[mikema63]

'moral reasoning' and genetics

Theres some evidence that the disgust response is partly genetic, and there is psychology research which strongly suggests that the higher the disgust response the more socially conservative someone might be on certain things. (i.e. homosexuality, anything to do with sex really, a handful of other things). The idea being that our initial disgust towards something shapes our moral beliefs about it. Jonathan Haidt has done some interesting research on his ideas about "moral foundations" that relate to this.

I personally am not totally bought into the idea though.

connection between IQ and moral reasoning.

Higher IQ children tend to think of morality in more complex ways than their same age peers. They also tend to be aware of issues earlier and worry about them more. However there isn't much evidence that in the long run their conclusions are any different than most peoples.

I find high moral reasoning to be more important than IQ in the success of our society and I have met people who appear to have not very high IQ but very high levels of moral reasoning.

If you mean by moral reasoning the ability to think about morality in intelligent ways then I would say that the two would coorelation. If you mean do they come to the correct conclusions in your view then it almost certainly makes no difference.

The only difference between a very intelligent person and a dumb person when it comes to a moral view point is the complexity of their justifications. Though I do think smarter people are probably better at accepting morally gray propositions than less intelligent people.

[Suntzu]

There is certainly a link between low I.Q. and criminality.

Maybe stupid criminals just get caught more.

[mikema63]

There are also links between low I.Q. and things that are predictors of criminality as well. It's dangerous to look at a web of coorelations and declare a particular factor the causal one. Especially when it fits your political or moral beliefs that you've already established.

[One Degree]

@mikema63
Thanks. I have read Haidt's work, but I need to do a quick search to refresh my memory.

Edit: duh, I remember recommending 'the righteous mind' now. I definitely think his ideas are worth reading.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

Wow! I am surprised it even got published. The media will have a field day trashing it. Too many people will be unwilling to accept it even if it is true. It definitely needs serious review.

The media tends to ignore publications like this, but if they are reported it obviously must be done by stressing the negative historical context and how dangerous this information can be. The only non-science article I could find does exactly that: Mindful of eugenics’ dark history, researchers are reexamining the genetics of social mobility.

As you say, and also mentioned in the article, many are unwilling to even entertain the thought and education in particular is a stronghold of attributing everything almost exclusively to nurture.

I'm somewhat skeptical. Educational attainment is such a complex social thing that's influenced by so many personality traits and social stuff that I find the idea of trying to do genetic analysis of it to be rather...ambitious in scope. More ambitious than trying to research intelligence broadly even.

I'd like to see studies on the more basic personality traits that coorespond to educational achievement on a genetic level.

With respect to twin studies the claim is quite in line with previous research. There is a tool here which is based on a recent effort to provide access to more than 2,700 twin studies that have been carried out during the last 50 years (link to paper explaining the details). If you select ICF/ICD10 Subchapter on the left and Education on the right dropdown field, it'll show you this:


The most interesting graph is that on the right which shows the average of the relative contribution of heritability (h2_all) and shared environment (c2_all) as reported by 31 twin studies that have looked at educational attainment.

Results for higher-level cognitive functions, which include various IQ test batteries and are based on 660 studies, are similar:


For temperament and personality functions h2 is lower but still substantial:


That said, identifying the genes to validate these results has turned out to be a formidable challenge. Under the current assumption that thousands of genes individually contribute very small effects (<1%), we would need samples of millions of genotyped people to detect all of these genes, and samples of this size are currently not available. Further, most studies that try to detect gene associations look at common SNPs (present in >1% or 2% of the population), yet not only are the vast majority of SNPs less common, but SNPs are just one type of genetic variation. It's therefore perhaps not surprising that reported heritability based on identified genes tends to be quite underwhelming, especially when compared with the estimates derived from twin studies. It's no different in the study mentioned in the OP:

Second, we used a new GPS that explains twice as much variance in years of education as the GPS (Rietveld et al., 2013) used in the previous studies. This new GPS, derived from a 2016 GWA analysis of years of education in a sample of nearly 300,000 individuals, explains 3.9% of the variance in years of education in independent samples (Okbay et al., 2016). Finally, in addition to conducting DNA analyses, we used twin data to obtain the first well-powered estimate of the degree to which intergenerational educational attainment is heritable.

Twin ACE analyses
Figure 1 shows the proportion of variance in intergenerational educational attainment that was estimated to be accounted for by genetic and environmental factors. The graphs indicate a substantial genetic influence, as approximately half of the phenotypic variance in liability was attributed to inherited DNA differences in both the upward-mobility analysis and the downwardmobility analysis. The influence of shared environmental factors (i.e., factors that contribute to similarities between twins growing up in the same home) was almost as large, accounting for approximately 40% of the variance. Nonshared environmental factors (i.e., factors that do not contribute to twin similarity) explained less than 11% of the variance in both analyses.

So more than 40% of the heritability still needs to be accounted for by actual genes. Whole genome sequencing, which makes it possible to look at other variants and pretty much the whole genome, is now possible and affordable. There is currently a project underway, involving several universities, that will conduct WGS for the five major psychiatric illnesses. And WGS will quite likely propel us forward also in terms of behaviour and traits.

Think this is the paper
The Genetics of Success: How SingleNucleotide Polymorphisms Associated With Educational Attainment Relate to Life-Course Development

Thanks, Wellsy, but that is a different paper.

50% is probably an underestimate given that IQ appears to be over 80% heritable.

And Gregory Clark in his work has found a level of social mobility of around one-fifth going back a thousand years in nearly every society he's studied bar India (which has clos to zero social mobility ).

Not that actual evidence will change the left's view on this subject. They are religious fanatics.

80% is at the high end of IQ estimates commonly cited and correlation with education is somewhere around 0.7 if I remember right.

The field of education will be the hardest nut to crack if twin studies are confirmed in the future. But even if opposition to this type of research and thinking increases, advances coming from medicine will not be so easy to ignore. And regardless of how successful people in the west will be in delaying it, others don't have the same kind of hang-ups.

[Sivad]

@Drlee,
130 IQ is two standard deviations above the white average, which means that about 5% of the white population has IQs 130 or above.

How would the economy function if 130 was the average? We'd have to pay janitors what we now pay doctors and doctors would have to work for fast food wages.

[mikema63]

IQ tests are normalized so the average individual is set to 100, it's literally impossible to have the average score be 130.

[One Degree]

https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx
Actually, only 2.3% have an IQ above 130. What is wrong with a janitor having this IQ? Some do.

[Sivad]

IQ tests are normalized so the average individual is set to 100, it's literally impossible to have the average score be 130.

Ok, but I'm asking what if the average intelligence was equivalent to our 130? If that was the case I doubt social mobility would be left to market forces.

[mikema63]

Well, I've complained about how I dislike IQ elsewhere but basically it probably wouldn't make much difference. IQ tests miss a lot of very important cognitive abilities and it's questionable whether or not, all else being equal, higher average IQs would effect anything more than people's general academic ability which often won't result in better job outcomes.

[Sivad]

I'm not really an expert on it but everything I've read suggests a strong correlation between IQ and social mobility, so whatever IQ is measuring seems to be a good indicator of your chances of moving up in the world. I guess my point was that the forces we allow to determine social status aren't like inherently fair or anything, it's really just all a fluke.

[mikema63]

I was a test designed to measure academic ability in French children. It roughly measures academic success but if everyone is successful in school then what is your degree worth?

[Hong Wu]

I was a test designed to measure academic ability in French children. It roughly measures academic success but if everyone is successful in school then what is your degree worth?

I was also a test and you failed, racist!

[SolarCross]

How would the economy function if 130 was the average? We'd have to pay janitors what we now pay doctors and doctors would have to work for fast food wages.

I'd guess if the even the janitors were genius level they would outsource their jobs to a slave race of robots that they built.

[Suntzu]

About 1 in 50 have I.Q.s above 130. They are in all walks of life.

[Sivad]

I'd guess if the even the janitors were genius level they would outsource their jobs to a slave race of robots that they built.

Or they'd genetically engineer a subspecies of cognitively stunted worker drones. But taking away those options I imagine in that world everyone would be some kind of socialist because most people would be educated enough to understand that market outcomes aren't fair and that market forces don't work in favor of the vast majority.

That's true in this world as well, but unfortunately most people aren't able to really grasp it and most of the ones that have the background to understand it don't really care to because the numbers here work to their advantage. If you're smart and educated in this world you can make a killing off capitalism, in a world with a severe shortage of readily exploitable labor capitalism becomes problematic.

[mikema63]

It is dangerous, in my opinion, to assume the problem that prevents people from agreeing with you is their lack of intelligence.

[Suntzu]

About 1 in 10,000 Black Americans . . .

. . . have an I.Q. 130 or above.

[mikema63]

And about 1 in 1 right wingers....

....pull "facts" out of their ass.

[SolarCross]

Or they'd genetically engineer a subspecies of cognitively stunted worker drones. But taking away those options I imagine in that world everyone would be some kind of socialist because most people would be educated enough to understand that market outcomes aren't fair and that market forces don't work in favor of the vast majority.

That's true in this world as well, but unfortunately most people aren't able to really grasp it and most of the ones that have the background to understand it don't really care to because the numbers here work to their advantage. If you're smart and educated in this world you can make a killing off capitalism, in a world with a severe shortage of readily exploitable labor capitalism becomes problematic.

Socialism is loser cult for dumbies. In no way would a society where everybody is a mensa level genius be socialist.