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Comment by danans

2 years ago

> The trauma is a consequence of poverty and bad parenting which is because of low IQ

You have the primary direction of causality between trauma and IQ reversed. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=childhood+trauma+and+IQ...

Population scale trauma exposure and bad parenting is a result of poverty, social structures, and sometimes wars and conflicts, not something predetermined by genetics.

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danans

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A_D_E_P_T  2 years ago

The IQs of adopted children have next to nothing to do with their environments, and much more to do with the IQs of their birth parents. IQ in general is very strongly heritable. There are several adoption and twin studies that have demonstrated this effect, e.g.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8513766/

  • danans  2 years ago

    Trauma (physical and emotional) causing reduction in IQ is totally compatible with IQ being in part heritable.

    Regarding race/ethnicity correlations from the paper you posted:

    "(McGue et al., 2007; Miller et al., 2012). McGue et al. (2007) reported minimal ethnicity effects in the SIBS sample at intake, which we largely replicate in the current follow-up assessment. While rearing family socioeconomic status and polygenic scores were both moderately higher among Asian offspring (Cohen’s = d .36–.46; p < .01 ), no measure of cognitive ability differed significantly between offspring of different ethnicities. See SI Table S6 for these and other comparisons, along with a discussion of their relevance."

    Also, the children in that study have not been victims of trauma (or the study has not considered and controlled for it), so it says nothing about that factor in eventual IQ of the individuals studied.