> Some evidence suggests that heritability might increase to as much as 80% in later adulthood independent of dementia (Panizzon et al., 2014); other
results suggest a decline to about 60% after age 80 (Lee, Henry, Trollor, & Sachdev, 2010), but another study suggests no change in later life (McGue & Christensen, 2013).
Your source is actually just partially about the Wilson effect, it only spends a handful of paragraphs about it as it enumerates it among the “top 10 Findings From Behavioral Genetics”. The pivotal study is actually a meta-analysis —or rather a summary of studies—from 2013[1]. Read it if you want to be more convinced of this pseudo-science.
In the 10 years since the publication of this pivotal study, this Wilson effect has gone nowhere. Not even a wikipedia page to show for it.
> The researchers aren’t stupid, obviously they try to control for things like schooling.
Don’t be so sure. Twin studies on intelligence are reeked with bad science and malicious data manipulation. A lot of the researchers conducting these studies in the 70s and 80s were eugenicists doing scientific racism. Some even went so far as to forcefully separate twins into convenient families so they could be “studied” (See Peter B. Neubauer). The method of twin studies was actually proposed by non-other then Francis Galton (which should settle all discussion on the link to the eugenicist movement), and now century and a half later, we are still not convinced on the merits of this method.
Given this history, I don’t think it is smart to take any results from twin and adaption studies seriously. Some researchers don’t want to go that far, so if they actually look more broadly they conclude that these effects go away if you include people adopted into lower income families. James Flynn (of the Flynn-effect) actually argues for a Family effect on intelligence[2] as a result. But—as I say—I think Flynn is giving twin studies weight that shouldn’t be given, and would claim that results are inconclusive.
I actually want to go further and say not only that results are inconclusive, but they are irrelevant. Like I said, this is all pseudo-science. IQ is no different from SAT in that it is a metric whose only value is it’s score. It provides no insight into what we call intelligence, only some skills that people have acquired. Finding out how much better you can become at this skill by merits of your genes is a weird question that ultimately proves nothing.
> Some evidence suggests that heritability might increase to as much as 80% in later adulthood independent of dementia (Panizzon et al., 2014); other results suggest a decline to about 60% after age 80 (Lee, Henry, Trollor, & Sachdev, 2010), but another study suggests no change in later life (McGue & Christensen, 2013).
Your source is actually just partially about the Wilson effect, it only spends a handful of paragraphs about it as it enumerates it among the “top 10 Findings From Behavioral Genetics”. The pivotal study is actually a meta-analysis —or rather a summary of studies—from 2013[1]. Read it if you want to be more convinced of this pseudo-science.
In the 10 years since the publication of this pivotal study, this Wilson effect has gone nowhere. Not even a wikipedia page to show for it.
> The researchers aren’t stupid, obviously they try to control for things like schooling.
Don’t be so sure. Twin studies on intelligence are reeked with bad science and malicious data manipulation. A lot of the researchers conducting these studies in the 70s and 80s were eugenicists doing scientific racism. Some even went so far as to forcefully separate twins into convenient families so they could be “studied” (See Peter B. Neubauer). The method of twin studies was actually proposed by non-other then Francis Galton (which should settle all discussion on the link to the eugenicist movement), and now century and a half later, we are still not convinced on the merits of this method.
Given this history, I don’t think it is smart to take any results from twin and adaption studies seriously. Some researchers don’t want to go that far, so if they actually look more broadly they conclude that these effects go away if you include people adopted into lower income families. James Flynn (of the Flynn-effect) actually argues for a Family effect on intelligence[2] as a result. But—as I say—I think Flynn is giving twin studies weight that shouldn’t be given, and would claim that results are inconclusive.
I actually want to go further and say not only that results are inconclusive, but they are irrelevant. Like I said, this is all pseudo-science. IQ is no different from SAT in that it is a metric whose only value is it’s score. It provides no insight into what we call intelligence, only some skills that people have acquired. Finding out how much better you can become at this skill by merits of your genes is a weird question that ultimately proves nothing.
1: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-hu...
2: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ifE4DAAAQBAJ&oi=...