When people try to be positive by saying: "it's not all natural talent, you must also work hard and persevere!", I wonder, aren't those also shaped by our genes? Is the ability to work hard and the mental fortitude not to give up not also something dictated by our genetics?
You can take that one step further. Couldn’t the willingness to believe in the foreordaining nature of genetics also be determined by genetics? Maybe those people, who believe that genetics does not determine everything, cannot believe otherwise, because of their own genes? In that case, isn’t there no point in you trying to argue about this? Those who believe in genetics and determinism will do so and leave everything to fall as it may, and those who believe in personal hard work and perseverence will try to work as hard as they can, because that is their nature.
This is my lazy excuse for not being an overachiever. I see people at the top of their fields and they so obviously seem innately driven to perform and be amazing. I was not born with that instinct and my brain doesn't reward me the same way theirs does. I'm fine with this.
I've observed for quite some time that determination, charisma, and the ability to sustain focus are more significant than either natural ability or education. If you don't believe me spend some time in New York.
It's something that came up a while back in a discussion with a friend on the concept of AI super intelligence. I personally don't think you would need superhuman IQ to run circles around humans. Superhuman focus and drive would do it. Something with a 150 IQ but able to operate like a person on amphetamine but minus the side effects and enter sustained periods of "flow state" focus at will would be godlike. Hell even mediocre IQ with superhuman focus would be scary.
> "it's not all natural talent, you must also work hard and persevere!"
I understood this to mean that to achieve your full potential ( naturally given potential ), you have to work hard and persevere.
A kenyan long distance runner might have a natural potential far greater than everyone else, but he still has to train to reach his natural potential.
> Is the ability to work hard and the mental fortitude not to give up not also something dictated by our genetics?
Genetics may predispose you to working harder and being mentally strong, but that's something you can change through hard work. You can't grow to be 7'5" like yao ming by working hard. You can't run as fast usain bolt by working hard. There are natural/genetic/physical limits. And there are natural predispositions.
I'm not a geneticist or a biologist so take it with a grain of salt.
It's not controversial that the large intelligence differences between cats, dogs and chimpanzees are genetic. Nobody says that in the right environment and nurture a cat will become as smart as a chimpanzee.
But somehow it's very controversial that the small intelligence differences between humans might be genetic, as if a species has a fixed IQ number, and the only IQ jumps are strictly between species, but not between individuals.
It isn't particularly controversial that IQ has a genetic component. What is controversial are other conclusions derived from that. Saying that something is controversial is often used as a rhetorical device to add credibility to arguments that aren't conclusive.
If you want a very good summary of recent genetics research results, have a look at Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes. Basically, even the most careful and underwhelming claims from the popular press overstate how much we actually understand about the connection between genes and real world attributes of people.
Anecdotally, anyone who has ever recontacted an adopted-out sibling will be able to tell you how much this is true.
We got back into contact with my older sister who had been adopted when I was about 12. She's absolutely the spitting image of her parents, both in looks and behavior, despite being raised in about as different a household as is possible.
The obvious pull quote, already in this thread, seems to say that this is a case of looking where we have the tools to look rather than where it makes a difference. Because you can get DNA with a swab and a MiSeq, you should try to determine the causes there rather than do the hard work of determining confounding environmental factors.
The end argument works out to laziness if the goal is to determine causes. If the goal is engineering change, the article makes it's own countercase - improvements to society-wide resources make for society-wide changes in behavior.
Why I don't find many of these types of articles interesting isn't because of the supposedly provocative genetic part, but of the glossed over results. They look at something like grades and then try to find a link between those grades and genetics. Eventually they do and conclude that there is a link between genetics and grades. But they don't consider if those genetics or grades are important in themselves. Which is why these sort of studies tends to not survive real comparisons e.g. between groups with different norms.
Even so I think the largest flaw tend to be in the final conclusion. Which is essentially always about how we should treat less fortune people. They day such an article conclude that we need to shut down private schools and make sure we don't have genetically challanged CEOs I will give them points for being provocative.
The end argument works out to laziness if the goal is to determine causes.
If your argument is that it must be so for reasons of ideological aesthetics, then you're in the company of Lysenko.
If the goal is engineering change, the article makes it's own countercase - improvements to society-wide resources make for society-wide changes in behavior.
If the culture would broadly accept that both nature and nurture contribute something, we'd be much better able to deal with a ground truth which is complex and nuanced.
Biology is one of those areas where ground truth tends to be complex and nuanced. Psychology is another field like this. The practice of good governance is yet another.
Biological determinism flatters the current elite -- "You're on top because you're inherently superior!" -- so it will always find an eager audience regardless of whether it is true. All the excess cheerleading makes it incredibly hard to assess.
I would have thought the exact opposite. Wouldn't the current elite rather believe that they are on top because they worked hard and earned their place? That way they can look down on the rest in good conscience while gutting welfare systems that only benefit those who "didn't" earn their own way.
Plomin's central argument seems to be that once you control for environment, genetics explains the remaining differences:
"Plomin’s argument is that, in a society with universal education, the greatest part of the variation in learning abilities is accounted for by genetics...
...Thus, the average height of northern European males has increased by more than 15cm in the past two centuries. That is obviously due to changes in environment. However, the variation in height between northern European males is down to genetics"
To conclude that it is "nature not nurture after all" based on this argument, seems quite backwards.
Regarding socio-economic status:
I have more than 2 university degrees. My dad attained the lowest higher educational attainment there is. My mom did not even finish high school. My mom and dad have all kinds of addiction issues regarding alcohol and drugs. I don't. I have more patience than both of them and am more level-headed. And I'm also pretty sure I'd be a better parent than them, since they set such a low bar that I had to be adopted and raised by my grandparents after 1 year.
Sometimes I wonder how I am a product of both my mom and my dad, because there are quite a bit of things in which I don't recognize myself in. If it was all nature, then it'd have been easier to spot and I'd also be addicted to a lot more things.
My upbringing was similar with regards to my mom (same people). But the situation was different, my grandpa didn't work much when I was around but was a workaholic during my moms time. My dad was beaten as a kid. I wasn't.
If it really is al genetics then how do you explain such a difference in socio-economic status? I think for them it's part drug abuse, a fucked up childhood and no nudge to do your best at school (in my dad's case, I don't know about my mom). I know that my dad had a propensity for learning but he never got to utilize it.
I'm pretty sure that if my dad had been in a better upbringing that he'd have fared better. I'm also pretty sure that if my momd would've been born around 1995 that she'd have fared better.
One interesting thing about genetics, and a very conspicuous one, is that randomness plays a not so little part in the process. Otherwise you wouldn’t even have evolution. How could a species adapt to a changing environment if heritability was the only determining factor?
In that case, it could be justified to think of you as one of those wildcards that nature continuously throws into the mix to sharpen the species adaptability.
That is, if you spread your genes around and those also prove more adapted. And so on.
On its face this study doesn’t seem controversial, but it’s easy to see how people can find confirmations of their own biases in it. For example when discussing race and gender.
The article mentions that much of this research is based on twin studies. I have a question about how these studies work - perhaps someone here has done this sort of research and can answer.
Here's my understanding of twin studies: you have some identical and fraternal twins. Each pair of twins are raised in the same household, and presumably experience the same environmental "nurture" effects. So, if we see stronger intellectual similarities between identical twins than fraternal twins, then we conclude that this difference is genetic.
But how valid is the assumption that the environments that fraternal twins face are as similar as those of identical twins? Let's assume for instance that:
1) women and men have the same innate potential for mathematical skill
2) our education system does a better job fostering mathematical ability in men than women
3) over time, this discrepancy causes women to score lower on tests of mathematical skill than men
While our identical twin pairs will all be of the same gender, the fraternal twin pairs may not. Two identical twin boys might receive the same environmental effects on their mathematical ability, but a girl and her twin brother will not, even if they have equal mathematical potential.
Given these assumptions, if we conducted a twin study on mathematical ability, we would see a stronger correlation between the scores of identical twins than those of fraternal twins, due to gender difference, and we would conclude that mathematical ability has a genetic component.
And our conclusion wouldn't be wrong! If gender impacts mathematical ability, and gender is genetic, then mathematical ability does arguably have a genetic component. But this gender difference comes about not because of an innate intellectual difference between women and men, but because of how a child's environment "nurture" changes depending on an arbitrary genetic trait "nature". In a world where these assumptions are true, a child's genes influence their future mathematical abilities - but in another world without gender-based educational discrepancies, the same genetic difference might not have any effect.
How do twin studies account for these more nuanced situations, where society causes nature and nurture to coincide in roundabout ways? Does it make sense to simply call these "second-order" socio-genetic effects "nature"?
The best twin studies look at pairs of identical twins who were separated at birth and raised in different households. If they still end up more similar to each other than to their adopted siblings on some trait, we conclude that trait has a significant genetic component, and more sophisticated analysis can measure how significant it is. Note that the technique I described is not strictly able to determine whether the effect is from genetics or some other pre-birth shared environment, like maternal alcohol consumption. For many practical purposes, that distinction doesn't really matter.
I don't like the way he seems to connect the science to the political spectrum. I think it would be the thinking of the left that we need to improve the environment especially for the disadvantaged (including those disadvantaged for genetic reasons) in order to improve society as a whole. Then he mentions how it was "dangerous" to publish his research, feeding the victim complex of those whose thinking doesn't line up with what he considers to be the left apparantly. Whoever claims that raw, uncivilized human nature bolsters equality can't be thinking straight.
I think it was a good point, that we have come a long way to equalizing the environment and that leaves a big part of the differences to genetics. I would say that is very high praise to the achievements we already made and shows that we are on the right way. I would guess that the same study made in a more unequal society would have different results.
Another problem that Plomin encounters with explaining his findings is that people often confuse group and individual differences – or, to put it another way, the distinction between means and variances. Thus, the average height of northern European males has increased by more than 15cm in the past two centuries. That is obviously due to changes in environment. However, the variation in height between northern European males is down to genetics. The same applies to psychological traits.
“The causes of average differences,” he says, “aren’t necessarily related to causes of individual differences. So that’s why you can say heritability can be very high for a trait, but the average differences between groups – ethnic groups, gender – could be entirely environmental; for example, as a result of discrimination. The confusion between means and variances is a fundamental misunderstanding.”
How does this work? How can one thing that causes the motion of the average not also affect the variation? How wouldn't the one which inherited the worst genes not benefit from environment?
Whoa, this is encouraging. A thoughtfully-written piece on an extremely important (and, lamentably, controversial) subject devoid of hyperbole and rancorous partisanship.
... published by The Guardian, no less. I am shocked and very pleased.
Human performance depends on a number of factors. These factors form a chain and this chain is as strong as its weakest link. So yes, some genetic diseases are severe enough to undermine cognitive performance. But no, genes are not the weakest link for most people. We are still wasting most of the human potential we already have. There is no need to seek genetic improvements at this stage.
AFAIK, the consequences of DNA depend as much or more on the processing of them by RNA and otherwise than on the original genes. I wonder how the theory accounts for that (I'm not pointing out flaw as an armchair cynic, but asking a question.)
Also, obviously environment plays a major role in our lives and I'm certain Plomin would agree: Abusive parents (or no parents), childhood experiences (think of rape survivors), education, the opportunities around us, access to resources, etc. etc. I would guess he's talking about an essential psychological nature that may determine how we respond to those things. My question is, where does he draw the line between that 'essential nature' (accepting for sake of argument that it exists) and environmental influence?
EDIT: "Plomin’s argument is that, in a society with universal education, the greatest part of the variation in learning abilities is accounted for by genetics, not home environment or quality of school– these factors, he says, do have an effect but it’s much smaller than is popularly believed."
Calling it "universal education" (the Guardian's paraphrase, not necessarily Plomin's words) is a big stretch - it's so different in different places, including in the same country, that it doesn't all fit under one term. Without more specific claims, it's hard to address that quote but I was reading in the last year about one poor school district which had accomplished a milestone: Half the third graders could read. Half those kids are in deep trouble, and I don't think that's due to genetics.
Re processing of DNA etc, this isn't the level these studies are typically working at. There's no biochemistry knowledge involved. They are just looking at DNA sequences, and what data they have about outcomes. Whether a piece of DNA makes something critical for some muscle, or is 10 steps away in part of some complicated switching apparatus, of indeed just influences something else which causes the growing animal to enjoy behaviour which happen to exercise this muscle -- all of this detail is a black box, all of these would contribute to genetic effect.
Re universal education, etc: in adoption studies this translates to "among parents who will be approved to adopt", and this indeed cuts the very bottom off the distribution of some factors. I don't think it's a huge issue, but not an expert.
But my understanding of the point Plomin is making there is a bit different. Regardless of the current state of (say) schooling, he's pointing out that moving from a system with large schooling inequalities, to a system of absolute schooling equality, would almost certainly increase the heritability of education. In the unequal system, some bright kids are stunted etc, weakening the correlation between input and output; but in the equal one, all the variation in the output will be driven by the input.
At least I think that's what he's saying. Haven't read the book, and not really my field at all...
> As Plomin writes: “We now know that DNA differences are the major systematic source of psychological differences between us. Environmental effects are important but what we have learned in recent years is that they are mostly random – unsystematic and unstable – which means that we cannot do much about them.”
I'm not sure what to read in the implied statement that we can do something about genes
Not sure why this is so hard to accept, why would evolution stop at the neck? Nobody has a problem with saying height is mostly genetic, yet say the same of intelligence and it's controversial.
And yet until the industrial revolution, environmental factors were the dominant effect. Anyone could have been taller with enough nutrition.
Genes are only ever expressed under certain environmntal conditions. The minimal condition for all of them is being alive. Malnourishment, or perhaps too much caffeine, amongst a hundred other things, all determine how our genes for height express themselves.
Which is all to say, people are wrong when they say height is mostly genetic. It may be true enough under current social conditions though. I think the same problem applies to calling intelligence "largely" genetic.
The controversy isn't about whether differences exist or not, but rather how strong those differences are, and how much we should factor them into society.
[+] [-] lumberjack|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whamlastxmas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|7 years ago|reply
It's something that came up a while back in a discussion with a friend on the concept of AI super intelligence. I personally don't think you would need superhuman IQ to run circles around humans. Superhuman focus and drive would do it. Something with a 150 IQ but able to operate like a person on amphetamine but minus the side effects and enter sustained periods of "flow state" focus at will would be godlike. Hell even mediocre IQ with superhuman focus would be scary.
[+] [-] liftbigweights|7 years ago|reply
I understood this to mean that to achieve your full potential ( naturally given potential ), you have to work hard and persevere.
A kenyan long distance runner might have a natural potential far greater than everyone else, but he still has to train to reach his natural potential.
> Is the ability to work hard and the mental fortitude not to give up not also something dictated by our genetics?
Genetics may predispose you to working harder and being mentally strong, but that's something you can change through hard work. You can't grow to be 7'5" like yao ming by working hard. You can't run as fast usain bolt by working hard. There are natural/genetic/physical limits. And there are natural predispositions.
I'm not a geneticist or a biologist so take it with a grain of salt.
[+] [-] undershirt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j7ake|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 21|7 years ago|reply
But somehow it's very controversial that the small intelligence differences between humans might be genetic, as if a species has a fixed IQ number, and the only IQ jumps are strictly between species, but not between individuals.
[+] [-] mhjas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxBarraclough|7 years ago|reply
If people are talking about political ideology and wishful thinking, rather than science, then that's another matter. As the article says:
> those on the left have tended to see the environment as the critical factor because it ties in with notions of egalitarianism
[+] [-] l0b0|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaggederest|7 years ago|reply
We got back into contact with my older sister who had been adopted when I was about 12. She's absolutely the spitting image of her parents, both in looks and behavior, despite being raised in about as different a household as is possible.
[+] [-] morgtheborg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awkward|7 years ago|reply
The end argument works out to laziness if the goal is to determine causes. If the goal is engineering change, the article makes it's own countercase - improvements to society-wide resources make for society-wide changes in behavior.
[+] [-] mhjas|7 years ago|reply
Even so I think the largest flaw tend to be in the final conclusion. Which is essentially always about how we should treat less fortune people. They day such an article conclude that we need to shut down private schools and make sure we don't have genetically challanged CEOs I will give them points for being provocative.
[+] [-] stcredzero|7 years ago|reply
If your argument is that it must be so for reasons of ideological aesthetics, then you're in the company of Lysenko.
If the goal is engineering change, the article makes it's own countercase - improvements to society-wide resources make for society-wide changes in behavior.
If the culture would broadly accept that both nature and nurture contribute something, we'd be much better able to deal with a ground truth which is complex and nuanced.
Biology is one of those areas where ground truth tends to be complex and nuanced. Psychology is another field like this. The practice of good governance is yet another.
[+] [-] rectang|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wizu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kpil|7 years ago|reply
The Economist called his paper disturbing (but interesting).
One would imagine that bringing facts to the table is a good thing, but apparently not.
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/42/4/1057/656274
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2014/08/21/...
[+] [-] cfmcdonald|7 years ago|reply
"Plomin’s argument is that, in a society with universal education, the greatest part of the variation in learning abilities is accounted for by genetics...
...Thus, the average height of northern European males has increased by more than 15cm in the past two centuries. That is obviously due to changes in environment. However, the variation in height between northern European males is down to genetics"
To conclude that it is "nature not nurture after all" based on this argument, seems quite backwards.
[+] [-] throwawaydna123|7 years ago|reply
Sometimes I wonder how I am a product of both my mom and my dad, because there are quite a bit of things in which I don't recognize myself in. If it was all nature, then it'd have been easier to spot and I'd also be addicted to a lot more things.
My upbringing was similar with regards to my mom (same people). But the situation was different, my grandpa didn't work much when I was around but was a workaholic during my moms time. My dad was beaten as a kid. I wasn't.
If it really is al genetics then how do you explain such a difference in socio-economic status? I think for them it's part drug abuse, a fucked up childhood and no nudge to do your best at school (in my dad's case, I don't know about my mom). I know that my dad had a propensity for learning but he never got to utilize it.
I'm pretty sure that if my dad had been in a better upbringing that he'd have fared better. I'm also pretty sure that if my momd would've been born around 1995 that she'd have fared better.
[+] [-] henriquemaia|7 years ago|reply
In that case, it could be justified to think of you as one of those wildcards that nature continuously throws into the mix to sharpen the species adaptability.
That is, if you spread your genes around and those also prove more adapted. And so on.
[+] [-] dev_dull|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatdayistoday|7 years ago|reply
Here's my understanding of twin studies: you have some identical and fraternal twins. Each pair of twins are raised in the same household, and presumably experience the same environmental "nurture" effects. So, if we see stronger intellectual similarities between identical twins than fraternal twins, then we conclude that this difference is genetic.
But how valid is the assumption that the environments that fraternal twins face are as similar as those of identical twins? Let's assume for instance that: 1) women and men have the same innate potential for mathematical skill 2) our education system does a better job fostering mathematical ability in men than women 3) over time, this discrepancy causes women to score lower on tests of mathematical skill than men
While our identical twin pairs will all be of the same gender, the fraternal twin pairs may not. Two identical twin boys might receive the same environmental effects on their mathematical ability, but a girl and her twin brother will not, even if they have equal mathematical potential.
Given these assumptions, if we conducted a twin study on mathematical ability, we would see a stronger correlation between the scores of identical twins than those of fraternal twins, due to gender difference, and we would conclude that mathematical ability has a genetic component.
And our conclusion wouldn't be wrong! If gender impacts mathematical ability, and gender is genetic, then mathematical ability does arguably have a genetic component. But this gender difference comes about not because of an innate intellectual difference between women and men, but because of how a child's environment "nurture" changes depending on an arbitrary genetic trait "nature". In a world where these assumptions are true, a child's genes influence their future mathematical abilities - but in another world without gender-based educational discrepancies, the same genetic difference might not have any effect.
How do twin studies account for these more nuanced situations, where society causes nature and nurture to coincide in roundabout ways? Does it make sense to simply call these "second-order" socio-genetic effects "nature"?
[+] [-] HALtheWise|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stkdump|7 years ago|reply
I think it was a good point, that we have come a long way to equalizing the environment and that leaves a big part of the differences to genetics. I would say that is very high praise to the achievements we already made and shows that we are on the right way. I would guess that the same study made in a more unequal society would have different results.
[+] [-] forapurpose|7 years ago|reply
Another problem that Plomin encounters with explaining his findings is that people often confuse group and individual differences – or, to put it another way, the distinction between means and variances. Thus, the average height of northern European males has increased by more than 15cm in the past two centuries. That is obviously due to changes in environment. However, the variation in height between northern European males is down to genetics. The same applies to psychological traits.
“The causes of average differences,” he says, “aren’t necessarily related to causes of individual differences. So that’s why you can say heritability can be very high for a trait, but the average differences between groups – ethnic groups, gender – could be entirely environmental; for example, as a result of discrimination. The confusion between means and variances is a fundamental misunderstanding.”
[+] [-] noobermin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leoc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golemiprague|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] camdenlock|7 years ago|reply
... published by The Guardian, no less. I am shocked and very pleased.
[+] [-] guy98238710|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forapurpose|7 years ago|reply
Also, obviously environment plays a major role in our lives and I'm certain Plomin would agree: Abusive parents (or no parents), childhood experiences (think of rape survivors), education, the opportunities around us, access to resources, etc. etc. I would guess he's talking about an essential psychological nature that may determine how we respond to those things. My question is, where does he draw the line between that 'essential nature' (accepting for sake of argument that it exists) and environmental influence?
EDIT: "Plomin’s argument is that, in a society with universal education, the greatest part of the variation in learning abilities is accounted for by genetics, not home environment or quality of school– these factors, he says, do have an effect but it’s much smaller than is popularly believed."
Calling it "universal education" (the Guardian's paraphrase, not necessarily Plomin's words) is a big stretch - it's so different in different places, including in the same country, that it doesn't all fit under one term. Without more specific claims, it's hard to address that quote but I was reading in the last year about one poor school district which had accomplished a milestone: Half the third graders could read. Half those kids are in deep trouble, and I don't think that's due to genetics.
[+] [-] iguy|7 years ago|reply
Re universal education, etc: in adoption studies this translates to "among parents who will be approved to adopt", and this indeed cuts the very bottom off the distribution of some factors. I don't think it's a huge issue, but not an expert.
But my understanding of the point Plomin is making there is a bit different. Regardless of the current state of (say) schooling, he's pointing out that moving from a system with large schooling inequalities, to a system of absolute schooling equality, would almost certainly increase the heritability of education. In the unequal system, some bright kids are stunted etc, weakening the correlation between input and output; but in the equal one, all the variation in the output will be driven by the input.
At least I think that's what he's saying. Haven't read the book, and not really my field at all...
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vanderZwan|7 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what to read in the implied statement that we can do something about genes
[+] [-] dash2|7 years ago|reply
Genetic cause does not imply genetic cure.
[+] [-] microcolonel|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] go_away_nsa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hydrox24|7 years ago|reply
And yet until the industrial revolution, environmental factors were the dominant effect. Anyone could have been taller with enough nutrition.
Genes are only ever expressed under certain environmntal conditions. The minimal condition for all of them is being alive. Malnourishment, or perhaps too much caffeine, amongst a hundred other things, all determine how our genes for height express themselves.
Which is all to say, people are wrong when they say height is mostly genetic. It may be true enough under current social conditions though. I think the same problem applies to calling intelligence "largely" genetic.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lifeformed|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corporateslaver|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] xxxdarrenxxx|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] adynatos|7 years ago|reply