Today i learned that Intelligence is heritable and it was a gut punch knowing my parents.
Can anyone clue me in on how it’s expressed or is it a soft cap?
Are highly hifted children anomalies or is it just a good expression of genes?
In: Biology
The genetic heritability of intelligence is something that is being actively studied and has been studied for a long time. The strength of intelligence’s genetic heritability is something that is not a settled matter in the scientific literature.
It is well-established that there is at least some genetic heritability that could be described as significant. Different studies have come to wildly different results regarding the strength of genetic heritability, however.
There’s multiple types of intelligence and there are various traits related to intelligence and success in tasks linked with intelligence, like e.g. how good one is in short-term memorization. There’s correlations between all of these, e.g. people with high IQ scores tend to do better in memorization tasks, or say, people who show high musical aptitude tend to also have higher IQs. These are statistical correlations, so they don’t necessarily hold for a specific individual.
In addition to genetic heritability, there are many known environmental factors behind intelligence, from the health of the mother during pregnancy to childhood nutrition to so on.
As an adult or late teen, it’s possible to improve on the metrics used to measure general intelligence. Adopting a healthy lifestyle correlates slightly with an increase in scores in intelligence tests. Learning new skills and staying mentally active does likewise.
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