Rather than acknowledging the high heritability and lack of malleability of cognitive ability, many people have taken the more socially desirable approach of emphasizing the importance of education and advocating for more spending or more time in school.
When you’re coercing millions of people (kids are people) into doing something for years and years and spending trillions of dollars, the burden is on you to demonstrate the benefits exceed the costs.
The stigmatization of eugenics and cognitive ability has been extraordinarily harmful. If even a size-able fraction of the money spent on education was spent on research into gene editing, IVG, GWAS on cognitive ability, etc. the children of today would be much much smarter and we wouldn’t need to waste years of their life.
Remarkable thing from Steven Pinker's Blank Slate:
Contrary to the popular belief spread by the radical scientists, eugenics for much of the twentieth century was a favorite cause of the left, not the right. It was championed by many progressives, liberals, and socialists, including Theodore Roosevelt, H.G. Wells, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Margaret Sanger and the Marxist biologists J.B.S. Haldane and Hermann Muller. It’s not hard to see why the sides lined up this way. Conservative Catholics and Bible Belt Protestants hated eugenics because it was an attempt by intellectual and scientific elites to play God. Progressives loved eugenics because it was on the side of reform rather than the status quo, activism rather than laissez-faire, and social responsibility rather than selfishness.
One misunderstanding caused by the term heritability is not stratifying it into narrow and broad sense heritability, or expressed range of variation of genotypic potential (I.e. components of the stratified fatty milk portion) vs attributed genotypic causality to phenotypic variability (non-fat components of milk vs fat components of milk). I agree with this consensus, however we are dealing with political entities who do desire an underclass and dependent class of individuals who can be used as political tools. Furthermore if behaviour is attributed to genetics, one can make a declarative claim of justifying elimination of the political class because of their lackluster contributions / disposition to exploit which is one possible reason why the main motto is eugenics for me and not for thee. Another reason is competitive exclusion where only certain forms of eugenics are allowed (intelligent and obedient) which will likely be the allocated outcome. The reality is though when women undergo IVF, such people are the most hardcore eugenicists... Though whichever society adopts reiterative embryo selection for free or more direct interventions in the future without limiting the potential to subservient obedience will outstrip all other societies in many advantages. The best counter argument is we go on an arms race for the best brain that we end up creating lopsided cognitive profiles that lead to our annihilation, I.e we stop valuing all humans, another argument is that humans will become commodified both in terms of body and mind. A cute genius eternally youthful woman with high sexual appeal may only be exclusive to those that can buy those patent polynucleotide morphisms. another argument against is we might develop different posthumans that branch off and kill each other or parasitizing if each other. Another argument is humans have intrinsic value and should not be modified because it violates the principle of some abstract notion of divinity or uniqueness, though not a convincing argument. Another possibility is targeted biological warfare with more developments in knowing how behaviour is determined from the brain, so behavioural modification is made possible-- though these are all lines of speculation in the longer time horizon of intelligence research and intelligence augmentation.
Also the likelihood of people experimenting on other people, especially governments is high to develop precision medicine or eternal youth cycles (like a certain jelly fish) in terms of research into genetic augmentation (we saw this with nuclear warheads). Master chromosomal modification and adenoviruses are unfortunately very experimental techniques which will likely incur high penalty costs in health and fitness i n the same way we breed dogs presently, so further developments into human augmentation are needed. But in terms of intelligence, simple selective breeding and pGS scores are likely to be the way presently at least for the more utilitarian countries like China and India.
"When you’re coercing millions of people (kids are people) into doing something for years and years and spending trillions of dollars, the burden is on you to demonstrate the benefits exceed the costs." --> would that institutions worked like this.
>> I think this error of reasoning is another example of the deductivist fallacy
I call it the limits of analogical thinking. When Turkheimer says that "chopstick usage is +90% heritable" that is true. But how applicable is the analogy of chopsticks heritability or good vision heritability to intelligence heritability in modern America? We see lots of evidence for failure to increase IQ but and lots of evidence that people can be trained to use chopsticks and have their vision corrected. An analogy is only as good as its applicability.
As far as I know, no one has actually ever demonstrated this empirically. I would guess a typical principal components control would remove this problem.
I'm saying that I wish real world institutions worked on the logic you propose, of requiring justifications for large spends and sprawling bureaucracies. Instead, large spends and sprawling bureaucracies create their own 'justification' through lobbying, entitlement effects, and the like.
Those arguing for social interventions, which is almost everyone who matters, should propose novel interventions for kids. Like eating a can of sardines every day, or sunbathing, or pushups, or never wearing polyester. If enough places tried a wide variety of things, maybe they'd stumble on something that worked.
Now I will annoy your libertarian and alt-right readers. (Yes, I know those are different. Opposed in many ways, even.)
This is an argument for a stronger welfare state (particularly if you don't start from rightish priors that take hierarchy as a given or desirable). Since so much of the deficit is genetic in nature, the less able are not to blame for their lack of success. Furthermore, given that the precise talents may differ from period to period (logical-mathematical intelligence is a lot more valuable than it used to be), many human beings could easily wind up at the bottom of the heap.
Thus, at the minimum, we should have a higher minimum wage and national health insurance to ensure people who wind up at the bottom of the socioeconomic food chain through poor genetics that are no fault of their own can have decent lives. Also, given that some people will always be in the employee class, we need strong labor unions to ensure that workers receive a reasonable share of the economy's surplus.
(This is not an argument for socialism, i.e. state control of means of production. They tried that in China and the USSR, didn't work well.)
Besides, if you don't, you have a large, immiserated underclass that's prone to manipulation by demagogues of the left and right.
These are essentially the kinds of arguments that Paige Harden made. The problem with going away from meritocracy is that it hurts the country as a whole by making it less productive (best people aren't in the right jobs), and causes dysgenic emigration (productive people move to lower tax countries). It's a short-sighted policy.
Yeah, I support meritocracy in college admissions and job selection and promotion. I just figure since most people are below average (the distribution of most abilities apart from 'g'--artistic, financial, mathematical, whatever- has a long right tail, half are below the *median*) you have to do something for the mediocre people or you have a society that doesn't work for most people.
You mentioned emigration. But immigration is a bigger problem. Since IQ and propensity towards violence are mostly heritable, arguing for bigger welfare state only encourages illegal immigration from poor countries who want free stuff.
Universal basic income might work if Denmark is 99% Danish. But no, there seems to be a lot of Somalians and Turks there for some weird reason. As far as I can tell, there's very little interracial marriage. Since the people with lower average IQs have higher fertility rates, dysgenic forces are at play.
I commented on this on another substack. I think the French have trouble keeping their nuclear power plants running because the smart people who built them are retiring and they cannot find enough equally smart people to keep them running. Have you been to Paris lately and looked the migrants there? You think they're capable of operating a nuclear power plant? Society will stop running well if there are not enough smart people.
In practice only the super-rich actually migrate due to tax levels. Almost everyone in rich countries in the 70th-99th percentile generally grumble but stay put.
If you have good state capacity then taxing high-income earners highly and spreading the benefits to those less genetically endowed makes sense.
But high taxes and poor ability to spend it well is not a good combination as you have a lot of inefficiency.
This only makes any sense if we cut off all non-elite immigration. Otherwise you turn America into the world's welfare office with an ever growing underclass of people whose entire lineage will be poor and a fiscal drain.
I actually would not oppose immigration restriction, particularly non-elite, as a corollary. I don't know why the left is so hardcore on this point. Still reading that Judis/Texeira book Texeira renounced?
I agree, but "progeny" would be a better word choice than "lineage." ;)
Caveat: barring entry to low-IQ migrants won't help much in the long run if US residents of above-average intelligence persistently fail to reproduce at or above the replacement rate, which has been the case as least as far back as the end of the post-WWII baby boom, due to deeply-entrenched social and economic disincentives.
Most, and perhaps all, first-world societies are, and have been for many decades, engines of dysgenic transformation w/r/t mean population intelligence. Largely because of social and economic disincentives for childbearing by women of above-average intelligence. Murray and Herrnstein noted in Bell Curve that there is an inverse correlation between female educational attainment -- a reasonable, if imperfect, proxy for intellectual capacity when considering large population samples -- and lifetime childbearing in the US. Mean lifetime childbearing by women who do not graduate from high school exceeds the 2.1 replacement rate by a considerable margin; that for women who graduate from high school but do not go to college approximates the replacement rate; the overall rate for women who go beyond high school is below the replacement level, and the shortfall is wider among college grads than among those who go to college without graduating and lowest of all (as might be expected) among those who earn graduate degrees.
And it seems fairly obvious, as a matter of common sense, that welfare subsidies provided to women at the lower end of the earned-income scale in an essentially meritocratic society (as any capitalist society would tend to be) will have an overall dysgenic effect if they increase as a function of the number of children borne by the recipients.
Greg Cochran has taken the position that just because schooling doesn't matter much for IQ now, doesn't mean that's the case by necessity. It could be that every educator has been ignorant of how to actually educate! He's also fond of pointing out that medicine was both widespread and worse than useless up until the 20th century. Of course, most education reformers don't take the position that what we've been doing is a waste and someone armed with science that takes IQ seriously needs to throw everything out to start over again.
If heritability is high, then education differences don't explain IQ variation. Therefore, this hypothetical effective education would likely benefit everyone and heritability remains high.
Glasses or cataract surgery can correct the distance vision of a near-sighted person to 20:20 -- i.e., to approximately the human optimum -- in many cases. To infer from this that it may well be possible to iron out most of the variance in human intelligence through education would be a non sequitur, to put it mildly.
The point is that we're talking about a hypothetical intervention which we haven't seen yet. Jason is right that we don't know that a hypothetical intervention won't just raise everyone's IQs without altering group differences, but we also don't know that it will.
Whether it's possible to raise everyone's, or most people's, mature IQ to any significant extent through education is also something I don't know. If you think it's feasible on what do you base your optimism in that regard?
I didn't say I thought it feasible (and I began by citing Greg Cochran as someone who said it was a possibility). I'm saying that if you're reasoning based on existing variation, you're leaving out the possibility that people have been going about it pointlessly and leaving out what may in fact be low-hanging fruit:
Transracial adoptions have been done, albeit rarely, on different races to determine interracial heritability of IQ. The Minnesota transracial adoption study is the most famous.
What's the best argument against this view? The only one I can think of is that heritability for g might not be that high. Philosophically, however, I can't find a flaw. Ipso facto, in a rational world one would surely expect determining heritability to be the final frontier. Of course it won't be because the same types of arguments will crop up: "the PGS for EA is picking up structural inequalities". Would be good to see a post of those types of arguments.
This has been studied many times over many decades. If improving the environment changes heritability, then the IQs of adopted children would correlate with adoptive parents. They don't. Especially in transracial adoptions. The most infamous case involved the "force adoptions" of Australian aboriginal children. Well-meaning liberals thought that changing the environment from birth will change aboriginal behavior. They were wrong.
There are also a lot of studies on per-pupil spending in American schools vs test scores. There's a widely held mistaken belief that the majority of blacks go to bad schools in crumbling buildings. Yes there are cases like that. But overall, they go to bad schools that get a lot of funding. But the schools are still bad because they're bad students.
Another famous recent example: Mark Zuckerberg gave $100M to Newark. That money didn't do shit. It's not about money for the schools, it's about the people in those schools.
This is probably not all that consequential a point, given the traits we are discussing. Sure in a less complex society, success might be more correlated with genotypes related to physical and not intellectual ability.
In that way the environment determines heritability. But i am not sure how your point salvages social interventions in a complex society
You're assuming that the improvement to education will only benefit the low IQ. But high heritability implies that variation in IQ has very little to do with schooling differences, meaning this hypothetical "better education" will help everyone and the heritability won't change much. High heritability means that intelligence differences cannot be explained by bad education in low IQ people, therefore a categorical improvement in education will increase everyone IQ. If this weren't the case, the heritability would be lower.
You need something analogous to glasses for the hard of seeing, something that selectively provides a extraneous boost to ability, but no such intervention exists and likely never will. And the people most concerned with inequality are convinced to a religious degree that equalising environments will close the gaps and not looking for the analogue of eyeglasses. Selectively providing gene therapy one day to only the low IQ and banning everyone else from using it might be the only kind of intervention that could work, but this kind of thing is anathema to the left.
The main concern of today's neo-Marxists is disparity between the mean income, mean net worth, and per-capita incarceration of the white population versus black, Hispanic, and indigenous populations. Murray and Herrnstein noted in Bell Curve that these disparities largely disappear when IQ is controlled for, but neo-Marxists maintain that such outcome disparities are due to "systemic" discrimination by white people, and they attribute the disparities in mean IQ to environmental disparities supposedly caused by racial and ethnic discrimination. They evidently don't have much hope that the disparities in testable performance can be ironed out through early education or any other means, however; instead they now seem bent on obscuring them by doing away with standardized testing and/or relying on double standards to achieve outcome "equity."
In your example with BMI, in order to make differences less dependent on genotype, any intervention would involve imposing conditions of scarcity.
So sure, as I said in my original comment in less complex societies, with conditions of greater privation, less of individual variation in various traits would be explained by genetics.
I dont think OP would disagree that differences im extreme neglect, malnutrition, lack of access to iodine, exposure to lead etc. are consequential, and that interventions to equalize environments with respect to these variables would have some effect.
“if the environment changes (say, with better education), the trait's heritability will also change.”
A high heritability implies that changing the environment for low IQ people to something more like that of high IQ people is unlikely to have much effect, otherwise heritability wouldn't be high! If equalising the environment closed the gap, then environment explains the variation and therefore heritability would be low.
In order for a environmental intervention to work in a high heritability society, it has to be a novel intervention thay gives some extraneous boost to the low IQ population. Short of gene therapy/selective breeding restricted to the low IQ, its hard to imagine what an intervention like this could actually be. And virtually all social interventions are aimed at equalising environments, which cannot work if heritability is high.
Rather than acknowledging the high heritability and lack of malleability of cognitive ability, many people have taken the more socially desirable approach of emphasizing the importance of education and advocating for more spending or more time in school.
When you’re coercing millions of people (kids are people) into doing something for years and years and spending trillions of dollars, the burden is on you to demonstrate the benefits exceed the costs.
The stigmatization of eugenics and cognitive ability has been extraordinarily harmful. If even a size-able fraction of the money spent on education was spent on research into gene editing, IVG, GWAS on cognitive ability, etc. the children of today would be much much smarter and we wouldn’t need to waste years of their life.
Remarkable thing from Steven Pinker's Blank Slate:
Contrary to the popular belief spread by the radical scientists, eugenics for much of the twentieth century was a favorite cause of the left, not the right. It was championed by many progressives, liberals, and socialists, including Theodore Roosevelt, H.G. Wells, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Margaret Sanger and the Marxist biologists J.B.S. Haldane and Hermann Muller. It’s not hard to see why the sides lined up this way. Conservative Catholics and Bible Belt Protestants hated eugenics because it was an attempt by intellectual and scientific elites to play God. Progressives loved eugenics because it was on the side of reform rather than the status quo, activism rather than laissez-faire, and social responsibility rather than selfishness.
Yup. The whole eugenics=right-wing thing started on account of Hitler.
(I personally think the Holocaust was a catastrophically dysgenic policy, BTW. Probably cost him the Bomb.)
One misunderstanding caused by the term heritability is not stratifying it into narrow and broad sense heritability, or expressed range of variation of genotypic potential (I.e. components of the stratified fatty milk portion) vs attributed genotypic causality to phenotypic variability (non-fat components of milk vs fat components of milk). I agree with this consensus, however we are dealing with political entities who do desire an underclass and dependent class of individuals who can be used as political tools. Furthermore if behaviour is attributed to genetics, one can make a declarative claim of justifying elimination of the political class because of their lackluster contributions / disposition to exploit which is one possible reason why the main motto is eugenics for me and not for thee. Another reason is competitive exclusion where only certain forms of eugenics are allowed (intelligent and obedient) which will likely be the allocated outcome. The reality is though when women undergo IVF, such people are the most hardcore eugenicists... Though whichever society adopts reiterative embryo selection for free or more direct interventions in the future without limiting the potential to subservient obedience will outstrip all other societies in many advantages. The best counter argument is we go on an arms race for the best brain that we end up creating lopsided cognitive profiles that lead to our annihilation, I.e we stop valuing all humans, another argument is that humans will become commodified both in terms of body and mind. A cute genius eternally youthful woman with high sexual appeal may only be exclusive to those that can buy those patent polynucleotide morphisms. another argument against is we might develop different posthumans that branch off and kill each other or parasitizing if each other. Another argument is humans have intrinsic value and should not be modified because it violates the principle of some abstract notion of divinity or uniqueness, though not a convincing argument. Another possibility is targeted biological warfare with more developments in knowing how behaviour is determined from the brain, so behavioural modification is made possible-- though these are all lines of speculation in the longer time horizon of intelligence research and intelligence augmentation.
Also the likelihood of people experimenting on other people, especially governments is high to develop precision medicine or eternal youth cycles (like a certain jelly fish) in terms of research into genetic augmentation (we saw this with nuclear warheads). Master chromosomal modification and adenoviruses are unfortunately very experimental techniques which will likely incur high penalty costs in health and fitness i n the same way we breed dogs presently, so further developments into human augmentation are needed. But in terms of intelligence, simple selective breeding and pGS scores are likely to be the way presently at least for the more utilitarian countries like China and India.
"When you’re coercing millions of people (kids are people) into doing something for years and years and spending trillions of dollars, the burden is on you to demonstrate the benefits exceed the costs." --> would that institutions worked like this.
>> I think this error of reasoning is another example of the deductivist fallacy
I call it the limits of analogical thinking. When Turkheimer says that "chopstick usage is +90% heritable" that is true. But how applicable is the analogy of chopsticks heritability or good vision heritability to intelligence heritability in modern America? We see lots of evidence for failure to increase IQ but and lots of evidence that people can be trained to use chopsticks and have their vision corrected. An analogy is only as good as its applicability.
As far as I know, no one has actually ever demonstrated this empirically. I would guess a typical principal components control would remove this problem.
I'm saying that I wish real world institutions worked on the logic you propose, of requiring justifications for large spends and sprawling bureaucracies. Instead, large spends and sprawling bureaucracies create their own 'justification' through lobbying, entitlement effects, and the like.
Those arguing for social interventions, which is almost everyone who matters, should propose novel interventions for kids. Like eating a can of sardines every day, or sunbathing, or pushups, or never wearing polyester. If enough places tried a wide variety of things, maybe they'd stumble on something that worked.
Now I will annoy your libertarian and alt-right readers. (Yes, I know those are different. Opposed in many ways, even.)
This is an argument for a stronger welfare state (particularly if you don't start from rightish priors that take hierarchy as a given or desirable). Since so much of the deficit is genetic in nature, the less able are not to blame for their lack of success. Furthermore, given that the precise talents may differ from period to period (logical-mathematical intelligence is a lot more valuable than it used to be), many human beings could easily wind up at the bottom of the heap.
Thus, at the minimum, we should have a higher minimum wage and national health insurance to ensure people who wind up at the bottom of the socioeconomic food chain through poor genetics that are no fault of their own can have decent lives. Also, given that some people will always be in the employee class, we need strong labor unions to ensure that workers receive a reasonable share of the economy's surplus.
(This is not an argument for socialism, i.e. state control of means of production. They tried that in China and the USSR, didn't work well.)
Besides, if you don't, you have a large, immiserated underclass that's prone to manipulation by demagogues of the left and right.
These are essentially the kinds of arguments that Paige Harden made. The problem with going away from meritocracy is that it hurts the country as a whole by making it less productive (best people aren't in the right jobs), and causes dysgenic emigration (productive people move to lower tax countries). It's a short-sighted policy.
Yeah, I support meritocracy in college admissions and job selection and promotion. I just figure since most people are below average (the distribution of most abilities apart from 'g'--artistic, financial, mathematical, whatever- has a long right tail, half are below the *median*) you have to do something for the mediocre people or you have a society that doesn't work for most people.
You mentioned emigration. But immigration is a bigger problem. Since IQ and propensity towards violence are mostly heritable, arguing for bigger welfare state only encourages illegal immigration from poor countries who want free stuff.
Universal basic income might work if Denmark is 99% Danish. But no, there seems to be a lot of Somalians and Turks there for some weird reason. As far as I can tell, there's very little interracial marriage. Since the people with lower average IQs have higher fertility rates, dysgenic forces are at play.
I commented on this on another substack. I think the French have trouble keeping their nuclear power plants running because the smart people who built them are retiring and they cannot find enough equally smart people to keep them running. Have you been to Paris lately and looked the migrants there? You think they're capable of operating a nuclear power plant? Society will stop running well if there are not enough smart people.
In practice only the super-rich actually migrate due to tax levels. Almost everyone in rich countries in the 70th-99th percentile generally grumble but stay put.
If you have good state capacity then taxing high-income earners highly and spreading the benefits to those less genetically endowed makes sense.
But high taxes and poor ability to spend it well is not a good combination as you have a lot of inefficiency.
This only makes any sense if we cut off all non-elite immigration. Otherwise you turn America into the world's welfare office with an ever growing underclass of people whose entire lineage will be poor and a fiscal drain.
I actually would not oppose immigration restriction, particularly non-elite, as a corollary. I don't know why the left is so hardcore on this point. Still reading that Judis/Texeira book Texeira renounced?
I agree, but "progeny" would be a better word choice than "lineage." ;)
Caveat: barring entry to low-IQ migrants won't help much in the long run if US residents of above-average intelligence persistently fail to reproduce at or above the replacement rate, which has been the case as least as far back as the end of the post-WWII baby boom, due to deeply-entrenched social and economic disincentives.
Most, and perhaps all, first-world societies are, and have been for many decades, engines of dysgenic transformation w/r/t mean population intelligence. Largely because of social and economic disincentives for childbearing by women of above-average intelligence. Murray and Herrnstein noted in Bell Curve that there is an inverse correlation between female educational attainment -- a reasonable, if imperfect, proxy for intellectual capacity when considering large population samples -- and lifetime childbearing in the US. Mean lifetime childbearing by women who do not graduate from high school exceeds the 2.1 replacement rate by a considerable margin; that for women who graduate from high school but do not go to college approximates the replacement rate; the overall rate for women who go beyond high school is below the replacement level, and the shortfall is wider among college grads than among those who go to college without graduating and lowest of all (as might be expected) among those who earn graduate degrees.
And it seems fairly obvious, as a matter of common sense, that welfare subsidies provided to women at the lower end of the earned-income scale in an essentially meritocratic society (as any capitalist society would tend to be) will have an overall dysgenic effect if they increase as a function of the number of children borne by the recipients.
Greg Cochran has taken the position that just because schooling doesn't matter much for IQ now, doesn't mean that's the case by necessity. It could be that every educator has been ignorant of how to actually educate! He's also fond of pointing out that medicine was both widespread and worse than useless up until the 20th century. Of course, most education reformers don't take the position that what we've been doing is a waste and someone armed with science that takes IQ seriously needs to throw everything out to start over again.
If heritability is high, then education differences don't explain IQ variation. Therefore, this hypothetical effective education would likely benefit everyone and heritability remains high.
If previously glasses don't exist, and then someone invents glasses, does the heritability of eyesight in practice remain high?
Glasses or cataract surgery can correct the distance vision of a near-sighted person to 20:20 -- i.e., to approximately the human optimum -- in many cases. To infer from this that it may well be possible to iron out most of the variance in human intelligence through education would be a non sequitur, to put it mildly.
The point is that we're talking about a hypothetical intervention which we haven't seen yet. Jason is right that we don't know that a hypothetical intervention won't just raise everyone's IQs without altering group differences, but we also don't know that it will.
Whether it's possible to raise everyone's, or most people's, mature IQ to any significant extent through education is also something I don't know. If you think it's feasible on what do you base your optimism in that regard?
I didn't say I thought it feasible (and I began by citing Greg Cochran as someone who said it was a possibility). I'm saying that if you're reasoning based on existing variation, you're leaving out the possibility that people have been going about it pointlessly and leaving out what may in fact be low-hanging fruit:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/?s=%22low-hanging+fruit%22
What if british royal family adopt one of twin massai or zulu children? After we should measure their adult IQ. We need extreme intervetion like this.
They might be better off outside the British royal family. ;)
Transracial adoptions have been done, albeit rarely, on different races to determine interracial heritability of IQ. The Minnesota transracial adoption study is the most famous.
https://www.amren.com/news/2019/10/twin-studies-arthur-jensen-iq-race-differences/
Philippe Rushton's book Race, Evolution and Behavior has a summary of transracial adoption studies.
Is this reasoning also true in the other direction? Does talent management have a raison d'être nowadays?
Oh yes. Particularly in the arts, where the relevant talent isn't positively correlated (and may be *negatively* correlated) with business ability!
What's the best argument against this view? The only one I can think of is that heritability for g might not be that high. Philosophically, however, I can't find a flaw. Ipso facto, in a rational world one would surely expect determining heritability to be the final frontier. Of course it won't be because the same types of arguments will crop up: "the PGS for EA is picking up structural inequalities". Would be good to see a post of those types of arguments.
This has been studied many times over many decades. If improving the environment changes heritability, then the IQs of adopted children would correlate with adoptive parents. They don't. Especially in transracial adoptions. The most infamous case involved the "force adoptions" of Australian aboriginal children. Well-meaning liberals thought that changing the environment from birth will change aboriginal behavior. They were wrong.
There are also a lot of studies on per-pupil spending in American schools vs test scores. There's a widely held mistaken belief that the majority of blacks go to bad schools in crumbling buildings. Yes there are cases like that. But overall, they go to bad schools that get a lot of funding. But the schools are still bad because they're bad students.
Another famous recent example: Mark Zuckerberg gave $100M to Newark. That money didn't do shit. It's not about money for the schools, it's about the people in those schools.
This is probably not all that consequential a point, given the traits we are discussing. Sure in a less complex society, success might be more correlated with genotypes related to physical and not intellectual ability.
In that way the environment determines heritability. But i am not sure how your point salvages social interventions in a complex society
You're assuming that the improvement to education will only benefit the low IQ. But high heritability implies that variation in IQ has very little to do with schooling differences, meaning this hypothetical "better education" will help everyone and the heritability won't change much. High heritability means that intelligence differences cannot be explained by bad education in low IQ people, therefore a categorical improvement in education will increase everyone IQ. If this weren't the case, the heritability would be lower.
You need something analogous to glasses for the hard of seeing, something that selectively provides a extraneous boost to ability, but no such intervention exists and likely never will. And the people most concerned with inequality are convinced to a religious degree that equalising environments will close the gaps and not looking for the analogue of eyeglasses. Selectively providing gene therapy one day to only the low IQ and banning everyone else from using it might be the only kind of intervention that could work, but this kind of thing is anathema to the left.
The main concern of today's neo-Marxists is disparity between the mean income, mean net worth, and per-capita incarceration of the white population versus black, Hispanic, and indigenous populations. Murray and Herrnstein noted in Bell Curve that these disparities largely disappear when IQ is controlled for, but neo-Marxists maintain that such outcome disparities are due to "systemic" discrimination by white people, and they attribute the disparities in mean IQ to environmental disparities supposedly caused by racial and ethnic discrimination. They evidently don't have much hope that the disparities in testable performance can be ironed out through early education or any other means, however; instead they now seem bent on obscuring them by doing away with standardized testing and/or relying on double standards to achieve outcome "equity."
In your example with BMI, in order to make differences less dependent on genotype, any intervention would involve imposing conditions of scarcity.
So sure, as I said in my original comment in less complex societies, with conditions of greater privation, less of individual variation in various traits would be explained by genetics.
I dont think OP would disagree that differences im extreme neglect, malnutrition, lack of access to iodine, exposure to lead etc. are consequential, and that interventions to equalize environments with respect to these variables would have some effect.
“if the environment changes (say, with better education), the trait's heritability will also change.”
This seems contestable
A high heritability implies that changing the environment for low IQ people to something more like that of high IQ people is unlikely to have much effect, otherwise heritability wouldn't be high! If equalising the environment closed the gap, then environment explains the variation and therefore heritability would be low.
In order for a environmental intervention to work in a high heritability society, it has to be a novel intervention thay gives some extraneous boost to the low IQ population. Short of gene therapy/selective breeding restricted to the low IQ, its hard to imagine what an intervention like this could actually be. And virtually all social interventions are aimed at equalising environments, which cannot work if heritability is high.