Is your intelligence based on genetics or your environment?

This is similar to the nature versus nurture concept. I think it’s a 50/50% thing.

Both. Probably we are born with a range of IQ and then our environement influences whether we are at the top or bottom of the range.

Genetics defines potential.
Environment determines actual.

99% environment. Smart kids are raised smart by caring and nurturing parents. From what I have seen, brilliant kids are raised by smart parents who are very demanding.

Genetics determines intelligence as long as you didn’t suffer from malnutrition, pathology or trauma, in my opinion. However, the environment you’ve been placed in determines whether you’ll have the opportunity to nurture your skills and express this intelligence. For example, to show that you’re talented academically you need to have been granted access to education. To show excellence in art would require exposure to that field from a reasonably early age.

I think it’s a dynamic relationship and there is no way to determine exact proportions. Certainly, new research shows the brain to be very plastic but there is a great deal of innate ability.

@Cruiser I disagree with your percentage. My father has a very high IQ, I would venture to say in the top 1 or 2%, I test in the 96th percentile typically, and I know he is smarter than me. He was raised by a paranoid schizophrenic father who just barely functioned, and an anxiety ridden mother who did nothing but cook and sit on the stoop outside of the house. The family was extremely disfunctional, and probably could be considered neglectful, but never physically abusive. When he graduated high school his mom was angry he was going to go to college, she wanted him to work and buy her new furniture.

They were extremely poor, and my dad did not learn to read until 3rd grade. He wound up in the end with a scholarship to Wharton for his PhD, he had another offer at Yale on fellowship, but he chose Wharton. The positive in his environment was the NYC school system for secondary school, and his group of friends I guess.

I firmly believe his natural given IQ drove him to pursue life the way he did, and the opportunity to be able to flourish was very important, but he was not really guided in any way, he had to figure it out for himself, and seize the moment. Someone with much less intelligence probably would not have figured it out.

Eurgh, this debate again.

It is always going to be both, and what everyone misses out is that there is an interaction between the two variables.

To some extent, genetics determine your environment (ie if you are born “shy” then you will enter different environments than if you weren’t born shy). Of course ignoring the further debate whether these things themselves are determined by environment/genetics. Other variables I would include are motivation, attention, and potential for mental capacities (ie how good your working memory functions).

Then there is the further interaction in the idea that your environment determines which genes are activated. In the very same way that other characteristics like nourishment can determine how tall you grow (for an example), the stimulus you receive in an environment determines how your mind develops.

And then we of course have to factor in social/cultural influences, such as linguistic determinism, how we perceive others, who we make friends with etc etc etc before we get a more broader view of this model.

@JLeslie I did say 99%!! ;) My kids are high functioning and I do go to all their school activities and my assessment was based on 14 years of personal observation of the other parents of my kids peers. Met plenty of hyper overbearing parents and all were totally involved in their childs education. Never met or saw a neglected child although I am sure they do exist as well as stories such as your fathers.

@Cruiser you said 99% environment, and I am saying my dad’s environment in childhood was fairly sucky relatively speaking, but he has a high IQ.

Plus I would like to personally question, why are you attributing numbers to something we cannot measure? At the best these “percentages” are going to be variable among individuals as environment may take more of a role than genetics in certain situations (ie adoption) than others.

And to say it is 50/50 is completely naive. That would be like saying that all the colours green are made from the combination of yellow/blue in a percentages of 50 each.

@JLeslie And don’t get me started on IQ…

@Ame_Evil Um, aren’t we talking about IQ? The OP asked about intelligence, I assume he is talking IQ and not emotional intelligence, or whatever they call that.

Mine is based on my absolutely amazing giant brain!

@Ame_Evil Meanwhile, I basically agree with your explanation in your answers

@JLeslie Intelligence has hundreds of measures, many which measure similar aspects of the same thing, and some which measure different aspects which can be regarded as intelligence. IQ is just one of these, and is a very flawed concept. The problem with measures are usually they have to ignore other things (like for example you mentioned emotional intelligence) which will always interact with other forms of intelligence.

Basically I am proposing a less than simple intelligence model: with different intelligences which all interact and affect each other. Just to give a simple example of this not-so-simple model: imagine the interaction between memory, emotional intelligence and social intelligence. A poor memory may affect the other two intelligences, but a good memory may not necessarily benefit them.

@rooeytoo Well done for saying something else which is widely disagreed on in psychology: that brain size is linked to intelligence. I suggest you look up research into the “encephalisation quotient”.

@Ame_Evil Honestly, I don’t think we are disagreeing. I think memory has a big affect, and that it all works together. I also agree it is like a big circle, gaining information, holding onto information, filing the information in our brains so we can pull on it when we need it, and for it to be filed in a way that it relates to many different things, so the memories are triggered by many things, aiding us in logical and analytical thinking. You obviously don’t like people being evaluated by a single test, like a standard IQ test, but it is a measure I think that counts. It is not the entire answer, and I am not saying it is a predictor of success, or anything like that, I am only saying it has some validity.

Both genetics and environment.

@JLeslie Mmm, my gripe is mostly aimed at the fact that people have misconceptions about IQ being the full intelligence, when in fact it is only a measure. It is like taking a slice of the brain, and trying to understand the rest of the brain just from that one slice. It will always miss other important things out, which impacts upon the validity of the measure.

In reality you could never measure accurate intelligence, and intelligence is indeed just a term used to organise the world around us.

No one know about their parents genetic capacity and diversity just by simple observation on their behavior and experience,we need genetic test to define that even though it’s not 100% accurate. As for me,I’ll have to say that my intelligence originated from my environment,genetic is just a simple base (like any other people) for me to develop from and it mainly contribute to my health and physical attributes.

@Ame_Evil well, I feel confident saying your gripe is not with me. Possibly I am not arculating myself well, or maybe you are so annoyed by encountering people who put to much emphasis and attach too much to IQ testing that you are projecting some of it onto me, becuase I used the term IQ (it seems to be some sort of trigger for you), but I think we agree for the most part, I think it all counts.

It’s both for most people. Kids born with decent physiology but then lick lead paint effect their intelligence. We can improve what we’re born with to a degree, but often, things that are out of our control, like the things we come into contact the first three years of our lives, or lack thereof, that builds our growing minds, how much we’re held, played with, talked to…. it all has an effect.

But, having smarts is one thing… being a decent human being is something all together different.

@JLeslie I can only speak from my observations of kids so far 14 and under and stand behind my original comments. I have not see one “intelligent” kid that did not have at least one parent who nurtured and guided that child to learn and become intelligent. What I do not know is how some of these other obviously smart kids I see turn out later in life who are not nurtured and guided as much as the high functioning kids such as your fathers case. And I am sure many do later on immerse themselves in their studies and build their intelligence level.

That being said, birth defects aside, I firmly believe we are all born with the capacity to learn and become “intelligent” by what ever standards of measurement, and that we are only using a fraction of our brain’s true potential.

@Cruiser although I think studying is related to intelligence, I think it is much more related to knowledge. Knowledge is much different than intelligence in my book. I know people who have less intelligence than I do, but are incredibly knowledgeable, especially in their specific careers and interests, because they have put in time to learn the concepts and facts related to the subject matter. Effort matters, there is no question, and that is why evaluating and tracking a child at a young age is a horrible thing in my opinion.

Sometimes I think how people discuss things when they know very little about a subject matter is more telling, then the subjects they know a lot about, when it comes to intelligence.

Intelligence from wikipedia

From wiki… ^ ^ ^
“Intelligence is an ill-defined, difficult to quantify concept. Accordingly, the IQ tests used to measure intelligence provide only approximations of the posited “real” intelligence.”

@cruiser, I have no quarrel with that statement. I said I think tracking a child based on an IQ test is an outrage to me. Hell, making assumptions about an adult by how they might test on an IQ test is not good either, it is only one measure, and an imperfect one, admittedly, but I think it counts in broad terms. A few percentage points difference is meaningless, but an IQ of 80 and an IQ of 130 is probably two people who have very different capabilities for learning and deducing answers based on limited knowledge. I am obviously not counting people who have difficulty with the test due to language difficulties, or some other such explanable problem that would affect the score.

I am saying knowledge is learning what is already known; intelligence is more related to what you can come up with from your base of knowledge, to hypothesize and relate what you know to other subjects. I am only talking about Acamic type of situations, emotional intelligence, and other parameters are a different thing.

Like my father is very bad at perceiving when people are very upset, bad at reading someones body language and affect. I think this is partly a result of his upbringing, the neglect. Some has to do with gender, many men have trouble reading affect. He is very social, loves talking to people, but cannot read clues when they are tired of talking, but his parents as he described, “most of time stared into space.” So he lacks there, but again can understand complex scientific theories, and knows an incredible amount of information about many things, and is extremely analytical.

@JLeslie I agree with what you are saying and when you really think about everything you know you had to learn somehow someway. And like your dad’s (in your eyes) shortcomings can all be learned. You simply cannot know everything. So IMO intelligence is truly in the eyes of the beholder. You can be book smart or street smart or like me a mixture of both. I consider myself very intelligent, was only so so in school by scholastic standards but most of what I consider that makes me intelligent I read in a book myself or I learned simply by doing and making mistakes….LOTS of mistakes.

My parents took me places of learning (museums, zoos, aquariums and landmarks) and gave me opportunities to experience many things on my own at the time I didn’t want to do. Those opportunities made me independent and an independent critical thinker. On the other hand I do know some people think I am a complete idiot. Again all in the eye of the beholder. :)

Neither. It’s based on karma.

@Cruiser I think we are still talking about two slightly different things, IQ vs. knowledge. You probably were born with a decent IQ and your environment helped to broaden your thinking and knowledge.

I once read that people with high IQ’s their brain has more pathways, more connections related to information and memory. For instance a discussion on fluther might be about a particular topic, but higher IQ people will use knowledge from many subjects and relate it to the question to reason out a possible answer, even if they know little about the particular topic. This may account for why high IQ tend to test a little better, they can deduce the most likely answer, even if they don’t know the answer. Now, when I say higher IQ, I don’t want it to sound like I am only talking about genius level. Average IQ would have plenty of ability for deductive reasoning.

I don’t think having a high IQ makes someone better, not at all, and as I said, average IQ is sufficient, and when interacting with people many things matter, not just IQ, but I do know that I can almost always pick out someone who is probably mensa level or close after knowing them for a while.

Low IQ, I hold no judgement, I don’t want it to come across as elite bullshit. The most important thing in life is being a good person, I respect all hard work, I don’t care if it is sweeping floors or bagging groceries, if that is all a person is capable of. None of it really matters in the end, everyone counts. My grandfather, the schizophrenic one, had a horrific childhood, but from a young age he got up every day and went to work, even though he was paranoid and sometimes heard voices; he sewed slippers in a not so great environment in a factory in NY. My mom has said, that he was smart (it was my dad’s dad) just out of it. Anyway, of everyone in my family, I think he overcame the most, and was the most successful, even though he was extremely poor and failed in some ways as a parent. If he was intelligent, his mental illness did not let it show through most of the time, and his circumstance limited him. Not everyone has to understand the theory of relativity, or ponder what will help the economy. And, of course we have observed people who test as having low IQ’s that have amazing abilities in a particular thing, math, piano etc.

Good points above. I wanted to mention also that the idea of genetics OR environment is turning into a false dichotomy as we learn more about how the genome interacts with the environment. Genes are not static blueprints; they change in response to epigenetic influences.

Both. But, honestly, I have to go with environment.

I think it’s both, but I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess on which is most influential. personally speaking, I am from parents of very average intelligence and I don’t feel that I’m much above average myself. I had access to an excellent education but I didn’t have the mental capacity to take advantage of it – that can only be genetic.

If the vast proportion of the human potential for intelligence is NOT borne out of genetics, then how come even the least educated of us is far more intelligent than every other animal on Earth?

The fact that genetics must account for the relative supremacy of the intelligence of the human race suggests that a significant proportion of the variation within the human race is also tied to genetics.

Me personally? Both

@downtide : Jiddu Krishnamurthi, recongized as one of the greatest philosophers to live and especially of the 20th century, was considered “dim-witted” as a child and flunked out of Cambridge a few times.

I agree with Sir Ken Robinson when he says this :

_“We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. We know three things about intelligence, one it is diverse; we think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinaesthetically, we think in abstract terms, we think in movement.

Secondly intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments, in fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

And the third thing about intelligence is, it’s distinct.” _

@shalom for me it’s not just a case of how academic I am. I seem to have a harder trouble with creativity, with logical reasoning and with memory, than do most people. I find it extremely difficult to understand or learn new things.

@downtide A lot of students think that they are not creative, good in reasoning, memory. It’s all just a matter of undoing the thinking that makes you think so by experiencing results that prove to you otherwise.

Again it’s to do with our conception of intelligence. The more we “think” we are a certain thing the more we re-create it as our reality. Very often people’s earliest experiences in formal learning created a deep, emotional impact on them and then formed their opinion of themselves as learners. People think and learn in different ways but we tell them there’s only one way to learn. It’s like, you have 10 fingers but only allowed to use one for typing so the finger that gets to hit the keypad the most is the “winner finger”. (No pun intended).

Creativity is not just about making new things or ability to think up things on the spot. Creativity is the UNBLOCKING of thinking that prevents original concepts from surfacing. Everyone, believe it or not, is creative. You have just never found a teacher that created experiments to help you see that in you.

@shalom I’m aware there are different methods of learning and I’ve tried them all (or at least, all the ones that have been invented so far). I was more capable of learning as a child – in fact I was a model A-student until my teens, then I seemed to reach a “ceiling” that I wasn’t able to proceed past. I just wasn’t able to process the level of information I was getting.

By your argument then everyone has equal mental capacity, if it’s accessed the right way, and that just does not seem to be the case for everyone. I think everyone has a ceiling. For some it’s so high they can never reach it.

Intelligence can be affected by genetics if, say, you have something like Down’s Syndrome. Apart from that we can only really discuss Intelligence if we changed our conception of what Intelligence means. If we limit our conception of Intelligence to getting good grades, spelling and punctuating well, argue well in writing or articulate better than others then that is a very superficial and shallow way of judging Intelligence. Given, it is a type of intelligence but not the be-all. We have just never questioned our inherited tradition of judging Intelligence.

@Downtide The ceiling you are talking about, again, depends on our conception of Intelligence. My conception of Intelligence goes beyond the idea of literacy skills.If you are talking specifically about scholastic aptitude – if we provide learning experts instead of teachers, provide motivation instead of discipline and accept that everyone has their own pace of learning then no ceiling exists.

The current idea of intelligence is based only on one kind of intelligence and the length of time it takes to achieve, not based on true potential of human intelligence.

Both.

Actually, there’s three factors:

Genetics, epigenetics, environment.

The last two interact with each other in complex feedback loops. Epigenetics is about genes that are able to switch on or switch off other genes.

Both to a degree but according to this article it is more about the height of a person then any other factor. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200901/why-men-are-more-intelligent-women

I think this is both because if you are born with a disease or something that makes it hard to learn (like me with my ADHD and ADD) then you may learn slower or not as well. But also, your environment can definitely affect your intelligence. There have been towns and clans of people who have never benefited from being isolated for instance in the wilderness. Although it can do you a lot of good such as if you don’t have TV. There are so many other things to do and your mind can grow if you explore the world around you.