I'm not claiming that there's no variation in innate ability, only that one island won't be innately better at juggling than the other (certainly one island will be better at juggling, because they will care about juggling more, pass down more juggling, push forward the juggling sciences, &c. But those won't be innate, biological differences).

In other words: if, 1000 years later, you somehow stole an infant from bad-juggling island and had them raised on good-juggling island, they'd likely behave as you'd expect a good-juggle-islander to behave, despite their provenance. (Stipulate that there aren't outwardly evident signs of which island you're from, like inherited skin tone or whatever, which would alter your interactions with your environment).

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medvezhenok 4 days ago | parent [-]

I think if we agree that there are individual differences in predisposition towards juggling aptitude, and that the predisposition is mediated genetically somehow, and if juggling (in this hypothetical) is biologically advantageous for survival/reproduction on one of the islands (really stretching the analogy here) - then I don’t see a way how my 1000 years experiment doesn’t produce actual, population level genetic drift in juggling predisposition between the population on island A and island B (unless we could somehow prove that juggling predisposition is not heritable)

	▲	wizzwizz4 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		This is the crux of the issue. You assume, in the absence of evidence, that juggling aptitude predisposition is mediated genetically, in such a way that it is variable among humans; and you place the burden of proof on "somehow prove[ing] that [it] is not heritable" (emphasis mine). But it's far easier to prove the positive (in a world where the positive is true) than prove the negative (in a world where the positive is false), so the appropriate perspective to adopt if you want to investigate via experiment is "try to prove it true, and if we honestly fail, that's an argument that it's false". If you don't intend to run the experiment, then different considerations dominate: you should justify this bias. Maybe you're drawing an analogy to something similar, which you know to work this way? Bias isn't the same thing as wrong, after all: but unjustified bias often is.