I hate that our nation seems to be developing the following motto-
Your Own Safety: Not Your Responsibility
Your Own Safety: Not Your Responsibility
I'm a little suprised on this site, of all sites, to see people subscribing to the idea that we are constrained by the intelligence of our parents.
EDIT: Spelling
This paper says IQ has 70% heritability, based on a twin adoption study. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2218526
Other twin studies have found 75-90% heritability for attention deficit disorder.
Schizophrenia is moderately heritable.
Migraine is well-known for running in families.
It is defiantly learned behavior how you want to make use of the capability but as plenty of people with learning difficulties would attest, if the underlying function isn't as strong as in others it makes it a whole lot harder to learn even with the motivation.
Given that, the only negative influence such people have by breeding is the influence they wield over their children (which can be a lot, but can also be overcome).
If the answer to the first question is "yes", it shouldn't take much to extrapolate from there.
Now, how to divvy up that quality which we call intelligence into what is inherited and what is learned is an open, and difficult, question. I think it's pretty clear that both are important, and their relative weights probably vary from individual to individual. Still, is the idea that intelligence comes in part from our DNA "remotely suggested"? I think it's fair to say so.
To rephrase my question: are you smarter than most (and in all likelihood all) non-human animals?
The answer is yes, and in the case of humans vs animals, I deny that it's because of culture or upbringing or all the other stuff that gets lumped into the category of "nurture". If it were just that, well, my cats would by now be speaking about as well as human five year olds do.
It's clear to me that nature plays a role. How much of a role is unclear, and, as I said, I suspect it varies.
For historical reasons, we're stuck with both racist pseudoscience and politically correct pseudoscience to contend with. I bet the truth about these matters, if ever found, will be somewhere in between. (And, FWIW, closer to the politically correct side of things.)
If a pedestrian is keeping as close to the side of the road as reasonably possible and is reasonably visible (e.g. not wearing all black on a pitch black section of road), then it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect a driver to avoid crashing into them - even on a highway. Especially if it's a reasonably straight road which most highways are.
I'll just leave this here.