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Comment by ectoplasm | Hacker News Reader

Per the intro to that article, presumably high intelligence also has a large environmental component, in that you need a good environment not to squash the heritability.

btw, I think you didn't finish editing:

> normally distributed with the mean of the offspring the mean of the parents

> normally distributed with the offspring mean the mean of the parents

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Yes even if you have the genetic potential for high intelligence environment can destroy it. What counts as a good environment is pretty basic though - the vast majority of people grow up in an environment which won't kill their genetic potential.

What I wrote about the means is correct. Over the population the mean intelligence of the offspring is equal to the mean intelligence of the parents. Of course with individual parents and offspring you can have sets of children where the means are not the same, but averaged over a large group the means are the same.

Ok re: IQ. Re: means, I still can't parse what you wrote the first time and I'm a native speaker. <noun> will be <verb> with <noun> <noun>?

What I wrote was a bit dense and extracting what I was try to say was not easy (this is bad writing on my part). What I was trying to say is the average intelligence of the children is the same as the average intelligence, but the actual values of the children will be scattered and this scattering will show a normal (bell curve) distribution. Putting this into numbers if the father has an IQ (g these days) of 110 and the mother an IQ of 150 then their children will be expected to have an average IQ of 130, but their actual IQs might be 115, 140, 160, and 100.

Sure, ok, makes sense.

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