I am only an amateur in all the relevant areas of expertise, but I have invested quite a bit of effort trying to make sense of these controversies. I have to say that your post is very confused, and you seem to lack familiarity with many important facts that would have to be considered before pronouncing such a sweeping judgment.
The lack of obvious correlations between genes and phenotypes implies only that the phenotypes in question are not determined by the genotype in a simple way. If they are determined by complex interactions between genes, then straightforward association studies won’t detect this connection. To make an imperfect but relevant analogy, if you took the machine code of various computer programs and did a statistical association study between these codes and the resulting behavior of the computer, while being ignorant of the way the instructions are actually decoded and executed—as we are still largely ignorant of the relevant biochemistry, which is also far more complicated—you could easily end up with no observable correlations.
Similarly, if some trait can be influenced by environmental factors strongly and rapidly, it is still a total fallacy to conclude that it is therefore determined purely by environmental factors. To take a trivial example, nobody disputes that hair color is highly heritable, but the development of cheap and convenient hair dyes has changed the average hair colors in the population dramatically. The behavior of computer programs is highly dependent on what you give them as input, but it doesn’t mean that the program code is irrelevant.
As for heritability studies, you are certainly right that there is a lot of shoddy work, and by necessity they make a whole lot of wildly simplifying assumptions. If there existed only a handful of such studies, one would be well advised not to take them very seriously.
However, the amount of data that has been gathered in recent decades is just too overwhelming to dismiss, especially taking into account that often there have been considerable ideological incentives to support the opposite conclusions.
On the whole, you are making a wholly unsubstantiated sweeping conclusion.
I am only an amateur in all the relevant areas of expertise, but I have invested quite a bit of effort trying to make sense of these controversies. I have to say that your post is very confused, and you seem to lack familiarity with many important facts that would have to be considered before pronouncing such a sweeping judgment.
The lack of obvious correlations between genes and phenotypes implies only that the phenotypes in question are not determined by the genotype in a simple way. If they are determined by complex interactions between genes, then straightforward association studies won’t detect this connection. To make an imperfect but relevant analogy, if you took the machine code of various computer programs and did a statistical association study between these codes and the resulting behavior of the computer, while being ignorant of the way the instructions are actually decoded and executed—as we are still largely ignorant of the relevant biochemistry, which is also far more complicated—you could easily end up with no observable correlations.
Similarly, if some trait can be influenced by environmental factors strongly and rapidly, it is still a total fallacy to conclude that it is therefore determined purely by environmental factors. To take a trivial example, nobody disputes that hair color is highly heritable, but the development of cheap and convenient hair dyes has changed the average hair colors in the population dramatically. The behavior of computer programs is highly dependent on what you give them as input, but it doesn’t mean that the program code is irrelevant.
As for heritability studies, you are certainly right that there is a lot of shoddy work, and by necessity they make a whole lot of wildly simplifying assumptions. If there existed only a handful of such studies, one would be well advised not to take them very seriously. However, the amount of data that has been gathered in recent decades is just too overwhelming to dismiss, especially taking into account that often there have been considerable ideological incentives to support the opposite conclusions.
On the whole, you are making a wholly unsubstantiated sweeping conclusion.