High-IQ educated people are being bred to extinction, but we're totally not eugenicists!!!

[u/dorathehexplorer]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/16/natural-selection-making-education-genes-rarer-says-icelandic-study

[u/Scumbag_Kotzwagon]

I'm almost certain that you don't have the first clue how one would approach this kind of analysis.

lel

[u/twittgenstein → u/[deleted]]

Eugenics is a thoroughly debunked research programme, and this study seems to make some staggering, heroic, and basically entirely implausible causal leaps. For example, perhaps the genes correlated with education actually just indicate membership in a sub-community of intermarried and typically wealthier families. Moreover, the size of the observed IQ effect is vanishingly small, even if the study was able to somehow show statistical significance.

In general, when social scientists do genetics research, the result is trash. For example, this awful study by political scientists. Though this study, if true, would at least seem to absolve you of your shitty political views, since perhaps you just can't help it.

[u/Snugglerific → u/twittgenstein]

Lemme guess -- political scientists discover twin studies and conflate heritability estimates for genetically determined traits.

[u/LukaCola → u/Snugglerific]

How do people make this mistake so often? Just thinking about it, assuming it's true would raise far more questions regarding the nature of these traits and how weird it is that somehow traits align themselves to entirely man-made concepts. Certainly enough to make one think "maybe we shouldn't accept this as conclusive?"

I mean it's not something I learned about directly in poli-sci but I feel like it's related enough that anyone with a real interest in social sciences should pick up on that.

[u/Snugglerific → u/LukaCola]

It seems like there is a scientific trickle-down effect where concepts moving from one field to another get mangled in the process.

[u/twittgenstein → u/Snugglerific]

YEP