/sci/ - Science & Math

An "innate hereditary difference"?
What's that?
Does innate mean genetic? All hereditary differences are genetic; the very definition of hereditary is variation in phenotype corresponding to variation in genes.

Long necks are hereditary among burmese because women in some cultures wear neck rings. That's an observed trait in appearance / behavior, which corresponds to a genetic difference (2 X chromosomes) and is thus hereditary.

It's another matter entirely to argue it's "caused" by genes. Lots of traits are hereditary, but their presence is not expressly because of the genes that vary with respect to the presence of the trait.

If tomorrow burmese men started wearing neck rings, the trait would stop being hereditary, but this change would not indicate microevolution.

The behaviors associated with the range of human intelligence are extremely polygenic; and there is no convincing evidence that genes must be the cause of the difference in the distribution observed between races. We've not yet worked out the noise between transcription of individual genes and IQ testing to conclude such a thing. The best we can do otherwise is process of elimination; of which the best evidence that exists are transracial adoption studies, for whoch the results are inconclusive, given that the performance gap does appear to shrink, but not dissapear, which is not surprising, given that environmental influences can not feasibly be fully controlled for, nor can it be ensured that the sample of babies put up for adoption must be representative of the race as a whole, nor that results of IQ tests truly reflect cognitive skills like intelligence over motivation.