I just posted this note in response to this article. I may decide to respond more fully later.
The heart of Seb Jensen’s criticism of my work is a pedigree-based GWAS (Hill et al.) that purports to show that IQ has a heritability of 0.54. Ever since this study came out in 2018, hereditarians have pointed to it in the hope that one day GWAS might confirm the high heritability found by twin studies, and just as often geneticists have pointed out its flaws. Most recently, this study was discussed in an article by Sasha Gusev, who pointed out that it does not fully control for relatedness/kinship. Since closely related individuals tend to share environments, it cannot be known how much of this heritability figure is due to shared environment. Nor could the Hill et al. study control for indirect genetic effects. As Hill et al. say in their paper:
“The use of related individuals can result in the confounding of pedigree genetic effects with shared family environmental effects. We were able to adjust for phenotype similarity driven by couple similarity, family similarity and sibling similarity, but some residual, uncorrected confounding might remain. Moreover, this method is incapable of separating out indirect genetic effects from relatives. Potential sources include geographical confounding, e.g., cousins attending the same school, and other environmental similarities that we could not adjust for.”
People who write on the issue of the heritability of IQ would be well-advised to read Gusev’s Substack articles and his online book carefully so that they don’t repeat points that have already been addressed.
Hereditarian substack has been giving me the silent treatment because I tell them that their worldview is looking increasingly untenable. I just wrote a substantial article on that subject so I guess they'll be even more silent.
"In a recent criticism of my work, the hereditarian blogger Seb Jensen distorts the findings of GWAS. He cites one GWAS that found a 54% estimate for IQ heritability using a pedigree-based approach. This methodology has been widely criticized for overestimating heritability due to its inability to control for indirect genetic effects and other environmental factors. Jensen makes an even more serious mistake when he writes that another GWAS found a heritability of 23% for IQ. That figure does not in fact appear anywhere in the study. The study cites a heritability of 24% for cognitive ability using a population-based methodology. However, the whole point of that study is to prove that this methodology inflates heritability through various confounds. The superior within-sibship methodology finds a heritability of 14%."
This wonderful article by Callie H. Burt argues compellingly that traditional heritability studies, including twin and adoption studies, are ill-conceived. Due to gene-environment correlations and interactions, as well as epigenetics, it is impossible to separate out the effects of genes and environment on traits. Everything you say in this essay is obsolete pseudoscience.
“I have argued that there is compelling evidence that heritability studies are methodologically flawed, especially for complex adverse health phenotypes. I have also argued, drawing on recent advances in molecular genomics and epigenetics, that heritability studies are grounded on a specious conceptual foundation. Recent advances in molecular genomics have debunked nearly every assumption that underlies heritability studies. This new evidence manifestly supports, indeed proves, the arguments that critics of heritability studies have been making for decades that the goal of partitioning genetic and environmental effects on variance in phenotypes is unsound (e.g., Lewontin et al. 1984). In short, heritability studies attempt the impossible.”
It's a superb discussion of all of the ways that genetic and environmental influences are intertwined and how incredibly hard it is to disentangle them.
It’s one thing to revise or critique former hereditarian views and describe yourself as ‘a former racist’ (you never were really pro-white or pro-European in any real ethnocultural sense but fixated on I.Q. like Hanania and others who later turned into garden-variety neoliberals) but openly associating and collaborating with blatant anti-white groups like The Southern Poverty Law Center indicates some interesting personality and psychological traits in your case.
I've never really associated with the SPLC. They invited me to do an interview, and it was the best way of getting my story out, so I did it. They invited me to collaborate with them in another project, and I declined. I don't read The Intelligence Report, and I probably don't agree with a lot of the ideas in it.
I've read Burt's works before and I am not unfamiliar with the points he raises. One of the most influential papers he was involved in, Burt & Simons (2014), turned out to rely on heavy cherrypicking, which they openly admitted to, and was corrected meta-analytically by Wright et al. (2015).
On twin methods more broadly, no one has ever claimed that they are perfectly flawless, because this is true for literally... nothing. All methods in any field are like imperfect instruments to varying degrees, but it's an empirical question of just how much various assumption violations or interaction effects bias the estimates or the extent to which they render them unreliable. It's no good to say "X could affect the way Y twin method estimates the heritability of a trait", you could say that for just about anything. In the post I've just linked, the totality of the evidence that is looked through strongly suggests that the biases are generally small and negligible, and where that's not the case, this has been acknowledged and the estimates are corrected accordingly, as is with the case of schizophrenia.
Here's an intentionally ridiculous example to get my point across which you will probably agree with using the EEA. Of course, it's not literally true that MZ twins are treated exactly as similarly as DZ twins are all the time. The question therefore should not be "is the EEA literally true?" but rather "to what extent are violations of the EEA going to relevantly affect the outcome of a specific trait being observed?", which is also covered in that post. It obviously can't be the former question because if you said to me that "well, you know, mommy might be more likely to kiss identical twins to sleep together more than for fraternal twins, and this is a violation of the EEA", my response to you would be an eye roll followed by telling you that it's time for you to go to bed.
Why do you keep linking that one post from Gusev everywhere? Are you a puppet incapable of formulating your own arguments? Not even going to address anything I said?
This is also a basic error you're making on shifting the burden of the proof. The default hypothesis on using twin methods would be that twin methods are not substantially biased, just because you failed to prove otherwise does not mean you can cite molecular genetics as some "debunk". Joseph Bronski offered several criticisms of that post Gusev made which you clearly saw since you left comments on it: https://www.josephbronski.com/p/does-molecular-data-overturn-iq-twin/comments
Instead of looking at the merits of all arguments and forming your own conclusions, you're suffering from immense confirmation bias and desperately searching for anything to vindicate it. Your comments are about the flynn effect, so I suppose you don't disagree (or don't know enough to disagree) with Bronski's critiques? But hey, if you care so much about the flynn effect, there's always some additional readings you can do:
I thought very weird Ian had a whole political view based sole on IQ, specially the fact he doesn't seem to truly understand the issue.
I just posted this note in response to this article. I may decide to respond more fully later.
The heart of Seb Jensen’s criticism of my work is a pedigree-based GWAS (Hill et al.) that purports to show that IQ has a heritability of 0.54. Ever since this study came out in 2018, hereditarians have pointed to it in the hope that one day GWAS might confirm the high heritability found by twin studies, and just as often geneticists have pointed out its flaws. Most recently, this study was discussed in an article by Sasha Gusev, who pointed out that it does not fully control for relatedness/kinship. Since closely related individuals tend to share environments, it cannot be known how much of this heritability figure is due to shared environment. Nor could the Hill et al. study control for indirect genetic effects. As Hill et al. say in their paper:
“The use of related individuals can result in the confounding of pedigree genetic effects with shared family environmental effects. We were able to adjust for phenotype similarity driven by couple similarity, family similarity and sibling similarity, but some residual, uncorrected confounding might remain. Moreover, this method is incapable of separating out indirect genetic effects from relatives. Potential sources include geographical confounding, e.g., cousins attending the same school, and other environmental similarities that we could not adjust for.”
People who write on the issue of the heritability of IQ would be well-advised to read Gusev’s Substack articles and his online book carefully so that they don’t repeat points that have already been addressed.
There are links in the note, which is here: https://substack.com/@ianjobling/note/c-70543695
This is like being an ex-mathematician.
This is why US needs more upper-caste pajeet immigration. white IQ is too low to sustain a high-technocratic civilization.
Hereditarian substack has been giving me the silent treatment because I tell them that their worldview is looking increasingly untenable. I just wrote a substantial article on that subject so I guess they'll be even more silent.
"In a recent criticism of my work, the hereditarian blogger Seb Jensen distorts the findings of GWAS. He cites one GWAS that found a 54% estimate for IQ heritability using a pedigree-based approach. This methodology has been widely criticized for overestimating heritability due to its inability to control for indirect genetic effects and other environmental factors. Jensen makes an even more serious mistake when he writes that another GWAS found a heritability of 23% for IQ. That figure does not in fact appear anywhere in the study. The study cites a heritability of 24% for cognitive ability using a population-based methodology. However, the whole point of that study is to prove that this methodology inflates heritability through various confounds. The superior within-sibship methodology finds a heritability of 14%."
There are links in the article:
https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/twin-studies-exaggerate-iq-heritability?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
This wonderful article by Callie H. Burt argues compellingly that traditional heritability studies, including twin and adoption studies, are ill-conceived. Due to gene-environment correlations and interactions, as well as epigenetics, it is impossible to separate out the effects of genes and environment on traits. Everything you say in this essay is obsolete pseudoscience.
“I have argued that there is compelling evidence that heritability studies are methodologically flawed, especially for complex adverse health phenotypes. I have also argued, drawing on recent advances in molecular genomics and epigenetics, that heritability studies are grounded on a specious conceptual foundation. Recent advances in molecular genomics have debunked nearly every assumption that underlies heritability studies. This new evidence manifestly supports, indeed proves, the arguments that critics of heritability studies have been making for decades that the goal of partitioning genetic and environmental effects on variance in phenotypes is unsound (e.g., Lewontin et al. 1984). In short, heritability studies attempt the impossible.”
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Callie-Burt/publication/272179794_Heritability_Studies_Methodological_Flaws_Invalidated_Dogmas_and_Changing_Paradigms/links/5554ea4508ae6fd2d821b9fe/Heritability-Studies-Methodological-Flaws-Invalidated-Dogmas-and-Changing-Paradigms.pdf?origin=journalDetail&_tp=eyJwYWdlIjoiam91cm5hbERldGFpbCJ9
Sorry but what is your explanation for black dysfunction then? Racism doesn't work as a justification anymore, are you following the culture route?
Yawn*, same old rehashed criticisms, no originality whatsoever
https://open.substack.com/pub/hereticalinsights/p/the-time-has-come?r=2h2py7&utm_medium=ios
It's a superb discussion of all of the ways that genetic and environmental influences are intertwined and how incredibly hard it is to disentangle them.
It’s one thing to revise or critique former hereditarian views and describe yourself as ‘a former racist’ (you never were really pro-white or pro-European in any real ethnocultural sense but fixated on I.Q. like Hanania and others who later turned into garden-variety neoliberals) but openly associating and collaborating with blatant anti-white groups like The Southern Poverty Law Center indicates some interesting personality and psychological traits in your case.
I've never really associated with the SPLC. They invited me to do an interview, and it was the best way of getting my story out, so I did it. They invited me to collaborate with them in another project, and I declined. I don't read The Intelligence Report, and I probably don't agree with a lot of the ideas in it.
I've read Burt's works before and I am not unfamiliar with the points he raises. One of the most influential papers he was involved in, Burt & Simons (2014), turned out to rely on heavy cherrypicking, which they openly admitted to, and was corrected meta-analytically by Wright et al. (2015).
On twin methods more broadly, no one has ever claimed that they are perfectly flawless, because this is true for literally... nothing. All methods in any field are like imperfect instruments to varying degrees, but it's an empirical question of just how much various assumption violations or interaction effects bias the estimates or the extent to which they render them unreliable. It's no good to say "X could affect the way Y twin method estimates the heritability of a trait", you could say that for just about anything. In the post I've just linked, the totality of the evidence that is looked through strongly suggests that the biases are generally small and negligible, and where that's not the case, this has been acknowledged and the estimates are corrected accordingly, as is with the case of schizophrenia.
Here's an intentionally ridiculous example to get my point across which you will probably agree with using the EEA. Of course, it's not literally true that MZ twins are treated exactly as similarly as DZ twins are all the time. The question therefore should not be "is the EEA literally true?" but rather "to what extent are violations of the EEA going to relevantly affect the outcome of a specific trait being observed?", which is also covered in that post. It obviously can't be the former question because if you said to me that "well, you know, mommy might be more likely to kiss identical twins to sleep together more than for fraternal twins, and this is a violation of the EEA", my response to you would be an eye roll followed by telling you that it's time for you to go to bed.
So if twin studies are so great, why have GWAS so spectacularly failed to replicate them? https://open.substack.com/pub/theinfinitesimal/p/no-intelligence-is-not-like-height?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Why do you keep linking that one post from Gusev everywhere? Are you a puppet incapable of formulating your own arguments? Not even going to address anything I said?
This is also a basic error you're making on shifting the burden of the proof. The default hypothesis on using twin methods would be that twin methods are not substantially biased, just because you failed to prove otherwise does not mean you can cite molecular genetics as some "debunk". Joseph Bronski offered several criticisms of that post Gusev made which you clearly saw since you left comments on it: https://www.josephbronski.com/p/does-molecular-data-overturn-iq-twin/comments
Instead of looking at the merits of all arguments and forming your own conclusions, you're suffering from immense confirmation bias and desperately searching for anything to vindicate it. Your comments are about the flynn effect, so I suppose you don't disagree (or don't know enough to disagree) with Bronski's critiques? But hey, if you care so much about the flynn effect, there's always some additional readings you can do:
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/a-requiem-for-nutrition?utm_source=publication-search
https://www.anthro1.net/p/how-real-was-the-flynn-effect