Intelligence is Inherited

codeButcher writes: "Now you can blame it on your parents! NewScientist.com reports on a study done on twins, that determines that IQ [and lack thereof then too, I suppose] is inherited. Quote: The finding suggests that environment - their own personal experiences, what they learned in life, who they knew - played a negligible role in shaping it."

Comments

Good book on the subject

[bofh31337]

In 1869 Francis Galton wrote a book called "Hereditary Genius" on this very subject. It's the first quantitative analysis of the human mental ability. He studied scientists, poets, politicians and many more people, classifying then into nature vs. nurture. In the end he concludes genius is hereditary in humans. Many people consider this book as the creator of the nature vs. nurture argument. He puts forth a great deal of stats in the book, something I find many case studies to be missing.

Re:IQ Bunkum

[pubudu]

For instance, a certain type of artist needs to know how to paint, how to communicate ideas through pictures, and use pictures to inspire certain emotions or thoughts in others. Ok, there's your skill list, and a pretty short one at that. But how do you test it without so much observer bias getting in as to make scores or rankings of ability unusable?

Why would you think that an ability to communicate is somehow indepedent from observer bias, such that we cannot measure artistic ability -- which you link to communicative ability -- because there is too much observer bias? Isn't observer bias the heart of communication? And thus wouldn't any attempt to measure such ability independent of such 'bias' be an attempt to measure nothing? And thus not at all surprising when we fail?

Or do you suggest that I can speak perfectly good German even if no so-called German-speaker can understand me? Or that what I speak can be classified as good German or bad German without regard to how Germans are speaking?