http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
I post these links to HN from time to time, because they are from top-notch authors on heritability research and join issue directly with a very common misconception about what heritability figures show about human behavioral traits. Simply put, whatever the numerical figure is for heritability of this or that human behavioral trait says NOTHING about how malleable (changeable or controllable by environment) the trait is. Let me be clear: all human behavioral characteristics are heritable, with heritabilities above the theoretical minimum of 0 and always strictly less than the theoretical maximum of 1. But no matter what the calculated heritability is of a specific trait, we know NOTHING about how subject that trait is to change under the influence of carefully planned environmental interventions. That is a separate line of investigation, not logically or factually related at all to the heritability calculated by the usual methodologies in studies of correlations of traits among closely related and less closely related individuals. The references provide more details.
From the article: "When I ask myself this question, I think my actual political views would change primarily with my beliefs about how likely government interventions are in practice to do more harm than good. I think my libertarianism rests chiefly on the empirical proposition—a factual belief which is either false or true, depending on how the universe actually works—that 90% of the time you have a bright idea like 'offer government mortgage guarantees so that more people can own houses,' someone will somehow manage to screw it up, or there’ll be side effects you didn’t think about, and most of the time you’ll end up doing more harm than good, and the next time won’t be much different from the last time." Similarly, my views on politics and economics are heavily influenced by real-world experience, particularly the real-world experience of living in Taiwan, and visiting Hong Kong and China, in the early 1980s when those three culturally similar areas lived under very different government policies. Government policies make a difference. Actuality trumps theory in political science and economics.