Wissenschaft und soziale Kontrolle

[Kira]

Wissenschaft und soziale Kontrolle: politische Lähmung und die Genetik-Agenda

..... ein interessanter Artikel

August 3, 2013
Science and Social Control: Political Paralysis and the Genetics Agenda
By Jonathan Latham, PhD (Originally posted July 31st and lost after a DDOS (electronic) attack).

Variations in individual “educational attainment” (essentially, whether students complete high school or college) cannot be attributed to inherited genetic differences. That is the finding of a new study reported in Science magazine (Rietveld et al. 2013). According to this research, fully 98% of all variation in educational attainment is accounted for by factors other than a person’s simple genetic makeup.

This implies that most of student success is a consequence of potentially alterable social or environmental factors. This is an important and perhaps surprising observation, of high interest to parents, teachers, and policymakers alike; but it did not make the headlines.

The likely reason is that the authors of the study failed to mention the 98% figure in the title, or in the summary. Nor was it mentioned in the accompanying press release. ...

http://www.independentsciencenews.org/s ... ics-agenda

[Karlheinz]

Aus der Studie (dem Original aus Science):

Twin and family studies suggest that a broad range of psychological traits (1), economic preferences (2–4), and social and economic outcomes (5) are moderately heritable.

Estimates suggest that around 40% of the variance in educational attainment is explained by genetic factors (5). Furthermore, educational attainment is moderately correlated with other heritable characteristics (1), including cognitive function (12) and personality traits related to persistence and self-discipline (13).

Taken together, our findings suggest that the genetic architecture of complex behavioral traits is far more diffuse than that of complex physical traits.

In social-science genetics, researchers must be especially vigilant to avoid misinterpretations. One of the many concerns is that a genetic association will be mischaracterized as “the gene for X,” encouraging misperceptions that genetically influenced phenotypes are immune to environmental intervention [for rebuttals, see (21, 22)] and misperceptions that individual SNPs have large effects (which our evidence contradicts).

Der Tenor des zitierten Sekundärartikels gibt eine reichlich verzerrte Darstellung. (Mit eingefügtem Obama Bild.)