Hacker News Reader

Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

I’d expect if we find the kids of professors to be more likely to be National Merit Finalists that we’d find a non-zero upbringing/educational correlation. Sure there’s a genetic component, but I’d be fairly shocked if “being good on academic testing” has no correlation with “being raised by academics”.

View on HN

There are studies of twins raised separately that directly address this. We know a great deal about the genetic heritability of IQ, please have a look at this for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

Extreme skepticism of social science findings is warranted for some subfields, but when it comes to intelligence, humanity has actually learned a lot.

Of course it would be correlated. Genes and environment and culture and family are all just one big interrelated mess. Is it even possible to tease the contributions apart, even in theory?

I guess I could imagine a study, something like: look at kids of professors, in particular identical twins vs fraternal. Not all children will be National Merit Finalists, but among those that are, do you find identical twin pairs more often? Even that is subject to environmental effects, though, because potentially identical twins are raised differently!

I remember something about studies about "twins raised apart".

In my opinion, Human nature is too complicate to poke at many of these factors, and talking about genetics quickly devolves into racism and elitism.

I agree with your last, which is very unfortunate in that if we could figure a way via research to shift upward the effectiveness of cognition (for which IQ is a proxy measure), I think peoples lives overall would be improved.

Some of these are interventions that we’ve already found to prevent wasting of ability (as you cite in another comment); others might be nutritional or environmental changes we could make to better support development in utero or as children develop.

Giving everyone 5% “better brains” would be a huge win for the world, but the sociological factors you mention preclude widespread scientific study.

You can't boost IQ, but you can stave off its decline with exercise. The reason why there's no incentive to do this is that no one wants smarter voters.

I agree with you but not the article which claims (without introducing evidence): “ By the way, when we say "environmental,” we mean “something other than additive genetics.” It doesn’t look as if the usual suspects—the way in which you raise your kids, or the school they attend—contribute much to this "environmental" variance, at least for adult IQ.”

Perhaps studies of early adopted children would another pathway for study, but there seems to be little appetite for IQ study in general.

I remember, without having googled anything additionally, studies where Malaria infections and lead exposition had a negative effect on final IQ, whereas deworming treatments and longer school attendance had a positive effect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com