At what level is racialism accepted in the scientific community?

[Chief_Pedant]

@iiandyiiii

It’s “laughably farcical” how you keep bringing this up as if it’s somehow a bombshell. No one denies this – this is the fucking problem we’re trying to explain. The question is “why does the gap, including a gap once SES is taken into account, exist?”. The existence of the gap when SES is controlled for says absolutely nothing, besides that SES is not the whole story, about what causes the gap. It provides no evidence whatsoever that genes are the answer.

So stop bringing up this thing that nobody denies. It offers nothing to this conversation!

I recognize that you are uncomfortable being constantly reminded of the central sticking point for egalitarians who want to start from a premise that genes are an unlikely or unsatisfactory explanation.

But there’s a reason you are trying to explain this stark reality and coming up with silly notions like the idea that (unknown) teachers shit on (unknown) privileged black students.

Those kind of patently absurd just-so fantasy stories are what you are down to because you determine, a priori, that “there is no evidence for genes.”

The stubbornly persistent gap when socioeconomic factors are accounted for IS the evidence for genetic differences.

The gap is not due to lack of opportunity. It is not due to an inferior education. It is not due to uneducated parents. It is not due to cultural perspectives on the value of an education. It is not due to lack of resources. It is not due laziness of effort. It is not due to teachers shitting on black students.

Consider for a moment a practical example repeated in thousands of workplaces. Firefighters need to take an exam for a small body of material to see who might be a candidate for advancement. The exam has been outsourced to an expert third party whose sole responsibility is to make sure that it is purged of any race bias and accurately and fairly represents the required content.

What happens? Black firefighters score more poorly than their counterparts. Surprise. About as surprising as is the NBA draft outcome by race. There’s no shenanigans here. There’s no antecedant dearth of educational opportunity somehow limiting the ability to master and reproduce grasp of a defined body of material (given to all test-takers in advance, and distributed at the same time).

Now that little microcosm (famously going to SCOTUS as Ricci v deStefano) is repeated thousands and thousands of times across the workplace and within academia. And the pattern is so stubbornly resistant to every effort to avoid it that no one has any answers anymore on how to fix it. The CEOs for Facebook, Google and Apple-and a thousand other companies–wring their hands on the lopsided race-based representation that happens when aspiring tech candidates are given psychometric or work-skill exams instead of being hired based on academic backgrounds or resumes. What happens is that two candidates who have been ushered through the same college-level schooling opportunity have markedly different outcomes. So markedly different that for FB, the disproportionate representation ratio is 120:1, asians:blacks.

Surprise. About as surprising as finding out the next crop of Olympians in sprinting will be over represented by blacks.

But of course, the explanation isn’t likely to be genes, because we haven’t identified which exact genes. :dubious: Without those exact genes, it’s probably some nurturing variable closeted away from the thousands of researchers desperate to unlock it, and figure out the way to eliminate that pattern once and for all.

And so as far as genes go as a putative explanation, we’ll just make it impolitic to even state the case for genes bluntly so that everyone can continue to pretend some undiscovered nurturing variables are Right Around the Corner.

[iiandyiiii]

@Chief_Pedant

I recognize that you are uncomfortable being constantly reminded of the central sticking point for egalitarians who want to start from a premise that genes are an unlikely or unsatisfactory explanation.

Nope, that’s not it. Just tired of reading the same shit I’ve read a hundred times. It offers nothing to this discussion at all – it’s not in dispute.

But there’s a reason you are trying to explain this stark reality and coming up with silly notions like the idea that (unknown) teachers shit on (unknown) privileged black students.

Those kind of patently absurd just-so fantasy stories are what you are down to because you determine, a priori, that “there is no evidence for genes.”

As the APA says, there is no support for the genetic explanation. The hypotheses of myself and others are reasonable, though not proven. Just because you think racism is over, and opportunity for achievement is truly equal does not mean that it is.

The stubbornly persistent gap when socioeconomic factors are accounted for IS the evidence for genetic differences.

No, that’s the problem we’re trying to solve. Why does this gap exist when SES is controlled for? The existence of the gap is not evidence as to its cause.

The gap is not due to lack of opportunity. It is not due to an inferior education. It is not due to uneducated parents. It is not due to cultural perspectives on the value of an education. It is not due to lack of resources. It is not due laziness of effort. It is not due to teachers shitting on black students.

Your fantasy of equalized opportunity has no bearing on the real world.

Consider for a moment a practical example repeated in thousands of workplaces. Firefighters need to take an exam for a small body of material to see who might be a candidate for advancement. The exam has been outsourced to an expert third party whose sole responsibility is to make sure that it is purged of any race bias and accurately and fairly represents the required content.

What happens? Black firefighters score more poorly than their counterparts. Surprise. About as surprising as is the NBA draft outcome by race. There’s no shenanigans here. There’s no antecedant dearth of educational opportunity somehow limiting the ability to master and reproduce grasp of a defined body of material (given to all test-takers in advance, and distributed at the same time).

And there’s no support for the assertion that the cause of this is inferior genes.

You can feel free to fantasize and babble in the corner; the rest of us will wait until we know something about the genes for high and low intelligence before we state who is more likely to have these genes.

[Chief_Pedant]

Originally Posted by Chief Pedant View Post
*“…50 years of research into the extent to which actual genes vary among populations, actual genetic clustering by race, human migration patterns creating broad divisions and isolation, and no closing of outcome performance differences despite the most intense efforts–including controlling for SES and educational opportunity, which was the “obvious” reason advanced in the last century until it crapped out as an explanation.”
*

@iiandyiiii

The efforts have not been “intense”. They’ve been feeble, and only for a few paltry decades.

This pattern is not “stubbornly persistent” – it’s only existed for a few decades of decent testing, and the testing has only been in a few parts of the world (and a few political systems).

Good point…a half century of study is not nearly enough to uncover nurturing reasons buried as deeply as these must be.

Nor are millions of administered exams to tens of millions of participants a broad enough base to uncover a pattern.

And any day now, in some as-yet-unidentified political system, the whole pattern will reverse. Maybe even by the next Olympics?

[iiandyiiii]

@Chief_Pedant

Good point…a half century of study is not nearly enough to uncover nurturing reasons buried as deeply as these must be.

No, the few decades and weak studies (much of it from questionable sources like Rushton and Lynn) done on this subject have not nearly been enough. The history of racial discrimination is very long and very complex.

Nor are millions of administered exams to tens of millions of participants a broad enough base to uncover a pattern.

Huh? Obviously a pattern has been uncovered. What the hell are you talking about here? Who says there’s no pattern? I assume this is just another CP trademark straw man.

And any day now, in some as-yet-unidentified political system, the whole pattern will reverse. Maybe even by the next Olympics?

Considering that, by some measures, the gap has shrunk, it’s foolish to be sure it is immutable. Especially considering the powerful affect racial discrimination still plays in our society, even reduced as it is.

[Evil_Economist]

@Chief_Pedant

Originally Posted by Chief Pedant View Post
*“…50 years of research into the extent to which actual genes vary among populations, actual genetic clustering by race, human migration patterns creating broad divisions and isolation, and no closing of outcome performance differences despite the most intense efforts–including controlling for SES and educational opportunity, which was the “obvious” reason advanced in the last century until it crapped out as an explanation.”
*

Reading the cites posted in this thread (by people who seem to assume that we won’t read them) I find the following:

The issue is whether this 15-point mean difference is due almost entirely to genetic differences between blacks and whiles, due almost entirely to environmental differences, or due to a significant amount of both. It may be noted that few, if any, serious researchers support the first of these positions, that the IQ difference is all or almost all genetic.

This cite was posted *in support of *a genetic cause for the testing difference.

So, in a survey of the literature, Mackenzie couldn’t name a single “serious” researcher who thought the test gap difference was due mostly or entirely to genetics. I’ve noticed that you have a tendency to forget things people tell you, but maybe you should try to remember that.

[Chuck11]

@Evil_Economist

Always interesting to read your and Chief Pedant’s cites; which for some reason never quite seem to say what you claim they say.

For example, you say:
But for some reason the cite itself says:

That’s not even fucking close!
Whereas the cite itself says:

Number of times the words “IQ” or “intelligence” appear in your cite: zero. Whoops.
I don’t have access to either of those cites, so based on my experience with you, I will not accept that they say what you claim they say. In fact, I will not accept any cite from you that doesn’t have the original paper in full, so don’t bother linking to any more.

Uh, no.

I linked to:

Gullickson, A. O. (2004). Amalgamations, New and Old: The Stratification of America’s Mixed Black/White Population (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley).
&
Kreisman, D., & Rangel, M. A. (2013). On the blurring of the color line: Wages and employment for Black males of different skin tones.

Both studies look at the NLSY97; both used the AFQT/ASVAB as a measure of cognitive ability. Whether they stated that the AFQT/ASVAB was a measure of intelligence is immaterial, because it’s accepted as a reliable IQ proxy in the psychometric literature. In table 3.2, the former shows that “biracial” individuals fall intermediate to mono-racial ones. The author latter controlled for grades and school attendance, which reduced the W-BW, but not BW-B difference. But from this one can infer nothing regarding causation since these outcomes are largely antecedent to cognitive differences. It’s simply ridiculous that you would bring this up. As for the latter, the figure I was referring to seems to have been deleted from the working paper. Luckily they can be found elsewhere. Here, on the left were the between family regression lines for color and AFQT. (Color isn’t significantly associated with CA within families, as one might expect in the case of inheritance.)

So, wrong again.

[Chuck11]

[QUOT*E=Chuck11;17664956] Luckily they can be found elsewhere.
[/QUOTE]

Meaning the associations, not Kreisman and Rangle’s figure. That was in their draft paper and was apparently not included in the published.

[Chuck11]

@Evil_Economist

Read this cite too. Here’s what it actually says:
It’s slightly sad that you come in here claiming that the evidence supports a genetic basis for race IQ differences, and your own cites that you claim support you are telling you that there’s no evidence for that. Makes me wonder how you developed your beliefs, that are so at odds with the papers you cite.

We’ve gone over this before.

I cite an environmental leaning author regarding issue X because I image that you would be less suspicious of him/her regarding that point made, and then you, unable to refute the point, turn around and reply that the author leans environmentally.

Comical.

As for expert opinions, we already discussed this. In the latest survey (conducted around 2013), the majority of responding intelligence researchers agreed that the B/W IQ differential has a genetic basis. The results mirror those from the last survey on the issue 30 years ago.

I will say that the paper did have an interesting discussion of the Eyferth Study. I’ll add that to the list of papers that uniformly and universally conclude that there is no genetic basis for IQ differences among the races. For those keeping score, that’s 100% of all papers that show this.

Uh, no.

For one meta-analysis. Here were biracial scores from studies published between 1960 and 2005, relating to the matter:

Biracial-White
Study……………….N…….d
Scarr et al. (1994)……55……0.66
Willerman et al. (1974).129……0.3
Eyferth (1961)……….177….0.05
Harrison et al. (2001)…128….0.32
Gullickson (2004)………88……0.46
N-Weighted……………577….0.29

Biracial-Black
Study……………… .N………d
Scarr et al. (1994)……55…….0.55
Willerman et al. (1974)…129……0.55
Harrison et al. (2001)…128……0.51
Gullickson (2004)………88…….0.49
Moore (1986)……………31…….0.1
N-Weighted…………….431……0.49

Score from 1910 to 1960 show the same effect.

I have to say, though, that you are proficient at motivated reasoning, if not logical.
.

[Chuck11]

@Evil_Economist

Not a single one of these cites has the full paper. Once again, based on the fact that you have repeatedly been less than truthful about what your cites actually say, I will not accept these “cites” as evidence.

So you failed to recognize that the AFQT/ASVAB was a CAT and it’s my fault?

For those keeping score, not a single one of Chuck11’s cites actually supported his position.

After dismissing the 16 studies in Shuey’s (1966), of course, 13 of which showed a CA advantage for lighter and/or whiter AAs. Whatever, you can just check the General Social Survey:
http://sda.berkeley.edu/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=gss12

For color-IQ

Dependent: Wordsum (a vocabulary test)
Column: Color (interviewer assessed skin color in 2012)
Filter: Race (2) (black)

For mixed race, use the RACECEN1/2/3 variables.

Let me know what you find.

[Chuck11]

@iiandyiiii

No. There’s no standard, accepted measure of motivation, self-esteem, self-confidence, etc.

Uh, no. There are well validated, standardized measures such as the Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale, which are roughly equally predictive of outcomes across populations. Based on such measures, and contrary to many popular predictions, African Americans do not show lower levels of motivation, self-esteem, and self-confidence than Whites. But ok, we can play story time. I hypothesize that, relative to African Americans, Whites are depressed in M. And that controlling for M, the Black-White gaps is 50% larger. Unfortunately, there’s no standard, accepted measure of M, so we can’t test my M hypothesis. But I’m sure it’s correct.

I hypothesize that the experience of being black in America includes many obstacles to achievement (academic and otherwise) that non-black people do not face, including things like media depictions, role models, day-to-day racism, law enforcement bias, lowered expectations, peer pressure, home environment, and many, many other factors, including ones that, most likely, no one has thought of.

Environmental factors that aren’t shared by sibs (E in an ACE model) can be ruled out since these types of factors don’t induce the type of difference that the B/W IQ gap represents. For example, non-shared environmental factors (E) don’t induce longitudinally stable differences, but the B/W gap exhibits a high degree of such stability on the inter-individual level. In behavioral genetic terms the B/W gap is due to genes and/or shared environment – the stuff sibs inherit. As I noted, biometric analysis implicates some genes.

[Evil_Economist]

@Chuck11

Uh, no.

I linked to:

Gullickson, A. O. (2004). Amalgamations, New and Old: The Stratification of America’s Mixed Black/White Population (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley).
&
Kreisman, D., & Rangel, M. A. (2013). On the blurring of the color line: Wages and employment for Black males of different skin tones.

Both studies look at the NLSY97; both used the AFQT/ASVAB as a measure of cognitive ability. Whether they stated that the AFQT/ASVAB was a measure of intelligence is immaterial, because it’s accepted as a reliable IQ proxy in the psychometric literature. In table 3.2, the former shows that “biracial” individuals fall intermediate to mono-racial ones. The author latter controlled for grades and school attendance, which reduced the W-BW, but not BW-B difference. But from this one can infer nothing regarding causation since these outcomes are largely antecedent to cognitive differences. It’s simply ridiculous that you would bring this up. As for the latter, the figure I was referring to seems to have been deleted from the working paper. Luckily they can be found elsewhere. Here, on the left were the between family regression lines for color and AFQT. (Color isn’t significantly associated with CA within families, as one might expect in the case of inheritance.)

So, wrong again.

Nope, not going to accept your summary of what you think your cites say. No offense, but your history of consistent misrepresentation means that I simply won’t accept a claim from you without a link to the full paper.

[Evil_Economist]

@Chuck11

We’ve gone over this before.

I cite an environmental leaning author regarding issue X because I image that you would be less suspicious of him/her regarding that point made, and then you, unable to refute the point, turn around and reply that the author leans environmentally.

Comical.

As for expert opinions, we already discussed this. In the latest survey (conducted around 2013), the majority of responding intelligence researchers agreed that the B/W IQ differential has a genetic basis. The results mirror those from the last survey on the issue 30 years ago.

Uh, no.

For one meta-analysis. Here were biracial scores from studies published between 1960 and 2005, relating to the matter:

Biracial-White
Study……………….N…….d
Scarr et al. (1994)……55……0.66
Willerman et al. (1974).129……0.3
Eyferth (1961)……….177….0.05
Harrison et al. (2001)…128….0.32
Gullickson (2004)………88……0.46
N-Weighted……………577….0.29

Biracial-Black
Study……………… .N………d
Scarr et al. (1994)……55…….0.55
Willerman et al. (1974)…129……0.55
Harrison et al. (2001)…128……0.51
Gullickson (2004)………88…….0.49
Moore (1986)……………31…….0.1
N-Weighted…………….431……0.49

Score from 1910 to 1960 show the same effect.

I have to say, though, that you are proficient at motivated reasoning, if not logical.
.

See above, I don’t really care to read anything you write here unless you link to the actual full paper supporting your claims (which by the way had better have been published in a legitimate journal), so that I can at least entertain myself by seeing how your claims differ from the author’s claims.

[Evil_Economist]

@Chuck11

So you failed to recognize that the AFQT/ASVAB was a CAT and it’s my fault?

Yes, it’s your fault. When you consistently misrepresent what your cites say, I won’t accept your summary of them. Link to the actual full paper that you’re citing. No excerpts, no summaries, no links to books that I’ll have to pay to read will be accepted.

From people who have a history of being truthful about what their cites say, I’ll accept their summary. That’s not you.

[Chief_Pedant]

@Evil_Economist

So, in a survey of the literature, Mackenzie couldn’t name a single “serious” researcher who thought the test gap difference was due mostly or entirely to genetics. I’ve noticed that you have a tendency to forget things people tell you, but maybe you should try to remember that.

I think this is true, if by “serious researcher” you mean a publicly-funded one responsible to an academic community. Any public-facing statement that blunt would kill a career, on the spot.

Bruce Lahn suddenly decided overnight that MCPH1 haplogroup variant D wasn’t worth pursuing, and all he had done was speculate that, because MCPH1 is involved in neurobiological function, and because the D variant was so highly penetrated into eurasian populations, maybe it was worth pursuing as a gene potentially related to intelligence to see how it might work…turns out the whole topic of how genes which differ by populations and might have a role in “intelligence” was not worth pursuing.

There is no conspiracy on the part of academia to literally hide hard facts. But there is certainly an awareness that how we state things, particularly when they are distilled into headlines, is profoundly important. And there is also an awareness that the subtleties around a complex topic will not even be stated the same way by everyone.

For example, imagine if we said “black,” instead of “a socially arbitrary population grouping established by identifying recent ancestral source genes for the predominance of a genetic admixture using DNA microsatellite markers and SNPs to reflect a continent-level clustering previous to the migration anchor points at the mtDNA L3/M-N split…” and so on. Splitters would be appropriately enraged (as they are now). “Black is not a race. There is more genetic diversity…Race is not biologically defined by any genetic marker…” blah blah blah and with good reason.

So the academic approach is a follows:
Study a topic carefully, and present a narrow conclusion using all terms as sensitively as possible. Keep way under the radar for public-facing statements about differences among races.

What have scientists said so far, out loud?

1. Highly privileged blacks significantly underperform their academic peers, to such an extent that those outcomes are barely on par with the lowest socioeconomic tiers from other race groupings.
2. Genes drive functional outcomes, including outcomes for appearance and physiology, including neurophysiology
3. Human migration patterns and evolution have driven gene frequencies to be different among clusters such as pre/post out-of-africa groupings
4. We have not identified the specific gene patterns which drive average outcome differences for academic skillsets. We have not identified specific nurturing variables which drive those average outcome differences. Therefore, the academic world should remain silent on which of these–nurturing or nature–contributes which proportion of the average outcome difference.

Since it is highly unlikely that every possible permutation of geneset will be studied for its effect on every neurobiological skillset outcome, I think we can rest easy that no scientist who wants to remain in the field will make a publicly-facing summary statement favoring a genetic explanation, even if they privately hold such a summary deduction.

Ultimately each individual will have to decide if they want to pursue the topic enough to come up with their own conclusions, and among the decision points will be to see if the evidence for nurturing variables is more persuasive than is the evidence for genetic variables.

[Paranoid_Randroid]

@Chuck11

Kreisman, D., & Rangel, M. A. (2013). On the blurring of the color line: Wages and employment for Black males of different skin tones.

[…]

As for the latter, the figure I was referring to seems to have been deleted from the working paper. Luckily they can be found elsewhere. Here, on the left were the between family regression lines for color and AFQT. (Color isn’t significantly associated with CA within families, as one might expect in the case of inheritance.)

Help me out here. Looking through the paper I don’t see any discussion that would validate your original claim, viz.,

Plus the more recent studies replicating the findng that skin color predicts IQ in the AA population.

the wording of which makes that (falsely) sound like the major point of the study in the first place. Am I missing something or did the authors not just remove the figure, but also scrub away all of the relevant discussion? And if they did have such a figure in an earlier version of the working paper, why would it be especially relevant to cite one figure from a paper by two economists on an only marginally related thesis?

Edit: Also, you write "Luckily they can be found elsewhere”, referring to the missing table[s?]. Those aren’t the same tables as you suggest were in the original working paper, presumably?

[Chuck11]

@Paranoid_Randroid

Help me out here. Looking through the paper I don’t see any discussion that would validate your original claim, viz.,

Kreisman and Rangel found that IQ (AFQT scores) correlated with color in the AA population. In the draft version of the paper, they showed this figure. The sample sizes were small at the tails, so the apparent non-linearity was likely due to error. Anyways, the results are easy to replicate. The authors discuss some of their findings here:

Our preliminary results show that most of the differences in labor market outcomes among individuals of different skin-color can be explained away by differences in the amount of skills they bring to the market. Nonetheless, there are differences in the rate of return to investment in those skills for dark and light-skinned individuals of the same racial group. The version new version of our exercises attacks the heart of this matter by investigating the investment process of families with sibling that “look” different.

By “skills they bring to the market” they mean AFQT scores. They interpret the results from a human capital investment/environmental position. As noted, above I agree that this is a tenable explanation. The finding of an AFQT x color correlation is nonetheless consistent with a genetic hypothesis.

I have no idea why the deleted the figure from their final paper. Possibly because they decided to do a follow up paper. If you really want, I could dig it up.

the wording of which makes that (falsely) sound like the major point of the study in the first place.

I have no idea why you would interpret what I said this way. I was citing a paper regarding results presented in it. This is common practice. It would simply be tedious to note e.g., “the authors present the findings in figure A3; they do not discuss them in detail”. No one does this. Look at a typical meta-analysis in which authors dig through papers looking for results in whatever way they are presented and combine them. No one ever said: “the original authors did not discuss these results with respect to our usage.”

Am I missing something or did the authors not just remove the figure, but also scrub away all of the relevant discussion? And if they did have such a figure in an earlier version of the working paper, why would it be especially relevant to cite one figure from a paper by two economists on an only marginally related thesis?

Because data is data and this data point supports what I was saying: that IQ correlated with color in the AA population. In the same way I would cite this paperregarding a correlation between income/education/occupation and ancestry – despite it not being the focus of the paper.

Edit: Also, you write "Luckily they can be found elsewhere”, referring to the missing table[s?]. Those aren’t the same tables as you suggest were in the original working paper, presumably?

I attached a pic above.

[Chuck11]

@Chuck11

Kreisman and Rangel found that IQ (AFQT scores) correlated with color in the AA population. In the draft version of the paper, they showed this figure.

To be clearer, the draft version was:

Kreisman, D., & Rangel, M. A. (2011). The Effect of Skin Color on Wages and Employment for Black Males. The published was: Kreisman, D., & Rangel, M. A. (2013). On the blurring of the color line: Wages and employment for Black males of different skin tones.

The first included a table A3, which had the following caption:

“Figure A3: Mean HGC and AFQT by skin color rating, black males with wage.
Plot of mean HGC and AFQT by skin color ratings for 697 black male respondents with a skin color rating and at least one valid wage. Skin colors 1-3 and 9-10 are combined for adequate sample size. AFQT is normalized to a Z-score for all black and white males with a valid labor market entry date. HGC is the highest grade the respondent ever completed.”

The figure presented (linked to above) showed a clear, though hardy perfect, correlation between AFQT and color. When I say “the authors found a correlation” I mean “they presented a graph which showed an association” and “they found that AFQT explained some of the wage-color association, which logically implies that AFQT is correlated with both color and wages”.

[Evil_Economist]

@Chuck11

The figure presented (linked to above) showed a clear, though hardy perfect, correlation between AFQT and color. When I say “the authors found a correlation” I mean “they presented a graph which showed an association” and “they found that AFQT explained some of the wage-color association, which logically implies that AFQT is correlated with both color and wages”.

What result does this paper provide that can only be explained through genetics? What prevents this from being an environmental result?

[Chuck11]

@Evil_Economist

What result does this paper provide that can only be explained through genetics? What prevents this from being an environmental result?

Uh, I originally said:

All of this merely points again to the fact that race differences are passed on inter-generationally…The problem is that these types of analyses don’t disentangle shared environmental and genetic effect[s]. And we know the the B/W gap is some combination of the two.

Anyways, I have uncovered evidence – much stronger than anything mentioned here – against a moderate to strong genetic hypothesis. So I would bet more on shared environment than genetics.

[Evil_Economist]

@Chuck11

Uh, I originally said:

So, you weren’t actually disagreeing with anyone (except perhaps Chief Pedant)? You were just agreeing with everything said to date and adding more evidence to the environmental side? Ok then, I guess.

Anyways, I have uncovered evidence – much stronger than anything mentioned here – against a moderate to strong genetic hypothesis. So I would bet more on shared environment than genetics.

This surprises me. I thought you were firmly in the genetics camp.