Shamelessly stealing this post from reddit because it’s a really cool story:
Context - László Polgár, a Hungarian educational psychologist, conducted an experiment to prove that exceptional talent is developed through intensive education and training, not innate ability. He believed in his theory so strongly that he sought a partner willing to raise children under this philosophy. Polgár wrote to Klára, a Ukrainian teacher, explaining his ideas and proposing marriage as a collaboration in this experiment. Intrigued, Klára agreed, and they married, later raising their three daughters—Susan, Sofia, and Judit—as chess prodigies. From a young age, the girls were immersed in chess and rigorous intellectual training The experiment was a success: all three became world-class chess players, with Judit Polgár widely regarded as the greatest female chess player in history.
- Posted here by /u/heroking4
You confuse things. The childhood environment is part of the nurture part, thus unrelated genetics (the biological aspect). So an adoptive child (no genetical relationship) would do equally well raised similarly.
The intelligence of the parent (or other genetical bagage) has little effect on the development of the child.
Just to preface this again. I absolutely think environment has the larger effect, i.e. your genes can be as great as you want, if your environment was shit then its all fucked anyways. So absolutely we should focus on environmental improvements first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study
This is what twin studies exist for.
You compare two sets of twins. One identical (they are genetically identical from the same egg) and one fraternal (they only share 50% of the genes).
If genetics didnt play a role at all, you would expect identical twins to be just as similar in their intelligence and achievements than fraternal twins, because they share the same environment (averaged over a large enough sample size to avoid parental preferences and stuff).
However fraternal twins diverge much more from each other than identical twins, so that means there is something other than just the environment. This has been studied for decades and the confidence in the results just keeps getting stronger.
To me its kind of absurd how this is even still a discussion because we already know and apply so much of this kind of knowledge in relation to hereditary illnesses. In scientific circles its not really a question of IF this is a thing, but HOW do we deal with this knowledge responsibly. The longer we pretend that this is just not real at all, the more time we give people with bad incentives to use it to their advantage for politics, profit and crimes against humanity.
The hereditary aspect of intelligence had been properly researched and debunked. F.i. : Campbell, Frances A.; Pungello, Elizabeth P.; Miller-Johnson, Shari; Burchinal, Margaret; Ramey, Craig T. (2001). “The development of cognitive and academic abilities: Growth curves from an early childhood educational experiment”
Ah yes the “i saw this one study that said something else than those other 100 studies, so all those studies must be wrong” argument that climate change deniers like so much.
Your whole baseline assumption in this thread is that most people are raised in an environment where they are likely to reach their full genetic potential. That’s an assumption that isn’t true in most populations.
If you have a population that has poor childhood nutrition, they won’t grow to be as tall as if they had proper access to good food. If you have a heterogenous population where some have access to good nutrition and some don’t, then the distribution of heights in that population will be less genetically determined than if they were all equally fed good nutrition.
Or, for another example, we know the number of fingers a person has is coded in their genes. But if you actually go perform a survey of the population to see how many fingers they have, and you collect their genomes, you wouldn’t be able to correlate those observed outcomes to genomes, because pretty much everyone who has a number of fingers other than 10 got that way through something environmental (perhaps prenatal development, often an industrial accident or something). So the heritability of the number of fingers is actually close to zero.
Same with sports or fitness: rank the population by how fast they can run 5k, and you’ll find out basically nothing about their genetics from those results. The variance in outcomes is utterly dominated by how much they actually run and train, not their genetic potential.
Turning to intelligence, that same phenomenon plays out. Childhood lead exposure, childhood nutrition, access to education (including mentorship and social support for learning), family stability, external stressors (and the accompanying internal changes to one’s endocrine system and brain development in high stress environments), all contribute to intelligence. And certain traits that do affect intelligence are less heritable than others (e.g., certain cognitive conditions). All those factors put together in the real world “experiment” of how humans grow up differently mean that even if intelligence were highly heritable in a homogenous environment, the differences in people’s environments would still get a wide distribution of outcomes due to non-genetic factors.
No it is specifically not, what are you even talking about? Did you even read anything in my comment? This whole thing is about explaining difference in outcome with near identical environment. This is not about absolute predictions its about potential, which is why i specifically bothered to preface the whole thing with the following.
Nobody in their right mind denies that environment is the most important factor.
Ok what tf has climate change to do with this argument. Even if I were a denier (which I’m not) that is a ridiculous ad hominem.
What? That was a behavioural analogy to show that a single study shouldnt be given too much weight in comparison to a large number of studies with differing results.
I didnt call you a climate change denier, i said your response was as shallow as the arguments that those types of people use.
Thats the literal opposite of an ad hominem, as it calls out your bad argument and not you as a person.
Climate change is bad, why would you agree with it?