Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2022 November 5

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November 5

Nature versus nurture

It is often said that the heritability of IQ increases with age and was/is greatest in school. This worries me a bit, it looks very much like an artifact. Where the children receive by force a same way of life, the way of life changes nevertheless depending upon family etc.. Have the intelligence researchers considered this? 2A02:908:424:9D60:0:0:0:F38B (talk) 00:02, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

What do you mean by "receive by force a same way of life"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:23, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

The evidence is increasingly pointing to intelligence being all nurture, no genetics. Abductive (reasoning) 01:02, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

What evidence? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:37, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure that is correct; see e.g. this article. See also Heritability of IQ. The present scientific consensus in the "nature versus nurture" debate appears to be that when it comes to intelligence as measured by IQ tests, both are an important factor.  --Lambiam 08:20, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

They are forced to go to school, to learn and so on. They hang out in classes, they have the same environment. 2A02:908:424:9D60:0:0:0:F38B (talk) 08:14, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

And they all make the same grades? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:26, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Some monozygotic twins get separated at birth and are raised in different environments; see e.g. this article, "Personality traits, mental abilities and other individual differences: Monozygotic female twins raised apart in South Korea and the United States".^[1]  --Lambiam 08:24, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Here is a popular articel about that study from one of the autores. 2A02:908:424:9D60:0:0:0:F38B (talk) 00:04, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

Heritability is the proportion of the total variation that is explained by the genetic variation. If the environment is more variable in a way that causes an increase in total variation, the heritability will be lower even though the mechanisms underlying the genetic effects are unchanged. Geneticists are very well aware of this. Heritability of IQ in adults is surprisingly high, about 0.75. The figure is smaller in children, probably because children of the same age vary in how developed they are. Jmchutchinson (talk) 16:03, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Concerns about page for Thermal Medicine

Hey all, Straight to the topic: I'm concerned about this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Thermal_Medicine

Basically, we don't have a thermal medicine page, and googling thermal medicine leads you to it.

The page is at best subpar for what Wikipedia would consider an acceptable medicine article, and I'm concerned that it presents a health risk. Even though the page is referenced, the references are from a time when p-hacking and using "researcher degrees of freedom" was rampant, and I'm not sure they represent the scientific consensus on the subject.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

Best regards, Victor ~victorsouza (talk) 22:06, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm not convinced that the Society for Thermal Medicine meets WP:NORG; with a quick web search I can't find any significant, independent coverage on it (except maybe this), and none of the sources currently in the article appear to help establish its notability. Also, I'm pretty sure there is an article about thermal medicine: Hyperthermia therapy. Shells-shells (talk) 00:11, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

Considerable swaths of text are verbatim or almost verbatim copies of passages on the history page of the Society for Thermal Medicine.  --Lambiam 01:44, 6 November 2022 (UTC)