Adapting to the era of limited malleability has not been easy for the media. First, there has been endless confusion about and misrepresentation of the data. The principal difficulty with all these formulations in some cases, they are hedged or qualified elsewhere in the article I am quoting is that none of the data now emerging postulates any such determined outcomes. The heritability of obesity, for example, is apparently somewhere around 0.40, meaning that 40 per cent of the population's variability in body weight is attributable to genes, leaving 60 per cent for environmental effects. For homosexuality the heritability may be as high as 0.50.
Some scholars say it is in about the same zone for alcoholism.
For political attitudes it is about 0.60, a figure raising the question of whether ideological sperm banks are just over the horizon. For IQ the heritability is even higher, by some measures as high as 0.80. A second, related problem with the press coverage is its insistent politicization of the data. This was particularly the case with data suggesting a biological basis for violent crime. The existence of such data has been documented in many different ways.