Posted on 11/21/2001 11:02:28 PM PST by pcl
Genes have a very strong influence over how certain parts of our brains develop, scientists in the US and Finland have found. And the parts most influenced are those that govern our cognitive ability. In short, you inherit your IQ.
Paul Thompson at the University of California at Los Angeles and his colleagues used MRI to scan the brains of 10 pairs of identical and 10 pairs of fraternal twins. Identical twins have identical genes, whereas fraternal twins sharing on average half their genes. The twins shared environments, means researchers can separate genetic and environmental factors.
The researchers found that certain regions of the brain were highly heritable. These included language areas, known as Broca's and Wernicke's areas, and the frontal region, which, among other things, plays a huge role in cognition.
In identical twins, these areas showed a 95 to 100 per cent correlation between one twin and the other - they were essentially the same. The frontal structure, says Thompson, appears to be as highly influenced by genes as the most highly influenced trait we know of - fingerprints.
"It's extraordinary how similar they are," he says. The finding suggests that environment - their own personal experiences, what they learned in life, who they knew - played a negligible role in shaping it.
Fraternal twins were near-identical in Wernicke's area, showing about 60 to 70 per cent correlation, but were less similar in other areas, . Random pairs of people would be expected to have no correlation.
The study was all the more interesting in that it found that not only was this gray matter highly heritable, but it affected overall intelligence as well. "We found that differences in frontal gray matter were significantly linked with differences in intellectual function," the authors write.
The volunteers each took a battery of tests that examined 17 separate abilities, including verbal and spatial working memory, attention tasks, verbal knowledge, motor speed and visuospatial ability.
These tests hone in on what's known as "g", the common element measured by IQ tests. People who do well on one of these tests tend to do well on them all, says Thompson.
It is not known what exactly "g" is. But these new findings suggest that "g" is not just a statistical abstraction, but rather, that it has a biological substrate in the brain, says Robert Plomin, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London. Plomin has spent eight years looking for genes behind "g". "I'm convinced that there are genes," he says, a lot of them, each with a small effect.
Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard University in Boston questions whether "g" should really be called intelligence. "G" picks up on abilities such as being able to abstract rules or figure out how to order things according to rules. "It's the kind of intelligence you need to do well in school," he says. "Not what you need to do well in life."
Journal reference: Nature Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1038/nn758)
Duh.
I'm not really taking sides on the issue, but I remember what someone once told me:
"If you don't think genes determine how smart you are, try teaching calculus to your cat..."
Whether people liked it or not, this DOES seem to validate / prove what " THE BELL CURVE " stated. Actually, this position has long been held by many.
Liberals delude themselves, they don't WANT to believe a scientific theory because it goes against their politics... I'd rather base my politics on rational, scientific thought.
That being said, it is also a fact, that mothers , with low IQs, and few , if any parenting skills, will retard their own children's development. High falutin words meaning that dumb parents have dumb kids, and just not due to genetics.
Another think to think about: what if by telling everyone the truth (that some people are genetically more stupid than others) that some begin to think of themselves as stupid, and start acting that way?
It's pretty well-documented that if someone (especially a child) thinks they are stupid, they'll become less intelligent (think of an abusive parent telling his/her child repeatedly that they are stupid). I think lying to the majority of the populace on this one issue might actually be beneficial to stupid people (if you tell them they can achieve, they're likely to achieve more than if you tell them they're just born stupid).
Yeah, if you didn't inherit these regions, you're already dead.
I don't know anything about this author, but this piece is written as if by a person who learned neuroscience from the reading material on a cereal box. The entire piece is riddled with absurd statements (like the one above) and is nothing more than page filler material.
The BOOMERS , as a group, were repeatedly told that they were THE best, THE brightest , and THE most well educated generation who had ever graced the face of the earth. They weren't ( collectively ) all that great, and previous generatios have far out excelled in the arts, writing, invention, etc. OTOH, a child, who is genetically low IQed, can, with early and proper help, can rise somewhat above what he could have, left to the sole mashinations of his dumb parents.
No one can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and that's true for making a low IQed child into a genius. By stiffling a genius, one can dumb down a gifted child, though.
It's much easier to destroy intelligence than the nurture it, but that's true of pretty much everything.
However, the idea of "inherited" traits including IQ has been used by the elites to decide that people with "inferior" iq's should be eliminated. (For example, the eugenicists from the British elite at the turn of the century decided the Irish were stupid, and the US elites decided Irish, Jewish and Blacks were stupid and should be taught birth control etc)
The problem with this kind of thinking is that IQ is also dependent on culture.
For example, I have worked in two African cultures. IN the first, babys were breast fed, fairly well nourished, and schooled. The kids had some limits in sophisticated thinking due to rural environment (the city kids at the local rural high school did not) but they were really smart.
But I also worked in an African country where low grade malnutrition was rampant, as was disease, in a city. I never saw so many low IQ's: Not lack of ambition, not lack of schooling, but just not smart. I suspect that if you encouraged the city moms to breast feed and got rid of parasites, malaria etc. their IQ's would be much better: After all, many of their relatives lived in the US, either captured as slaves, or moved there to work in more recent years, had normal or superior IQ's .
So Intelligence is inherited, but it is influenced by culture, upbringing, lack of pollution (E.G. lead poisoning) and especially nutrition.
And, of course, the way you measure IQ depends on the way you test. OFten IQ tests are culturally oriented to the mainstream culture, and measure false low points if it is not in your native tongue. They predict ability to function in that culture, not true intellect. Which is why the Jewish immigrants in NYC in 1920 were listed as imbiciles by some of the eugenics literature at that time.
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