Book contents
- Understanding the Nature–Nurture Debate
- Understanding Life
- Understanding the Nature–Nurture Debate
- Copyright page
- Reviews
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Genesis: Why Do We Care About Nature–Nurture?
- 2 The Worst Legacy of Francis Galton
- 3 Statistical Science and the Invention of Heritability
- 4 Reports of Galton’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
- 5 Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis
- 6 Plomin’s Predictions and the Human Genome Project
- 7 GWAS Unchained, GWAS Unwound
- 8 Intelligence
- 9 IQ, Race, and Genetics
- 10 Nature–Nurture and the Possibility of Human Science
- Summary of Common Misunderstandings
- References and Further Reading
- Figure and Quotation Credits
- Index
3 - Statistical Science and the Invention of Heritability
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2024
- Understanding the Nature–Nurture Debate
- Understanding Life
- Understanding the Nature–Nurture Debate
- Copyright page
- Reviews
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Genesis: Why Do We Care About Nature–Nurture?
- 2 The Worst Legacy of Francis Galton
- 3 Statistical Science and the Invention of Heritability
- 4 Reports of Galton’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
- 5 Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis
- 6 Plomin’s Predictions and the Human Genome Project
- 7 GWAS Unchained, GWAS Unwound
- 8 Intelligence
- 9 IQ, Race, and Genetics
- 10 Nature–Nurture and the Possibility of Human Science
- Summary of Common Misunderstandings
- References and Further Reading
- Figure and Quotation Credits
- Index
Summary
Notwithstanding Galton’s admonition to count everything, counting is just a tool; it is no more science than hammering is architecture. One hundred years after Galton, Robert Hutchins remarked, contemptuously, that a social scientist is a person who counts telephone poles. The obvious way to turn counting into science is by conducting experiments, that is by manipulating nature and observing what the consequences are for whatever one is counting. Gregor Mendel, for example, was certainly a counter – he counted the mixtures of smooth and wrinkled peas in the progeny of the pea plants he intentionally crossed. What made Mendel’s work science was the intentional crossing of the plants, not the counting itself. It would have been much more difficult – perhaps impossible – to observe the segregation and independent assortment of traits by counting smooth and wrinkled peas in the wild.
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- Understanding the Nature‒Nurture Debate , pp. 32 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024