https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/beware-of-hbd/

“I think I’d rather be hated by a 250-pound beer-guzzling, pick-up-driving, Confederate flag-waving bubba than some socially-deprived STEM geek quant.”

by the way your hereditary studies even explicitly chalk some of their phenomenon up to environmental factors, which is funny because you have an instinctual need (and probably environmentally reinforced) to believe that isn’t possible and yet you cited it.

All the studies to a one you ever link are A.) outdated B.) dont say what you want them to say C.) you ban everyone that demonstrates this D.) rely on p-values which the scientific community is gradually abandoning

Evil? Ugghhh… I mean agree basically with what you are saying but the fact that it was his personality structure that best explains this outcome doesn’t mean you can’t sympathize with him. What he did was the worst thing someone can do but it was driven by pain. If he’d been able to feel good about himself he wouldn’t have done it. He simply was not able to feel worthy. The guy killed himself, he can’t be punished. We can at least acknowledge that he was a tormented soul and feel badly for him. We should understand the plights of perpetrators AND victims if we really want to understand situations like this.

[…] about the human personality intelligence, extraversion, neuroticism, aggressiveness, and so on is heritable to some degree117, typically at around the fifty percent level. This suggests that the human personality, and the […]

[…] about the human personality—intelligence, extraversion, neuroticism, aggressiveness, and so on—is heritable to some degree, typically at around the fifty percent […]

[…] I begin, I want to be clear that it should be understood that all human behavioral traits are heritable, with “nurture” as its commonly thought of playing a minimal role to nonexistent […]

I have a vary obvious question that you didn’t seem to mention and it is related to observational bias.

It has to do with this statement
“Contrary to what Chua claimed on your show, one cannot make one’s children into “respectful, decent human beings who contribute to society” if it is not in their makeup, their peer environment, and the luck of the draw to become this way.”

First there is lots to pick apart about what makes one “respectful and decent” and such. A respectful WEIRDO might be disrespectful for a Asian (assuming that we follow the right cultural cues). Frankly I think he’d come off as arrogant or brash or something. – but that is another discussion.

I think what was missed are the questions of “when are we making this judgment/evaluation of decent human?” and “is the person just pretending?” And while pretending or passing oneself off as the group normal or as expectations is mostly learn* – that is when and how to do it – there is good reason to think that the motivation for that would be genetic. Humans are after all a pack or herd type animal. One that is fundamentally group.

So to the TigerMom I’d ask “are you seeing what is? or what your observational target wishes you to see?”

*I’d say that about 95%+ maybe even 105% of us know to be like the group – and this is certainly genetic in action. The how much, when and why to be like the group is a what I’d say is mostly learned/environmentally taught.

[…] Religion comes to the religious because that’s how their brains are wired. A believer cannot think any different … Believers literally have God/Earth spirits/Buddha on the brain. To such a person, their deities are as real as the Sun in the sky (since, after all, the believer’s brain is the only brain he’s got). Religiosity is highly heritable (as are all behavioral traits)… […]

American & British organizations made intense efforts to remove German Jews from Germany/Austria.

Of Jews who died in WWII, German Jews were the smallest group.
They were also the wealthiest and probably the group that had more and better education.

Slavic Jews had least educational achievement and died in far larger numbers in WWII.

So did the war skew the gene pool in favor of higher IQ German Jews?

A parent might decide to enroll their kids in survival classes, or they might raise them in a wilderness environment and teach them survival skills themselves. Or a parent might push a high IQ kid to pursue Medicine or Law, whilst another parent might push a high IQ kid to study art. The kid may be destined for reasonable success in any field, but if the parents pressure the kid to do law he will likely end up richer.

Education and life experience can come from many sources. Look if you put a young man on a desert island with no tools and no knowledge of primitive survival he will ptobably die. On the other hand if you put him on a 1 month survival course where you teach him to make fire, build shelters, spear fish, etc. He has a much higher chance of surviving. You can increase his life outcome considerably with just 1 month of education.

It is statistically demonstrated that IQ is much more hereditary than environmental. But this is because IQ tests have been specifically designed to be culturally nuetral and measure raw g. You cannot really think that education and life experience have no bearing on life outcome at all. If that is what you believe then an 18 year old high school graduate with a high IQ would be just as succesful at wining a law case as a 50 year old Harvard Law Graduate with 30 years of experience with the same IQ. No, surely most fields require a great deal of education and experience. The more education, experience, and wise advice a parent can cram into the home environment, the better the child will be.

[…] between the people who inhabit them Edit: [see the aforementioned preceding posts, and see my posts All Human Behavioral Traits are Heritable, Environmental Hereditarianism, and The Son Becomes The Father; recapped in my 200th post, […]

[…] Environmental Hereditarianism The Son Becomes The Father More Behavioral Genetic Facts […]

[…] be more creative. This is certainly true and links back to the ideas discussed in Principle 1. But creativity, like every other human characteristic, is heritable to some extent. Children’s imaginations, whatever the variation between haves and have-nots, are […]

Anyone who has ever grown plants or raised animals, knows that genetics is a huge part of what their outcomes are.

But while ‘good genetics’ play a very key role – ideal environmental circumstances play the biggest role in a population of moderate genetic variation. In otherwords, you could give me a seed containing the genetics of a poor-performing plant, and a novice grower a seed of a genetically-superior plant, and I will still get 3-4x more yield out of my plant than they will, because I am an expert at cultivation.

What metrics would I use ‘yield’? Could be size, could be fruit production, could be the ability to fight off infection, could be lifespan – as the grower, all of these can be tuned by controlling which parts of the plant get light, when they get light, the nutrient balance, and physically restraining/manipulating the plant.

Now, give me a seed of high genetic potential, and sure enough the ‘yields’ will be higher still – but that isn’t the point. While I agree with the concept of HBD, and im an Epigeneticist by trade, pragmatically speaking I absolutely *will* cultivate my plants/children to get the most out of them, and further more, it would be foolish not to.

[…] hard work and conformity — are the same things that help you to earn a high income. And these traits have a genetic component as well. So, even in a world with perfect equality in terms of child-rearing, parents with high […]

Concerning your update “Edit, 6/5/14″ it is interesting to see that self-report measures have higher shared-environmental effect compared to criminal report. I’m not surprised by this result. These measures surely reflect some shared familial experience. If you want studies on the heritability of income, see here. Try to do an CTRL+F and enter “Hyytinen”. One other thing I have noticed is that EEA may be violated for income. Try to enter “EEA appears to be violated”.

Does this mean that the composition of the family(single parent, nuclear, extended, alternative, etc.) and the way they treat their children has no impact on their development as long as they are not abusive?

Further, is peer environment the only factor found outside of genetics to affect who a child becomes? If so, does affecting it by controlling the environment the child grows up in, school they go to, etc. have an impact or are all efforts taken by parents to improve the life and prospects of their children useless?

Reblogged this on Philosophies of a Disenchanted Scholar and commented:
reference

Reblogged this on Philosophies of a Disenchanted Scholar and commented:
reference

[…] More Behavioral Genetic Facts – The sequel to the previous post, I continue to tie up additional dangling points and affirm the high heritability and lack of “shared environment” impact on traits such as IQ, criminality, emotional/mental problems. I talk about the extended twin design and how it can clear up some dangling questions, like who do we choose our mates? Do spouses influence each other? I mention the key findings of behavioral genetics, namely: […]

[…] heritability of behavioral and personality characteristics. Which is a lot: JayMan has put together an excellent reference post, spelling it all out, with numerous […]

[…] heritability of behavioral and personality characteristics. Which is a lot: JayMan has put together an excellent reference post, spelling it all out, with numerous […]

[…] Previously: Beware Armchair Psychoanalysis […]

This is somewhat similar to the case of Anders Breivik where the debate concerned how the anti-immigrant sentiment in Norway had encouraged him. Both arguments can be dismissed with the very simple argument that if culture/society is a big causal factor then rampage killings would be common since it acts on all of us. But it’s an incredibly rare type of crime, although highly publicized.

People believe it because of the blank slate legacy, their education and career. But perhaps the most insidiuos factor here is the power of storytelling. People enjoy stories, they remember events better that way, it seems to be a basic data structure in the brain. So people turn to storytellers rather than truth-tellers. And even crackpot feminists have better stories than “he did it because he was crazy.” It’s very frustrating…

Yes, it would be interesting to see how East Asians & Indian Americans do when raised by white parents.

It’s interesting because I blogged about this exact same topic with respect to serial killers.

http://pumpkinperson.com/2014/04/13/was-rob-zombies-michael-myers-based-on-henry-lee-lucas/

Henry Lee Lucas had a horrific mother who forced him to attend school dressed as a girl. Did this contribute to him becoming a killer, or did the same genes that made him a killer also make his mother abusive?

Parenting may have no impact within Tiger Mom samples (Japan) and within non-Tiger Mom samples (white America), but in order to see an effect, one would need a sample that included both Tiger Moms and non-Tiger Moms. In other words, studies in both Japan and in America may both suffer from range restriction.

You believe that the effects of extremely bad parenting (abuse, neglect) are obscured by range restrictions. So why wouldn’t you believe the same for the opposite extreme?

Actually it should be mathematically to possible to calculate the effects of extreme parenting simply by adjusting the existing studies for restriction of range.

Severely abusive or neglectful parenting—cases of which are routinely excluded from behavioral genetic studies—would have a deleterious impact, but thankfully, most American parents do not do these horrible things to their children.

Severe tiger parenting is also routinely excluded from genetic studies.

[…] most high-profile of these shootings, Elliot Rodger’s rampage. I have commented on this (see Beware Armchair Psychoanalysis). In his case, crackpot theories weren’t limited to coming from the bare slate P.C. […]

Hm… concerning Molenaar (2013) you should take my earlier comment with pinch of salt. They said that GxE interaction could have diminished GWAS heritability. I thought I could believe them, but after reading the references they cite, it says the opposite. It’s curious they mis-understood it, or maybe their sentence was poorly phrased. After all, GWAS heritability is supposed to get only the additive portion, and GxE can’t be additive, by definition.

Honestly, GWAs seem more important than what the skeptics tend to believe. Since GCTA/GWAS sample only the nonrelated individuals, thus no genetic similarity (unlike twins) the necessary consequence is to remove (almost) entirely GE correlations of all types. This argument does not work anymore. It’s finished. And who is attempting to use that argument again is either a complete ignorant of GWAS or he is still locked up in his ideology.

[…] Beware Armchair Psychoanalysis – “‘Behavioral genetic studies have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that heredity is responsible for a sizable portion of the variations in people’s personalities. Some people are more hot-tempered or outgoing or meticulous than others, and these variations are a function of the genes they were born with as well as the experiences they had after they were born. The exact proportion— how much is due to the genes, how much to the experiences—is not important; the point is that heredity cannot be ignored.’” – from jayman (quoting judith rich harris there). […]

[…] have recently updated two key posts, my post More Behavioral Genetic Facts and More Maps of the American […]

Yeah, I understand and agree with your general point. I’m just saying Harris’s anecdotal evidence is less than convincing given the ease of picking and choosing stories to paint a certain picture. And as kai said, the evidence of genetic causation is stronger for broad personality dimensions like big 5 than for specific and rare behaviors.

Harris’s anecdotes seem cherry picked to me. I mean, haven’t you known identical twins yourself? Did they seem as freakishly similar as what Harris describes? Most identical twins have rather distinct personalities, with their own quirks and inclinations. In my experience anyway.

Well, I agree, for me the lesson from the twin studies is that, except in the very rare case where we have a convenient control (real twin raised appart) it is extremely difficult to know if our actions are mainly caused by reaction to some stimulus, or by an innate tendency that would manifest in most cases. For broad personality, the science has spoken and, contrary to what people (want to) believe, it’s mostly innate. For more specific action, like shooting half a dozen people for example, it’s unknown. I hope it’s stay unknown (or, at worst, that the predictions based on genetic will remain very weak for specific actions)…else it would be a minority report society for true. It would be much worse than gattaca (which is in fact not so bad….lucky cause it is also almost here ) I could live in gattaca. But not sure I could in minority report…

While I usually stand right in the nature camp just like you, and feel that the 50-50 hypothesis is a cowardy, easy and trendy position, I feel you are a little bit too much in the genetic determinism camp here. Circumstances sometimes matter, especially when trying to explain extremely rare behaviors. Would this guy have turned a well balanced womanizer if raised differently? No way! Would he have started killing people if raised in a totally different environment….like in japan for example? (Not chosen arbitrarily, his view of woman and hit success would have been very different, and the importance of his success with girls too his self image would have been different too) I also doubt it. Maybe he would have turned suicidal when falling academically? Or live an unremarkable life as a frustrated mid level salary man? I think that you need the genetic background to turn into a killing psychopath…but also the trigger. For some the trigger may be trivial. For other, it take much. Reading the manifesto of the guy, he clearly is unbalanced. More so as it progress…but I suspect he needed quite a trigger, my feeling is that just getting laid would probably have been enough to avoid the shooting (probably not to make him sane, but who is in Hollywood anyway )

These include Heartise (who couldn’t resist blaming the dad despite the clear folly of this as per my earlier posts The Son Becomes The Father and More Behavioral Genetic Facts), who has his own 8-factor causal proclamation.

Heartiste is a funny writer but he’s not a scientist, and he usually comes across as totally out of his depth. Sometimes he is downright cringeworthy.

i live in the midwest – i absolutely do not care about Elliot Rodger. i’m a psychologist who realizes so very little is due to the “environment” that the field of psychology could be abolished without harm. it’s cute that some people believe in psychology the only real part to it is psychometrics – which is simply an accurate way to measure biological attributes. the rest of psychology follows the reverse of occam’s razor – i call it “under-simplification” – inventing complex socio-cultural/environmental reasons for behavior. it’s a cottage industry!

It seems to me he’s just a genetic mis-fit: a combination of various bad human characteristics (narcissism, low empathy, weakness to fall into psychosis, neuroticism) and under certain circumstances (like involuntary solitude, perceived low status, no forced hospitalization, access to firearms) they can come out badly. Very, very badly.

Eliot Rodger actually had a lot going for him, he was privileged (the real kind), so I don’t buy he had to snap. Tons of guys suffer more, longer, harder, more unfair and never snap. The whole talk of divorced parents, stepmom, et al is pointless; of course, all these things never help screwed-up people to be less screwed-up, but they’re not the reason why he snapped. Some people have a bad personality structure, which makes them evil or, at least, capable of evil under the right circumstances.

“Elliot Rodger had a twin brother with similar difficulties – including one or more violent episodes – but was raised in some far away place in quite different circumstances?”

- I lol’d when you put your own genetic twin study spin on it.
And yeah, Lion seems to have come out with a good analysis of the individual.

Of course, it’s still armchair psychoanalysis, but it seems to avoid the dumbest pitfalls of the genre.

In New York, being Jewish and neurotic isn’t nearly so maladaptive. While Hollywood is hardly a hotbed of emotional stability, it’s built around people who are outgoing and social, while Rodger was a poster boy for the opposite traits. And at least from what Lion has posted, it sounds like Rodger was somewhere around one-in-a-million neurotic+shy. He’d have had trouble in any environment, but the Hollywood environment seems almost designed to torment someone like that. In Jewish circles in New York, he’d be outstanding for his shyness, but maybe only far edge of normal for neurotic.

I mean, I’m kind of neurotic, and used to be pretty shy, and had dumb ideas about what girls wanted in men, and didn’t have a girlfriend until later than I’m willing to publicly admit, but I *did* actually talk to girls and occasionally ask them out. Rodger apparently never managed even that. That’s really unusual – most guys try at least a little before giving up.

Lion of the Blogosphere, who is pretty uneven on these sorts of things, I think has nailed this one. Rodger was way out on the edge of the bell curve on Neuroticism, well before this incident happened. And he was in an environment where high neuroticism is extremely maladaptive.

Yes, I know he has hit back and I’m glad he did. If the inanities persist from those who claim to be scientists, he should keep hitting back.

I stumbled on that piece on Mindhacks myself the other day, and posted links to it in a few places. It’s what I wish I’d written instead of arguing with people.

I read about Amy in a New Yorker article on twins many years ago, and it forever changed my view of just about everything, cemented by Judith Harris’ book a few years later. I photocopied the article and tried to get everyone I knew to read it, but no one found it as fascinating as I did. Why they didn’t is still a mystery to me.

I got into a number of arguments online about Elliot Rodger last week, to the point that I may not be welcome back at some sites. I wanted to scream when I saw the knee-jerk “Rape Culture” being screamed all over the place. Like you, I am a liberal who finds that liberals can be colossally blind sometimes.

But I’m 65 years old. People my age have an excuse. We were taught a lot of crap about human nature. Why more younger people are so unaware of what’s been going on in the sciences is harder to fathom. It’s as though a collective decision was made that some things are so distressing that we’re going to simply refuse to see them. How long can this gone on?

The final paragraph of the New Yorker article as I recall it said something to the effect that perhaps our real freedom is the freedom to be who we were born to be. I liked that.

Keep up your good work. You do such a good job of making things clear.

BTW, Jayman, forgot to add–I’ve been enjoying and am thankful for your assiduous efforts to bring reason to the race denialists attacking Wade all over the net. It’s a sign, I think, of their panic, that they keep changing their tactics, even within the same blogposts and comments. It’s as if they feel they must use the scattergun approach, hoping something, anything, sticks.

However, you and others have done a marvelous job of counterpunching as well as punching, with facts and logic, and at some point, these people will conclude that the curtain has been pulled back on them.

If people could only watch researchers fiddle with neurotransmitters and the resultant rodent behavior, everything from their aggression levels to their choice of what gender to try to mate with, perhaps they’d moderate their natural inclination to choose the more comforting conclusion that environmental/social influences cause most of our behaviors.

right on. armchair psychoanalysts abound in history books – most biographies incorrectly revel in assigning early environmental experiences to later personality traits (often assigning widely differing traits to similar early experiences: “Gge Washington was independent b/c he lost his father early… Aaron Burr was a charming cad & womanizer b/c he lost his father early,” etc.) The field of history should be ashamed. History ignores IQ/ability as a major contributing reason as to why things are the way they are – it instead assumes that everyone in say Syria or Libya is the same as a European American. Uhh, no… They are compelled to act the way they do b/c it is in their nature to do so. Same as us:)

I keep saying that, but people keep being all, “Hollywood culture drove him to it!”

[…] the dad despite the clear folly of this as per my earlier posts The Son Becomes The Father and More Behavioral Genetic Facts), who has his own 8-factor causal proclamation. It doesn’t occur to many of these people that […]

When you say rGE is often negative, it depends on which one you are thinking. Passive ? Reactive ? Active ? For the last one, it’s impossible, because it means that people tend to seek environments contra their own genetic propensities. It’s extremely difficult to conceive that. But I can easily conceive that parents and teachers prefer to invest more on low IQ children, thus, in that case you have your passive/reactive negative rGE. Such outcome seems very likely in most of the modern (western) societies where the dominant political orientation is the supra-egalitarianism (just look at how the new book of the french economist Thomas Piketty encounters its success). Now that is said, I want to precise that it seems unlikely that behavioral researchers think about passive/reactive rGE when they use that argument for the explanation of the increase in h2 with age. No, they think about active rGE. It’s obvious when you think that shared environment (c2) don’t have much impact in adulthood, and that rGE shifts from passive to active from childhood to adolescence/adulthood. Nonetheless, you can have a rather strong critic of active rGE from Brant (2013) “The Nature and Nurture of High IQ: An Extended Sensitive Period for Intellectual Development”.

The most prominent theory of developmental increases in the heritability of IQ posits that across development, individuals gain more scope to shape their own environments on the basis of their genetic propensities (active gene-environment correlation), which causes an increase in genetic influence over time (Haworth et al., 2010; Plomin, DeFries, & Loehlin, 1977). Our results challenge this explanation, as they show a later increase in heritability for individuals of higher IQ. To explain our results in the context of active gene-environment correlations, one would need to posit, counterintuitively, that higher-IQ individuals seek out environments concordant with their genetic propensities later in development than do lower-IQ individuals.

The reason for developmental increases in the heritability of IQ thus remains unclear. Other possibilities include amplification of existing genetic influence by increasing population variance in cognitive ability and the simultaneous limiting of environmental influences and introduction of new genetic influences as a result of synaptic pruning processes and myelination at the end of the sensitive period (Plomin, 1986; Plomin et al., 1977; Tau & Peterson, 2010).

Like I used to say, it’s interesting that they dismiss rGE when at the same time they have opened another possibility. The genetic amplification. To be sure, it’s John Fuerst who suggested me this idea, first. Look here.

http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/genetic-amplification/

Now, just some ideas, when I was reading your article :

Lot of people expect heritability (h2) to be upwardly biased. In the case of twins, it’s always MZ correlation that is suspected to be biased upwardly. One reason is rGE effects. Suppose that’s true. In that case, I expect rMZ to be much higher than the double of full sibling correlation, because the double is just what an additive model surely expects to find. Because rMZ seems to be just the double of full sibling correlation, that makes me believe there is a high genetic additive component in the IQ. But another, better way to disentangle that difficult question is to look at the h2 of the trait in question in different countries, preferably in very different social environments. For example, you can expect h2 in poor countries such as Africa and India for IQ to be lower. A failure to find difference in h2 would surely dismiss any rGE hypotheses. That’s the best test of the “locality” of h2.

I mention IQ but evidently it goes the same for all behavior traits. It’s just that I did not find the data for them. But if h2 is similar for, say, happiness, trust, agression, openness, and some other things like those, among different countries, with different political regimes, cultures, and different regions, e.g., rural versus urban, then if the h2 are quite comparable under diverse condition, it would seem that neither rGE or GE interaction is likely to produce most of the h2. When researchers attempt to use model-fitting for choosing which hypothesis needs to be retained, it’s no sufficient enough. They must always be accompanied with experiments. Even if your data tells you that you model looks very likely, has the “best fit to the data” that’s meaningless if experiments lead you to reject your model anyway. It’s the same kind of guys who believed they can model financial behaviors, coming to the conclusion that the crisis won’t happen. Well, we see it’s not true. The subprimes reveal quite a lot of bad investments.

Concerning h2 interaction with SES, I don’t think we should be surprised by a possible lower h2 at lower SES. h2 may be expected to move closer to 100% when environments become stable and/or better because in this particular case you don’t have much environmental variation, but on the other hand, the high-risk environments will just add more environmental variation and thus will act to reduce h2. That seems to be common sense. For instance :

One comprehensive review of class and health surveyed mortality rates in Britain from 1921 to 1971 (Black, 1980; Townsend & Davidson, 1982). Everyone was living longer, but the professional classes gained more years than semiskilled and unskilled workers. In 1930, people in the lowest social class had a 23% higher chance of dying at every age than people in the highest social class. By 1970, this excess risk had grown to 61%. A decade later, it had jumped to 150%. In Britain, a National Health Service has long existed to minimize inequalities in access to medical care. The increasing correlation of health and social class makes sense when one realizes that removing environmental impediments makes individual-difference variables more dependent on innate characteristics. (Placing intelligence into an evolutionary framework or how g fits into the r–K matrix of life-history traits including longevity, Rushton 2004)

This aside, the topic is highly controversial, and the topic is fulled of dishonest claims. Researchers always cite Turkheimer, but rarely the studies contra such conclusions. That said, I just wanted to point out this document.

Genotype by Environment Interactions in Cognitive Ability: A Survey of 14 Studies from Four Countries Covering Four Age Groups (Molenaar 2013)

It’s a very important article. They say explicitly that lack of representativeness can distort the direction and magnitude of the GxE interaction. At some extremes, maybe the interaction disappears, or magnifies. IQ measurement is also a possible cause of the inconsistency. Sometimes, it’s verbal IQ that is measured, sometimes, full IQ, sometimes nonverbal IQ. Another problem, less known, is the error measurement in the IQ. In ACE model-fitting, the E component also includes measurement error, and the portion of E that is tied to error variance can give rise to spurious GxE effects. Thus you must use multiple IQ measurements (see how many subtests in your battery, how many items per subtests, etc.) and try to reduce error variance as much as possible. But, interestingly, age can make a difference. Indeed, Molenaar and his team found that in childhood, there is negative GxE, which means lower E at higher level of G. In adolescents, no effect at all. And in adulthood, E was stronger (not smaller) for higher level of G. That runs contra Turkheimer/Rowe/Sluis/Tucker-Drob. Unfortunately, the final result is not easily interpretable because you have lot of differences between the studies and the countries (look their figure 2). In other words, it’s not sure that aggregation makes sense at all. The Molenaar paper is infinitely more important than the Hanscombe. I don’t understand why no one else cited it. Because it’s by far the best one available on that topic. And everyone should read it.

There is also another feature worth noting in Molenaar paper. The authors explicitly stated that the unmodeled GxE interaction might be one reason for the “missing” heritability in GWAS estimates. Another factor of under-estimated GWAS h2 may be population stratification, as mentioned by :

A genome-wide association study for reading and language abilities in two population cohorts (Luciano 2013)

Among the last paragraphs they wrote that when they exclude non-white people in the analysis, the correlation was significant whereas it didn’t when non-whites were included. Stats stuff is really, really, highly complex.

Including all 80s kids, I had been so busy being told just how special I was I didn’t get that that opted for everybody else, too.

Now I’m sad that I’m less important.

[…] 4. All Human Behavioral Traits are Heritable – With the First Law of behavioral genetics as the title, I talk about the fact that heredity impacts (to some extent) all aspects of human behavior and differences between individuals in that behavior. That is, genetic differences are involved in every aspect that makes any two individuals different from one another. From politics – to religion – to personality – to body weight – to intelligence – to income – genes play a role in each, and I talk about these. I discuss the evidence we have for this, coming from twin studies, adoption studies, as well as the newer direct genomic analyses of Peter Visshcher et al that confirm previous results. The non-effect of parenting and the impact for HBD is discussed. A key post that remains high on my list on intro posts. […]

There are dramatic difference in average outcomes between *groups* proportional to how sealed off those *groups* are from the dominant culture in the post-60s West and how much those *groups* promote different behaviors (Mormons, Muslims, Amish etc).

One explanation is boiling off over generations.

Another possibility is that as humans are a social animal then as well as hereditability of individual behaviors there may also be heritability of group conforming behaviors. This might not alter the frequency of inherited individual behaviors but it would alter the level of display of those behaviors.

The change in the dominant culture since the 60s and the change in average behavior among groups not sealed off from the dominant culture – mostly media driven – has been so sudden and dramatic that boiling off is not an option imo so we have a very clear experiment showing that the average difference in behavior between *groups* in the same dominant culture is proportional to how much their group rejected the post 60s culture *and* critically how much their group was also able to seal themselves off from the dominant culture into a sub-cultural bubble.

The post 60s cultural experiment shows that both are required: rejection of the dominant culture and relative isolation from it.

So individual hereditability of behaviors yes, individual parental powerlessness against the dominant culture yes but also the hereditability of group conformity behavior means *groups* who isolate themselves into a sub-cultural bubble can resist the dominant culture.

Great post,

I should say that Harris’ theory talks of peer pressure to differentiate rather than to conform so it’s hard to see how this could turn up as shared environment. While the company is shared the treatment will be differential and it’s the treatment that is the social environment. I suppose the evidence would be found in correlations between peers as adults, if they stabilize as more (inversely) correlated than control groups. That said, these increasing heritability estimates are making the mystery of unique environment a shrinking one.

[…] culture isn’t something they have within themselves? Something that affects behavior while being highly heritable and stable over the lifespan? And why are there so many Asian Americans holding on to face culture […]

As you mentioned before labelling the “25% or something” of human traits as unique enverionment is misleading, since this might not be environmental at all. Possibilities include among others:

- alterations in somatic genome (Mosaicism, Chimerism, X-inactivation for women etc.)
- “noise” from small auto-immune reactions based at random (receptor rearrangement) events during T and B cell maturation
- microbiome (pathogenes alter somatic genome as well)

What do you think are the most likely sources of this 25% non-inherited variability? What percentages would you assign to each possible source?

–

With the advent of surrogacy the effect of uterine environment could actually be deduced. It is tricky, because they cannot be seperated from effects directly caused by the artificial surrogacy (implementation, in vitro fertilisation). Do you know any studies looking at uterine environmental effects?

“There are two aspects where spouses are highly correlated – the things you don’t talk about in a bar: politics and religion”

But what is your theory to explain the high correlation on religiosity and political trends between spouses? it seems you are suggesting a homotypic preference.

First we should bear in mind that within-pair matching for a feature may arise even if people pay no attention to this feature in prospective partners. So marry each other depends partly on the structure of the marriage market and social stratification, the effect propinquity / nearness has on our pool of potential mates, and also involves cultural norms of endogamy, or the choice to marry within a group.

Owing to physical proximity and ease to contact, people in a romantic pair tend to come from the same rather than different social groups. This is why partners are usually similar in characteristics associated with a social group, such as age (due to attending to schools), education and social status, etc.

On the other hand, I doubt that there is a mate preference for these kind of personality traits (i.e. religiosity, politics) determined by a genetic locus.

Furthermore, from an overall genetic framework, we should not forget such mechanisms as inbreeding depression and heterozygous advantage, so I’d assume that same-type matings are less fertile than different-type mating. If all individuals have a disassortative mating preference a viability-reducing trait may be maintained even without the fertility cost of same-type matings; a disassortative mating preference can be established even if it is initially rare, when there is a fertility cost of same-type matings.

Moreover, an assortative mating preference is less likely to evolve than a disassortative mating preference. This may be applicable to the evolution of MHC-disassortative mating preferences documented in animals and humans.

As you know, although Handscombe’s study failed to find an SES-heritability interaction there are a number of papers other than Turkheimer’s 2003 paper that have found this effect. Given that at least some of these studies have reasonable sample sizes and utilize the normal MZA-DZA model. Why do you think some studies find an interaction affect and others don’t ?

I feel that everything has a genetic component, and part of that is the susceptibility to a triggering event or the possibility that a therapeutic intervention can make a difference or not. Personally, I’d rather see the strong evidence for heritability and work around that for exceptions and modifications than deal with the “Environmental Causation” folks who don’t narrow down the factors they’re looking at because they are so insightful that they “look at the big picture.”

Even in the strongest arguments for the genetic heritability of behaviors and disorders, I don’t see such a degree of absolute determinism that modification to environment or behavior is completely dismissed out of hand.

>One key question: how do they assess “trust”? Just how good was their measurement? Measurements in social science need to meet three basic criteria: they need to be reliable (that is multiple testing instances of the same individual should give roughly the same results), they need to be “valid” (that is, be predictive of some real-world outcome), and they should be heritable.

Doesn’t the third criterion make the “all behavioral traits are heritable” a tautology?

You have gradually and quite completely won me over to your “extreme” position on the issues you discuss. Still, it seems to me their is room for misunderstanding (or maybe I am misunderstanding?) in terms of the take-away that a lot of people will have to your position. For instance, a generation or two back African Americans were famous for their good manners, no doubt because of the way they were taught be their parents in combination with the fact that white society would not tolerate the kind of bad manners (ghetto manners) which are so common today. Maybe you cover this when you emphasize that your position does not hold when different generations are being discussed?

Or take the issue of child sexual abuse: obviously different children are affected in different ways by such abuse (I know a woman for whom it seems to have triggered a borderline personality disorder) and let us stipulate for the purposes of argument that you are absolutely correct (and I believe you are) when you say these different reactions are mediated by genetic differences. Still, it would be a shame if people came away with the idea that child sexual abuse didn’t matter. Somehow you need to emphasize this side of your argument more effectively if you want it to be more widely accepted. I think.

[…] and child relative to the environment as a whole is completely due to shared genes. See my posts All Human Behavioral Traits are Heritable and Taming the “Tiger Mom” and Tackling the Parenting Myth for more on the mechanics of […]

[…] for virtually every single behavioral trait ever documented among human beings is heritable. [see All Human Behavioral Traits are Heritable] We know that two children who are reared by the same pair of parents can be strikingly different […]

[…] I’ve been thinking about digit ratio a lot lately, largely because it means a lot on an individual perspective. But I’ve recently come to the realization that it can mean more than that, much more. This is especially when it comes to the implications regarding someone’s mate selection and the character of the resulting offspring. You see, even though the current research on digit ratio has been stressing the intrauterine nature of the hormone exposure that results in a range of changes in the phenotype we know from a great deal of research on the subject that all human behavioral traits are heritable. […]

[…] Cochran references yours truly as he talks about the pervasiveness of heredity in all things (i.e., All Human Behavioral Traits are Heritable), with illustrative anecdotes about twins. Notes the role that genes play in infectious diseases, […]

what exactly do the racial differences have to say about IQ scores? I’m very curious….. because to think a person’s “race” has anything to do with so called “IQ” is not very smart.

Facts about humanity lend themselves to denial, because while it’s relatively easy to come to terms with some abstract notion about the world, it’s a lot harder when we’re talking about ourselves, because here there may be truths that we don’t want to accept. Nonetheless that doesn’t change these truths, and denying them often has deleterious consequences for people and society.