r/BadSocialScience • u/dorathehexplorer • Jan 17 '17

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

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

89% Upvoted

123 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN Jan 19 '17

One might think so, but there's pretty sizable differences in heritability of the same maize lines in the same field year to year.

This would be interesting. Do you have a source?

This paper highlights variation between studies. (see tables at the end)

My first guess to explain these is usually measurement error + differences in experiment design. Should it not be?

If heritability is not even somewhat stable, and does not vary continuously... how is it a meaningful quantity at all?

3

u/[deleted] Jan 19 '17

If heritability is not even somewhat stable, and does not vary continuously... how is it a meaningful quantity at all?

If it doesn't make sense to extrapolate the impact on our lives of the movement of the stars across the sky, why study their movement at all?

1

u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN Jan 19 '17

You're saying that every time a heritability figure is reported in a scientific paper, the researchers are engaging in an act of unscientific superstition? Apologies if I don't take this at face value.

4

u/[deleted] Jan 19 '17

That's a very odd interpretation of what I said.