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
Intelligent parents know how to better teach their children is the only way its passed on afaik.
If anything intelligence returns to the mean rather than blooming further away per person created. Maybe I too will learn if this is not the case.
Intelligence is built up of many things.
In *no* priority order:
1. Family DNA
2. How much damage the parents did to their DNA in their youth before procreating (the line ‘sins of the father carried in the son is quite real genetically speaking)
3. Pregnancy, baby, childhood and teen years nutrition — virtually every country’s IQ was raised with the implementation of iodised salt, certain countries like the Himalayas which only used rock salt (no iodine) had genuine intelligence problems.
4. Baby, toddler, childhood, teen years stimulation and challenge.
Intelligence is 1. Virtually made up and 2. Entirely a thing of nature and nurture. We see endless evidence of twins separated at birth who have similar intelligences but due to their nurturing achieve different life ends.
But broadly speaking, a person from a highly substance abusive family whose birth mother didn’t take good nutritional care, whose developmental years were not focussed on good mental stimulation and nutritional goals is never going to compete brain function wise with a child from a drug and alcohol free home whose mother was fit and on all the good prenatal nutritional guidelines, who gave the child a varied diet and who went to lengths to stimulate the child growing up.
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.
Heritability isn’t always genetic/biological. One of the most consistently inheritable traits is sport team loyalty. I don’t think I have literal niners fandom in my genes.
Gifted children I’ve encountered have had parents who can afford to give time and resources to their children. Maybe there is some genetic component but it would be wrong to ignore environmental factors.
Also intelligence as a single factor or metric is kinda silly. IQ is bogus and we all know people who couldn’t do calculus or write a good paper but could fix your car with duct tape and some twigs, are those people not smart?
I went to uni as a mechanical engineer and sooooo many of those kids were math wizards with high GPA but couldn’t understand why a 5mm shaft stuck into a 5mm blind hole that is expected to spin at 5000+ rpm is a dog shit design.
Being smart is in your hands, keep asking questions, keep looking for better answers. Accept that you don’t know nothing and that’s ok. The quest for knowledge is where genius lies.
Heritability and heredity are not the same thing.
Heritability is the tendency for populations to display similar traits as their ancestors over time due to genetics.
Heredity is the passage of genes to offspring, and the traits resulting from that.
A lot of traits are heritable, but also influenced by environmental, cultural, historical, and social reasons that lead to their being huge outliers. Heritability is a trend, not a rule. It has to do with populations, not individuals.
There is not a lot of strong evidence that intelligence is any more highly genetically heritable than obesity or susceptibility to certain environmental cancers; you can be born with the genetic predispositions, passed down from your parents, but they will only get you about half of the way there.
Edit: changed wording and provided other examples.
Intelligence, at best, is 20% heritable. That word used in genetics means how much of the variation can be explained by your genes. In intelligence’s case, maybe your genes can affect 10-20 points. What matters more is the so called “environmental factors”. That is everything that isn’t related to your genes. Upbringing, luck whatever. That’s the major deciding factor.
I’m no expert, but I think intelligence is largely a nature vs nurture thing. Two genius parents can have a child with learning disability, and two average parents can have a genius child. It is more about what the parents do with the child they are given. If the average parents of a child with genius traits mistreat him, make him believe he is stupid for being different, etc., then no matter how good genetically the child is, he will go a large portion of his life believing he is stupid, thus his talents will largely go to waste unless he reparents himself. But any average child can study hard and be interested in a field, and become an expert, largely with supportive and encouraging parents.
This is why all those developmental toys, books, etc. are actually important. And good grades in school don’t always mean someone is smart. I am an educator, and more often than not, in a test, it is more about if you know how to approach the tasks than your actual knowledge, especially in humanities like languages, art, etc. You have to produce what is requested, not what you know or can do.
My mom was extremely encouraging about learning instruments, languages, doing arts and crafts, etc. And as an adult I am a fully humanities kind of person – speak 8 languages, play 2 instruments, sew and do cosplay, etc. However, as an adult I learned that to be a functioning member of the society you need to be logical and a problem-solver. So I am also good at that, but I largely taught that to myself just because me being emotional and gentle wasn’t optimal in the society. Now I am extremely good at organisation, optimisation and similar things.
Okay, first, “intelligence” in the colloquial sense is not even properly defined, much less measurable.
“Intelligence” in the sense of somebody doing IQ tests (ie “Intelligence is whatever the test measures”) is heritable, that means it correlates with your parents results. This means if your parents score high, you have a better chance of also scoring high, and vice versa.
This does not mean that all of that correlation is genetic. An example for a non-genetic causal relation would be that if your parents are “smart”, they earn more money, and with that can make sure their child gets a better eductation, which makes the child “smarter”.
“Highly gifted” children are a combination of factors. Genes, a good upbringing, the opportunity to actually get their talent recognized and to do something with it, luck. Genes are merely a small part in all of this.
Serious question; Why would this surprise anyone?
As I understand it, the heritability aspect is an observation applicable to large populations. Individuals can still have notable IQ differences from their parents due to differences in environment & education, especially the younger they are.
There’s also the Flynn Effect. Every 10 years, average IQs go up 2 or 3 points, and scoring is adjusted to make the average fit the curve and keep the middle at 100. So what was an IQ of 100 in 1924 would be a 70 today: borderline developmentally disabled. But those people in the 1920s were fine—completely functional, generally intelligent, if not occasionally outright geniuses who far surpassed their parents in achievement. Meanwhile, consider what it means for your generation. If the trend holds, you’re probably already at least 6 IQ points ahead of your parents, right?
My kid is adopted and struggles with self-doubt over what may be inherited from the awful birth parents. My job as a parent is not to indulge the doubts. My kid and their siblings are all bright, charismatic and thriving, because they’ve got supportive families and schools. It doesn’t matter if there’s a good chance they won’t be getting a scholarship to MIT; they’ve already surpassed their birth parents in every other way that matters.
Try to look at it like this: Kids inherit the best parts of their parents. If your parents had grown up in a better environment, they still may not have scored high on IQ tests, but they could still have been good people living fulfilling lives. If you got the best parts of what they were, you will almost certainly surpass them. Whether that manifests as a higher score on an IQ test, or just a better life by some other measure, who knows.
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