well i'd be interested to read this...any chance you have a link?
I would rather believe that they are just lazy bums, but im trained to place faith in the trappings of the scientific method so until something better gets put right under my nose I will hold onto the belief provisionally.
I don't really have a link that will give you full text articles unless you have some sort of journal access. But here are some abstracts from the issue:
This is a general critique of the fallacies in the methodology. It is the most useful of the articles I will mention.
Hereditarian scientific fallacies Bailey RC
Abstract: Some have recently declared that a hereditarian or more balanced approach has triumphed over environmentalism as an explanatory tool for variation in the cognitive ability and behaviour of humans. However, the entire debate is constrained by several fallacies described here. Heritability of a trait, does not predict the effect of environmental or genetic changes on the trait (Fallacy #1), so knowing heritability does not assist in writing prescriptions for societal ills or budget cuts. Heritability estimates themselves are inaccurate, given the potential for gene-environment covariance and interaction, as well as other non-additive effects on behavior or cognitive ability (Fallacy #2). The 'revolution in molecular genetics' has provided more effective tools for describing the genome, but doesn't permit separation of gene and environmental effects on traits (Fallacy #3). If we were able to measure heritability accurately, it would give us absolutely no indication of whether or not group differences are genetically based (Fallacy #4). Finally, any proposed models of the evolutionary divergence of human groups must more adequately answer the basic questions of such a study, and are not supported by high heritability in present populations (Fallacy #5). Humans are not and should never be exposed to artificial selection and crossing experiments, so behavior geneticists will continue to be very limited in their ability to partition the effects of genes, the environment, and their covariance and interaction on human behavior and cognitive ability.
From
http://www2.psych.purdue.edu/~phs/Abstract81.htmlSchonemann, Peter H.
Models and muddles of heritability Genetica, 1997, 99, 97-108
Abstract
One reason for the astonishing persistence of the IQ myth in the face of overwhelming prior and posterior odds against it may be the unbroken chain of excessive heritability claims for 'intelligence', which IQ tests are supposed to 'measure'. However, if, as some critics insist, 'intelligence' is undefined, and Spearman's g is beset with numerous problems, not the least of which is universal rejection of Spearman's model by the data, then how can the heritability of 'intelligence' exceed that of milk production of cows and egg production of hens?
The thesis of the present review paper is that the answer to this riddle has two parts: (a) the technical basis of heritability claims for human behavior is just as shaky as that of Spearman's g. For example, a once widely used 'heritability estimate' turns out to be mathematically invalid, while another such estimate, though mathematically valid, never fits any data; and (b) valid technical criticisms of flawed heritability claims typically are met with stubborn editorial resistence in the main strream journals, which tends to calcify such misinformation.
Notes
Based on a talk entitled "Totems of the IQ myth: General Ability g and its Heritabilites (h2, HR)", delivered at the 1995 Meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. Among other things, it is shown that the conventional heritability estimates often produce absurdly high values for variables that cannot possibly be genetic. For example, if one applies the traditional heritability arithmetic to the twin data collected by Loehlin and Nichols (1976), one finds that answers to the question "Did you take a bubble bath last year" are 90% genetic. This should have alerted the experts long ago that something must be amiss. What is wrong, of course, is that their simplistic models rarely fit the data. Heritability: uses and abuses Oscar Kempthorne
Abstract: This paper begins with a brief summary of the history of the development of ideas in the field of quantitative genetics. Next there is discussion of the controversy surrounding the contention that IQ tests validly estimate some highly heritable general intelligence factor. The validity of the reasoning supporting this contention is questioned. The theory of correlation between relatives has been of vast importance in plant and animal breeding because it is possible to design and carry out experiments to estimate variance components in expressions for covariances between relatives. However, data on humans is observational and individuals are not randomly assigned to environments, so that estimation of heritability from such data is not on the same firm foundation as it is in plant and animal breeding contexts.
Uses and misinterpretations of genetics in psychology Steve Anderson Platt and Michael Bach
Department of Psychology, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI 49855, USA
Abstract: An analysis is made of the frequently posed question in psychology of relative contribution of genotypes and environments to phenotypic variation. The illogic of the question, the inappropriateness of the methodology, the inadequacy of the data, and the misleading implications of assertions of proportionality as seen through a sampling of introductory psychology textbooks and referenced publications are outlined. To ask the question of proportionality (of the relative contribution of genotypes and environments in human populations) requires the questioner to make two major erroneous assumptions. The first error is to grant validity to heritability estimates for humans. The second is to conceptualize the genotype as having a range of potential outcomes. An examination is made of these false assumptions.
