of it, aside from what they bequeath to their children genetically. See this review of the behavioral genetic evidence by Thomas Bouchard and Matt McGue [2002], as well as this one by Bouchard (2004). The high heritability and zero shared environment is also seen in the Dark Triad(Tetrad) traits as well, as seen in this meta-analysis [Evertsson & Meehan 2012] of the heritability psychopathic traits.
It’s worth mentioning that many of these studies don’t partition out measurement error, that is, inaccuracies in the assessment of the traits to be analyzed. This has the effect of attenuating the heritability estimate. Other studies, which use methods to get around that problem [Riemann, Angleitner, and Strelau, 1997], find heritabilities for personality traits in the 0.7-0.8 range, as is found for IQ, mental disorders, and physiological variables like height and BMI.
The significance of measurement error brings me to another thing. Sure, parenting might have no effect on intelligence or behavioral characteristics, but what about “values” and “beliefs,” the things many parents hope to instill in their children? Well, there’s no effect of the shared environment there, either. We see this for overall religiosity and religious values. (A note here, a review of behavioral genetic studies [Koenig & McGue, 2011] on this found that there was a non-insignificant shared environment component to religiosity in adults. However, religious beliefs and convictions are traits for which assortative mating [Watson et al, 2004] is very strong [Zietsch et al 2011] – indeed, my wife and I are both atheists, and so are my wife’s sister and her husband. This would have the effect of erroneously inflating the shared environment estimate at the expense of the heritability estimate in MZ twin-DZ twin studies. One study in the review compared MZ twins raised apart with those raised together. It found a zero shared environment, making it likely that assortative mating is behind the non-trivial shared environment finding in MZT/DZT studies). We also see this with political beliefs, as found by Peter Hatemi et al’s massive meta-analysis across five countries [Hatemi et al, 2014], and with their “extended family design” twin study [Hatemi et al 2010], which included a longitudinal component, allowing for both the partitioning of any shared environment findings and accommodation of the effects of assortative mating and measurement error:
Indeed, when we consider the effect of measurement error (adding it to the heritability estimate and to the somewhat nonsensical negative gene-environment correlation values), the heritability of political attitudes and social values skyrockets, being upwards of 85% (74%) for views towards pornography in women (men). The heritability of overall political orientation, when accounting for measurement error, teeters on 100%!
Liberals and conservatives will be battling for a long time to come.
So as we see, the heritability of everything that goes into forming a person is high, the shared environment, which represents the effects of parents, is zero. (It’s worth mentioning for those who are unfamiliar with these terms that there is also a “unique environment” term, which tends to be somewhere between 50-20% or so, typically lower once you account for measurement error. Hence the “shared environment” ≠ “all environment.”)
By the way, these findings don’t just hold in Western countries. The high heritability of and nil shared environment impact on behavioral traits are also found in Japan and South Korea [Hur et al 2013]. These East Asian cultures – with vastly different attitudes towards parenting – show the same pattern of heritable and shared environment influence as do Westerners.
But that’s all OK, yes? The whole point of education is to “shape” the raw individual beyond his/her genetic predilection, right? Wrong.
The problem is that everything that comes out, the adult outcomes, shows a shared environment impact that is also zero. These include:
- Criminality (massive meta-analysis [Rhee & Waldman 2002] of twin and adoption studies shows insignificant shared environment effect in adults)
- Marital stability/divorce risk (WW II [Trumbetta, Markowitz, and Gottesman, 2007] and Vietnam era twin registry [Jerskey et al, 2011] and Minnesota twins study [Jocklin, McGue, and Lykken, 1996])
- Substance abuse (review of meta analyses [Agrawal & Lynskey 2008] – high heritabilities in the 0.6-0.75 range, 0 shared environment for alcoholism, cannabis use, cocaine, and heroin)
- Tobacco smoking (meta analysis [Li et al 2003] – shared environment impact on initiation, as explained above; no impact on persistence)
- “Sociosexuality” (promiscuity) (Australian twin registry study [Bailey et al, 2000])
All the major outcomes don’t seem to show any lasting impact from whatever the shared environment impact on educational attainment is. But, most damning of all, a large meta-analysis covering [Hyytinen et al 2013] the U.S., Australia, Finland, and Sweden has found that the shared environment impact on lifetime income is also zero! The very thing most hope education will translate into appears to depend more on the individual’s innate traits – “moxie“ – and luck – than any special benefit conferred by mere degree. Whatever shared environment influence there is on educational attainment, like so many other things, it doesn’t seem to matter in the long run.
OK, so you might be willing to accept that you can’t shape your child’s personality or values. You can’t control his major life outcomes. You can’t even control how much money he will go on to earn. But surely you can do something useful, like leave your children a lifetime of happiness, right? After all, I believe, and advise, that a parent’s key duty, after ensuring that their children grow up healthy and safe, is to ensure that each has a happy childhood. Surely that must count for something, too,? It does, in the form of fond memories of childhood.
For it turns out that overall life satisfaction as an adult has a high heritability and a shared environment impact that is also zero, as found in a Dutch [Stubbe et al 2005] twin study and in a Norwegian [Røysamb et al 2003] one, together with a combined sample size of over 12,000. One’s lifetime of happiness boils down to genes and to the fickleness of luck. Edit, 3/3/15: [A new meta-analysis of subjective well-being and life satisfaction twin studies with a combined sample of nearly 48,000 finds a significant (>35%) heritability and a zero shared environment. This study included twins reared apart, finding similar results in that sample. See Bartels 2015. ***End Edit***]
Some of you might wonder how I could be a parent and believe that my efforts in raising my child will not impact who he goes on to become. Well, I’ve long since known that it was out of my hands. He will be who he will be. It’s only my job to help him get there, and pass on the legacies of all those who came before him. I did all I could do: I married well. Beyond that it’s in the hands of “fate”.
The failure of parents to appreciably affect the outcomes of their children affirms Gregory Clark’s findings, and indicates that much of the transmission of status from one generation to the next is ultimately genetic in origin. Clark’s studies used several measures of status, and I haven’t covered them all here. Perhaps something reliably affected by the shared environment might yet turn up. I’m not betting on it though.
Almost certainly, throughout history, and across the diverse societies, there has been a huge amount of “noise” in the transmission of status, especially on the individual level and in the short run. The vagaries of the circumstances no doubt imbued good fortune on some and dashed the success of many others. But through it all, the thing that is at the root of continuity – DNA – remained the active ingredient to propagate lineages in their respective places through out the ages.
It is as it was said in the Richard Donner Superman films: “The son becomes the father, and father becomes the son.” That encapsulates the essence of the reality here. Underneath all the variability (much of which is driven by more or less random forces), there is a fundamental truth in those words.
As for the theme for this post, I can’t think of anything more appropriate than “Jaga’s Theme.” This tune symbolizes both survival and the passage of knowledge and a legacy from one generation to the next. It is perfectly fitting.
Please see my 
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In Asia, like China and Japan, it was not unknown for a nouveau riche to take a famous surname to adapt it as one’s own. Also in Japan adoption was actually encouraged; often a child of a poor relation who showed some promises was adopted to a more prominent family and got the surname, and in some cases retainers or employees who were talented were allowed to marry the lord’s daughter and adopted the surname.
Also, after WW2, many people in Asia changed their surname to more prominent ones. Most people in Korea have the surnames of Kim and Lee but it is more or less accepted that about 80% of all surnames are fake, since Korea only had about 10% who had any kind of surnames around 1900.
So the huge takeaway here would be that while nothing you do after contributing DNA will help your own kid you CAN help your eventual grandkids by beating into your kid’s head the need to marry a high quality spouse. Works for me.
As someone new to all of this, one thought I’ve come to is that essentially we’ve re-arrived at the religious idea of “pre-destination”. Just curious what you think of that characterization or how you’d respond to it.
Given the rewards that accrue to high-status individuals, there is little chance that status could be anything but primarily genetically determined. If being high-status means you have a significantly better chance of surviving longer and reproducing more, anyone who had a stronger innate drive to attain status, and a stronger innate competence to attain it, would overtime beat out people who simply attained it by luck. It’s obvious that concern for status permeates into every single thing a person thinks about, either at the forefront or in the background. This must be because the evolutionary rewards for being high-status (or the cost of being low-status) have been high since human beings have been social. If that’s true, and I think it surely must be, then of course it makes sense that status is primarily determined genetically as the result of an on-going arms race.
When it comes to the higher classes in NW Europe, they might still be outbreeding, but within a much, much smaller pool. British, Dutch, German nobility and similar (like Dutch Patriciaat) tend to marry people like themselves. Exactly, in the same way Clarke & Cochran argue.
They have all sorts of socializing efforts to keep it that way; specific neighbourhoods in high-priced villages; specific youth clubs to bring them together; sport clubs like hockey & tennis; events at estates and invite-only prestigious festivities; political action groups; sororities at universities; balls; on and on, it goes; typical studies like law and MBAs; internships at renowned companies arranged by family; working at banks and law later in life, etc., etc. There might be outbreeding, but it is outbreeding in a very predetermined environment.
For once, I think I’m siding with the left on this one. I’ve seen privileged stuff during my college years that made me ill and demoralized. They might have the genes to do well in life, they sure can thank their parents (and their parents and theirs…) for making that happen. This really doesn’t strike me as meritocratic — in the sense that everyone gets a fair start. They don’t
And yet, when man’s free will is taken totally out of the equation then the talk of creating legacies puts the whole diatribe in disrepute. Whatever these “scientists” are observing in the data “it” CANNOT have anything to do with “creating legacies.” Such delusions are an obscene hilarity.
Beyond ”shared environment” and other technical analytical terms i think that one of the most important key that have push the intergenerational and historical patterns of socio-economic success in human history to be the dark triade traits. Well, many high functioning psychopaths and derivatives are very well self-conscious. Self-consciousness (self awareness) is one of the sides of this traits that in most part of the time to be combined with ”dark personality”. Is obviously that the majority of very self-aware people are not psychopath but the vast majority of psychopaths and sociopaths are very self-aware that related with your narcisism. Unfortunatelly many of the most (technical and or non-contextual or wise) smartest and global conscious or empathetic-conscious people during your lives understand as socio-economic success happen and decide avoid this way of life. As the result, we have, high functioning psychopaths command our lives while people who can make the real and not superficial differences around the world are in somewhere got a life with low expectation and down of their capacities.
The negative events, when the harmony of sequential happenings is based in ”wrong people in a wrong place” and ” good people in a wrong place” caused the chain of events and situations that build a unequal and (real) unfair social landscape.
This events are caused by ”dark behavior” genes in economic and social status evidence combined by extremely higher (self and global) consciousness of perfect people (higher intelligence, intelectual – specially- and technical, ”fair personality”, in other words, the analytical and wise genius) that impossibilite this people to live your ”predestination”, like Aristotelis say about ”natural aristocracy”. I don’t know if he used the same meaning about it, but if not, i’m today used this term to conceptualise the ”perfect people”. It show us that the human nature is like as nature and it is unfair and unequal, to real and complete evolution of the human beings will necessary forced the ”fair personality” combined with higher intelect to command the destiny of humanity.
Obviously that it does not mean that ”do not exist rich and good people”, they are, but are few and many of them do not have the wisdom to understand your power and your possibility to finish the problems of the society. The problem begin on the fact ”saints despise whealth”.
Even the title of this entry is nonsensical when free will is stripped from “son” and “father” and that picture appears downright alien. The “scientists” don’t really desire the consequences of their “observations.”
impossibilite do not there in english, is preclude
The problem is that is it absolutely impossible to observe “self-awareness” in the data when the axiomatic assumption is “no human free will.”
”The problem is that is it absolutely impossible to observe “self-awareness” in the data when the axiomatic assumption is “no human free will.” ”
Thorndaddy,
agree absolutely with you, well, my way to think is, if in fact, our ”free will” is limited by our genetics, necessarily does not mean that ”free will not there”. but ”our free will is genetically limited”, point. I agree with Jayman that, is not always that the best answer will be in a middle but, my opinion ofcourse, the chances to ”the best answer in extremities” will more improbable because extremities fit very well with ideology and in my opinion again, the true is the sum of the all sides of the all perspectives.
If i accept the inexistence of human free will so, who is control myself to write in a illiterate english in a smarter blog like that??
Sure, there ”genes” or ”patogens”, the free will is when you have knowledge about ”i’m making a wrong thing”, this is not a evidence of free will but is a evidence of self awareness (not the phenotype personality but the little manifestation that naturally happen in all humans) and free will is derived of awareness.
The idea of ”inexistence of free will” is so absurd that make us imagine incredible scenarios like ”Mike born to be taxi driver, he had no free will (choice, environmental or biological) to be different like that”. I’m a genetic determinist because genes and other are the fundamental basis of all who we are, all is derived by genetics, is a obvious and observable fact. But, this not mean that all of our actions in day-a-day to be directly determined by our genes. As i always to say,
there a biological-internal-variation, like a bell curve or personal spectrum. I think ”Tony have 89 iq, but if he effort more, he can improve your performance”. Iq is not only a average, but the maximum and the minimum possibilities. We are like a nations, there a strong genetic factors that limited our actions and performance to our averages, but is not mean that i can improve, if i have self knowledge i can improve myself.
Our possibilities to be limited by our genetics, by our choices (to internal and limited possibilities) are not. Free Will is very little than we imagine, but it there.
It is interesting that ‘bright’ majors show much greater cognitive differentiation. Supports SLODR.
bright math vs bright verbal.
there is less differentiation at the extremes afaik. high verbal iq correlates with high math iq, moreso than a high low mismatch
awesome post! thanks!
mostly i just want to say: awwwww! (^_^) about that one picture, of course! (NOT the one of the bushes. =/ )
Gottlieb…
It’s nonsensical to claim the input to be limited by the program.
Ah, but will your efforts to beat it into his head actually affect his decision?
@Elijaharmstrong:
Indeed. Good spot!
Happened in my family around 1300 AD in China, although it was more of a change from dirt poor to lower middle class. So there’s one data point for you.
HBD chick did not originate the outbreeding hypothesis, it is worth noting (no disrespect meant to her – and of course she has never tried to improperly take credit for it). Referring to it as “her” hypothesis is misleading. It was originated by Stanley Kurtz and popularized by Steve Sailer.
@elijahlarmstrong:
Well, my view on that is that it’s kinda like saying Christopher Nolan doesn’t deserve credit for his interpretation of Batman because he didn’t create the character. Sure, maybe HBD Chick didn’t originate the hypothesis, but she has, by far, developed it (including developing a mechanism with which it may operate) more than anyone else. Hence she, in my opinion, deserves a big piece of the credit.
The overall heritability of political attitudes, when accounting for measurement error, teeters on 100%!
If this is true, and conservatives have demonstrably out bred liberals over the past couple of generations, why has the electorate (even absent immigrants) that has come of age recently seemed to be more liberal than previous generations? Or am I wrong and has any slight trend toward conservatism by the native population been swamped by immigration?
Has perhaps the increased “outbreeding” due to economic mobility resulted in more liberal (universalist) offspring, even those born to two conservative parents?
See this post.
@thordaddy:
At some point, you stop looking for the fairies in the garden….
The SAT to IQ link should be GRE to IQ. Taking my edited reddit comment on it:
I was suspicious of the linked chart because the chart title is “Graduate Record Examination Scores” while the column headings breaks down by SAT?
—
After some sleuthing the chart is supposed to be listing GRE scores, not SAT scores. The numbers and majors match up with the pre-2011 GRE data provided by ETS here:
https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/2010-11_gre_guide.pdf
The title should be *IQ Estimates by Intended Graduate Field*, and the chart headings should read Verbal GRE, Quant GRE, Average GRE, and Average IQ.
You can delete this comment if you change it.
Jayman…
At some point you declare that you have done nothing here willingly. This is the truth of the matter BY your own admission. If we start from this understanding then ALL your findings are suspect. And you are simply too intelligent to be given the benefit of ignorance. Data put forth UNWILLINGLY is AUTOMATICALLY suspect. And because you cannot actually inform us of the manner in which you have obtained your findings, we are stuck in suspense.
steve hsu has said, politley, that genetics cannot explain this. regression to the mean over the number of generations concerned is assured 100%. cryptic population stratification can’t explain this either. it would require a caste system more thoroughgoing than india’s.
and needless to say cochran and harpending make a cardinal error as usual. they assume that there is a thing called moxie and that it is independent of time and place. it’s just a word game, but people of so little ability as cochran and harpending are very fond of word games.
and an always overlooked mathematical FACT using the usual model IQ = hG + (1-h)E:
1. those of the highest ability owe their ability much more to environment than those of average ability. with an h^2 of .7, if you have an iq of 160, the probability your twin’s iq is as high or higher is only 1.4%!!!
an always overlooked experimental FACT:
2. high IQ is less heritable than low IQ.
what this means:
children with an above average genetic true score will develop an even higher full score as a result of a superior environment.
this does not contradict the eveidence you may think you know, because this evidence does look at the gifted exclusively.
Thordaddy@
”It’s nonsensical to claim the input to be limited by the program.”
I don’t think, why not??
My 20 cents to ”very great trends to higher iq people believe in environment factors than genetic factors”. This way to see as things working is only the self expression of intelligent people, they have more chance to make or choice different path than low iq because of their higher capacity. They are more influenced by environment, higher intelligence is capacity to respond quickly and efficiently to environmental demands, basically the capacity to adaptation. But to very smart people, as their non-sooo smart pairs, also do not there many chances. The fitness is higher to little above and above average iq’s, 95-130,140?? Without leave into account the other ingredients like personality type.
Other common problem found in statistical psychometric works is when the researches talking about ”smarter people vs dumb people” they need urgently detail what this smart and dumb ones they are working. One a classical example of misconception not only to ordinary people but also to gifted minds here in hbdosphere. ”Smarter people” are more beauty than ”dumber people”. Many people in popular scientific online magazines AND many hbd’ers interpret this like as ”people like Stephen Hawking, Temple Grandin and others are more beauty than dumber people”. Is not, the results found in this research was ”people with average iq 107 are more beauty than people with average iq 89”. The ”smarter ones” in any psychometric research depend to other ”opposite group” to be compared. The pearl-in-oyster that many people don’t fish was ”very beauty people score slightly higher than average iq” in this research.
There smart and smart, stupid and stupid, depend to groups who are being compared.
I’m talking about that, because this little debate happens in one of this last post of Hbd Chick, about ”Matrioshkas”. Luke Lea said about ”higher capacity to smart people to adapt”. I’m very sceptic about it and this question raise a analytical problem that should solve or should specified. When psychometrics are working about cognitive comparison that to be specified what empirical adjetives you are using. I agree with mister Lea about the higher capacity about smarter people have to adapt to local demands but, this smarter people will tend to be the ones with not so outlier cognitive phenotype, and i’m excluding the most intelligent because is clear to us who they are not able to adapt at least in a modern society.
@Anonymous / Apr 1 2014 4:53 AM:
You do realize that no one knows what that “environmental” component is, right? See my post Environmental Hereditarianism. The “environmental” component of IQ is within the range of the measurement error of IQ tests (i.e., the correlation between MZ twins is the same as the correlation between the scores of the same person taking the test twice). Even if there are genuine “environmental” effects, it may just be developmental noise.
Is there evidence that high IQ is less heritable? I’d like to see it.
It’s interesting that given a strict hereditarian position people don’t really need to be nice to their children or raise them at all, they could theoretically inseminate someone, or birth the child and then abandon little Mozart to grow up in foster care. If parenting doesn’t matter then basically making as many babies as possible with the most intelligent females possible (if indeed what you want is intelligent children) and then abandoning them seems like it could be a viable strategy. I mention this not to suggest that you would do this or tear down your arguments, but because one side of my family, which is filled with many highly intelligent people of both sexes, has just such a history. Multiple times in the past my prior relatives have left families to fend for themselves only to start another family in some other city, sometimes several times in succession. And I’m not just talking about the baby boomers here, this behavior goes way back, we’ve found multiple instances over many generations.
I wonder how common this is among the highly intelligent. It also points to why (as Misdreavus eluded to in one of his recent tweets) so many social conservatives reject strict hereditarianism: if parenting doesn’t matter then the traditional family doesn’t necessarily matter, marriage could be conceived of as an unnecessary artifice. It certainly has been to many of my past relations who apparently only availed themselves of it when it suited them.
~S
Gottlieb,
If the crude equation is human action/illusion of free will/input + environment/fixed process/program = output/free will/illusion of free will then how can we infer that the human action/illusion of free will/input is necessarily limited by an environment/fixed process/program?
The 800 pound elephant in the living room is the exaltation of the homosexual “nature” and the secular materialist’s attempt at falsifying Creation and the liberal “Christian’s” attempt at falsifying human “evolution”/HBD. So the genuine white Supremacist finds himself against three collectives that only appear to be in conflict when one feigns blindness to the subcollectives. All three collectives desire radical autonomy and all three collectives despise genuine white Supremacy. Jayman shows us that overlap between secular materialist and HBD is a MECHANISM to advance his radical autonomy. He gives the impression that liberal “Christians” are fundamentally different than himself. In the aggregate, his contribution advances Liberalism at the expense of Objective Supremacy (this is what normal people “observe”) EVEN THOUGH he only works to discredit a less radical version of himself.
@thordaddy:
I’ve been indulging you so far, but you’re making absolutely no sense. Knock that and the hatefulness off, please.
Thanks.
One question that Clark doesn’t systematically deal with is the problem of people changing their names, typically in a more upscale direction. For example, in England Smyths are much higher status on average than Smith: the usual assumption being that Smyths used to be named Smith until a change was made for social climbing reasons. Similarly, the Sailers of Wil, Switzerland, used to be the Seilers until one became the mayor and decided that being named Ropemaker was an insult to his new higher status in life.
Heck, Winston Churchill changed his last name from the very prestigious Spencer-Churchill (e.g., Princess Di was a Spencer) to hyper-prestigious Churchill to emphasize his descent from the world historical figure John Churchill, who won the War of the Spanish Succession over King Louis XIV. But, that covers up that Winston wasn’t a direct male line descendant of John – the dukedom had passed through John’s daughter who married a Spencer.
Three of the last seven Presidents have had different surnames at various points in their youths.
I have no idea how to estimate the impact of this kind of thing, but somebody ought to try.
Jayman,
There is nothing hateful about informing your audience that they do in fact have free will and it is not something that HBDers can ignore without absolutely impugning their “findings.”
And it is necessary to point out the false conflicts between the various liberationist movements including the HBD movement and liberal “Christians.”
The “environmental” component of IQ is within the range of the measurement error of IQ tests (i.e., the correlation between MZ twins is the same as the correlation between the scores of the same person taking the test twice). it depends on what you mean by reliability. if you mean test-retest over a year your statement isn’t even close to the truth. if you mean long term decades reliability then this is closer to the truth but still false. didn’t you get the memo. the heritability of iq for children raised in poverty is 0. for children raised in affluence it’s .6. maybe this goes away. but the current statistical model is simply wrong.
i’m suprised a self styled hbd expert wouldn’t no that genetic correlation studies have shown that only g is inherited not factor scores and that g vs iq is heteroskedastic, that is the higher the iq the more common are large differences in factor scores. that is, going up in iq g explains less and less of the variability until at 2sds or so it hardly explains any. this is all on wikipedia for god’s sake.
and obviously no one knows what environment is because there is no one environment which affects genome in the same way. but this is assumed by the G + E model.
there is no G to behavioral trait function and there is no E to behavioral trait function. there is only a GxE to trait function. trying to decompose this function with a best linear approximation is just mathematical jive. it’s not getting at the reality. this is understood by geneticists but not by psychologists. perhaps there’s a difference in cognitive ability? one geneticist dismissed charles murray and his type as someone who thought he could “unbake a cake”.
@thordaddy:
Free will isn’t what I’m talking about when I say hateful.
The nonexistence of free will doesn’t mean that people can’t make choices. I’ve stated this over and over, it’s in all my posts on the matter. Please don’t bring up the topic again here without showing that you made at least a good faith effort to try to understand what I actually said.
As HBD Chick put it: HBD is not a movement! Please don’t confuse HBD with your political bullcrap.
I’ve always wanted a better breakdown of this data myself. I’ve heard many times how high math correlates with high verbal, but how strongly? How common are 750 verbal but avg math and vice versa? I’ve known a lot of guys in the sciences and engineering with 700+ math but mediocre verbal scores but I’ve never met a high verbal scorer who didn’t also score well in math(which doesn’t mean they don’t exist of course, only that I’ve worked in STEM). It looks from the data by major that the humanities, arts and Philosophy _tend_ to have equal scores where the STEM fields tend to have higher math but with averages we don’t really know much. I guess I want to see the scatter plot.
@Anonymous:
I’m going to consolidate my responses to you into one comment. Please respond to this comment to keep up the conversation.
I have an entire post full of evidence that flat out contradicts you. You would have been better off saying that this was an April Fool’s joke. DO NOT repeat any of this nonsense here or you will be banned. Thank you.
Cochran explained this. What does “regression to the mean” mean? It is the result of the loss of genetic and environmental “luck” across the group. However, the individuals in a group regress to the mean of their group, not the mean of the entire population. The thing that pulls the group as a whole towards the population mean is non-assortative mating. With reasonable about of assortative mating, it is hardly unbelievable that it would take a while (10+ generations) for a lineage to regress to the population mean. Indeed, in closed mating system (i.e., India) that may never happen.
While there will be a great deal of variation in the traits that confer high status from one society to the next and from one time period to the next (indeed, this is a good bit of what comprises the selective pressures each society exerts), there are probably quite a few traits that are going to be beneficial in any, or almost any environment. IQ is one of them. Attractiveness and overall physical health are others. Taken together, these would be the components of “moxie”, and if they result primarily from additive genetic variance, they will be passed on from one generation to the next.
That, ultimately, is speculation. I’m going with what we know, not what we don’t know and some would like to believe.
The test-retest reliability of IQ is in adulthood around .8. Again, this is comparable to the heritability of the test, and similar to the correlation between different types of IQ tests.
Actually, yes, different mental sub-abilities are quite heritable, and they have different heritabilities, just as they have different g-loadings. But, the more g-loaded sub-abilities show higher heritabilities.
Yes, but, so? The higher the level of IQ, the more genes of outsized effect will be apparent, leading to this variation.
That is bullshit. Heritability is NOT modulated by SES. See here and here.
This is complete and utter horseshit. You most certain can decompose the share of the variance in a trait corresponds to genetic vs. non-genetic variance. Do not bring this up again here, or you will be banned. I simply don’t have the time for nonsense.
My time is very limited, so I don’t have time for nonsense. Please think carefully before your next comment. (If you are trolling for April Fools, haha, very funny. But the joke is over now.)
@Steve Sailer:
Thanks for commenting.
It would seem to me that the paternity studies that Cochran discusses (establishing that the non-paternity rate is about 1%) would cover name switching, yes?
Jayman,
I agree that HBD isn’t a movement, rather, it’s an assertion aimed at moving strict materialists, blank slaters and liberal “Christians” towards an amicably agreeable false reality based on the “truth” of HBD.
There are those that stand outside this milieu and willfully critique the fatal flaw of this theatrical soap opera. It’s redundant. “We” have a name. You have a name for us, also. They are nearly identical. The only difference is that I impart traditional understanding to the label and you create one that seemingly suits your ideological and racial fancy. This is why you have unwillingly detected hatred where none existed.
And please explain how “choices” do not imply the application of free will?
some more people who know what they’re talking about:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005461w
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00545l3
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/11/21/eric-turkheimer/race-iq
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/11/11/eric-turkheimer/fundamental-intuition
wikipedia on g: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29
i’m sure you wouldn’t want them on your blog either.
you simply don’t have the mathematical or conceptual sophistication to have an informed opinion on behavioral genetics. everything you’ve said above is either false or shows a lack of understanding. you’ve confused teacher and pupil.
and it’s very sad. because you’re not alone.
end of story!
Jayman, I still cannot understand your comment at mangans vs impossibility of impact of “reactive” parenting (i.e. specific reactions to random events plus reactions tailored to shared environment). Could you please write a post elaborating more on this point?
By “I don’t understand” I mean why any portion of such parent-child interaction would necessarily end in shared environment? Why the assumption that there would be “systematic similarities” between the way one set of parents treat their children? This is the part I don’t get.
@szopeno:
Well, think about it. If these interactions existed, in order for them not to show up in the shared environment, the average effect of each needs to be exactly zero. How plausible is that?
Nonetheless, direct tests trying to correlate child outcomes to parental treatment with genes controlled for don’t find them. They don’t show up in extended family twin studies either. So the point is moot.
jayman,
You are a “black nerd” that indulges in a HBD/race realism that has as its sole intent the inflaming of racial tensions and scapegoating “white supremacy” in a SILENT collusion with the “other.”
That you are so “deep” into an assertion that takes no actual stand while being so inexplicably oblivious to the larger ramifications is textbook “nerd” behavior. Yet, you are not to be left off the hook for you are not to be given the benefit of ignorance.
szopeno…
There is another fanatical collective that absolutely rejects the influence of “parenting” except that this collective is much more particular in its claim as compared to the HBD expression. They don’t merely deny the influence of “parenting,” they reject the effect of a mother and father, completely. As in, they claim that ALL a child needs is a “loving environment.” In reality, this IS WHAT HBD is actually saying with its slightly different “interpretation” of the “data.” And in ironic “opposition” is a “deeper truth” that has absolutely no supporting data. It’s pure claim with HBD running a support role. There is ideological collusion behind the scenes. Homosexuals and HBDers are like hand and glove in this affair.
@thordaddy:
I’m losing my patience for off-the-wall comments…
Jayman…
Not “off the wall,” rather, outside your bubble. You can’t expect comments to only come from inside your bubble, can you?
@thordaddy:
Not at all. Indeed, the more from the outside, the better, since none of us know everything. It would be nice if they at least made sense, however.
How about this jayman…
In liberal mathematics, we have the equation:
no parental effect = no mother and father effect = no mother effect = no father effect
Does this equality hold “true” so that the “deeper truth” of the HBD stance of “no parental effect” is ACTUALLY no effect of the mother and no effect of father on child rearing? If so, are you ignorant of the fact that the radical homosexuals have subjectively asserted such “no parental effect” long before HBD came on the scene?
Jayman, you understand that you are not to be given the benefit of ignorance in these matters, yes?
@thordaddy:
Who makes a claim has no effect on whether or not it is true.
That there is no long-term effect of parenting (including the presence or absence of either parent) across the broad range of non-extreme parenting styles so happens to be true. End of story.
Final comment on this point. Please don’t keep recycling the same nonsense.
What about single parent households. Aren’t they far worse than two parent households for kids? Is that mainly genetic too?
@Mark F.:
The effect is entirely genetic.
So, single moms (and their sperm donors) just have worse genes? Encouraging marriage would make no difference, but encouraging people to make better choices regarding who they mate with would? Am I understanding you correctly?
@Mark F.:
Precisely.
Family = Clan = Ethnicity = Race. They are essentially interchangeable, the only thing distinguishing the succeeding term from the one preceding it being size, and saying that the transition points between these terms are hazy and indistinct is a major understatement. A big, related family or group of related families is a clan; a big, related clan or group of related clans is an ethnicity; a big, related ethnicity or group of related ethnicities is a race.
Steve Sailer pithily summed this up nearly two decades ago, describing a race as an extended family with some level of in-breeding present.
From this, we discern things like what La Griffe du Lion calls the fundamental constant of sociology, the implications being, among other things, that if both a white couple with IQs of 115 and a black couple with IQs of 115 each have a child, chances are the child from the white union is going to have a higher IQ than child from the black union. It’s far from certain that as much would be the case when only a single white and single black couple are being considered, but take 100 white and 100 black couples as described above, and it’s virtually guaranteed that, on average, the collective white litter will have a higher average IQ.
Intelligence is just one aspect of countless other characteristics–seemingly all traits are heritable to some degree–but just this one is often too much for most polite people to handle. The truth is no less evitable in spite of them, of course.
Working from the ground up, so-to-speak, is probably the most socially and politically effective way to spread the HBD word.
@Audacious Epigone:
Very well said!
And this is, ultimately, why Greg Clark found what he found. As made abundantly clear here, we know achievement is highly heritable on the individual level. And it is clearly heritable on the level of races, as IQ and the Wealth of Nations exemplifies. It should be no surprise then that it is also heritable on an intermediate level, on the level of clans. There shouldn’t be too much fuss about this.
”Gottlieb,
If the crude equation is human action/illusion of free will/input + environment/fixed process/program = output/free will/illusion of free will then how can we infer that the human action/illusion of free will/input is necessarily limited by an environment/fixed process/program?”
Thordaddy,
i’m not understand clearly what you want to say above but i fish the last part (i think). The immediate actions would be as strong genetic (or organic) factors. Reflexion or thinking would be as ” my genes make me do it” ”and now, what i can do??”. Two forces, your thinking, a result, a reaction of action AND the action, non-free will here. Free will would be when you have the capacity to reflect your action or thinking. Free will is a combination of empathy and self awareness. If you can choices (but this not mean that you will make the better choices) you have a ”free” or alternative will??
The problem of Jayman thought that is he believe in a dualist thinking ”to be or not”. Genes OR ”environment”, is a central problem about the initial thinking of Jayman in my non-soo humble opinion, all of rest is derived of this beliefs, sorry Jay man.
If free will seriously exists, why don’t you convert to homosexuality
and suck my ****?There.The only right way to respond to an incorrigible troll such as this
is rudeness.[JayMan: Easy, my man, easy. Yup, his comments are nonsensical, and yup, I’m getting my fill, but gotta respect the commenters nonetheless.].
Gottlieb says,
Genes OR ”environment”, is a central problem about the initial thinking of Jayman…
More particularly, jayman’s “central problem” is MERELY genes and environment without man’s free will EVEN a “free will” conceptually collapsed INSIDE the gene/environment paradigm. Meaning, in a less limited reality there are genes, environment AND man’s free will existing outside the LIMITED material paradigm BUT still operating within it. Jayman’s first delusion is that of a knowledge of a larger reality. He actually “endeavors” to LIMIT the scope of reality FOR ALL OF US. There are only two things we really know about the modern evolutionist; he denies man’s free will and no two will give you the same mechanism for the “evolution” of life. But the delusion goes even deeper when you dig towards the fundamental assertion of a “jayman” which is, “I “observe” no free will in the data.” A self-evident impossibility. For us provincial folks, free will is readily observed in the traditional manner. As in, we see free will all around with our apparently lying eyes. Now, here comes a “jayman” to tell us what we see with our own eyes in not actually the manner in which to truly observe free will. No, we have to go to the data and “observe” what it tells us and it tells “us” that we have no free will. Of course, this means that the “jaymans” of the world, so adamant in convincing the masses that they have no free will, are unwillingly “doing” what they are doing. Meaning, the “jaymans” are BEING FORCED to convince the masses that they posses no free will. It’s like self-fulfilling “science,” but WHO is forcing the “jaymans” to do this and WHY?
Thordaddy,
i want who you stop to make ad hominean comments and centralize your attention in a discussion here and not try search problems, many them personally idealized, into a person that write the text, this inscounterproductive and sorry, but also is stupid.
First, we have to understand the concept of ”free will”. The adjective ”free” initially to be wrong. If we to be really free, indeed, we could fly immediately when you want, but not. We are not total free but the birds are not ”free’ because they can fly. The limite define ”liberty” in your pure concept, make what do you want. To all things, abstract and concretes, there degrees among the extremes or opposite poles (aka spectra). We understand who ”total liberty is also like a slavery” then.
Animals or non-human species, in my opinion, to be very focused in your ”way of survive”, they to seems exactly like robots of movie fictions. (my impression,only) Humans, like i always said, are very deviant than nature and our way to evolution is change us more and more in a ”anti-nature” species because we since the early period of our historical obscure existence are envolved in a disadvantageous behavior when compares or into a perspective to non-human strategies. We are not ”body-mind system” but, my opinion again (always, i’m not a ocean of certainties), we are as two simbiotic system, mind AND body”. For it, we are what we are.
Deny the (Limited but existent) human free will is like deny yourself, deny the ”I’m”, deny our capacity to imagine the future, deny our capacity to choice, deny our desire. Animals can’t control ”it’selves, they born, quickly sexually mature, reproduce and die. SOME humans can control if want or not have children. Pathogens?? I don’t know but if to be, well, this ”pathogens” define our identity as singular species. Every human and specially, the most cognitive evolved type are like as individual species, majority of animals or non-human species are like as twins or very-near biological relative. The phenotypical diversity contained in a whole non-human species can be founded in only one human family (but no genetics).
I agree with you about the (some times) pedantic trends of science to try explain all things and ”supposed obvious things, like racial differences in intelect but you can’t deny the role of the genes.
Jayman believe that if the genes have the predominant role to architect our behavior, so we not have ”free will” (was that i understand Jayman) because this. I disagree, if us are our genes, don’t there ”genes govern us”, because you ”can’t to be controled by other-yourself, you is you, you to be the genes, you is every cell, every part of you, no chance. Like i said, action is derived by desire, desire is the first component, action is a result or not of a desire. When i talk about genes, i want to talk about you. If free will don’t there, then desire don’t there. The problem about dicotomy ”genes and environment” is basically these dualistic perspective.
There’s an ancient Sanskrit saying from one of the Vedas that the “son becomes the father”.
Thordaddy,
”szopeno…
There is another fanatical collective that absolutely rejects the influence of “parenting” except that this collective is much more particular in its claim as compared to the HBD expression. They don’t merely deny the influence of “parenting,” they reject the effect of a mother and father, completely. As in, they claim that ALL a child needs is a “loving environment.” In reality, this IS WHAT HBD is actually saying with its slightly different “interpretation” of the “data.” And in ironic “opposition” is a “deeper truth” that has absolutely no supporting data. It’s pure claim with HBD running a support role. There is ideological collusion behind the scenes. Homosexuals and HBDers are like hand and glove in this affair.”
Thordaddy,
i have two brothers with similar ages and can to say with certaintie to you, this ”parent effects” for me was ZERO. The only non-very well analysed component could to be ”genetic similarity among son and fathers”. My mother love so much my older brother, is a observable fact. Interesting that, fathers love their problematic kids and despise their non-problematic kids, why????
My mother have similar personality and obviously similar interest. My older brother also is ”facially” similar as my mother face.
Environment is, particular desires derived of the personalities. Is not, ”people are environmentally affected by actions of others” but ”RESPOND individual and personalized-genetically to events”.
Your environmental thinking to me also to be a way of deny free will or desire.
Internal conflict (like creative broken personality) growing self awareness and free will, genius derived by this. Even if free will ”don’t there” (and you are chronologically programmed to act as animals or greater majority and in a degrees of non-human species) the internal conflict make you open your eyes.
“The failure of parents to appreciably affect the outcomes of their children….”
Failure of parents to affect the outcomes of their children only happens in cultures (such as Western) where individuality is emphasized, even at the cost of the family.
In South Asia there is no such failure of parents to appreciably affect the outcomes of the children. The majority of marriages are still arranged and most kids grow up to go into the professions that their parents tell them to.
Culture, people. Culture.
“There’s an ancient Sanskrit saying from one of the Vedas that the “son becomes the father”.”
And we have a ritual for it too. Again, CULTURE.
@Om Yogi Om:
Clark’s findings would suggest it doesn’t quite work that way.
I will see if any behavioral genetic studies were done in India.
And even if parents did have some kind of effect in India, the evidence is abundantly clear they no effect here in the West, or in (at least a good bit of) East Asia. So readers from those regions can take a chill pill.
@JayMan I can see why both conservatives and liberals don’t like you. However, facts have no ideology. I was just musing that my late mother was a lovely woman, and she sort of blamed herself that none of her 3 sons (including me) has been a great success in life. None of us have ever had very good jobs and income or successful personal relationships, and we gave her no grandchildren. I did struggle through college and finish, which I must have managed due to genes inherited from my high I.Q. dad. I wish I could have told her that her behavior had nothing to do with how we turned out. Interestingly, I recently discovered that all of us boys, independent of each other and without talking about it between ourselves, have constructed little “shrines” to mom in our apartments with pictures of her and memorabilia. We all must have gotten the gene which caused that!
Few years ago I read the data about effect of divorce and single parenthood. I remember at that time I was amazed that one type of “single parents” homes were mostly devoid of negative effects: homes in which one of parents have died. While divorce always caused immediate problems and sometimes long-term negative effects as well (more problematic for boys than for daughters), death of mother or father seem to have only short-term effects but not long-term impact (in statistical sense). i was puzzled at that time. I guess I shouldn’t.
But remember we are talking about “long-term” effects. There may be short term effects, which will however have diminishing influence on children outcomes in adult life. That is, I _believe_ based on what I read, that divorce impact (bare genetic predisposition for certain character trait which caused the divorce in the first place) may have effect when you are 16, less visible when you 20, and non-existant by 40 (numbers taken from thin air).
Well, there is another thing about “no parental effect”. This is all about so called “normal” families, e.g. short of abuse etc. E.g. in MAOA studies, children with 3-allele version have higher probability of problematic behaviour when raised in “abusive” families, but were, IIRC, not visibly different from other children when raised in “normal” families (regardless of parenting style).
Seems parents may disturb normal development of children, but not so much aid it.
I was surprised to see the Minnesota study for MZAs (who volunteered, oops) found a rho of only .69 for the WAIS fullscale and .64 for bp.
bp varies quite a bit. it’s even less reliable than IQ. so if it were corrected for reliability…
But anyone save those with kidney problems or an adrenal tumor can reduce his bp to 100/60! It’s been done.
It can be soberly and solemnly concluded that IQ is not heritable in any significant sense!
And I’m in the bgi study. Too bad. I just got lucky!
@szopeno:
Pretty much that’s how it goes.
@szopeno:
But what else differs between “normal” and “abusive” families? That’s right, other genes. This is why, by in large, you can’t test for “gene-environment interactions”. They are really seeing gene-gene interactions.
Great post,
I looked up the 100 richest Swedes and there were 37 times as many names from the nobility as you’d expect from their share of the population. It’s basically setting up your own ethnic group by mild inbreeding (or in some cases severe). As for the dark traits, I don’t think psychopathy will contribute much to success given that it entails poor impulse control. Pure lack of empathy could work better. Anecdotally, it’s my distinct impression that the nobility here are narcissistic whereas the equally rich Jews are more machiavellian. Not sure why but I imagine that the nobility, traditionally landowners, woud rely on social status, having people think they are better, as a protection against angry peasants. (Why machiavellian traits are common in Jews is probably due to them traditionally being into business.)
An important aspect of the phenomenon is that the prosperous for much of pre-industrial history had about twice as many surviving offspring as the poor. This means that the right half of the bell curve was growing and the left half was shrinking. I expect that Norman surnames are more common today than they “should” be all up and down the SES axis.
@Mark There are likely reasons your father chose her and it might well be the same reasons you worship her as well. People don’t have to be brilliant to be wonderful. There’s a great deal to be said for friendliness, warmth, and charm. I’d rather hang out with fun amicable people of average intelligence than brilliant but pretentious self satisfied snobs (and I often do). I don’t know why intelligence so often comes with a bucket brimming with numerous neurosis, but I am often saddened by it.
~S
@Anonymous (presumably you’re not the same Anonymous who’s been trolling here as of late):
The sample size was also n = 54! Broadly speaking, the samples in MZA studies are so small, that they likely underestimate the heritability estimates at times due to shear random sampling error.
Broadly, correcting for reliability/measurement error (an average in the case of blood pressure) increases the heritability estimate.
I don’t think so. That’s a HUGE claim for which I don’t think there’s good evidence.
Well, considering that MZA studies, MZT-DZT studies, adoption studies, and GCTA studies all come back with the same results, yes, I think we can declare that IQ is indeed highly heritable.
@Anonymous:
By the way, for that last comment of yours, you are banned (don’t worry, I know you when I see you). Go troll somewhere else. I’m going to address these last points of yours for completeness.
Your pontification against behavioral genetics hasn’t gotten a leg to stand on. We get the same results from MZ twins raised apart, MZ together/DZ-together, adoption, and Genome wide Complex Trait Analysis (GCTA) studies. Fundamentally different methods of study all produce the same conclusions. The findings of behavioral genetics are as solid as a rock, indeed, amongst the most solid set of findings in all of the human sciences, and certainly so in social science. You’ve got nothing.
As for Turkheimer:
Feelings, nothing more than feelings… | West Hunter
A review of the results of adoption studies clearly show the pattern of higher concordance between biological relatives and zero correlation between adoptive “relatives.”:
See here. Your railing against behavioral genetics is a futile attempt to stop the tide of evidence rising against you. Which you’re free to do (someplace else, that is), but it’s not incredibly productive.
@harpend:
Thanks for commenting!
Absolutely, one would imagine that to be the case, based on Clark’s earlier findings. I’m sure we could extract this from Clark’s data.
@Staffan:
Thanks!
Sounds about right. It’s too bad Dark traits are hard to test for in smart people, since they have reason (and ability) to hide it.
That makes sense too. I’d love to have a personality data for these groups.
@Sisyphean:
Indeed!
I’ve seen some data towards this effect, but I’d like to know for sure to what degree mental illness is correlated with IQ, if at all.
I’m not talking about mental illness. More the big five’s neuroticism trait. Think Woody Allen and the characters he’s written for himself (and for many other characters in his movies) over and over. It’s not crazy exactly, but damn it’s exhausting to be around.
Gottlieb…
The are three positions on “free will” in my estimation.
1. No “free will” (jayman’s position)
2. Some “free will” in a limited, materialist paradigm.
3. Free will as an experience… Extant, temporal, unmeasurable.
So what do we “observe?”
IN REALITY, #3 can accommodate both #1 and #2.
#2 can compromise with #1 but must reject #3 AND BECOME practically equal to #1.
THE REALITY OF #1 cannot CONTAIN #2 or #3, but DOES SO, apparently unwillingly.
So #1 is observably an extreme position. To push it publicly MEANS SOMETHING, does it not?
What does it mean?
@Sisyphean:
According to this review neuroticism appears negatively correlated with IQ (r = -0.15). Not very strong, but there we are. Maybe you’re getting the neurotic smart people? Maybe Staffan will want to chip in?
Gottlieb…
You are missing my point…
My point was that before the “jaymans” and HBD crowd “enlightened” us on the negligible effect of “parenting” there was another radical collective making assertions MUCH MORE SPECIFIC without a scintilla of “data” to back the assertion.
In this order of “cause and effect,” HBD seems to be a lagging indicator of an imprecisely defined phenomena.
The radical homosexual HAD ALREADY INFORMED “us” that mothers and fathers are meaningless in rearing a child. “They” made this pronouncement over a decade ago. They claimed that ALL that was needed was a “loving environment.”
Where is the HBD answer on this much more specific question?
So now we have a more complete picture. The “science” looks suspiciously like ideological confirmation with room for plausible deniability (um… we weren’t really looking for the effect of specific mothers and fathers on child rearing just “parenting” in general). And when you add to this milieu “scientist” doing this “science” unwillingly (without free will) then things look doubly suspicious.
BUT THEN…
There is a third angle…
The “nerd” perspective and his obliviousness to the bigger picture… As in, “science” used to spread ideological driven fallacies.
But “nerd” DOES NOT get “dumb blond” benefit ESPECIALLY when he’s a “black” male. Lol.
”Gottlieb…
You are missing my point…
My point was that before the “jaymans” and HBD crowd “enlightened” us on the negligible effect of “parenting” there was another radical collective making assertions MUCH MORE SPECIFIC without a scintilla of “data” to back the assertion.
In this order of “cause and effect,” HBD seems to be a lagging indicator of an imprecisely defined phenomena.
The radical homosexual HAD ALREADY INFORMED “us” that mothers and fathers are meaningless in rearing a child. “They” made this pronouncement over a decade ago. They claimed that ALL that was needed was a “loving environment.”
Where is the HBD answer on this much more specific question?
So now we have a more complete picture. The “science” looks suspiciously like ideological confirmation with room for plausible deniability (um… we weren’t really looking for the effect of specific mothers and fathers on child rearing just “parenting” in general). And when you add to this milieu “scientist” doing this “science” unwillingly (without free will) then things look doubly suspicious.
BUT THEN…
There is a third angle…
The “nerd” perspective and his obliviousness to the bigger picture… As in, “science” used to spread ideological driven fallacies.
But “nerd” DOES NOT get “dumb blond” benefit ESPECIALLY when he’s a “black” male. Lol.”
Thordaddy,
soo sorry again but i don’t find what do you to want to say. I go try to replicate your observations (off topic) but i’m not understanding your points.
Half of your comment i understand that the supposed non-existence of free will (people really believe strongly in abstract concepts, unbelievable) will can used to prove that ”parenting effect” is also inexistent. I’m right?
I believe not exactly in ”parenting effect” like as trivial nurturist perspective but in differences in personality phenotypes and its possibly non-directly-genetic influences and degrees.
Most important to analyse ”behavioral traits” is analyse ”personality phenotypes”, a combination of this traits, ’cause people are not a single behavior traits obviously. I read somewhere that the sociopathy is more influenced by environment than psychopathy. I strongly believe that some people to be more influenced by ‘environmental factors” (genetic anthropomorfized constructions, concrete or abstract). Important now is prove it, catalog,classify, identify and test.
”Loving environment” can work for some people but not for other, in fact there many complex things who ”us” should analyse that today i have the impression that genetic factors are more important than environmental factors because this first are assuredly obvious, without genes us do not there, simply. Even if was proved that we are as blank paper, our genes would as our pencil or pen, deny this is like a mental disorder to understand the basic.
If there some personality types like some sociopathic personality that is more influenced by ”gene-construction of social landscape”, aka, environmental factors, so why not others types also could to be more influenced?
Hbd is a sophisticated ‘conservative oriented’ answer to liberalism today, nothing wrong about that, only liberals can do it? Is necessary today, strongly necessary to be people who have feets in the groud.
But the problem about extreme perspective is that it tend to deny all or majority of these assumptions raised by your opponent, this a problem. Liberals are not wrong about all of their assumptions but today, they are intoxicated by your ego, like as conservatives were one century before.
The last part of your comment i see who you don’t hear my request to stop to used ad hominean ”arguments”, i see who you is a smart guy, stop to use their neurons to do personal attacks, is a waste. Interesting that Jayman, even beeing a ”black” (in true, he is mixed race, stupid ”hypodescendence” of one drope rule) ”accept” (he do not accept, he know and do not need to accept) many facts that work ”against” him. But it is not true because i think that he want improve the quality of life in your homeland and make REALLY the world a better place.
I’m strongly against these possible public actions about homossexuality found by Jayman and Cochran, because like i always said, is much early to do any action to supposed ”pathogen”. I got proppose to Jayman to analyse the role of pathogens not only about non-reproductive sexual behaviors but also to more profound questions like, the concrete (and not verbally scientifically build concept) nature of human genes, what in fact are the mutations, etc.
There are many distractions in modern societies, and even though a child is intelligent they might not be as motivated as they need to be.
One can view the behavior of some Chinese parents as being selected to ensure that more of their offspring get to the pinnacle of their society and pass on their genes.
well, i actually think i kinda-sorta did, although the idea was obviously HIGHLY inspired by steve and kurtz. steve sailer never discussed outbreeding afaik — only inbreeding and inclusive fitness when discussing iraq/afghanistan and democracy (his Cousin Marriage Conundrum article). (stanley kurtz didn’t discuss inclusive fitness or biology at all.) i remember inverting it in my head and wondering: well, if inbreeding hinders the development of democracy, did some sort of outbreeding promote it in europe?
in any case, william hamilton got there before all of us — in the 1960s/70s. (^_^)
oh – i should also add that another big inspiration came from the economist avner greif who connected the church’s cousin marriage bans and “corporatism” in european societies. again, though, he missed out on the biology of it (the inclusive fitness connection and selection for traits, etc., etc.). still, he was very much on the right track.
yup. standing on a lot of shoulders am i! (^_^)
Thordaddy,
i see some problems about interpretation of data here, SPECIALLY when the subject is about ”meritocracy”. I believe in the possibility in meritocracy, but today, this not there or if there is very slight…
Born in a right place in a right time is very important. What’s the chances to a smart person born in a favela in Nigeria compared than smart american born in New York??? I’m not try to say or suggest that there a enormous quantity of talents undiscovered in Nigeria, only for comparison, but indeed there smart people who live in a poorer conditions grace to stupid people around.
What was the chance of a white smart guy born in a proletarian street of Notthingham in XIX??
I’m not a classicist, but i believe in a natural aristocracy and these is not based in blood but in character, specially when we observe who ”dark” and ”fair” personality traits varies within the families.
Poor environment created by lack of ”smart genes” of the populations around is a important factor that underdeveloped the entire smart fraction of a one nation (not only, measure and identified by iq).
Like i said in Hbd Chick post and to take similar quote to Bruce Charlton, today modern educational system selected against the really smart guys and girls and priorize the low intense personality and technical intelligence. These people today fight against all danger of the system that make them riches, socially prominent or economically safe. Education specialist fight against darwinian or non-soo lamarckian perspectives. Diversity campus rectors fight against counter arguments to racial cognitively unfair quotas. The technically smart and intelectually stupid is the most powerfull enemies against the true of facts.
When HBD find excuses to explain why many higher iq people believe strongly in lamarckian assumptions is a way to justify the deterministic and simplistic hbd perspective about iq and intelligence correlation.
The problem about meritocracy today and in the past is about collective transcendence. Nations selected some phenotypes to determined goal, des-selected in counterpart this groups that don’t serve this objectives.
I’m try ressurect the lamarckian theory, was he wrong in all its assumptions???
Darwin explain how mechanisms work to adaptative, micro or contextual evolution. ”I think” in ”repetitive movements” can cause mutations, not in a one human generation scale as monsieur Lammarck was suggest but in a specie evolution scale (as for comparison, geologic time). During their lifes individuals suffer by random and non-random mutations (if not, there would be no cancer), of course, if you have intense personality combined by great intelect so your brain will suffer mutations cause these personal interaction with the environment and its demands. I see human beings and beings as Planets, with all of components that characterized the Planets and with a geological ”stratum”. Indeed, your kid is your continuation and of its family.
”The radical homosexual HAD ALREADY INFORMED “us” that mothers and fathers are meaningless in rearing a child. “They” made this pronouncement over a decade ago. They claimed that ALL that was needed was a “loving environment.”
Good question. Jayman and the other few so called “HBD” bloggers I’ve skimmed seem to be all up in this concept of “family values” and against government having input into families and how kids are raised.
If it doesn’t matter, then WHY?
“And even if parents did have some kind of effect in India, the evidence is abundantly clear they have no effect here in the West”
That’s why I said “culture people, CULTURE”.
No chill pills or me, thanks. I’m an herbalist.
Gottlieb,
“The technically smart and intelectually stupid is the most powerfull enemies against the true of facts.”
In my circles there’s a lot of intellectually smart but technically stupid people. They can analyse philosophy, art and culture all day long, and that’s about it. I think a liberal arts degree does that to people.
“Hbd is a sophisticated ‘conservative oriented’ answer to liberalism today,”
But why are they “conservative” if family, environment, culture, behavior and choices ultimately don’t matter? If none of that matters and one can do exceedingly well “letting it all hang out” and raising one’s kids amongst the dregs of society (where often times more fun is had) then why be conservative?
Why work so hard for oneself and ones family if it doesn’t matter?
Hello?!?!?!
Om Yogi Om ”
In my circles there’s a lot of intellectually smart but technically stupid people. They can analyse philosophy, art and culture all day long, and that’s about it. I think a liberal arts degree does that to people.”
Om Yogi Om,
majority of teachers for example, to be intellectually stupid. Huuuuum, my impression show us that humanities to be the central nervous system of liberalism. Beyond the bio-behavioral nature of creative people, the selection of people with strong liberal views as well contribute to these situation in humanities, but many of the most smart and compromissed divergent thinkers are derived by this cognitive verbal universe.
Creative people are very variable in their ideological views (less the most famous, grace by the liberal mèrdia) (and many of creatives in fact, are not higher creatives). Many deep thinkers, group derived by creatives, to be the very higher intelectual capacity, the real philosophers, ideoilogically free minds. Like us…
Complexity of humanity today achieve such a high level that only very smart people is able to understand.
”But why are they “conservative” if family, environment, culture, behavior and choices ultimately don’t matter? If none of that matters and one can do exceedingly well “letting it all hang out” and raising one’s kids amongst the dregs of society (where often times more fun is had) then why be conservative?
Why work so hard for oneself and ones family if it doesn’t matter?
Hello?!?!?!”
Om Yogi Om,
you to be accusing me about it?? I’m not understand. I’m not against conservatism, i’m against the past of REAL oppression of conservatism, as today happens with liberalism against divergent thoughts and people. To me, sincerely, can the two ideological groups killed themselves, both are not as angels in the Earth, never was.
The problem about the world is, liberals are right about many’things, conservatives also are right about many other things. They are complements. Satan love these divisions.
If, liberals live in their world and conservative in their world, we do not would this problems.
When a neonazis with suastika tatoos, a jews and a black panthera can coexist, respect their spaces and use the dialogue and not the animalesque aggression, the world will a better place, without any doubt about it. But for it, will necessary extinct the own human nature.
Gottlieb, Om Yogi Om, thordaddy
I’m putting the three of you under moderation. The three of you are adding very little, if anything, to the discussion, and you are only serving to make the comment thread too lengthy and unwieldy for readers who might be interested in participating.
Gottlieb, in your case, your remarks seem to be coming from a place of reasonably good faith. However, your comments are too long, too confused, and strained with the language for me to devote too much time to addressing. I will try to piece together a response to some of your points in a comment to you here.
Also, guys, should any comments from that “Anonymous” troll leak through, please do not comment. I will deal with him myself.
To this anonymous troll: didn’t I ban you? That’s right, I did. So return to whatever dark pit from whence you came.
I will deal with whatever lingering objections you raise in an upcoming post. Maybe then, and only then, I might temporarily unban you.
Chick could publish her research and it would be her publication same as for anyone else who publishes.
So much has been written now about tribalism, individualism, universalism etc., that at the very least, Chick could publish -from the wealth of cross-cultural and historical case-study material that she has painstakingly read and reviewed and appraised- in support of existing hypotheses.
But is it not so that Chick’s unique hypothesis is that, if all the various other hypotheses – pertaining to fitness, altruism, family & marriage, manorialism, christianity – are brought together, a theory emerges; sexual selection as a key driver in civic (and other) social structures.
But….I’m struggling with the coincidence that just up the road from the outbreeding project (and many years before) lactase neoteny took place, cattle breeding started, and megalith structures were built through collective action for communal purpose with people aggregating from hundreds of miles away. How do we explain this? Is there magic in the Gulf Stream?
@ Mark: Please explain how being raised by a single, high-class professional (my mother) was worse for me than being raised in a household where my father regularly beat my mother.
@Jayman, @Sisyphean
“According to this review neuroticism appears negatively correlated with IQ (r = -0.15). Not very strong, but there we are. Maybe you’re getting the neurotic smart people? Maybe Staffan will want to chip in?”
Only to say that -0.15 is very little and that there is research suggesting that this is mediated by test anxiety. Woody Allen and others portray it as an intellectual trait but this may relate more to guilt culture, common among some Jews as well as Northwest Europeans, than to neuroticism in general.
Well I do live in the North East which as Staffan has pointed out is a higher Neuroticism area of the country so it may just be that everyone is neurotic around here, not just the smart. Part of the problem though is that I score absurdly low on Neuroticism, essentially zero (I am similar to The Dude Lebowski in many many ways, except perhaps a tad higher on the cognitive scale), making even what others would consider normal levels of anxiousness, worry, and concern, feel annoying to me. It’s no big deal though, It’s not like I worry about it.
“@ Mark: Please explain how being raised by a single, high-class professional (my mother) was worse for me than being raised in a household where my father regularly beat my mother.”
It was not worse for you in terms of significant adult outcomes. I’m sure it distressed you as a kid, and you obviously have bad memories of it. But it didn’t ruin your adult life, no.
Re: the importance of education: it’s good to remember that two of America’s most accomplished people, Benjamin Franklyn and Abraham Lincoln, had between them a total of three years of formal education.
Re: the importance of education: it’s good to remember that two of America’s most accomplished people, Benjamin Franklyn and Abraham Lincoln, had between them a total of three years of formal education.
Another thing, this time a question, somewhat off topic: surveys of happiness show that countries in South America are happier on average than in North America. Yet South Americans also score significantly lower on IQ. So my question is, to take it to extremes: can you have a stupid, dysfunctional societies full of happy people (a la Idiocracy)? I would be interested in the historical dynamics of such societies: how long do they last, what do they give way to? H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine has an interesting take on this.
Formal education is not the only kind. One can be self taught, read a lot, and get exposed to others who know a lot and learn stuff from them.
College education is now used as a marker for other characteristics. That is the primary reason college educated people earn more, not what they learned in school. People who attend college and drop out just earn 10% more than high school grads, while college grads earn 83% more on average. Today Lincoln couldn’t become a lawyer without 19 years of formal education, wouldn’t be possible.
I think this essay has shed some light onto my situation and I feel like sharing it with strangers who probably don’t care.
My dad and mom are both socially adept people, but my dad has some sort of personality disorder that I can’t really identify. He’s paranoid (which manifests itself both in personal relationships and politically) and at least in his youth he was quick to aggression.
I must have inherited something from him, perhaps a distaste of authority and a general paranoia – but it manifests itself differently. He’s messed up in a lot of ways, but at least he’s functioning in society. When he was growing up in a poor neighborhood he could and would use violence to solve his problems. (Nowadays he’s a funny guy and uses that to his advantage, although he still doesn’t trust people and he’s not exactly financially successful. I’ve no idea how he’ll survive as an old man with no savings.) I have temper problems but have always chosen not to get violent in public. He chose fight, but I choose flight. Instead of resorting to violence to resolve conflicts, I’ve opted to entirely avoid conflicts because I cannot stand them. I dropped out of highschool because I couldn’t stand having strangers stare at me anymore. I’ve retreated to my room for 4 years, leaving only to take out the trash or do other menial tasks demanded by my parents. Psychologically it’s a hellish existence and I’ve been contemplating suicide because of it. But why did I have to be this way? What traits did I inherit from my parents that have crippled me like this?
According to a Raven’s Advanced Progressive matrices test from iqtest.dk, my IQ is roughly 119. On one hand this makes a bit of sense to me because I can remember attempting to think deeply about things ever since I was a little kid, and I think I’m more thoughtful than the average person (albeit I pale in comparison to the HBD, neo-reactionary, and new right communities, where I’d guess the average IQ of active contributors to be 130 or higher). On the other hand it feels artificial, as if I’ve substituted a slow process speed with….just more time spent thinking. To be fair to myself, exactly how one gets to have a particular IQ might not be too important. If it’s a personality quirk that results in my having prolonged thoughts, that doesn’t really make the IQ “artificial” compared to someone who can analyze and solve problems quickly – though I must admit that I’m extremely jealous of people who are the latter type.
It’s hard for me to gauge my parents’ intelligence. My mom isn’t exactly stupid but she’s not very smart either. I’d guess her IQ to be 110. I’d say my dad’s IQ is lower than that. But of course, IQ isn’t always going to match the parents’ because of natural variation and all that. Anyway, I found this essay extremely compelling and I’m mostly glad I found it. On the other hand I realize the only person I should have kids with is a beautiful, nice, and smart conservative women, of which there seem to be very few these days, and in my current situation would have no chance with anyway.
I don’t see job/career titles of “Community Activist” or “Elected (career) Politician” or “Appointed Bureaucrat”; the people occupying these positions need to be accounted for in these charts and graphs.
This is the thesis of a resist critique of heritability as applied to criminology. Has an hbder responded here?
Should be “recent” not “resist.”
Jayman, Don’t know if you will see this here, or another source.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/05/19/the-wealthy-in-florence-today-are-the-same-families-as-600-years-ago/
Basically, if you live in Florence, and your ancestor was wealthy in 1400’s, odds are that you are also. It seems to fit your ‘son becomes the father’ It is worth noting that income mobility is higher in other areas, but this also could be explained by genetics. In the US, where a poor man can become rich and a rich poor more easily than about anywhere else, that dynamic is desired, so those who seek their fortunes migrate to the US and away from areas where they can’t.
If you think single mothers are the victims of their single mother genes, there’s just no way to put this politely. You’re a fucking idiot. My IQ surpasses my mother’s and fathers by a long shot. Maybe I have a rare mutation? Maybe, just maybe the IQ test is worthless and contaminated beyond hope and you rely on it because it offers simple, convenient explanations for a confusing and frightening world that you pretend you can grasp on equal terms but can’t. Genes don’t code for behaviors, but proteins that form tissues which work in a complex, dynamic system which creates an emergent property known as consciousness. Try tying the preference of apple to pecan pie to genes. Try tying a fear of getting water stuck in your ears to genes. You can’t and you’ll always be putting the cart before the horse in any attempt to do that.
All you do is cherry pick studies that seem to be saying what you think they are, deliberately misinterpret them to fit the a priori position that’s comforting to STEM seeking social retards and deriving a harebrained philosophy from that a priori position (everything everyone does is down to genes.)
We know shit all about genes but we know that they turn on and off all the time. We know that identical twins have contrasting personalities which shouldn’t be possible at all if we were clockwork men. We know now that there isn’t a single type of intelligence but there are many types of intelligence, and that a system that measures it by using a single numerical rating value is inherently ridiculous and should be laughed at. Your ego (and subconscious black shame) governs everything you believe, and it does so in concert with genes, not solely and unequivocally derived from the proteins they encode. You should be embarrassed and ashamed, but not because you have black genes, but because you don’t have the will to override them.
Single parenthood is merely the result of bad genetics, hahhaha. Morality police (or lab rats) ahoy
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/01/single_moms_are_better_kids_raised_by_single_mothers_are_sturdier.html
Florence isn’t closed and if you actually read that article you wouldn’t be making demented pleas to genetics to account for this effect. It shows flat out that savings explains the largest explainable part of the effect.
The US is a terrible place to become rich if you’re poor. It falls consistently in social mobility every few years. I suppose you could handwave this away by saying its genetic drift but it isnt. From this we can infer the obvious; that it isn’t what you know, or how much you’re able to know, but who you know. Intelligent people often become rich because of the confidence it affords them, not the ability. One of my former employers was in most respects a fucking moron but he was ruthless and single minded as most HBDers/phrenologists are.
You use dictatorship to mendaciously refer to a single party state ruled by a single strong man. Non disingenuous twats who bother to read Marx’s words and take him at his word (instead of interpreting their way around it by referring to every philosophy they fear as “pseudo” this or that) will have inevitably arrived at the heart of the matter he actually described in plain language. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a single party state ruled by the proletariat which would comprise all of society at the end of the revolution.
But by all means just home in on the word dictatorship because it sounds scary (see: bad faith reasoning)
Regression to the mean would indicate high downward and upward mobility, if class structure was this rigid regression to the mean is clearly overstated. According to Stephen Hsu IQ can go from genius level (140) all the way back down to 110 in 3-4 generations. It’s not uncommon at all for upper middle class people to produce offspring who would be better suited to blue collar work. Regression to the mean is a powerful phenomenon and it indicates that one cannot maintain high intelligence over many generations. Stephen Hsu said that it’s common for super high IQ physicists to produce kids who can “only” become doctors, and doctors could also produce kids who could only become electricians.
See my post
Regression to the Mean
Regression is a one time effect only. It is less than perfect assortative mating that drives regression generation after generation. If assortative mating was perfect, there would be no regression (as we see in groups that mate endogamously).
social mobility is WAY higher than Clark’s estimate. It’s common for high ability men to marry attractive but less intelligent women, resulting in a sharp socioeconomic and IQ decline in the next generation, especially if they’re boys, since boys tend to be closer to their mother in IQ than their father. Women will try to marry into more intelligent families, raising the IQ of their offspring above their own level, whereas men marry into less intelligent families lowing the IQ of their offspring. The idea that assortative mating is greater today is preposterous, during most of history people practiced arranged marriage, to keep intelligence and wealth from diluting back to average. India’s caste system was specifically designed to ensure intelligence and wealth maintained itself over the generations. People today marry people they “love” it doesn’t matter if her father was a truck driver or elite, people marry by education level, which is’t a great proxy for IQ unless it’s STEM.
I think I am getting a bit confused here, regarding the bolded…
Why would you add Measurement Error to the Additive Genetic value? I thought the reason that it is removed from the original Additive Genetic value itself is because it is an error and being corrected for.
Nothing in the paper itself says to Measurement error to the Additive Genetic value…
I have a similar question to @Not Here
What is the basis of adding those three components, namely:
effect of measurement error, the heritability estimate, and the negative gene-environment correlation values?
I’m late in the discussion, but the author has to answer my points before he can convince me parents don’t matter (outside their genes) :
1) How could your genes only react to specific environmental factors ? It doesn’t make any sense from a logical standpoint. It’s like saying gravity only works in New York but not in Paris. No, either gravity works for everybody or nobody. It should be the same for environmental influences : either any environmental influence has an effect or envinronment has no influence. Actually, everything react to everything, that’s why causality means something to physicists…
– The only logical and possible explanation is that the studies are unable to properly measure shared environmental influences or don’t look at the right things. Usually, they only care about psychological traits while what really matters are life outcomes, not psychological traits, even if they are correlated. For instance (and by caricaturing) if you score really high in agressiviness, you could become either a succesful boxer or an inmate.
– Let’s say you have a high genetic susceptibility to develop mental illnesses under stressful events : how an unstable family could not affect your innate propency to develop a mental illness ? Once again, it doesn’t make sense.
2) If genes and luck are so powerful, then this article doesn’t matter too, because as said the author : Beyond that it’s in the hands of “fate”.
– Or perhaps the author acknowledge that knowledge can make a difference in your life. And i’m certain that many people here would live their life differently if they knew what they know today. If your parents say you genes matters a lot (and i don’t dispute this fact) then it may influence how you choose your furtur partner for instance…
3) My last point is this one : what we can conclude from those studies is that parenting may not make children more similar in their psychological traits. This doesn’t mean parents can’t affect their child’s life in a positive or negative way. Once again, only actual life outcomes matter and twins studies typically don’t measure that. People with similar personalities and IQ can totally have different life outcomes. Good parents may not make their children more similar psychologically, but this doesn’t mean they don’t make their children more similar in how successful they were in their life.
– For instance, by many aspects, Bill Gates is closer to someone like Snoop Dogg (status, money, etc.) than a random engineer who only earns 2000$ by months.
Excuse me if you don’t always clearly understand me because english is not my native language.