Environmental Determinism and human behaviour

I think it’s a bit of both, but I lean pretty heavily towards the “left” description. An idiot in an ideal environment has a better chance for success than a genius in a shitty environment. A lot of people don’t know what they don’t know. Anyone who sits totally on one pole of this dichotomy is being short sighted, IMO.

I don't think "smartness" or "intelligence" is at all objective. Perhaps you could assess how educated a person is, and maybe even measure how two people compare on a test given the same book and amount of time to study - but even that doesn't give you some intelligence metric to then apply to how those people learn other topics, or learn the same topic by a different method (say, teacher giving a lecture). In short yes any person with the time, energy, support, and tools could become as educated as Einstein

As to your question: seems near impossible to determine for a fact, it just comes down to beliefs. I think some people, like my sister (similar genes and home environment), are/was just as smart as I but more interested in different things which then impacts dedication to studying. I also think my sister was more naturally talented with drawing and so, relative to me, focused more on developing that skill. I think this is how people develop behavior and abilities.

sidenote: I, a radical leftist, wouldn't just say "bad neighborhood" - it's mostly a result of being poor: most importantly bad nutrition, but also parents working long hours and are more stressed, poor kids more frequently have violent or drug addicted parents, poor kids can't afford material possessions which signify status (nice clothes, cultural norms, etc.) and see themselves as outsiders.

I think the "genes vs. environment" picture is reductive to the point of being useless. The whole process of translation from genetic "blueprints" to phenotypes is in general mediated, at pretty much every step, by the environment. This impacts methylation and histone modification, the translation of genes into hormones and proteins which take a more active role, etc. Potentially some genes are even introduced through horizontal gene transfer rather than the traditional channels, although I don't think it's known what these genes code for.

Furthermore, this runs the other way; using Plomin's terminology you can have passive genotype-environment correlations (the genotype and environment are simultaneously but independently passed on to a child), as well as active/reactive genotype-environment correlations (people who have some gene tend to find themselves in better/worse environments as a result). When looking at heritability (keep in mind that this is a measure of the components of variation, not necessarily what causes some trait in the first place), passive G-E correlations tend to be accounted for by the study design (i.e. twin studies), while active G-E correlations is tentatively thought of as just an indirect expression of some genotype. However, reactive G-E correlations tend to post a major problem for interpreting heritability as being "in favor of" environmental vs. genetic explanations, since there's not really any posteriori way of gleaning it from the metric itself. But it is very much an effect coming not from biological pathways, but through other mechanism related to some set of traits, which comes up a lot in superficial cases. This problem certainly makes me skeptical of biological determinism, but also the conceptual distinction between genes and environment in the first place.

The way I see it, it's similar (and somewhat related to, actually) the idea of massive modularity. It's a useful and intuitively appealing conceptual distinction, but new findings in cognitive science and neurobiology increasingly point away from such a conceptualization of the brain. Not only do fMRI scans of the brain during complex and focused activities show activations in all parts of the brain rather than individual modules, the human brain itself is incredibly plastic, constantly molding and rearranging itself to fit local needs and stimulus. Some of the best evidence for that comes from people who have had strokes on some side of their brain, and eventually recovered normal brain functions due to the plasticity of the brain.

The general leftist argument is that the reason why some people are poorer or less intelligent than others, is because they lived in a "bad neighbourhood".

I think it's important for leftists, or anyone who is looking for such an explanation, to emphasize that it's not just "someone who has less money gets more stupid" necessarily. Although money is somewhat linked to things like diet and environmental toxins, which certainly do have an effect, attenuated intelligence can also come from more "intransient" sources like stress, and/or lack of stimulus in home and/or educational settings. The brain reacts to stimulus. Cultural transmission is big. And it's not always cleanly related to money, although I think it definitely does share a grain with economic status.

We don't like threads that are just titles. Contribute more to help get a conversation started!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.