What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 4 ~ the heritability fallacy

I have discovered you cannot question claims of hereditarians without being insulted on social media. 

In the image below, from Bluesky, Abdel Abdellaoui patronizes me in response to Part 3 of this series "What happened to Adam Rutherford?" 

I have been insulted by Adam Rutherford, Razib Khan and Jesse Singal. 

They never explain why they have a problem with me or my work. 

At least Emil Kirkegaard gives some reason, as feeble as it is - because I have a website where I critique Steven Pinker:

It's funny that a Neo-Nazi like Kirkegaard would claim anybody else is unfit for society. 

Kirkegaard is touchy about criticisms of Steven Pinker, probably because Pinker has been an influence on Kirkegaard and Pinker has helped to mainstream Kirkegaard's Aporia Magazine. 

A final note about Kirkegaard's attack - I haven't had a cat since my poor Mr. Fuzz died in 2021. Although to be fair, it's likely Kirkegaard called me Cat lady not because he cares about my pet ownership status but because Emil Kirkegaard is a misogynist. Anyway, I think I've made it clear I prefer to be called Catwoman.

Now, could there be something in the genetic makeup of hereditarians that makes them attack anybody who dares to question their claims? I don't think it's genetic, I think it's social. I think they believe they are on the path to Great Man of Science status. Hell, Rutherford is at least halfway there, he's had many TV shows in England. 

And who am I to dare question these Great Men? I certainly don't have my own TV show. 

I think I've made a pretty good case that the quest for Great Man of Science status was the reason E. O. Wilson decided to promote hereditarianism - he wanted to become as famous as Arthur Jensen, and he saw hereditarianism as the quickest route.

And it worked like gangbusters.

Which is why Wilson (and Jensen) are so inspirational to hereditarians, and likely why Razib Khan attacked a Scientific American author for daring to point out - very gently - the embarrassing fact of Wilson's racism. 

An attack that Abdel Abdellaoui joined. 

And not only Abdelloaui - two other co-authors of the Rutherford paper agreed to sign on to racist Razib Khan's attack on Scientific American for daring to discuss E. O. Wilson's racism: Hilary Martin and Peter M. Visscher. 

Rutherford tweeted an acknowledgement of Wilson's racism (see above.) I wonder if he had any discussions with Abdellaoui, Martin or Visscher about their support for Razib Khan's campaign against Scientific American. But I doubt it. These hereditarians seem remarkably incurious about the racism-adjacent activities of the people they work with.

Since I posted Part 3, Abdellaoui has blocked me on Bluesky. This is how hereditarians deal with questions about their claims: they refuse to discuss them.

So now let's talk about heritability.

David Sepkoski was a member of one of two
research teams who wrote about E. O. Wilson's racism.

In 2016, David S. Moore and David Shenk recommended that "heritability" no longer be used to discuss human behavioral genetics in their paper "The heritability fallacy" (my highlight) :

The term‘heritability,’ as it is used today in human behavioral genetics, is one of the most misleading in the history of science. Contrary to popular belief, the measurable heritability of a trait does not tell us how‘genetically inheritable’ that trait is. Further, it does not inform us about what causes a trait, the relative influence of genes in the development of a trait, or the relative influence of the environment in the development of a trait. Because we already know that genetic factors have significant influence on the development of all human traits, measures of heritability are of little value, except in very rare cases. We, therefore, suggest that continued use of the term does enormous damage to the public understanding of how human beings develop their individual traits and identities.

Nobody paid any attention to them. Certainly not the authors of the Rutherford paper who write (my highlight):

The considerable heritability of intelligence—that is, the extent to which genetic differences explain individual differences within a population—and its increase from childhood (about 0.43) to adulthood (about 0.65) have become among the most replicated findings in twin research...

The confusion over "heritable" is demonstrated in this blog post by psychologist Eric Turkheimer (my highlights and bold):

But the real reason I am irritated by the way Pinker and Plomin talk about the three laws is more fundamental. Given that they both disagree with much of what I have said over the years, why are they so interested in the three laws in the first place? The reason is that a superficial reading of the first law, “Everything is heritable” sounds like it might be an endorsement of the kind of “genes make us who we are” hereditarianism that they both endorse. But if you actually read the paper (available here) you see that the theme of the paper is exactly the opposite. The paper is an explanation of why the quantitative genetic statistic called heritability, when applied to humans via twin studies, does not lead to any kind of deterministic hereditarianism, or to a contention that families don’t matter, or any of the other things that Plomin and Pinker have argued for over the years.

Plomin is one of the sources used in the Rutherford paper. 

Turkheimer could be seen on Twitter arguing with Kathryn Paige Harden, another source for the Rutherford paper, over the term. Turkheimer notes that one of Harden's authorities is Visscher, one of the co-authors of the Rutherford paper. (I mention him above, he was one of the signatories of racist Razib Khan's defense of racist E. O. Wilson.) In a paper co-written by Visscher, Heritability in the genomics era—concepts and misconceptions, the description says: Heritability allows a comparison of the relative importance of genes and environment to the variation of traits within and across populations.

It's striking that even people who are involved professionally with the term "heritability" don't agree on the definition. It's not surprising that those of us outside the field find it hard to understand.

But Rutherford certainly does want his claims to be understood which is why he commissioned a cartoon based on his paper. And the cartoon explains exactly what the hereditarians believe: that we live in a meritocracy now and so anybody who is doing poorly has only their genes to blame. 

This is a belief shared by many racists, including Andrew Sullivan and Charles Murray. More about that in part 5.