Emil O W Kirkegaard

You have to expect that significant genetic influences pushing in a given direction _usually_ result in the opposite effect. Why would that happen? Reich is lying, of course, and you prefer that.

Do you think that there are literally no possible environmental shifts with large interactions with between-group genetic variation for intelligence? I’m not sure there’s any other quantitative trait in any species where we could make that kind of statement

Possible, sure. Iodine is a powerful example. But do you really think that genetic tendencies are, for the most part, going to point in the opposite direction to what we actually observe? Which is what Reich said?

Sure, they could. It’s not like people get a Nature paper when they find something like that in a common-garden experiment. But more importantly I think the question is obviously stupid

The only reason people care is that they hear “genetic” and they think “immutable”

In an ultimate sense, nothing is immutable. In a proximate sense, nobody knows how to close gaps. We've tried, you know.

I’m not trying to convince you that these things are mutable. I want to make sure that we agree that whether variance in a trait is genetic has almost no bearing on that trait’s mutability

if there's lots of variance and it's all environmental, obviously you can do something by changing the environment. If it's mostly genetic, less likely. I mean, we could talk about the wonders of treating PKU with a low-phenylalanine diet, but very few