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Comment by sethev | Hacker News Reader

> whether or not you wear lipstick has high heritability.

Think about this example. The genetic factor here is massive, much higher than anyone is claiming for IQ. Can you imagine how hopelessly lost you would be if your analysis of lipstick distribution in the population focused on its heritability and link to genetics?

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An even bigger issue you immediately run into in these conversations: someone will say "I don't mean heritability that way, I mean genetic heritability". Which, whatever, except: now you've discarded all the science. The papers you'd draw these numbers from are referring to heritability in its technical sense, not in some message board sense.

Yes. I mean, either you're talking about statistical properties of a population or you're talking about something else. These discussions usually devolve into "something else" almost immediately.

I mean I still fail to see how comparing these three scenarios

- genetic twins separated at birth

- genetic siblings raised in same household

- genetically unrelated same age siblings adopted in the same household

are teasing out anything but an underlying genetic component and reproducing in studies

You can have intuitions about any of these issues, but you can't use heritability research as evidence for them without understanding the technical meaning of "heritability". That's all that's being said here.

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