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Chimpanzee Intelligence Largely Determined By Genetics
As reported by National Geographic, intelligence in chimpanzees appears to be strongly heritable, according to research led by William Hopkins, a primatologist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, who examined both genetic and environmental factors for a group of related chimpanzees with varying measured intelligence:
To find out how much of that variability is due to genetics, Hopkins and his team assessed the cognitive abilities of 99 captive chimpanzees. They used a battery of 13 tests measuring various manifestations of intelligence, such as how the animals dealt with the physical world, reacted to sound, and used tools.
The group of chimps tested had an expansive family tree, ranging from full siblings to fourth and fifth cousins. This allowed the researchers to calculate how well scores on cognitive traits aligned with genetic relatedness. Two categories of tasks were significantly heritable: those related to spatial cognition, such as learning physical locations, and those that required social cognition, such as grabbing a person's attention. Some chimps are quite clever, making kissing sounds or clapping their hands to draw an experimenter's attention, Hopkins said. "This one is a real measure of intelligence and innovative behavior."
...Anyone agree? Have a look...
Here...
are you telling the stuff the jew professors at college told me about german engineers and black welfare moms being equal was a lie? why would they do such a thing?
...we're lead to believe with enough money for education everyone can be intelligent!
Genes and Race: The Distant Footfalls of Evidence
A chimpanzee named Fred was eaten by a tiger after recklessly clapping his hands and making kissing sounds, attracting the tiger's attention.
Other members of the troop were unanimous in describing Fred as "not the sharpest stick in the jungle".
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
They demonstrated a novel argument for why there are no hidden variables and that the statistical descriptions of quantum mechanics reflect reality accurately.
Universities suspected this with humans also and did published research on it; Most of which has quietly been removed because it's not politically correct to show Asians have a 10pt higher IQ on average than white person(me), and 'other numbers'.
Interestingly enough true genius seems quite random, can have a long history of average parents etc and them produce someone quite gifted.
I am looking forward to Hollywood's announcement of a breeding program for intelligent chimps in order to cut costs on future productions of Planet of the Apes.
By the way, the study seems to indicate that trees are only as intelligent as their genes allow it to be, but specialised breeding could lead to intelligent plants. But for now, crossing a human with a flower may not result in a talking flower, though it still could be a pretty looking flower.
The USSR tried—and failed—to breed man and chimp
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
... although factors like scholarity and religious affiliation also play a role
Human intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with genetics and everyone is equal.
HAHA
- Nelson Muntz and Eric Raymond
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"why-I'll-be-a-smart-monkey's-uncle dept."
Ooooook!
Human intelligence may also be significantly determined by genetics...
** WOO WOO WOOO **
Sorry people, the person who posted the above sentence has been arrested for politically incorrect statements. Pointing out statistics and scientific studies is racist. He won't ever be bothering you again.
I am sure "Is it gender linked/dominated/driven?" would be asked next
The corollary here is that intelligence isn't always an advantage. Or else all chimps would have evolved human class intelligence. The question I'd like answered is, what natural advantages does innate stupidity confer upon a creature that enables it to spread its just as efficiently or even bettera than an intelligent creature. Maybe the neurons required to be good at puzzle solving and the like are subtracted from the total needed for street or jungle "smarts".
So this is how scientists research intelligence without hurting the feelings of people who believe everyone on the planet is as smart (individually or collectively) as everyone else on the planet. They study chimps. They publish their results. Left unmentioned is whether their conclusions might have parallels for the human race, but the fact that they specifically studied the acknowledged closest-related species says it for them. After all, drugs are developed by testing much further-removed animals like rats, and it's a process that seems to work great.
If these scientists had tried to study intelligence in humans, well, let's just say they'd have been doing it on their own dime, and their results would have been largely dismissed.
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have one here that can see
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
This just in, intelligence also highly heritable in humans. Only it isn't politically correct to talk about.
I assume all the chimps in the experiment were hand reared from birth.
Humans are the silliest peoples.
Can't remember whether I saw this on /. or another news site, but the cutting edge research on evolution has been called "neo Lamarckism". Intelligence itself can be passed on genetically. A recent "Epigenetic inheritance" study showed that mice who were taught to associate an odor with danger had baby mice who reacted strongly to the same odor. http://www.sciencedaily.com/re... (Science Daily 12/2013). It may be that learning or education "triggers" latent genes. Lamarck may not turn out to be a Tesla, but Darwin is unfinished business.
Gently reply
Ha! Got your attention!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
The capacity to become intelligent is.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Eugenics is a field of psychology, really?
Scientologist troll alert.
I still can't help but wonder what would happen if the Chinese government said something like "If both parents are in the top 10% for IQ, they can have all the kids they want." How much more would the per-capita GDP change after 5 generations?
So now we could breed up a strain of highly intelligent chimpanzees by selecting new parents from the highest scoring chimps?
I am anarch of all I survey.
Hereditary=genetics? What kind of a gross over-simplification is that? "Like in Humans, Genes Drive Half of Chimp Intelligence"? Genes don't drive human intelligence. They determine the upper and lower limits that can be achieved with proper nutrition, care and education and a multitude of other factors. More and more factors are being discovered everyday, each diminishing the role of genetics.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content...
http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb...
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Quoting an insightful comment on TFA: [quote] It is simply wrong to state that intelligence is 50% genetic and 50% environmental. This is probably the most common misconception about the meaning of the term "heritability". Heritability does NOT measure what fraction of a trait is genetic. It measures how much genetic variability contributes to the variability of that trait in that population. This sounds like a subtle distinction, but it is MAJOR. First of all, consider a thought experiment. What would happen if we made a herd of dolly's sheep (clones) that are genetically identical. Would they produce exactly equal quantities of milk? Of course not, because we all know that environment will influence milk production. So would we conclude that milk production has no genetic contribution? of course not! To quote my old friend Tim Tully "Of course its genetic. They are making milk for christ sake! (well, thats a rated G version of the quote anyway)" So this little example demonstrates that the quantity we call "heritability" does not measure genetic contribution to a trait in any meaningful or absolute sense. "Heritability" does not mean "inheritable". "Heritability" depends on the particular constellation of genetic variants in THAT POPULATION. And how those particular variants influence the trait. But there is a second and even deeper issue, which is that even when genes DO influence a trait, they do so by interaction with each other AND by interaction WITH THE ENVIRONMENT! so a given gene may or may not influence a trait depending on the environment, and depending the other gene variants that happen to be in that particular animal. And the magnitude of the gene's effect size will also vary depending on environment and the other genes too! This almost certainly contributes to the so called "missing heritability" problem that runs rampant in human genetic studies. Bottom line: its an interesting study and blog post. But the claim to quantify % of genetic influence on intelligence is dead wrong, and actually very dangerous. Josh Dubnau, Assoc. Prof. CSHL, geneticist.[/quote]
Some meta-analysis of the actual study, along with some examination of how the media has generally thoroughly misrepresented the study, is available at Language Log.
Thus Component 1 (23.6% of test variance) was significantly heritable — h2 = 0.538. The symbol h2 is used to denote "narrow-sense heritability", which is the ratio between the variance due to average effects of alleles, and the phenotypic variance as a whole:
$$h^2 = \frac{Var(A)}{Var(P)}$$
In other words, about half of the variance in a PCA component accounting for about a quarter of the variance in test results was accounted for by genetic variation.
Component 3 (10.8% of test variance) was also significantly heritable, with h2 = 0.335. Thus about a third of the variance in a PCA component accounting for about a tenth of the variance in test results was accounted for by genetic variation.
The genetic relationships of components 2 (11.7 of test-score variance) and 4 (8.2% of test-score variance) were not statistically significant.
A quarter plus a tenth of the test results were shown to be related at all (not in whole, but at all) to heritable traits. The grand total overall was just under 16% (a half of a quarter, plus a third of a tenth).
Now, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't describe 16% as "largely". I'd describe 16% as "partly", or "mildly", or "somewhat". But of course, reporters for Nat'l Geo and The Independent and the like aren't big on math.
It's still an interesting and intriguing study, of course, but so grossly misreported that it boggles the mind. We need a better grade of chimpanzee writing science articles for the general public! :D
Idiocracy?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Don't worry, that would be balanced out by Murica ala Idiocracy.
Eugenics doesn't only concern itself with psychological traits, but also with physical ones. That alone is sufficient to disqualify such categorization.