[zevon]

Why do you insist on saying that I "don't believe" in genetic components when I've literally said the opposite? The people who wrote the stuff on the Wikipedia site I was provided with and their (researcher-)sources seem to try to tell you and me both "hey, this is an interesting field of study but it's very complicated, many genes are involved, we are far from understanding them or being able to model them, be very careful with interpreting correlations and for (m)any practical purposes (such as thinking about how to structure educational environments), you really should consider quite a lot of things not directly related to genetics." What's so controversial about that and what overwhelming evidence does that go against?

edit: Sorry, to clarify, you are saying that "Two parents of higher IQ are much more likely to produce an offspring of higher IQ than median" because of genetics as the main determining factor?

[Dylan16807]

> "hey, this is an interesting field of study but it's very complicated, many genes are involved, we are far from understanding them or being able to model them, be very careful with interpreting correlations and for (m)any practical purposes (such as thinking about how to structure educational environments), you really should consider quite a lot of things not directly related to genetics."

I'll say the same thing as you: context matters. Someone trying to say that smarter parents lead to a smarter student body doesn't need to model any genes and they don't need to care about the difference between things that are transferred genetically and things that are transferred socially.

> because of genetics as the main determining factor?

Does that matter? While the word "heritability" was used, and that term "very much has to do with genetics" as you say, that person didn't directly mention genes and didn't attribute any particular percent to genes. The original argument is the same whether genes are 80% or 20%.

[zevon]

Again, the person I was originally replying to called intelligence "highly heritable". That does mean a genetic argument and I replied to that and not a generic assertion that there are mechanisms in play that have influence on the expression over generations.

[whimsicalism]

Absolutely agreed. I got bogged down in the genetics portion, but it is not actually a necessary component of the argument I'm trying to make - merely that kids are like parents.

[whimsicalism]

you’re not arguing in good faith and now you’re motte-baileying. you said:

> Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems don't mean that intelligence is inherited in the genetic sense. If you're seriously arguing this, you're very close to flirting with eugenics and the like.

the obvious reading is that you do not believe in a genetic component to intelligence - and in fact say that a belief in “this” is arguing for eugenics.

> Sorry, to clarify, you are saying that "Two parents of higher IQ are much more likely to produce an offspring of higher IQ than median" because of genetics as the main determining factor?

Even if you remove all environmental factors, two smart parents are more likely to have a smart kid than the counterfactual.

[zevon]

My original answer was a condensed and far from comprehensive one-sentence reply to another condensed one-sentence-reply (that included the phrase "highly heritable" which is how the whole genetics argument started). Why is what you apparently perceive this original one-liner to mean so important to you? I've expanded on the points I was trying to make quite a bit. And again: The researchers who look at those things seem to be the ones telling us that the relationship between intelligence and genetics is complicated and many, many non-genetic factors are in play, no? Did I miss some big new movement on deterministic genetics in education or some such since I've sat my basic biology, psychology and sociology courses? Do you know stuff that's not on Wikipedia? Help me out here, please - and I'd politely ask you to refrain from insulting my good faith.

I'd also be - again, genuinely - interested in how you come up with that clear of a statement about smart parents and their non-externally-influenced child, how one would approach that as a research question/design and how - practically - useful this piece of data in and of itself would be when most of us are not Kaspar Hauser or any other conceptual model of a human being that exists without external interdependences.