Bryan, I’ve given my views on this topic repeatedly. If you don’t know what they are, I think it’s because you want to think they’re something else.

And where have I ruled out a role for genetics based on anything, much less plasticity? Note that this has been asked multiple times before, and you’re still not answering.

https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/jensen-2011-the-theory-of-intelligence-and-its-measurement.pdf

Why does plasticity rule out a genetic explanation?

DuWayne, if you want to reject the results of the sorts of studies we’ve been discussing, you will have to do better than “oh, it’s so terribly complex, surely we can’t know anything before we know everything blah blah blah”. That’s the classic method of creationists, climate change denialists, and other charlatans.

I did better than that and if you weren’t an ignorant dumbass, you would realize that.

What we have learned about the malleability of the brain in the past five years has shown that the tools used in those studies are absolutely useless. And to understand the role genetics has in neurodevelopment, we must understand how it generally plays out on an individual level. Unfortunately, we don’t have the tools to do that.

I am absolutely *not* claiming it is too fucking complex. If you understand English on more than a rudimentary level, I would suggest you re-read my comment. You will note that nowhere in my comment, did I say anything about it being too complex. I spoke of our ignorance and a lack of tools to alleviate that ignorance. I did so because I am pretty fucking certain that we will eventually develop those tools. Once those tools are developed, this shit won’t be any more complicated than understanding how and why lightening happens. Not everyone will understand it, but it will be easily understood by people who choose to learn about it.

The bastion of creationists is the need to grasp tightly to outdated, discredited ideas. Between us, the person engaging in that behavior would be you. I would suggest you spend some time learning about neuroplasticity and it’s implications for the discussion of genetics versus environment, before you start trying to argue as though you have the foggiest fucking clue what you’re talking about. I actually have paid rather a lot of attention, because it is integral to the research I am going to be doing.

To be very clear, I want the tools to make these determinations to exist. I wish they did because they would make my research a hell of a lot easier. Not in the context of some idiotic measure of some types of intelligence, to be sure – I couldn’t possibly care less about that. But generally understanding the role that genetics actually plays in cognition is extremely important to me, because it would make the treatment of mental illness a hell of a lot easier.

So you’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better than further than trying to dismiss me because you either didn’t read or couldn’t comprehend what I actually wrote.

The purpose of the biometric approach of behavioral genetics is NOT to find out how genetic and non-genetic influences play out in the development of an individual. Behavioral genetics is about the causes of variation at the population level, not in individuals. There are always different levels of analysis in science. Behavioral genetics can be useful when entangling the developmental process in individuals, too, but heritability analyses are not dependent on our knowledge of the developmental process.

I’m not going to accuse you of being a moron, because I don’t actually know for sure that you are, but mostly because I have a lot of respect for our host. I will mostly assume you’re rather ignorant of just how powerful the research tools you are talking about actually are. They are certainly useful in certain contexts. But the behavioral genetics tools are not particularly useful for testing what you think they do.

The brain is both a lot more malleable than we once thought and we are shaped by cues far more subtle than we ever imagined possible – especially in infancy. This understanding tends to bring doubt to the assumptions made, based on such studies. While it by no means definitively determines they are wrong, it absolutely reasserts the questions they were assumed to have answered.

The only way we will ever be able to untangle this web, is to dramatically increase our understanding of genetics and neurobiology. We will need to not only determine the gene sequences that govern intellect, but also to determine exactly what they do. I have little doubt that eventually we might get there, but we are not there now. Given our modern understanding of human cognition and neurodevelopment, there is simply no use in making firm assumptions about the genetics of intelligence. About the best we can say is that genetics are likely to play some role, while environment plays some role as well.

Pretending any sort of certainty either way, would just be silly and irresponsible.

JL, one more comment insulting someone here on the basis of spurious “best methods in social science” gets you booted.

BrianX posted a comment that was purely a personal attack with no factual or rational basis. Such a comment is moronic, and I pointed this out to him. Why is it that you seem to have no problem with his comment, only mine?

Saying we don’t have to control for environmental variables shown to affect IQ in order to call our correlations “heritability” because we’ve already done that, then deciding that, no, you don’t need to back that assertion up with any citations because it should just somehow be obvious that environmental variables have no effect?

Behavioral genetics is all about devising ways to separate genetic and environmental causes. Criticisms of behavioral genetics center on attempts to disprove that behavioral genetic methods succeed at providing such separation. However, for these criticisms to be noteworthy, they must be specific. For example, critics of the classic twin design have specifically attacked the equal environments assumption that the method relies on. Similarly, if you want to make a case against these new molecular genetic studies of IQ heritability, you must point out specific flaws that you think they have. Otherwise you have proved nothing.

I am rather curious what “the best methods in social science” would entail. Especially as they have apparently been used for a hundred years.

The methods have been developed over a period of a hundred years. Methods developed mainly for the purposes of IQ research (e.g. classical test theory, IRT, factor analysis, various forms of SEM) have colonized many other disciplines, too, because of their superiority, whereas behavioral genetic methods are superior because they can shed light on both genetic and environmental sources of human behavioral variation, unlike, say, traditional sociological analysis.