Left_Hand_of_Dorkness:
Indeed–reading over what I wrote, it’s pretty obviously wrong. I’m not entirely sure what I was thinking when I wrote it, but I think I was trying to get at the idea that we’ve not found genes that control for intelligence. And I’ve even been corrected on that, I think.
Your buddy Inbred is not so sure.
They don’t understand basic things, like the field of importance for them in understanding individual differences in IQ is behavior(al) genetics, not the population genetic studies they frequently point to. If they knew they were “students” of behavior genetics they might actually read an article or two and see how the association studies they sometimes reference are only the most basic tip of the iceberg. They’d know of the 1000s of studies that found an association between an allele of a gene or genetic marker and variability in some behavior only to be matched by a study that could not find such a relationship. Behavior genetics requires the analysis of the steps from a potential gene locus to the expression of a protein in a tissue that results in the modification of behavior. In all these many tiered processes of expression you have interaction between these processes and the environment. This is very hard to do and the field is hardly out of the gate on intelligence and has hardly scratched the surface on human intelligence.
And here’s an anti-racialist from a prior thread who (to the extent that I can tell what he’s saying) appears to have been arguing that variations in intelligence are not caused by genetic difference. (The argument goes past this post, and possibly extends to other threads - I remember this guy arguing that position, and this is the only place it turned up in a brief search.)