The evidence is overwhelming that intelligence is at least partly heritable. It's uncontroversial among experts to say that it's likely around 50% heritable. It's perhaps a little overstated to say it's "largely" heritable and that the evidence for this is overwhelming.
Being charitable here perhaps the author was just saying that the evidence is overwhelming that intelligence is heritable (to some degree), and that it's their opinion that it's "largely" heritable (assuming they mean 50%+). If by "largely" they just meant somewhere in the region of 50%, then I think this is a fairly accurate statement.
The author shares my view on this. If I had to guess intelligence is likely to be somewhere around to 60-80% heritable in the West. However, in countries where malnutrition, disease and lack of basic education are factors these are likely more important than genetics.
> This is the problem with “rationalists”.. . They don’t actually use their brains, they defer to “authority”, arguing that anyone that doesn’t listen to authorities is arrogant, but then they pick who they deem to be authorities to match their pre-existing opinions.
Ad hominem. Also your criticising rationalists for both blindly overweighting the opinions of experts and also not listening to the opinions of experts. If they're selecting expert opinions based on their own opinions then, if not their own brains, where did these opinions come from?
Whether or not you wear earrings is highly heritable. The number of fingers on your hands is not. People like the author use the word "heritable" in a way that strongly suggests they mean "IQ is genetically determined", but heritability statistics are just a way to ask that question, not answer it.
Also: that's not how the ad hominem fallacy works. It's not a religious law against criticizing groups of people; it's a logical flaw in a particular argument --- the commenter you're replying to didn't make that particular argument (in fact: they made the opposite kind of argument), and so you can't invoke it like a magic spell.
I don't know how the author used the word "heritable", however if we expand the scope beyond genetics – eg, a child of an academic parent might inherit that parent's cultural attitudes towards education via their upbringing – then it would be even more uncontroversial to say that IQ is "largely" heritable.
I personally assumed the author meant the variance of IQ within a population is "largely" a product of genetics. Assuming they they believe this genetic factor is around 50% then this would not be a controversial position to hold among intelligence researchers.
Yes: that's what I took the author to mean too. And that's not an argument heritability statistics can make. My point is that the author has confused "heritability" with "genetic determination".
> I don't know how the author used the word "heritable"...
If the author doesn't really know what heritability means, then maybe they're not in a position to be communicating to the world about what the "overwhelming evidence" shows, or even having an opinion on the matter at all.
#1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Elman ... Jeffery Elman. I wonder what his stance on the matter is. Let's see if there's a quick way to determine what his thought on heritability are.
It's call "Rethinking Innateness," questioning the over-attribution to genetics of gene x environment interactions.
It took me all of 2 minutes to look that up. The author of this article clearly just completely made up what they said. They had no basis or intellectual discipline in arriving at their opinion.
I had never heard of Jeffery Elman (though I'm familiar with some of his work on RNN's apparently). I had the same thoughts about gene x environment interactions that he apparently describes in his book. I arrived there through a combination of reading papers about the impact of genetics on psychological and cognitive function as well as using critical thinking... as I bet most who have studied cognitive science would.
If I were going to publish a blog post, let alone a book, I would at least do the bare minimum 2 minute google search to see if I'm completely making stuff up before I make claims, implied or explicit, about the consensus of a whole field.
It's not an ad hominem at all. I attacked their thought process, not their person. And the point is that they encourage other people not to use their critical thinking and brains, and just defer to others who they happen to agree with.
> Being charitable here
And why would I do that? They're not being charitable to the opposing opinion.
If they were rational, they would have attempted a full catalogue of both sides of the matter, taking the actual of actual opposition, rather than making up straw men.
> The evidence is overwhelming that intelligence is at least partly heritable
This is an argument against nobody and nothing. I don't think there's a single scientist in the world who said intelligence is 0% heritable. This is a very far cry from the stance that it's mostly heritable. Which would imply greater than 50%.
So even being charitable the author's factual stance is very weak, yet they're drawing strong conclusions from it.
If it's 50% heritable that means less than 50% genetic... which implies that at least 50% of intelligence is based in environment. This is not at all evidence of the author's point. It's evidence against it.
Being charitable here perhaps the author was just saying that the evidence is overwhelming that intelligence is heritable (to some degree), and that it's their opinion that it's "largely" heritable (assuming they mean 50%+). If by "largely" they just meant somewhere in the region of 50%, then I think this is a fairly accurate statement.
The author shares my view on this. If I had to guess intelligence is likely to be somewhere around to 60-80% heritable in the West. However, in countries where malnutrition, disease and lack of basic education are factors these are likely more important than genetics.
> This is the problem with “rationalists”.. . They don’t actually use their brains, they defer to “authority”, arguing that anyone that doesn’t listen to authorities is arrogant, but then they pick who they deem to be authorities to match their pre-existing opinions.
Ad hominem. Also your criticising rationalists for both blindly overweighting the opinions of experts and also not listening to the opinions of experts. If they're selecting expert opinions based on their own opinions then, if not their own brains, where did these opinions come from?