14 thoughts on “Intelligence”

  1. Is the belief, more common on the right than on the left, that homosexuality has no genetic basis “loopy” for exactly the same reasons? I think so. Do you agree? If so, we can conclude that this sort of loopiness is bipartisan.

    For that matter, I suspect that at least an significant minority of the right wingers who reject evolution altogether will also reject the idea that there is a genetic basis for any trait.

    2. It depends on what you think the “reasons” are. They both derive from a religious belief. I don’t know anyone who is skeptical about evolution who doesn’t believe in heritability.

      1. I knew a guy with a PhD (in Chemical Engineering) who insisted that God wanted children to generally resemble their parents, but since it was completely up to God, anything could happen. This struck me as a rather convenient belief that would help maintain harmony in his small religious community when children looked like the mailman (or the pastor!)

        But I don’t think religious thinking is the usual culprit for this sort of loopiness. I think this is a combination of wishful thinking, and pragmatism. Some leftwingers would like to think that with enough quality and quantity, school can make anyone smart. And if kids are going to be in school anyway, it is pragmatic to act as if it is true. Some rightwingers would like to think that with enough quality and quantity, church can make anyone straight. And if kids from religious families are going to be in church anyway, it is pragmatic to act as if it is true.

        1. (I meant to add: the chemical engineer was quite the rightwinger — he was the guy who introduced me to Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s. )

  2. I remember back in high school I had a chem teacher that would probably get fired now days. One day a kid made the comment that he wasn’t a very smart kid. The teacher stopped the chemistry lab so the whole class could hear and said “You’ve got two kinds of smarts. The kind god gave you and the kind you work for. So, if god didn’t give you very much, you just have to work harder. Saying your too dumb to understand isn’t an excuse.”

  4. Of course intelligence has genetic components… it’d be hard to imagine how it could avoid them.

    The more common problem I see is the idea that its genetic basis is simple …

    Equally, people seem to discount the deep, broad evidence for the effects of upbringing and environment.

    (Heritability can’t explain the Flynn Effect, after all.)

  5. I think of the Genetics factor as setting the upper theoretical limit.

    I think of the effort and applied learning as being how close to that hard-wired limit you can get.

    I think very few of us approach our true theoretical limit so unless somebody is abnormal, believing one is stupid is simply an excuse to avoid hard work.

    “The Grapes were almost certainly Sour anyways! So why bother?”

  6. The evidence seems weak, just looking at the article. They tried 54,000 statistical tests on their data in order to get one publishable result! They would need P<0.000001 on that one interesting case to make the overall result P<0.05.

    I have no doubt that intelligence is influenced by genetics. I see no reason, though, to expect a simple one-gene one-result sort of influence. And the research said that they only found 0.5% of intelligence involved with this gene…

  7. If they can only account for 0.5%, then a first estimate of 200 genes are involved. What other functions besides increasing intelligence would those other 200 genes do? And with this one gene being the only strong correlation out of 54000 genes studied, it is reasonable to assume that there are far more genes that we don’t even know about yet than there are genes we do know about.

  8. We may be able to measure intelligence but we have yet to define it. The elements we can define we can program a computer with. But defining it completely may forever elude us. Meaning we need not fear the singularity.

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