by zevon | 2025-10-15 09:11:14+00:00
Maybe what I actually meant to express becomes more clear if I re-phrase and expand the the sentence a bit:

Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems does not mean that you can determine genetics as a relevant factor when thinking about how to structure education and if one is interested in the relationship between success (on whatever metric) in education and family trees.

I'm neither a geneticist nor is English my first language but I've always understood "heritability" to be a term that very much has to do with genetics and the Wikipedia link you provided implies the same. If we are talking about other factors/mechanisms that impact success in educational systems and that express themselves over generations and in family structures - sure, that's basically what I'm saying.

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(Long) edit after a cup of tea and a sandwich spent over the Wikipedia-Link you provided:

I must say, I think that's pretty readable even for me as a non-geneticist. In the context of this thread, there is a lot of interesting info about "Heritability and caveats", "Influences" and "Environmental effects". I've highlighted these quotes for myself while reading:

"Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis."

"Heritability measures the proportion of variation in a trait that can be attributed to genes, and not the proportion of a trait caused by genes."

"Contrary to popular belief, two parents of higher IQ will not necessarily produce offspring of equal or higher intelligence. Polygenic traits often appear less heritable at the extremes."

The whole section on "Implications":

"Some researchers, especially those that work in fields like developmental systems theory, have criticized the concept of heritability as misleading or meaningless. Douglas Wahlsten and Gilbert Gottlieb argue that the prevailing models of behavioral genetics are too simplistic by not accounting for gene-environment interactions. Stephen Ceci also highlights the issues with this assumption, noting that they were raised by Jane Loevinger in 1943. They assert that the idea of partitioning variance makes no sense when environments and genes interact and argue that such interaction is ubiquitous in human development. They highlight their belief that heritability analysis requires a hidden assumption they call the "separation of causes", which isn't borne out by biological reality or experimental research. Such researchers argue that the notion of heritability gives the false impression that "genes have some direct and isolated influence on traits", rather than another developmental resource that a complex system uses over the course of ontogeny."

Since this is a US-centered forum, this also seems relevant:

"In the US, individuals identifying themselves as Asian generally tend to score higher on IQ tests than Caucasians, who tend to score higher than Hispanics, who tend to score higher than African Americans. Yet, although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that between-group differences in average IQ have a genetic basis. In fact, greater variation in IQ scores exists within each ethnic group than between them. The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups. Growing evidence indicates that environmental factors, not genetic ones, explain the racial IQ gap."