"Go look up twin studies" is a very strange thing to tell someone on a message board in 2026. It's like saying "go look up phlogiston".
"Go look up twin studies" is a very strange thing to tell someone on a message board in 2026. It's like saying "go look up phlogiston".
Fraternal twins reared together: .55 correlation in IQ
Identical twins reared apart: .75 correlation in IQ
And the genetic correlation grows as children age.
No, genetic studies did not "demolish" heritability estimates, they set a floor on them. Genetic studies do not and cannot (currently) predict all phenotypic outcomes, they set the floor on how much variation can be caused by genetic differences.
The genetic predictions don't even directly contradict, never mind demolish, the twin study findings.
The "missing heritability problem" is only a problem if one believes our genetic analysis techniques are comprehensive, but we already know they're not. For example, current methods are extremely limited in detecting gene-gene interactions, which we have good reason to suspect are widespread (otherwise making new genetic drugs would be trivial).
This has come up a bunch on HN and I don't want to rehash dozens of earlier comments, but the search bar will give you plenty of cites.
I'm not sure what you mean by "hereditarian" given that even the genetic studies obviously point to significant heritability.
This is always a funny conversation because on the one side you have people saying "intelligence is both heritable and correlated with nearly every outcome we care about."
On the other hand you have people saying "nuh uh! It's only... medium-high heritability and medium-high correlation with other positive outcomes," as if it makes any material difference to any downstream question.
Again, the search bar will avail, but the answers you're giving here are very early-90s.
Why don't you just share what your estimate is?
Is it zero?
It's totally OK if we're just not going to persuade each other or develop any productive ideas in this thread! I've said all I originally wanted to say.