Does Intelligence

depend more on
Nature or Nurture?

Surbhi Sharma
B.A(H) Applied Psychology
Roll no. -374
Introduction
“Intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge, to think and reason effectively, and to deal
adaptively with the environment.” (Passer & Smith, 2007)

David Wechsler defined intelligence as “The aggregate or global capacity of the individual to
act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment.”

Intelligence" derives from the Latin nouns Intelligentia or Intellēctus, which in turn stem
from the verb Intelligere, to comprehend or perceive.

The phrase nature versus nurture was popularised in the 1880s by Francis Galton. Follower of
his cousin Charles Darwin, Galton 1869 concluded that intelligence is inherited after finding
that eminent men had a higher proportion of eminent relatives than other men did. This led
Galton to champion eugenics, encouraging supposedly superior people to reproduce while
preventing supposedly inferior people from reproducing. Galton's view also influenced the
attitudes of psychologists towards immigrants in the early 20th century.

Heritability of Intelligence
The issue of nature versus nurture re-emerged in 1961 when President Lyndon Johnson began
Project HeadStart, which provides preschool children from deprived socioeconomic
backgrounds with enrichment programs to promote their intellectual development. Project
Headstart was stimulated in part by the finding that African Americans scored lower than
whites in IQ tests. Those who supported headstart, attributed this difference to the poor social
economic conditions in which African American children were more likely to be reared. But
in 1969, an article by psychologist Arthur Jensen questioned whether programs such as
headstart could significantly boost the intellectual level of deprived children. Jensen's doubts
were based on the notion of Heritability - the extent to which the variability in a
characteristic within a group can be attributed to heredity. Jensen claimed that intelligence
has a heritability of 0.80, which means that 80% of the variability in intelligence among the
members of a group can be explained by heredity.

Several lines of research offer support for the view that heredity plays an important role in
human intelligence. Considering findings with respect to family relationship and measuring
IQ, if intelligence is indeed determined in part by heredity, we would expect that the more
closely two persons are related, the more similar their IQs will be. This prediction has
generally been confirmed by various studies e.g., McGue et al., 1993; Neisser et al., 1996.

Suppose that intelligence was totally heritable, that is, suppose that 100 percent of the
intellectual variation in the population were determined by genes. (No psychologist today
would maintain that this is so, but examining the extreme view can be instructive.) In that
case, any two individuals with the same genotype would have identical intelligence test
scores, so, the correlation in IQ between identical (monozygotic) twins would be 1.00.
Nonidentical brothers and sisters (including fraternal twins, who result from two fertilized
eggs) share only half of their genes. Therefore, the correlation between the test scores of
fraternal twins and other siblings should be substantially lower. Extending the argument, the
correlation between a parent’s test scores and his or her children’s scores should be about the
same as that between siblings, because a child inherits only half of his or her genes from each
parent. What does the actual data look like?

TABLE 1: Correlations in Intelligence among People Who Differ in Genetic Similarity

and Who Live Together or Apart
(SOURCES: Based on Bouchard & McGue, 1981; Bouchard et al., 1990; Scarr, 1992)

Percentage of Correlation of
Relationship Shared Genes IQ Scores
Identical twins reared together 100 .86
Identical twins reared apart 100 .75
Nonidentical twins reared together 50 .57
Siblings reared together 50 .45
Siblings reared apart 50 .21
Biological parent–offspring reared by parent 50 .36
Biological parent–offspring not reared by parent 50 .20
Cousins 25 .25
Adopted child–adoptive parent 0 .19
Adopted children reared together 0 .32

The correlations between the test scores of identical twins are almost +0.90 and substantially
higher than any other correlations in the table (but they are not 1.00). Identical twins
separated early in life and reared apart are of special interest because they have identical
genes but experienced different environments. The correlation for identical twins raised apart
is nearly as high as that for identical twins reared together. It is also higher than that for
fraternal twins raised together. This pattern of findings is a powerful argument for the
importance of genetic factors (Bouchard et al., 1990; Plomin et al., 2007).

Adoption studies are also instructive. As Table 1 shows, IQs of adopted children correlate as
highly with their biological parents’ IQs as they do with the IQs of the adoptive parents who
reared them. Overall, the pattern is quite clear: The more genes people have in common, the
more similar their IQs tend to be. This is very strong evidence that genes play a significant
role in intelligence, accounting for 50 to 70 percent of group variation in IQ (Petrill, 2003;
Plomin & Spinath, 2004). However, analysis of the human genome shows that there clearly is
not a single “intelligence” gene (Plomin & Craig, 2002). The diverse abilities measured by
intelligence tests are undoubtedly influenced by large numbers of interacting genes, and
different combinations seem to underlie specific abilities (Luciano et al., 2001; Plomin &
Spinath, 2004). Both the Colorado Adoption Project (Coon et al.,1990) and the Texas
Adoption Project (Loehlin, Horn & Willerman, 1994) have also provided strong support for a
hereditary component in intelligence.
On the basis of these and other findings, some researchers have estimated that the heritability
of intelligence—the proportion of the variance in intelligence within a given population that
is attributable to genetic factors—ranges from about 35 percent in childhood to as much as 75
percent in adulthood (McGue et al., 1993). The contribution of genetic factors to intelligence
increase with age Perhaps because as individuals grow older, their interactions with their
environment are shaped less and less by the impacts of their families or their social origins,
and more and more by the characteristics they bring with them to their environments. In other
words, as they grow older, individuals are increasingly able to choose or change their
environments so that these permit expression of their genetically determined tendencies and
preferences (Neisser et al., 1996). Whatever the precise origin of the increasing heritability of
intelligence with age, there is little doubt that genetic factors do indeed play an important role
in intelligence throughout life.

Within the range of normal cognitive abilities — that is, apart from studies of learning
difficulties — the molecular genetic study of intelligence is still quite new. There have been
almost no well-replicated associations between candidate genetic variants and intelligence.
An exception is the APOE gene: people with one or two e4 alleles of this gene tend to have
lower cognitive ability in old age, and tend to decline more in cognition across their lifetimes,
than those who lack e4. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of intelligence have not
yet revealed any additional variants with genome-wide significance.

There is, though, molecular genetic evidence that some variance in intelligence differences is
detected by common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The application of the genetic
complex trait analysis (GCTA) method to intelligence differences in childhood and older age
found that between a quarter and a half of the variance could be accounted for by variants in
linkage disequilibrium with common SNPs. GCTA creates a genetic relationship matrix
among unrelated individuals and calculates the association between this genetic similarity
and phenotypic similarity. This analysis did not identify the causal variants; it suggested that
intelligence is highly polygenic, with large numbers of variants of small effect sizes.
Bivariate GCTA analysis has shown that the genetic correlation between intelligence
measured in childhood and old age in the same individual is high; to a substantial extent, the
same genes cause higher intelligence in childhood and older age.

Environment
Environmental Enrichment and Deprivation: Additional evidence for the role of
environmental factors in intelligence is provided by the findings of studies of environmental
deprivation and environmental enrichment. With respect to deprivation, it has been found that
intelligence can be reduced by the absence of certain forms of environmental stimulation
early in life (Gottfried, 1984). In terms of enrichment, removing children from sterile,
restricted environments and placing them in more favorable settings seems to enhance their
intellectual growth (e.g., Skeels, 1938, 1966). For example, in one of the first demonstrations
of the beneficial impact of an enriched environment on IQ, Skeels (1966) removed thirteen
children, all about two years old, from an orphanage in which they received virtually no
intellectual stimulation—and virtually no contact with adults—and placed them in the care of
a group of retarded women living in an institution. After a few years, Skeels noted that the
children’s IQs had risen dramatically—29 points on average. Interestingly, Skeels also
obtained IQ measures of children who had remained in the orphanage and found that on
average, these had actually dropped by 26 points—presumably as a result of continued
exposure to the impoverished environment at the orphanage. Twenty-five years later, the
thirteen children who had experienced the enriched environment were all doing well; most
had graduated from high school, found a job, and married. In contrast, those in the original
control group either remained institutionalized or were functioning poorly in society. While
more recent—and more carefully controlled—efforts to increase intelligence through
environmental interventions have not yielded gains as dramatic as those reported by Skeels
(1966), some of these programs have produced beneficial results. For example, in one such
study, known as the Venezuelan Intelligence Project, hundreds of seventh-grade children
from disadvantaged backgrounds were exposed to special school programs designed to
improve their thinking skills. This intervention produced significant gains in the children’s
scores on many tests (Herrnstein et al., 1986). In another program, the Carolina Abecedarian
Project (Campbell & Ramey, 1994), children were provided with enriched environments
from early infancy through preschool. The test scores of these youngsters were higher than
those of children who did not benefit from this intervention, and remained higher even at age
twelve, seven years after the end of the program. Together, findings such as these suggest that
improving the environment in which children live can indeed affect their IQs.

Another source of evidence for the impact on intelligence of environmental factors is

provided by the finding, in many studies, that the longer students remain in school, the higher
their IQ scores tend to be (e.g., Ceci, 1991). While this finding could also be interpreted as
suggesting that it is the more intelligent people who choose to remain in school, several facts
point to the conclusion that staying in school may actually benefit intelligence. For example,
it has been found that students who attend school regularly score higher on intelligence tests
than students who attend irregularly. Similarly, when children of nearly identical age but who
are one grade apart in school are compared, those who have attended school longer have
higher average IQs. (This difference in grade levels occurs because all school systems have a
cutoff date for birthdays, and only children born before that date can start school in a given
year.) Additional support for the role of environmental factors in intelligence comes from
research showing that many biological factors that children encounter while growing up can
affect their intelligence. Prolonged malnutrition can adversely affect IQ (e.g., Sigman, 1995),
as can exposure to lead either in the air or in lead-based paint—which young children often
eat because it tastes sweet (e.g., Baghurst et al., 1992). We have already examined the
adverse effects of factors such as alcohol and drugs on the physical health of developing
fetuses; here I simply want to add that research findings indicate that these factors can also
adversely affect intelligence (e.g., Neisser et al., 1996). To conclude, then, many forms of
evidence support the view that intelligence is determined, at least in part, by environmental
factors.

Shared Family Environment: How important to intelligence level is the shared environment
of the home in which people are raised? If home environment is an important determinant of
intelligence, then children who grow up together should be more similar than children who
are reared apart. As Table 1 shows, siblings who are raised together are indeed more similar
to one another than those reared apart, whether they are identical twins or biological siblings.
Note also that there is a correlation of .32 between unrelated adopted children reared in the
same home. Overall, it appears that between a quarter and a third of the population’s
individual differences in intelligence can be attributed to shared environmental factors. The
home environment clearly matters, but there may be an important additional factor. Recent
research suggests that differences within home environments are much more important at
lower socioeconomic levels than they are in upper-class families. This may be because lower
socioeconomic families differ more among themselves in the intellectual richness of the
home environment than do upper-class families (Turkheimer et al., 2003). Indeed, a lower-
income family that has books in the house, can’t afford video games, and encourages
academic effort may be a very good environment for a child with good intellectual potential.

Flynn Effect: According to researcher James Flynn (1987, 1988), the world’s population is
scoring progressively higher on intelligence tests. Flynn studied the standardization data of
the different editions of Stanford-Binet And the Wechsler's scale from 1932 to 1981. He
found that with each addition of these tests, a higher standard was established than its
previous versions. Flynn reports that because this there have been increases of 28 points in IQ
in the United States since 1910 and similar increase in Britain since 1942. On average, iqs in
the West have increased about 3 points per decade. This is known as the Flynn effect. The
increase in the same degree of both men and women for different ethnic groups. Looking at
the Flynn effect it is quite clear that genetic changes cannot explain such gains. The rise in IQ
could be due to many reasons like changes in Environmental conditions, better nutrition,
urbanisation, television, better education etc. Another explanation of this effect comes from
the technological advances that may have helped in shaping the analytical and abstract
reasoning skills, these advances include the advent of television, video games and the
internet. The striking changes could also be due to better and longer schooling over the past
century, more Complex and stimulating environment provided by better educated parents and
better nutrition. (Greenfield, 1998)

Conclusion
In sum, there is considerable evidence that both environmental and genetic factors play a role
in intelligence. This is the view accepted by almost all psychologists, and there is little
controversy about it. Greater controversy continues to exist, however, concerning the relative
contribution of each of these factors. Do environmental or genetic factors play a stronger role
in shaping intelligence? As noted earlier, existing evidence seems to favor the view that
genetic factors may account for more of the variance in IQ scores within a given population
than environmental factors (e.g., McGue et al., 1993; Neisser et al., 1996). Many people,
including psychologists, are made somewhat uneasy by this conclusion, in part because they
assume that characteristics that are heritable—ones that are strongly influenced by genetic
factors—cannot readily be changed. It’s important to recognize that this assumption is false.
For instance, consider height: This is a characteristic that is highly heritable— one that is
influenced by genetic factors to a greater extent than intelligence is. Yet despite this fact,
average heights have increased in many countries as nutrition has improved. So here is a case
of a trait that is strongly determined by genetic factors, yet is still responsive to shifts in
environmental conditions. The same thing is almost certainly true for intelligence. Even if it
is influenced by genetic factors, it can still be affected by environmental conditions. For this
reason, programs designed to enrich the intellectual environments of children from
disadvantaged backgrounds may still produce beneficial results. Whether such programs have
the desired effects or not is an empirical question open to scientific study; however, there is
no reason to assume in advance that enrichment programs cannot succeed because
intelligence is influenced by genetic factors. Heredity, in short, should not be viewed as a set
of biological shackles, nor as an excuse for giving up on children who are at risk because of
poverty, prejudice, or neglect.