> It means that in the United States nutrition has mostly been solved

Nature is not off of the table. We've just traded problems with calorie quantity to quality.

  condition           US prevalence
  hypertension        49%
  obesity             40%
  metabolic syndrome  40%
  prediabetes         38%
  fatty liver disease 25%
  diabetes            16%
  coronary disease     5%

That's not mostly solved, that's tens of millions of truncated, immiserated lives. Of course calorie quality differences are important to child development.

▲ everdrive 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's solved in the narrow "you'll be 6 inches too short" sense, but not the wider "you'll avoid diabetes and heart disease" sense.

▲ tptacek 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you'll find in comparisons of 2025 to the turn of the 20th century that we lives are, by comparison, neither truncated nor immiserated. Anyways, this has nothing to do with the topic of the thread.

▲ delichon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

My argument is that we cannot simply say, they're both getting enough calories, therefore we can discount the nutritional component of their IQ differences. Sufficient calories do not remove nutrition as a confound.

▲ tptacek 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You're handwaving away the nutrition hypothesis for the Flynn Effect, and I think losing sight of the timeline for the comparison. It's going to be very difficult to make any case like this if we're looking back to 1900, which is what we're doing when we talk about the nutrition/intelligence shifts we see in stats.

▲ delichon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

We seem to be having different conversations. I'm responding to

  if we know for sure the genes are the same and nature is off the table, how much variance remains?

... and saying that nature isn't off the table at all. Are you saying that it is?

	▲	tptacek 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For intelligence? Where "nature" refers to "innateness" of the trait? I think it mostly is off the table, yes. I'm not saying that the only or even the most important environmental trait is nutrition. (I think it can't possibly be entirely off the table, since we have mechanistic understanding of some gene-mediated cognitive disabilities).