Regarding cloning and regression to the mean: Have you written somewhere about the influence of the maternal environment on genetics? One could imagine that part of what made von Neumann great were not just his own genes, but also those of his mother who carried him to term, and a clone of him would not have her maternal environment.
I guess to disentangle the effects of genes and maternal environment, there might be studies of paternal half-siblings, or of couples who had children both naturally and via egg donation.
By maternal environment, do you mean just home/rearing environment attribute to the mother rather than father, or the womb environment/dam effects? The former does exist (you can do neat designs these days like looking at IGEs of just genes in the mother but not father) but influences stuff like EDU much more than IQ; a clone is already maxed out on EDU potential so we don’t care if the adoptive placement gives mothers less keen on education than von Neumann’s parents were. Womb environments have also been measured, I think through designs like you suggest (or was it children-of-twins designs? I forget) and found to be generally unimportant despite some hype. After all, whether you correlate against the mother or father, or second-degree relatives in any direction, the correlations are similar...
Thanks for the answer! By maternal environment I indeed meant the latter rather than the former, i.e. womb environment etc., i.e. the part one might not be able to duplicate when cloning. But if that hardly matters in the general population, I guess that’s not much of a worry.
Regarding cloning and regression to the mean: Have you written somewhere about the influence of the maternal environment on genetics? One could imagine that part of what made von Neumann great were not just his own genes, but also those of his mother who carried him to term, and a clone of him would not have her maternal environment.
I guess to disentangle the effects of genes and maternal environment, there might be studies of paternal half-siblings, or of couples who had children both naturally and via egg donation.
By maternal environment, do you mean just home/rearing environment attribute to the mother rather than father, or the womb environment/dam effects? The former does exist (you can do neat designs these days like looking at IGEs of just genes in the mother but not father) but influences stuff like EDU much more than IQ; a clone is already maxed out on EDU potential so we don’t care if the adoptive placement gives mothers less keen on education than von Neumann’s parents were. Womb environments have also been measured, I think through designs like you suggest (or was it children-of-twins designs? I forget) and found to be generally unimportant despite some hype. After all, whether you correlate against the mother or father, or second-degree relatives in any direction, the correlations are similar...
Thanks for the answer! By maternal environment I indeed meant the latter rather than the former, i.e. womb environment etc., i.e. the part one might not be able to duplicate when cloning. But if that hardly matters in the general population, I guess that’s not much of a worry.