Heritability as Stalking Horse for Mutability
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Genome-wide association study
17 min read
Central to the article's discussion of 'missing heritability' - GWAS is the method that finds far less genetic influence than twin studies predict, which is the core scientific debate being examined
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No Child Left Behind Act
12 min read
Explicitly mentioned as one of 'the two most important American educational bills in the 21st century' - the article argues this legislation embodies blank slate assumptions about student potential
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Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder
12 min read
The article compares preterm birth academic effects to fetal alcohol syndrome effects as a benchmark for severity - understanding this condition provides crucial context for the magnitude of harm being discussed
CORRECTION: I goofed! This post attributes a post written by Sasha Gusev to Eric Hoel. Hoel shared the piece on Substack Notes and Gusev’s name does not appear on the piece, and I was confused. (Also I haven't slept more than three or four hours in a night since late March.) It's my bad and I regret the error: apologies to both. As Hoel has explicitly endorsed the piece, all of the arguments here stand.
For about a decade now I’ve followed the research about the negative effects of preterm birth on later academic achievement. I’m interested in part because I’ve wondered why, exactly, there doesn’t appear to be much public knowledge about the topic. It would appear to be the kind of phenomenon that prospective parents obsess over, and yet most people seem to have no idea that the association exists.
The effect has been replicated in dozens of papers, which have been combined in several high-quality meta-analyses, and in the context of educational research where effect sizes tend to be quite small the negative impact of prematurity is very large. Most of the research specifically concerns severe prematurity, so this next part is a little less certain, but the effects do indeed scale with the severity of prematurity at the extremes of preterm birth and the best evidence is that it has some impact on babies who are much less premature but still premature. Intuitively, that is to say, you’d expect the effect to scale even with prematurity that does not reach the medical threshold of severity. (Of course, the “correct” amount of gestational time varies naturally and babies born a little early would have small effects that could be easily canceled out by other factors that influence cognition.) In any event, we know that severely premature babies tend (tend!) to grow into children that face serious academic hurdles, and the degree of this impairment is as large or larger than those thought to be the result of many behaviors we discourage in pregnant women.
What kind of effect sizes are we seeing here? With the inevitable caveat that there’s lots of individual variability (plenty of premature babies go on to be high-achieving children), and bearing in mind that different studies look at different DVs, the most prominent meta-analyses
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