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Genetics/Intelligence question

Suppose parents A and B produced child C.

Both parents A and B have a high IQ of around 140 and attended say, Oxford University where they both studied maths.

Therefore, child C will be outstanding at maths.

Deductive logic assumes that child C will be good at maths because both parents were too. However, does genetics influence the child's intelligence further. Suppose parent A had a father who wasn't academic. Could child C inherit his genes as opposed to parent A's genes?

I know next to nothing about genetics. :confused:
Reply 1
Original post by I'm clever
Suppose parents A and B produced child C.

Both parents A and B have a high IQ of around 140 and attended say, Oxford University where they both studied maths.

Therefore, child C will be outstanding at maths.

Deductive logic assumes that child C will be good at maths because both parents were too. However, does genetics influence the child's intelligence further. Suppose parent A had a father who wasn't academic. Could child C inherit his genes as opposed to parent A's genes?

I know next to nothing about genetics. :confused:


Your username is incorrect.
Reply 2
Original post by Arcanine
Your username is incorrect.


Have you heard of irony? :rolleyes:
Reply 3
Original post by I'm clever
Have you heard of irony? :rolleyes:


No.
Reply 4
Original post by Arcanine
No.


'Irony (from the Ancient Greek ???????? eir?neía, meaning dissimulation or feigned ignorance)[1] is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions. Ironic statements (verbal irony) usually convey a meaning exactly opposite from their literal meaning. A situation is often said to be ironic (situational irony) if the actions taken have an effect exactly opposite from what was intended. The discordance of verbal irony is created as a means of communication (as in art or rhetoric). Descriptions or depictions of situational ironies, whether in fiction or in non-fiction, serve a communicative function of sharpening or highlighting certain discordant features of reality.'

I know you're like 10 years old so sorry if there's words in there you don't understand! :smile:
Original post by I'm clever
Suppose parents A and B produced child C.

Both parents A and B have a high IQ of around 140 and attended say, Oxford University where they both studied maths.

Therefore, child C will be outstanding at maths.

Deductive logic assumes that child C will be good at maths because both parents were too. However, does genetics influence the child's intelligence further. Suppose parent A had a father who wasn't academic. Could child C inherit his genes as opposed to parent A's genes?

I know next to nothing about genetics. :confused:


Intelligence is mainly down to environmental factors/personal experiences, not genetics. I guess certain genetic traits that give predispositions for a high intelligence exist, but there is no 100% way of determining intelligence looking at genetics alone.
Original post by I'm clever
Suppose parents A and B produced child C.

Both parents A and B have a high IQ of around 140 and attended say, Oxford University where they both studied maths.

Therefore, child C will be outstanding at maths.

Deductive logic assumes that child C will be good at maths because both parents were too. However, does genetics influence the child's intelligence further. Suppose parent A had a father who wasn't academic. Could child C inherit his genes as opposed to parent A's genes?

I know next to nothing about genetics. :confused:


1) Most people who studied maths at Oxford will have an IQ considerably higher than 140.

2) Intelligence is only partly genes (admittedly a decent part)

3) The milkman is your real father, sorry.
Does that mean Einstein was child Z?
The child almost definitely will be good at maths, but we can by no means conclude from that heritability of intelligence or of mathematical ability. The fact that his/her parents are likely to spend more time helping their child with maths and in a complex way, due to their education, confounds the issue; as does the fact that there are likely to be maths books around the house, that the parents are likely to talk about maths in a much more positive fashion than most parents would and that they are likely to have careers in maths.

Personally, I believe that intelligence is, by and large, not biologically based (except in the sense that one has to be a human without significant disability) and haven't seen any serious evidence to persuade me otherwise. I scored on 142 on a MENSA test (I believe they used the Stanford-Binet test), but I'm not sure that my parents would score as high (due to having different life experiences) and I'm not at all sure that I would have scored as high had I taken the test at other times in my life. I don't even like the concept of a "reaction range" (i.e. our genes predispose us to a certain IQ range, but that the actual range developed is related to experience) since that just seems like sloppy revisionism; I mean, obviously it's true in a very general and loose sense, but it doesn't really add anything scientifically to the debate.

(You might also like to see the videos in my signature, which happen to have some relevance.)

EDIT: Besides, there's certainly nothing like 100% heritability of intelligence (however defined) from one's parents -- the Flynn effect (i.e. the empirical increase in average global IQ scores over time) couldn't occur if there were.
(edited 12 years ago)
Original post by I'm clever
Suppose parents A and B produced child C.

Both parents A and B have a high IQ of around 140 and attended say, Oxford University where they both studied maths.

Therefore, child C will be outstanding at maths.


The general consensus is that genetics give a maximum level of intelligence that may or may not be reached, but the individual may or may not reach it, depending on environmental factors.

What you are assuming in your example though, is that the parents are naturally very good at maths. Whilst if they both went to oxford and studied maths, they will probably have at least some natural aptitude for maths, or more likely very logical thinking, their skill at maths is an acquired characteristic, rather than a genetic one, and so will not be passed on.

However, their child probably will be good at maths, as being a child of mathematicians he will have access to a resource of mathsy knowledge as a child.

Original post by I'm clever
Deductive logic assumes that child C will be good at maths because both parents were too. However, does genetics influence the child's intelligence further. Suppose parent A had a father who wasn't academic. Could child C inherit his genes as opposed to parent A's genes?


The genes that determine maximum intelligence are not a single pair dominant/recessive alleles, so it is unlikely that the child's maximum intelligence exactly the same as either one of their parents, however, again, it is more important what the child's environment is like.
This is why adopted children tend to have IQs higher to their adoptive parents than their biological parents.
Reply 10
Original post by Persephone9
The general consensus is that genetics give a maximum level of intelligence that may or may not be reached, but the individual may or may not reach it, depending on environmental factors.


You saved my faith in this thread.

Behaviour, especially human behaviour, and especially intelligence are immensely complicated. There are so many factors involved: hormones, the anatomy of the brain, the environment they have been raised in, their chemical environment in the womb, their everyday stimuli and behavioural triggers, genetics and so on.

Does the fact that his or her parents or grandparents had a high mathematic ability give us an indication of the child's mathematical ability? Well no, not really, if at all.

But if instead we are given evidence that that child was in a healthy pre-natal environment, and then was given plenty of mental stimulation through childhood for good brain development, followed by a positive introduction to mathematics at an early stage that was then encouraged thereafter. Well now we're getting somewhere.

It is also worth considering how you would test it. Maths is very broad and stretches over many area that require different mental abilities. You could go for an exam-style test, but what would you include? Also, although IQ is the most famous intelligence test, it is by no means the most indicative of anything useful. They mostly show the ability of a person to complete IQ tests.

If you are interested in finding out more about human behaviour then there's a lecture course available free online from UC Berkeley "Human Behavioural Biology" by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, primatologist and neurobiologist.

So in all, human intelligence is extraordinarily, fascinatingly complex. I love it.

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