All human behavioral traits are heritable
Thursday, March 5th, 2020
First law: All human behavioral traits are heritable.
Second law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
Third law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
Murray adds some related findings:
Whether the topic was a Big Five characteristic such as extraversion or neuroticism or more specific characteristics such as tolerance, sense of well-being, or alienation, twin studies of heritability kept coming up with correlations for MZ twins that were more than twice the correlations for DZ twins, leaving no role for the shared environment.
[…]
The literature on shared environment, nonshared environment, and heritability tells us that a family’s SES (income, parental education and occupation) is unimportant in explaining the cognitive abilities and personality traits that parents try hardest to promote.
[…]
The bulk of the variance in success in life is unexplained by either nature or nurture. Researchers are lucky if they explain half of the variance in educational attainment with measures of abilities and socioeconomic background. They’re lucky if they can explain even a quarter of the variance in earned income with such measures. The takeaway for thinking about our futures as individuals is that we do not live in a deterministic world ruled by either genes or social background, let alone by race or gender.
I take it for granted that morphic fields are real and physically verifiable. (That fact usually gets me excluded from discussions of genetics.) If Rupert Sheldrake is right and morphic fields are real then they probably get observed by geneticists who don’t believe in them. Then they probably produce field – mediated effects that are mistaken for genetic inheritance effects. But since most geneticists take it for granted that every sentence c containing “Rupert Sheldrake” can be dismissed, I don’t expect geneticists to start considering my opinion any time soon.
Sheldrake’s morphic fields appear to be a rationalization (or perhaps a specific instantiation) of extradimensional patterns commonly expressed metaphorically as angels, demons, spirits, gods, Old Ones, and a great cosmic battle over the soul of man.
These metaphors occur in every tradition besides the scientific materialism, a radical metaphysical break, perhaps without equal in world history.
It would be funny if everyone else was right.