Spicy topic!
The Breeder's Equation
11–20 of 76 posts
Re: The Breeder's Equation
#12"And of course the breeder’s equation explains how average IQ potential is declining today, because of low fertility among highly educated women."
Do highly educated women have a high IQ? Or does a high IQ make you a highly educated woman?
The writer seems to start with the conclusion that highly educated women generally have high IQs.
Re: The Breeder's Equation
#13I’d expect if we find the kids of professors to be more likely to be National Merit Finalists that we’d find a non-zero upbringing/educational correlation. Sure there’s a genetic component, but I’d be fairly shocked if “being good on academic testing” has no correlation with “being raised by academics”.
Of course it would be correlated. Genes and environment and culture and family are all just one big interrelated mess. Is it even possible to tease the contributions apart, even in theory?
I guess I could imagine a study, something like: look at kids of professors, in particular identical twins vs fraternal. Not all children will be National Merit Finalists, but among those that are, do you find identical twin pairs more often? Even that is subject to environmental effects, though, because potentially identical twins are raised differently!
Re: The Breeder's Equation
#14Two people with IQ's of 120 will have kids with average IQ's of 110, but if you put those kids on an island and they have kids their average IQ's will be 110. What?
The parents genes are only 120 because 10 points were based on environmental "luck". Genetically they had the genes for 110 IQ +/- 10 points to accommodate the environmental luck. The two kids had average luck, so they got 110 IQ, but they still have the same genes. So when they have kids with others with the 110 IQ gene's, they will still be 110 +/- 10. A simpler explanation: you might be the child of geniuses but t…
[deleted]
Re: The Breeder's Equation
#15I’d expect if we find the kids of professors to be more likely to be National Merit Finalists that we’d find a non-zero upbringing/educational correlation. Sure there’s a genetic component, but I’d be fairly shocked if “being good on academic testing” has no correlation with “being raised by academics”.
Of course it would be correlated. Genes and environment and culture and family are all just one big interrelated mess. Is it even possible to tease the contributions apart, even in theory? I guess I could imagine a study, something like: look at kids of professors, in particular identical twins vs fraternal. Not all children will be National Merit Finalists, but among those that are, do you find identical twin pairs…
I agree with you but not the article which claims (without introducing evidence): “ By the way, when we say "environmental,” we mean “something other than additive genetics.” It doesn’t look as if the usual suspects—the way in which you raise your kids, or the school they attend—contribute much to this "environmental" variance, at least for adult IQ.”
Perhaps studies of early adopted children would another pathway for study, but there seems to be little appetite for IQ study in general.
Re: The Breeder's Equation
#16"And of course the breeder’s equation explains how average IQ potential is declining today, because of low fertility among highly educated women." Do highly educated women have a high IQ? Or does a high IQ make you a highly educated woman? The writer seems to start with the conclusion that highly educated women generally have high IQs.
The writer starts with that unstated assumption. It’s not the conclusion.
Re: The Breeder's Equation
#17"And of course the breeder’s equation explains how average IQ potential is declining today, because of low fertility among highly educated women." In the Heinlein universe, the Howard Foundation runs a voluntary eugenics program by paying people with particularly long lived ancestors to mate with each other. Protagonist Lazarus Long is a product of this. The author is saying that this would work as expected, with off…
An IQ is just a number coming out of a test. Whether or not that correlates to something useful for humanity, or even the individual being tested, is a different question. Surely the majority of useful discoveries are made by people with above-average IQs, but would juicing the numbers through eugenics really make much of a difference? How many extra Isaac Newtons would it take to make controlled nuclear fusion work?…
Not to mention the regression to the mean issue discussed in the article, and the slight problem of attracting women aware that they have a very high IQ to trade career success or other personal preferences for being the baby making machine for some billionaire's experiment. It's not like they're currently disproportionately likely to choose not to have kids because they can't afford them
Re: The Breeder's Equation
#18Like most looming disasters, whether or not this is a real problem depends on quantifying the problem. Is this likely to significantly affect the population intelligence before we learn to engineer our children, say within the next 200 years?
Re: The Breeder's Equation
#19From a didactic perspective, I think he goes off the rails by immediately focusing on something as abstract and hard to measure as intelligence, and where there's a long history of people talking about whether it's even a single trait. In terms of just explaining the breeder's equation, I think he could have been more effective talking about, IDK, tall Dutch people.
The other thing that's annoying here is that although this is an 'equation', as I understand it it's typically not predictive because that heritability term is so fuzzy. It's not that you know the heritability term in advance and predict the response to selection; measuring the response to selection also updates your information about the heritability.
His examples have a cherry-picking feel for this reason. Take the "national merit finalists" thing he mentions multiple times. Note that he doesn't mention the IQ distribution of the college professors (surely it's logistically impractical to get any large number of busy faculty to spend time taking such tests) or of the college towns (which might not be the same as the overall population mean), or the degree to which being a professor is correlated with IQ or the degree to which being a national merit finalists is correlated to IQ. Had the data come out differently (and I suspect he mentions _finalist_ multiple times because there wasn't as distinct a signal among _winners_), this perspective leaves plenty of room to declare that (a) maybe heritability of intelligence is lower than initially thought or assortative mating along IQ lines is weaker than expected (b) maybe professor-ness is less correlated to IQ than assumed or (c) maybe national merit finalist status isn't especially correlated to IQ (semifinalists have to submit a bunch of info other than test results).
Re: The Breeder's Equation
#20The heritability of intelligence is overhyped, and in my opinion of no practical use.
It's extremely hard to find data where it is even possible to distinguish between genetic and environmental influence. That would be the studies of the kind "twins raised apart". And that already excludes the reality that those twins will probably grow up in a similar background, similar health and educational system etc.
The talk about heritable IQ is pointless, even dangerous, because it leads to complacency around issues around structural racism and equality in education.