Heritability of Intelligence

~ Clarissa

People have gone completely nuts. How can intelligence not be heritable? The rest of the article is partisan, emotional crap, as well, but the underlined sentence is beyond that.

Of course, intelligence is heritable, and the author of the article clearly lost the genetic lottery in this aspect.

That people ascribe moral value to IQ is their problem. They could just as well do it for height and then run around, trying to dispute the glaringly obvious.

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Published by Clarissa

24 thoughts on “Heritability of Intelligence”

  1. “How can intelligence not be heritable?”

    Well, that way, different races can’t have different average IQs, and that’s the claim that people really care about.

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  2. Why people choose to deny it is because of group differences. Of course, group differences in measured cognitive traits can be plausibly explained by different environments and experiences. Few heritable traits are 100% heritable and 0% environment. Height, for instance, is heritable, but also strongly influenced by early childhood diet and similar factors.

    How people deny it is simple: This One Person. “I know this one person who is SOOOO smart and her parents are idiots. And I know this other person who’s so stupid and his parents are so smart!”

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  3. The capacity for high intelligence is heritable. But there’s still room for improvement on the low end, that would benefit everyone: we could still do better on prenatal care, early childhood nutrition, and really basic stuff like support for mothers to quit drinking and doing drugs while pregnant, that sort of thing.

    And I say with some trepidation, but also reasons: we need saner policies on surgical sterilization. Right now, women (not sure about men) who want to do that, basically have to wait until age 30 and pay for it themselves. I think we should give surgeons lawsuit immunity for people who change their minds later, so women don’t have to wait till 30. I think we’d be better off if there were more programs, perhaps privately funded, offering free tubal ligations and vasectomies for a whole range of circumstances likely to cause problems in biological offspring– genetic disorders, addiction, toxic exposures, physical problems (uterine malformation or scarring, for example, or previous gastric bypass surgery which makes you chronically malnourished), autoimmune disorders, chronic illness… Voluntary, well-publicized, and completely free.

    That’s an easy investment in bringing the low end up, and preventing some of the causes of really devastating low-IQ problems. Because nobody’s worried about 120 vs. 160. Those guys are all at least capable of having a good life. But the difference between 60 and 85 is enormous, and that’s still light-years from 100. And at least some of that is stuff that’s amenable to fairly simple social, medical, and practical support. Like, FASD is *probably* less common now than when I was in school, but still way more common than you’d think. What if we could make real progress on that?

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    2. Unfortunately, only the high-IQ neurotics will use such programs. The “less fortunate” wouldn’t go for it. There was a large effort in this direction in India, and it failed miserably.

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      1. I dunno– the project prevention lady has had a pretty good sign-on rate, and that program only addresses addicts. Maybe it’s too niche to make a big difference, but just looking around at IRL situations: I think women having gastric bypass need to be offered a simultaneous tubal ligation. Maybe as a prerequisite. That surgery makes you malnourished for life, is irreversible, and if what I’ve seen is a representative sample, it is *devastating* for children born to post-op moms. I don’t think it has been studied *nearly* enough.

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        1. This is a new horror unlocked for me. I had never considered that anyone would try to get pregnant after a gastric bypass. I know a handful of people who’ve had them, and they all seem extremely sickly and weak even years after the surgery. Being fat isn’t great, but I really don’t get the continued popularity of getting that surgery. It seems like such a horrible trade off, esp. when most seem to wind up in a thinner but not really healthy seeming state.

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          1. I never thought about it, either. Somehow one can never fathom the bizarre things that would occur to some people.

            Many people don’t seem to understand that the human body is not a machine where you can swap parts and never notice it. I was just reading a story of the procedure of reconstructing breasts after gender-based mastectomy. It’s horror on top of horror, plus it’s very expensive and not covered by any policy. It’s very profitable for some but ruinous to others because even the process of doing one terrible elective surgery doesn’t make them desist from doing more.

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          2. AFAICT bariatric surgeons are the worst kind of shysters. “Oh, it’ll make your diabetes go away! You’ll be thin and beautiful!” “And yeah, you’ll have some dietary limitations… but that’s the same as going on a diet right?”

            What they don’t tell you is: don’t ever get pregnant, and this procedure so radically alters your digestion that a scary percentage of post-ops become raging alcoholics because now even a small drink makes you totally schnockered. You can never, ever safely drink again. And yeah, malnourished for life.

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            1. It’s yet another magic pill. And it’s so seductive that people simply won’t listen to any evidence. Look at how many people are gorging themselves on Ozempic before trying to find out the downside. Some actually use the word “magic” to refer to it.

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              1. Here’s the thing: There are a lot of women out there with PCOS. It’s basically insulin resistance in the ovaries. One of the things it does is make you infertile. Another thing it does is cause weight gain. This was over 10% of women of childbearing age, twenty years ago… likely more now. This is also going to be a non-trivial portion of women seeking radical weight-loss solutions. And the thing is… if you have this problem, have tried to conceive and failed, and then have a treatment that (through one mechanism or another) shoves your metabolism into a low-carb situation (bariatric treatments basically starve you while you’re still eating) that radically lowers your insulin levels… it tends to restart fertility, at least in the short term. I think the rate of women getting knocked up after these treatments is probably way higher than you’d think, because a lot of them had never had to bother with contraceptives before.

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    3. The only reason my grandson exists is because my daughter was unable to find a doctor who would surgically sterilize her when she was young, healthy, and childless. (Nowadays she would have no problem; all she’d have to do is claim to be transgender.) At the time she got married she was 100% sure that she didn’t want children, and would never change her mind. Today she will tell you her son is the best thing that ever happened to her.

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      1. Which is great, and there are lots of stories like that. But there are an equal or greater number of stories of women who have really good reasons to be sterilized at twenty, and had to wait ten years for it. We’re talking about girls with bleeding disorders that make both childbirth and abortions life-threatening, women with physical malformations that make pregnancy dangerous in other ways (spinal deformations, for example) (I know two such who in the meantime had an “oops” kid… and both those kids had serious problems), people who are carriers for serious genetic disorders, people autoimmune conditions… have you seen the stats on autism in the children of mothers with diabetes? And yeah, women with addiction problems should be outright *encouraged* to do so. I don’t care if that adorably damaged kid was the best thing that ever happened to its mother, or its adoptive parents. Kid didn’t deserve that, and it didn’t have to happen.

        I *have* diabetes, I have three kids who are all awesome, and I still think that sterilization should be an easy option for diabetic women, for the good of women and their potential children. I tracked my blood sugars obsessively and painfully through each pregnancy, exercised like my life depended on it, to keep my glucose in a safe range, knew what I was doing, and it still got harder with each kid. Now that I’m over forty (but not menopausal), I don’t think I could do that a fourth time, and I’m kind of terrified of getting pregnant again. On the other hand, I can’t afford to get spayed, but if I get accidentally knocked up, the state will pay for the medical expenses. I’m sure that kid would be awesome, too, but… at my age, and my state of metabolic health, odds are waaaay higher now that there will be some serious things wrong, and it would be unconscionable to try it on purpose.

        It’s an open question whether healthy young women with no physical, genetic, or serious lifestyle problems should have the same access. I’m open to arguments that they shouldn’t. But they’re not the main problem here.

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        1. Not disputing any of that; I was reacting to your suggestion that surgeons be given immunity from lawsuits if the women they sterilize end up regretting it. A healthy childless woman in her teens or early twenties is not in a position to make that decision. Don’t the experts keep telling us that our brains aren’t even fully formed until we’re twenty-five or something like that? Just as minor children should not be allowed to consent to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or the surgical mutilation of their genitalia, so a young healthy childless woman should not be consenting to permanent sterilization — especially when there are other ways to prevent pregnancy.

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          1. All those things. But the reason docs won’t do that surgery for women who really *should* have it, by objective standards most would agree with (not “I’m sure I don’t want kids”)… is because even they can change their minds and feel litigious. I think it’s a risk adult women, and their doctors, should be able to take. And maybe there need to be clear categories for who’s eligible, but if you lied about being an alcoholic to get access, you don’t get to sue later. 

            I don’t think doctors should be transing anyone, but you have to be able to draw a line somewhere, and right now all the reasonable places to draw the line between “you have to be protected for your own good” and “you’re an adult now and I can’t stop you from doing stupid things anymore” fall somewhere between 18 (legal adulthood) and 23 (your divorced parents can’t be held responsible for your health insurance or tuition anymore). 

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  4. So let’s talk about another kind of genetic heritability then …

    Here’s a reference chart you may not understand at first:

    See Figure 1:
    https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/350795/fphar-09-00305-HTML/image_m/fphar-09-00305-g001.jpg

    It’s a reference chart for CYP2D6, a gene locus for the metabolism of several drugs including opioids.

    It comes from this article:
    https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2018.00305/full

    “A” on this chart is what people with normal CYP2D6 have, which is the reference CYP2D locus.

    The second one down in “E”, which is CYP2D6 *36 *10, is what I have to deal with.

    It’s not as bad as a full gene deletion (see *5 or “B”), but it’s pretty bad.

    And here’s how bad it is: there are certain families of opioids that do nothing to nearly nothing for me.

    Tramadol and oxycodone (aka Percocet) do nothing at all for me aside from any paracetamol that’s blended into them, which is at risk of putting me into a literal death spiral because of NAPQI production as a result of paracetamol using up available glutathione reserves.

    Hydrocodone (aka Vicodin) works but on an accelerated time table, and it’s so accelerated that I can’t take it all day because of the paracetamol in the common formulary.

    Ketorolac barely works and after five days I have to be off it unless I want some serious problems.

    In Japan, I can get by on hydromorphone because many Japanese have the same problems, plus hydrocodone has been made illegal in Japan.

    During the recent surgery, it was deemed better for me to stay in a medically induced coma on propofol, which actually does something for me, than to come out of it and have to be on opioids that may or may not work.

    This is something I can apparently get doctors outside the US and especially outside the US insurance systems to understand.

    But if I could get hydrocodone without paracetamol, that would take care of my pain needs in the US as they come up, with of course the risk of becoming part of this thing people like talking about …

    Which is that some well-meaning people have been going on about an “opioid crisis”, and so even if I want Vicodin with paracetamol, it’s absurdly expensive if I can get it at all, with absurd limits on how much of it I can take based on people with a normal CYP2D6 *4 allele or something close to it.

    And so my unconventional take on this emergent “intelligence crisis”: well-meaning people will drive out all of the truly smart people who are able to get away, the people with problems for which they’ve weaponised their own intelligence in order to fight them, and the remaining midwits will proclaim themselves smarter than Wittgenstein and Goethe, all while the engineering works that they are unable to maintain crumble around them.

    Toward this end: I am presently unable to hire doctors within several counties of where I’ve been in the US who are able to interpret and understand the implications of Figure 1 above.

    Instead, despite extensive genetic profiling about this problem, these doctors are too ignorant and too arrogant to stop prescribing the wrong stuff and will not listen to actual experience or evidence.

    And so now instead, I now make trips to Mexico and elsewhere to get what I need, staying over as needed so I don’t have to transit through borders with banned medications, avoiding doctors in the US almost entirely, dropping my once $16k/year barely adequate US health cover to the basics and a really top-notch international travel medical cover package, and leaving me with two lingering questions.

    Does this stand a chance of getting better while I’m alive?

    Will I benefit from trying to remain despite it getting worse?

    Both of which I now regard with a solid and emphatic NO.

    A society has to be smart enough to understand that it has an intelligence problem.

    Without that, the society is not smart enough to get over the abstractional and intellectual barriers that are in the way of developing a certain quality of life.

    Mark Bauerlein’s right, Jonathan Haidt’s right, Greg Lukianoff’s right.

    But the mass of people won’t listen until they’re left wondering why it is that they import all of their technology, medicine, engineering, and so on instead of producing it.

    And I can continue to explain how CYP450 works and how CYP2D6 *36 *10 works for me to under-educated doctors and everyone else until I’m literally blue in the face.

    Or we can go somewhere else where we don’t have to fight entrenched anti-intellectual attitudes masquerading as anti-racism.

    So about 2024 (again) …

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    1. The problem with the US medical system is that it is becoming (or already is) a “color by number” endeavor. The care is standardized and doctors follow a particular workflow. What gets prescribed when is a part of this and the medication you can get is often determined by your insurance company. If you are not average, good luck to you. There is not much room for practicing the art of medicine, the system is simply not set up for independent thinkers. Come to think of it, it is not only medicine that has this problem. Curiously, as much as academics like to go on and on about training students to be critical thinkers, there is little thinking actually happening, unfortunately. There may be a few countries outside of the US where the system is not standardized enough yet, so you can get the care you need. I’m sure that sooner or later they will get some standards implemented there as well.

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    2. I could tell you a hair-curling story about *my entire extended family of over a hundred people* trying to get a proper diabetes diagnosis. Because it turns out that probably more than 5% of diabetics are neither type 1 nor type 2, but something else instead, and that something else is usually a single-mutation dominant genetic disorder that all your kids have a 50% chance of inheriting, so you’d think it’d be important to know about, right? Plus common diabetes meds (metformin) either don’t work, or are actively dangerous (sulfonylureas at standard doses), depending on what type you’ve got.

      But, short version:

      Most *endocrinologists* who deal with diabetes all day every day have never heard of this, and if you suggest you’d like to be tested for it, they will *make fun of you*.

      If you somehow badger them into it, the test costs $1500, your insurance won’t pay, and it only tests for the 3-5 most common types.

      And for years now, it’s been possible to test yourself for all fifteen known variants, without a doctor, using consumer genetics like 23andme plus a simple code-search program that looks for mutations. Less than $300 last I checked. But that’s not “scientific” so your doc won’t even look at the results.

      —-

      PS: I don’t know how opioids work, really, but I’m apparently some kind of freaky hyper-responder. The one time I was given any (codeine cough suppressant), I came pretty close to being Baker-acted for suicidal tendencies. I have never had any such tendencies. Just that one day, with the codeine. Have avoided all such things ever since. God help me if I ever need surgery.

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      1. I also have a very strong reaction to opioids but I don’t know if it’s physical or simply being very attuned to my body and being able to spot something very abnormal.

        As for diabetes, gosh, the state of the medical services on that is terrible. With my first gestational diabetes, I got a severely incompetent “counselor” (who was probably not even a doctor). It took a long and grueling process of self-education to figure out what was true and what wasn’t. Some of the suggestions she gave me were downright criminal. I got a list of heavily processed garbage foods that made absolutely no sense. For most people, it’s extremely hard to defy the medical establishment, so they follow bad advice and live with the consequences.

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        1. The medical establishment is funded by the Coca Cola company, apparently. They’re not allowed to say anything that might damage junkfood sales.

          Meanwhile, the cheap home glucometer, and being able to actually *test for yourself* what will and will not frack your blood sugar, has caused a revolution in diabetes management, for patient smart, motivated, and disciplined enough to ignore everything the doctor says, and make proper use of available tech.

          Many diabetics are doing fairly well these days, but only by completely ignoring their doctors and the ADA, doing their own research, and carefully observing their own results. Everything helpful you get from your doc– testing, drugs, etc.– is almost something you have to lie and manipulate them to get access to. Online, and self-published books (Jenny Ruhl comes to mind) are full of instructions on which official parameters and instructions you should ignore, and how, if you’ve been taking good care of yourself, to make sure your numbers are *bad enough* in official tests that you can get your insurance to cover the medications and supplies you need. It’s that ridiculous.

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    3. Thank you for this comment, Post Alley. It’s truly taking forever to bring what science has already uncovered about genetics into the actual practice of medicine. It’s a product of both lack of intelligence and of ideology because people are terrified of what genetics tells them about the nature of human beings. We have convinced ourselves that humans should control absolutely everything about themselves but genetics says that it’s not possible. And we just can’t accept it.

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  5. BTW …

    Have you read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”?

    Every few generations, some Americans try to drag everyone else back into it.

    In this next telling of it, I suspect the Pirates of Barbary will show up to kidnap Katrina Van Tassel so she may be delivered to a Saudi oil sheikh.

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