[zevon]

No, I said one is "close to flirting with Eugenics" wich is rather not the same than accusing anybody of being an Eugenicist and I stand by that point. However, you and the other person insisting on (mis-)interpreting my original one-liner now seem to do the "retreating" and to say that the post I was replying to somehow "clearly" was about the generalized notion of kids being like their parents instead of being very specifically about genetics.

The study you linked is interesting but its results are far from "clear" (see its discussion section but that's probably also just bias and hedging or whatever) and it does have fuck all to do with your proposed thought experiment of a Kaspar-Hauser-like child. Even less so with your confident prediction of how a Kasper-Hauser-like child would turn out. I think you probably know this yourself but these kinds of predictions are something scientists would very, very rarely do - because they know the limitations of their work.

I'm kind of weirded out by this exchange, people here rather confidently express quite a bit of stuff that goes against years and decades of training I received when I became a scientist and I think I'll stop replying now. That was the recommendation of a colleague - who actually is a geneticist - I showed this thread to over coffee as well.

[Dylan16807]

> your proposed thought experiment of a Kaspar-Hauser-like child

Oh my god this is the most malicious possible reading of "remove all environmental factors".

They're talking about making the environments match, for fuck's sake.

The bulk of your comments are arguing that heritability is very complex, which is completely compatible with the words "highly heritable". And you still haven't explained why the term "eugenics" was relevant to anything anyone else said. If it's something about race, a superficial similarity across millions of people in shifting groups has very little to do with the correlations between child and parent that share 50% of their genes, but even if those were the same the comment still didn't say anything that got anywhere near eugenics!!

> the post I was replying to somehow "clearly" was about the generalized notion of kids being like their parents instead of being very specifically about genetics

I didn't use the word "clearly". You're misquoting now too?

And I still believe they meant the entire complex mess you're talking about, yeah. I think you have zero justification to barge in and say it's a complex issue, and the person making a single sentence comment must have meant the most simple possible version, there's no way they were referring to the entire complex issue already without your help, in a context where the distinction doesn't even matter.

Even if you're done replying I hope you see this: If you were actually talking in good faith you're doing a very bad job at giving anyone the benefit of the doubt for how they word things.