Jack comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 15 March 2010 07:18:04PM 7 points [-]

And the fact that biracial children do better on IQ when the mother is the white parent than when the mother is black seems strong evidence to me that genetics are not the whole story, if they play any part at all.

It is not evidence for that at all; an alternative explanation for the difference is that a child's intelligence depends to a significant degree on the prenatal environment, which is determined by the mother's genetics exclusively. I predict that the extra degree of correlation between a mother's and child's intelligence over the correlation between a father's and child's intelligence will be very close to equal to the degree of correlation between a genetically unrelated surrogate mother and child's intelligence.

Comment author: Jack 15 March 2010 07:44:50PM 8 points [-]

the prenatal environment, which is determined by the mother's genetics exclusively.

I don't know about exclusively.

Comment author: jimrandomh 15 March 2010 08:11:25PM 2 points [-]

You're right that that was too strong; I should have said it's determined largely by the mother's genetics (but also to lesser degrees by the father's genetics and environmental factors.) But note that the strongest known environmental factor, alcohol consumption, is at least somewhat genetic (http://psychiatry.healthse.com/psy/more/alcoholism), and other factors like susceptibility to smoking addiction probably are as well.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 26 September 2011 10:50:50AM 2 points [-]
Comment author: Hook 16 March 2010 02:41:22PM 0 points [-]

Any given chemical is not equally likely to cause pleasure for human beings, so of course alcohol and nicotine consumption have a genetic basis. It seems equally obvious that the availability of alcohol and nicotine are part of the environment. Additionally, they are parts of the environment where it is easy to imagine life being substantially similar without them (unlike environmental influences such as oxygen and gravity).