Comment by 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.
It's also compatible with low IQ causing poverty and bad parenting.
Low IQ doesn't "cause" poverty. Poverty is highly multivariate, and likely dominated by factors having nothing to do with IQ, like structural inequities in health/education access and historical lack of access to asset ownership, and exclusion from access to other vehicles of economic advancement.
Of course low IQ can cause poverty. Someone with below 70 IQ is going to have a much harder time finding gainful employment than someone with 100 IQ. A college degree is huge for escaping poverty, and the average US college graduate has an IQ of 113.
I agree that it's multivariate, and I'm open to the possibility that it is primarily another factor (although you haven't supported that claim), but it's absurd to conclude from that that low IQ does not cause poverty. People with learning disabilities have a much harder time finding success in the modern world, and I'm bewildered that I even have to say so.
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