Comment by xr4ti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xr4ti | Hacker News Reader

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Not sure I agree. Inheritance refers to flow of influence on properties from parent to child. I think anything beyond that high level definition requires additional qualifiers (e.g. genetic heritability). Inheritance is typically not deterministic, even in the case of genetic heritability.

For example, the statement that tall parents will always have tall children is incorrect, though there is a strong bias. I would be curious to see how the probabilistic linkage between parent and child height compares to that for language. My guess is that parent language has a stronger effect than 99.9% of SNPs identified in GWAS.

If you really think about the difference between the two inheritance scenarios you outlined, it's that one mechanism of influence occurs at a scale that readily admits direct observation and perturbation while the other doesn't.

I don't think we (humans) know anywhere near enough about how genes compare and interact with other factors to support an argument either for or against your final statement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability

Heritability has a very specific meaning. The first sentence from that article: "Heritability is a statistic used in the fields of breeding and genetics that estimates the degree of variation in a phenotypic trait in a population that is due to genetic variation between individuals in that population."

The key part in that sentence is "due to genetic variation between individuals in that population".

Yes, there is a very strong relationship between first spoken language of parent and first spoken language of child. But there is no genetic element to that relationship (Asian children adopted by American parents will speak English, not the language of their parents), thus first spoken language is not heritable.

> I don't think we (humans) know anywhere near enough about how genes compare and interact with other factors to support an argument either for or against your final statement.

There is a difference between knowing that an effect exists and knowing how an effect works. We know, via twin studies, that IQ and height are highly heritable (50-80% for IQ; 80% for height), even though we don't know all the genes responsible or the way in which they contribute. Similarly, wealth/financial status have been shown to be heritable. Siblings raised apart will have levels of wealth that are more similar than random strangers. Identical twins raised apart, even more so.

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