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Heritability and Causality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Neven Sesardic
Neven Sesardic*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Zagreb
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, University of Zagreb, Kjure Salaja 3, 41000 Zagreb, Croatia.
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Abstract

The critics of “hereditarianism” often claim that any attempt to explain human behavior by invoking genes is confronted with insurmountable methodological difficulties. They reject the idea that heritability estimates could lead to genetic explanations by pointing out that these estimates are strictly valid only for a given population and that they are exposed to the irremovable confounding effects of genotype-environment interaction and genotype-environment correlation. I argue that these difficulties are greatly exaggerated, and that we would be wrong to regard them as presenting a fundamental obstacle to the search for genetic explanations. I also show that, to the extent they are cogent, these objections may prove to be even more damaging to the “environmentalist” standpoint.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , September 1993 , pp. 396 - 418
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1993

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Footnotes

†

I wish to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Bielefeld for supporting the work on this paper. I am also grateful to Richard Lewontin for giving his opinion on the first draft, and particularly to an anonymous referee for Philosophy of Science for extensive and very constructive critical comments.

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