A few people have pointed me to Charles Murray’s comment at The Enterprise Blog, The Debate about Heritability of General Intelligence Radically Narrows, which alludes to the recent finding of genomic confirmation of the behavior genetic heritability measure for intelligence. Murray indicates that this should end the “debate” on the heritability of intelligence as a quantitative trait. As I implied earlier much of this debate had more to do with rhetoric and ideology than reality, in that I doubt many people support a very low heritability measure for intelligence ( < ~0.30) in developed societies when they don’t have strong ideological commitments. These commitments being that social policy can homogenize environments enough that only the genetic components of variation of a trait value will be important in the future, so that heritability values will go from ~0 to ~1.0.
At this point some of you may be rather confused. What I’m saying here is that the logical end point of a quasi-”blank slate” policy position is the diminution of environmental impacts so that only genes matter. For a complex trait like intelligence this final state of ~100% of the variation being due to genes is probably ...
