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The Breeder's Equation

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Re: The Breeder's Equation

#21

Post by pfortuny »

abeppu wrote: post #19

From 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 althou…

Even more so: every time IQ and regression to the mean is explained, it is always in the “more-to-less direction”, whereas it works in both and both are relevant.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#22

Post by bayesian_horse »

losvedir wrote: post #13
sokoloff wrote: post #2

I’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 remember something about studies about "twins raised apart".

In my opinion, Human nature is too complicate to poke at many of these factors, and talking about genetics quickly devolves into racism and elitism.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#23

Post by mynameishere »

abeppu wrote: post #19

From 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 althou…

This kind of quibbling always comes up. He's just using professors and national merit finalists as examples.

The truth is, you could probably take the top 10 percent highest-earning car salesmen (EDIT: and women), drop them on a desert island and, after two generations, get the highest-IQ society the world has ever known. But that's less obvious, so why use such an example?

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#24

Post by bayesian_horse »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
losvedir wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

I remember, without having googled anything additionally, studies where Malaria infections and lead exposition had a negative effect on final IQ, whereas deworming treatments and longer school attendance had a positive effect.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#25

Post by pjscott »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #20

The 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 a…

The usual studies for disentangling genetics and environment involve twins raised together: they get basically the same shared environment -- this is a feature, not a bug -- but identical twins are more closely related than fraternal twins.

For example, say you're trying to find out how much of adult height comes down to genetics (in a modern, non-malnourished environment). You measure the heights of a bunch of twins and compare: how much more similar are the heights of identical twins than the heights of fraternal twins? Do a bit of calculating and you've got a number for heritability.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#26

Post by sokoloff »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #22
losvedir wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 remember something about studies about "twins raised apart". In my opinion, Human nature is too complicate to poke at many of these factors, and talking about genetics quickly devolves into racism and elitism.

I agree with your last, which is very unfortunate in that if we could figure a way via research to shift upward the effectiveness of cognition (for which IQ is a proxy measure), I think peoples lives overall would be improved.

Some of these are interventions that we’ve already found to prevent wasting of ability (as you cite in another comment); others might be nutritional or environmental changes we could make to better support development in utero or as children develop.

Giving everyone 5% “better brains” would be a huge win for the world, but the sociological factors you mention preclude widespread scientific study.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#27

Post by pjscott »

abeppu wrote: post #19

From 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 althou…

> (surely it's logistically impractical to get any large number of busy faculty to spend time taking such tests)

You can estimate it decently by looking at SAT scores, which most professors will have taken at some point. Your error bars will be larger than if you administered IQ tests to everyone, but it's a lot easier.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#28

Post by pjscott »

max_ wrote: post #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.

It's been found empirically that IQ and educational attainment are moderately correlated.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#29

Post by PKop »

throwvirtever wrote: post #10
hirundo wrote: post #6

"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?…

>why would we expect an intelligence-focused eugenics program to be useful at all?

Are there no uses of a having a higher population average intelligence besides "does it immediately produce nuclear fusion"? Is higher average intelligence good for many many many other things besides producing fusion? Of course it is, this is an absurd premise.

Also, where did nuclear fission get invented? Are there correlated differences in IQ of people from this region? Did nuclear fission get invented in areas with low average IQ?

"An IQ is a just a number coming out of a test". Oh, but it does correlate with other group-wide achievements that aren't just numbers coming out of a test, does it not?

>Surely the majority of useful discoveries are made by people with above-average IQs

How it is not obvious then that increasing the average would also increase the level of the outliers and their ceiling?

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#30

Post by nfmcclure »

I'm very happy to see "The Breeder's Equation" on Hacker News. Wow. I spent my graduate career studying mathematical biology and working with biologists.

It's a fascinating equation and I spent some time on it converting it from a discrete equation into a continuous equation along with explaining the use cases and motivations behind it here: http://fromdata.org/2013/10/27/the-continuous-breeders-equat...

This of course, does not take into account mutation, transduction, conjugation and other sources of genetic variation.

Edit: Please take these approximate expectation equations with a grain of salt. They only apply to larger, discrete-reproducing, controlled populations. Applying results like these on spatially segregated or small populations does not really work. Also this equation does break down a bit when the phenotypic trait is a result of very complicated interactions between genetics and the environment.

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