I never understood why the politically correct crowd happily accepts that athletic ability is heritable, yet when it comes to intelligence suddenly all bets are off.
As soon as we accept reality for what it is, we can begin adapting our societies and policies to maximize opportunities for individuals with the knowledge that our talents and limitations vary quite drastically.
It's not that I don't believe that intelligence is heritable. I do. It's more that I don't believe that it's all that important to be intelligent in order to be a good Human.
People have a natural attraction to those similar to them. In history, the over-emphasis of particular and possibly unimportant (who knows?) traits has often been the cause for wars, genocides and all sorts of other evils.
Further, I don't think that relative Human intelligence has all that much magnitude. That is - a 'really intelligent' Human is not all that different from a 'non-intelligent' one, taken in the context of other species. And, those non-intelligent ones may have particularly interesting genetics that make them important to the species, in other ways.
Humans have done pretty well as a species with lots of diversity. Why ruin a good thing? And, do you really want Humanity to be comprised of near clones?
Probably because the jobs traditionally done by the less intelligent are being shipped overseas or done by machines leaving these people in poor economic circumstances. Intelligent people would not have to be clones, smart people can be quite different from each other in terms of personality, areas of interest etc.
All to often, people start using it as justification for income disparity, wealth disparity, minority crime rates and sometimes differences in economic development between different countries. Racism and classism aren't too far behind.
I'm reminded that it is no more noble to fool a person out of his money by outwitting him, than it is to bully him out of his money with superior strength. Being smarter isn't necessarily a moral justification for greater rewards.
Similarly, we rely on the economic system using prices as an information signalling mechanism; more valuable labour is priced up, and thus supply should follow. But if the valued labour is intelligent labour, and its supply is not easily increased, then there is less of a moral case for paying its suppliers more, for that attribute alone.
Although assuming it was true that intelligence was mostly based on genetics rather than quality of education (I don't have a strong view one way or the other) then we could use that knowledge to improve wealth inequality by filtering people into school systems with very different curriculum where they would learn the best way to add value with their ability level.
> the politically correct crowd happily accepts ...
I don't think I've heard anyone serious say that there was no heredity of intelligence. Could you be more specific about who says what? Perhaps you are writing quickly, but these are imaginary statements from imaginary people.
>> I never understood why the politically correct crowd happily accepts that athletic ability is heritable, yet when it comes to intelligence suddenly all bets are off.
Because athletic ability is more recreational - you can say different people are good at sports, music, art, etc... there are nice alternatives. But it's not PC to imply anyone is inherently stupid. I phrase it that way because saying "inherently smarter" is OK on the surface, but the corollary is that someone else is inherently less smart. Being "PC" is all about not offending anyone.
I'm not aware of any generalised test of athletic ability. The traits that make one good at archery will be different from those that make one a good sprinter. With intelligence we attempt to collapse it all down to one number and rate people as smart or dumb as a single metric.
Two points about this. First, a consensus developed over more than a hundred years of study requires a little more than an off-handed dismissal-- do you understand _why_ a general factor of intelligence is acknowledged by practically everyone who has studied the issue, or why it is impossible to devise a test that purports to measure cognitive ability but varies independently of that general factor?
Secondly, I gladly accept your reductio of a "general factor of fitness". If you restrict yourself to the range of world-class athletes, I grant that performance in archery will correlate negatively with performance in sprinting. This is just Berkson's paradox, or the "restriction of range" phenomenon. If you consider the entire population, however, I would be very surprised if a "general factor of fitness" didn't fall right out of a battery of athletic tests. In general, people who are faster than average will also be stronger than average and probably more dextrous too, and it makes sense to call that factor "physical fitness".
Intelligence and fitness are two very different things. Fitness has a lot to do with make up of muscle fibres in the body, fast twitch (anerobic) vs slow twitch (aerobic).
This is why marathon runners and weight lifters have very different body types , training a lot in one discipline will make you worse at the other. Genetics plays a role in which type of muscle you can most easily develop.
Intelligence simply doesn't work the same way, learning to draw well won't make you worse at computer programming for example.
Yes, maxing out one dimension of performance may degrade it in another. This is just Berkson, again. My point is that along the entire range of variation, all reasonable measures of athletic performance are likely to be positively correlated. If you doubt this, consider the following thought experiment:
1. Pick an arbitrary athletic contest: 100m dash, bench press, obstacle course, marathon, whatever.
2. You pick a member of the population at random.
3. I pick a member of the German national football team at random.
4. If Joe Schmoe wins, I pay you a dollar. If Dieter Schmieter wins, you pay me a dollar.
5. Repeat until convinced.
Who do you think will win more money in the long run? Will the Germans tend to win because of their high general fitness, or will it be a toss-up because the Germans merely have "high soccer fitness" which does not help (or perhaps even disadvantages) them at non-soccer tasks?
That is what I mean when I speak of a "general factor of fitness". Over the whole range of population, people who do better at one athletic task will tend to do better at any other. If you take a sample from the population, measure their performances on whatever athletic tasks you choose, and drop the results into PCA, you will find one factor which is positively correlated with every test and explains, I'm guessing, at least 3/4 of the variance. What happens at the extreme tails is already acknowledged, and does not bear on this general point.
I tried to find data for non-elite-athletes taking something like the NFL combine and couldn't find anything, but there, at least, is a testable prediction for you.
My only point about a "general factor of fitness" was that I am unfazed by the comparison to IQ, because physical fitness is a perfectly reasonable concept that captures something real in the world. So too IQ. If you think the analogy is inapt, remember who brought it up :)
You're comparing a trained athlete against a person who is untrained. It is not surprising that fitness related tasks are very amenable to training in a way that is not quite so clear with intelligence. A more interesting comparison would be between a sedentary Dieter Schmieter who worked as a computer programmer (or a Dieter Schmieter who had trained purely for strength) and a random member of the population who was trained by Dieter Schmieter's coach for 10 years.
Amongst the general untrained population you will see very large variance between performance on different fitness tests. Lots of broadly built overweight people who are very strong despite never having done any weight training but can't walk up a flight of stairs without breaking a sweat and skinny people who can run well without much training but barely lift anything. So I would doubt that there would be a strong general factor for physical tasks.
Intelligence as a general topic is pretty hard for me to swallow. A lot of "intelligence" that we can test for is mathematical in nature and that can be learned. I'm pretty sure I could teach multiple-choice test taking.
Intelligence, I think, can broadly be defined as "the ability to score well on intelligence tests." The most common is supposedly correlated with freshman college survival. History is full of people who were considered "dull" as students but later shook the world in a way that means they had significant intellect.
It wouldn't be a problem except we sort people into piles and this is yet another sorting mechanism.
As soon as we accept reality for what it is, we can begin adapting our societies and policies to maximize opportunities for individuals with the knowledge that our talents and limitations vary quite drastically.