The heritability of mental traits in humans: A proposal for a more coherent discussion

It is proposed to simplify the debate about the heritability of mental traits in humans by concentrating on two crucial issues: Population specificity of heritability estimates and the relation of these estimates to the malleability of the trait to which they refer. It is demonstrated that due to vast differences between the environmental variations of populations there would have to be a heritability estimate for every imaginable population, and that a heritability estimate allows no predictions whatsoever about the malleability of the trait in question. It is therefore concluded that this field of research should be abandoned.