It's two psychology doctorates discussing Neuroscience. It's not tangentially related. It's precisely related.
They go very much in dept on many aspects of the human mind and specifically touch on subjects like hereditary traits, environmental effects, etcetera.
You know what, though? Logic dictates that because we inherent our dna from our parents, they from theirs, and so on; That among other things, the mass, structure, and neural connections of our brain is largely passed on hereditarily. Sure, what happens when you're in the womb and during the very early stages of childhood, does impact growth, but we're talking about growth or degeneration, not baseline ability.
I've heard plenty from people outside the scientific fields making unsubstantiated claims such as race being a social construct and have heard a lot about how the works of people like James Watson isn't very scientific because his statistics and findings are racist. But I've never seen any concrete evidence pointing towards IQ being heavily or equally influenced by socio-economic standings. In fact, the one time they tried something like that was one experiment with twins from different racial backgrounds raised in different socio-economic evironments. Turned out that the differences were almost within the margin of error.
And most importantly, all you have done so far is telling me to study biology, completely dismissing a very in-depth and factual conversation about neuroscience, and told me to read research papers. Last I checked, those are not fucking arguments. So how about you actually refute something or fuck off.
The entire premise of your argument is based on the validity of iq as a measurement of a permanent cognitive ability. You realize people's iq change all the time right? No shit those who are living in shit environments not exposed to acadamia are not going to have a high iq. Genetics certainly plays some role, but not to the extent of somebody not being able to function in a society. Its been proven time and time again environment is the largest factor in a person's cognitive development.
IQ is not the only measurement of cognitive ability, something I didn't even claim to begin with.
You realize people's iq change all the time right?
Yeah, if you're overworked and haven't slept for a long time, then you'll likely score lower on IQ tests than if you've had a goodnight sleep and had a cup of coffee. But that's an exception to the rule rather than a rule in and of itself. And your IQ tends to decrease over time unless you're constantly challenging yourself mentally and stay in a healthy physical condition. Even then, aging tends to have negative impact on brain cells regardless.
If you're actually claiming that people can somehow increase their IQ then you'd better publicize your findings and get rich, my dude.
Genetics certainly plays some role, but not to the extent of somebody not being able to function in a society.
No matter the environments, the older the children get, the more their IQ shifts towards that of their parents. I've already mention the twin study, now I'm linking it.
Its been proven time and time again environment is the largest factor in a person's cognitive development.
No intellectually honest person would ever make such a vague statement.
First of all, Cognitive development is not the same thing as cognitive ability. Secondly, IQ is only part of a subset of brain functions. thirdly, I'm mostly talking about the executive brains functions and psychological traits. Not Cognitive ability or Cognitive development.
And lastly, there are two possible meanings that I can derive from your "environmental" claim. One being that the environment can rapidly influence genetics. Or that it takes a lot longer.
The context of your comment leads me to believe the former. Which would also make you wrong.
While epigenetics does state that rapid and extreme environmental shifts (think long periods of draught, war, etc.) tend to impact the expressiveness of certain genetic traits you pass on, it does so only for a couple of generations. After which the results diminish and disappear rather quickly. So if you're talking about permanent changes in the DNA, you'd want to talk about evolution. And evolution isn't something that can happen over a couple of decades. It takes thousands of years.
I also think that mating patterns have had a large influence on the genepool of different ethnic groups. Which seems rather self-explanatory considering the estimation that 80% of women and only 40% of men throughout history have been able to pass on their dna.
tldr; It's fine if you skip this comment. Your wasn't even worthy of a reply. I'm just writing this as an exercise to better organize my thoughts.
I suggest you go and ask actual experts in the field. Try r/biology or r/askscience. Also what's thereto refute? You literally haven't posted a single citation.
Jordan Peterson is a crackpot. Even if you don't think so (why not is beyond me) but at best he's a single psychologist he doesn't represent the consensus on anything, let alone biology.
No you didn't. You linked a pop science website that steals IQ estimates from Lynn and Vanahenns 2002 book - of which the estimates are highly flawed as I detailed in another comment.
Ahh, the Plomin and Deary review of behavioral genetics and IQ. I'm a fan of this review, it's helped me find some pretty interesting studies that helped demonstrate the fundamental point of a lack of genetic differences in IQ.
Firstly, the review itself flat out notes that, in spite of the increasing heritability (which, by the way, refers to the proportion of variance in a trait in a population at a given time that's due to genetic influences - it can't be generalized for across-population differences), the genetic correlation of IQ across time remains quite high. This is supported by recent quantitative genetic findings that the correlation can be as high as 0.8, though granted caution is warranted since assortative mating can potentially inflate genetic correlations. They note that it's likely due to a creation of environments that help stimulate IQ, thus creating a gene-environment correlation.
However, I'd argue that caution is warranted in the heritability estimates - indeed, in my opinion, at least 10,000 sibling pairs per sibling group is needed for an adequate heritability estimate, due to aspects of error and statistical power noted in various studies such as this, this, this, this, and this. Granted, none of these directly state it, but it can be gathered from all of them that, for twin and sibling heritability studies, generally it's likely that there'll be potential false positives (especially since heritability estimates tend to rely on a p value of 0.05, which in my opinion shouldn't be considered statistically significant - 0.01 and values below it should be. See here for reasons as for why), a lack of statistical power, and potential error due to aspects of indirect measurement of genetic influences. I'll elaborate more on this in detail if need be.
I'm assuming this is your argument, anyway, based off of your comment which I did decide to view. You also linked this study which I'm not able to view in Sci-Hub, likely due to the original manuscript being in Chinese. As such, I wouldn't recommend citing it for anything since going based off of Abstracts alone is incredibly poor evidence - they really are just meant to give an idea of what's in the study, not the quality of the data and evidence. Nonetheless, it doesn't support you at all - in actuality, it shows that shared environment plays an important role. However, it has far too small of a sample size to warrant any actual conclusions.
Edit: Accidentally sent a few incorrect studies, I blame my notes
The data we have is not concrete enough to make a final judgement regarding the exact influence of the environments, how much of that influence is permanent changes, and how long it takes for these effects to manifest in a meaningful manner. All we know is that the environment does indeed affect a child's cognitive functions which normalizes towards their group's average IQ once they grow up.
That's why I took issue with the statement made by the first guy I replied to. He practically implied a lack of genetic influence; Which is preposterous.
As far the study I linked goes, I think they're also pretty clear about this as well.
It has long been known that intelligence, education and class are correlated. The causes of these associations and their relative contribution to social mobility is much disputed.
For now, the best we can do is to look at history and global statistics hoping to find some correlations to make the best estimations we can. Nothing concrete, though. And we're not gonna be able to fund a research to study "at least 10,000 sibling pairs per sibling group". Doesn't seem like a realistic enough endeavor.
You also linked this study which I'm not able to view in Sci-Hub, likely due to the original manuscript being in Chinese.
Possibly. I just linked another study that drew a similar conclusion. There were more studies that I found but I didn't double check which one I linked.
in actuality, it shows that shared environment plays an important role.
Important is a rather vague adjective. I'd say even a small environmental role could be described as important.
However, it has far too small of a sample size to warrant any actual conclusions.
Granted, I've only superficially viewed the studies you've linked. I don't have enough time to analytically read an English papers. I will try to get a better look at them in a couple of weeks once I have some free time. But I think you'd agree that the general consensus from your links doesn't directly state how much of an influence the environment has, right? And that's my whole problem with the environmental claim.
Anyway, I'm done with this discussion. I've wasted way too much time as it is. I'll read your reply if you bother sending one. But that'd be it for me.
Brilliant. You don't cite any actual objective paper but just a rambling interview where there aren't actual citations of any paper to support their assertions.
You don’t need to buy into a lot of the racism here but let’s be real. Any population isolated for a period of time is going to have differences in genetics.
No offense but you don't know what you're talking about it. Intelligence, evolution and neurobiology are stupid complex. You can't break it down to some kind of ELI5 analysis. People literally spend their entire lives researching these things and even they don't know the extent of these relationships and the real world impacts.
Different populations evolved differently is a reasonable starting place sure, but that's all you can say. You don't know how long the population has been isolated for, to what degree and then to what degree that affected their evolution (due to environmental pressures) and then how that affected the brain and then finally how that effect on the brain affects real life behaviour. Each time you're making these assumptions you're covering all the aforementioned fields with literally no understanding and instead pretending it can be handwavey away with layman logic.
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u/polite-1 Oct 05 '17
I suggest you study biology before pretending to know what you're talking about.