Does Hereditary Influence Iq Scores? Essay

Throughout the history of human existence, there have always been many questions that have plagued man for centuries. Some of these questions are “what is the meaning of life” or “which came first, the chicken or the egg.” Within the last 400 years a new question has surfaced and has caused an enormous controversy which takes our minds to much further levels. The controversy is whether inherited genes or the environment influences and affects our personality, intelligence, behavior, development and abilities. This controversy is most often recognized as the “Nature vs. Nurture” conflict. Some people believe that it is strictly genes that affect our ways of live and how we are, while others believe that it is the environment that affects

The following research shows the influence of nature and nurture on an individual 's intelligence. Intelligence can be defined as "The aggregate or global capacity to act purposefully think rationally and deal effectively with the environment." Thus intelligence helps define ones action in a given situation. Intelligence can be influenced by many factors, mainly being the nature and environmental. The natural factor consists of the inborn tendencies and genetics that show that a part of intelligence is inherited. The nurture consists of environment and socio economic factors that contribute towards ones intelligence. The issue of nature versus nurture has been constantly debated over in terms of intelligence. Over the years, the pendulum of intelligence has been swinging from nature to nurture determining them to be an independent factor for one 's intelligence. However this pendulum is seen to be coming to a standstill forming a theory which supports both the nature and nurture and their contributions towards one’s cognitive abilities and intelligence.

Sir Francis Galton (1869, 1883) quantified traits that were assumed to be correlated, and developed the first comprehensive test of intelligence. By the end of the 19th century, the foundation was laid for modern day intelligence testing (Wicket, 1998). In 1905, the French psychologist Alfred Binet published the first modern intelligence test to identify students who needed special help in coping with the school curriculum (Neiser, et al. 1996). Shortly thereafter in 1908 and 1911, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon published revisions of the Binet intelligence test (Wicket). The mental age concept was adopted to express the results in adequate units. The concept is based on an individual’s performance in comparison to the average performance of individuals in a specific chronological age group (Kaplin, & Saccuzzo).

The Mismeasure of Manused, created by Stephen Gould is an account and analysis of the statistical methods and cultural motivations, which are the fundamental biological determinism.

Also, in the early 1900’s there were different intelligence test conducted mainly to “justify racial and ethnic discrimination”. According to the understanding race website, “The results of these intelligence tests were influential in shaping U.S. immigration policy that limited immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and in justifying race-based segregation in public education, and U.S. conscription during World War I. Previously, the scientific debate centered largely on perceived differences in racial intelligence based on cranial size”. (Science: 1900s-1930s Race and Intelligence)

Binet was involved in creating one of the more recent forms of intelligence test, referred to as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. A similar test is that formulated by Wechsler (Neisser et al. 1996). These led to the measure of IQ (“intelligence quotient”) being founded, where an individual’s “mental age is divided by their chronological age and multiplied by 100” (Gardner 2006, p. 3). The tests measure intelligence through verbal and non-verbal tasks, assessing scholastic aptitude, school achievement and specific abilities (Neisser et al. 1996, p. 78).

Many scholars believe that "the new science of behavioral genetics has intellectual roots in the old ideas of Eugenics" (Steen 33). Eugenics disguised a political agenda as a scientific one in an attempt to endow discrimination with credibility. Supporters of genetic determinism theories do the same. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray defend the theory of genetic determinism in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which was published ten years ago. Their book is one of the most widely referenced works regarding the theory that intelligence is inherited. The authors claim that the social order mirrors natural selection, wherein the genetically superior or more intelligent human rises to the top. Of course this means that the lower class, predominantly blacks, are represented as genetically inferior (xxi-xxiii). The authors claim that "ethnic differences in cognitive ability are neither surprising nor in doubt" (269) and attribute the inequality of life among Americans to inherent differences between races in intelligence (127). Their argument rests on the assertion that intelligence is both inheritable and immutable and is supported by intelligence test scores. The text is full of contradictions and a close analysis proves it to be lacking in evidence and smacking of social myth. Their theories are developed using speculation and are tainted by bias. There is no science involved.

In the early 1900s, IQ test was originally developed by the French psychologist, Alfred Binet.

In 1904, a French psychologist (Alfred Binet) created the first intelligence test in order to help the French Ministry of Education segregate children that may have difficulty learning in a regular classroom. At that time, he did not know that his test would be the basis for IQ tests administered over 100 years later. He has a Stanford University psychologist, Lewis Terman, to thank for expanding his work and creating the Stanford-Binet intelligence test that took root in the United States in 1916 and is still popular today. However, along with its popularity came criticism. Critics see the current version of the Stanford - Binet test and other intelligence tests, despite attempts to make them culturally fair, as limiting to individuals who are not from the major social norm. They claim that cultural bias in test questions is why certain races do not perform as well as others on the test.

An overwhelming majority of people in the world believe that intelligence is fixed. They believe that from birth, those 46 chromosomes are the deciding factor between an educated businessman and an employee working on an assembly line. When deciding which topic, I was interested in discussing for my research paper, a memory from second grade popped into my mind. I remember that my classmates and I were in IDEAS class, and it was the first day where we would break up into reading groups. The blue group was the highest, with green as a close second, while yellow brought up the rear. I was placed in the blue group, while my friend Noah was placed in yellow. To make a long story short, two years passed by and Noah worked his way out of the yellow group, into the blue group. Fast forward eight years and there we are, sitting at graduation while Noah stands before us all, speaking to us as the Valedictorian of the Class of 2016. If this doesn’t support the idea that Intelligence isn’t fixed, I’m not sure what does. With that being said, as new research on this topic continues to be churned out, the statement that intelligence is inherited at birth continues to be proven wrong. Throughout this paper, I will do just that, by providing information to support my question, “Is Intelligence a Malleable Trait?”

Biological determinism as stated by Gould, states “that shared behavioral norms, and the social and economic differences between human groups-primarily races, classes, and sexes-arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology” (Gould, p.52). He explains this idea further through his explanation of how biological determinism can be measured or assigned based on the craniometry, which is the size of the skull, for at the time it was believed that the larger the skull, the more intelligent that individual was. This explanation became one of the earliest works connected to scientific racism. Gould, believed that during this time many scientists used their own prejudices, and bias’s when concluding their research, such as the work of French anthropologist, Paul Broca, who stated that “the small brains of women” concluded that men were to be regarded as more intelligent, as well as, above women, however, although women did prove this prejudice to be wrong with “their talents and their diplomas”, they were still “opposed by numbers” (Gould, p. 58). “Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits” for it states that people who are at the bottom are basically biologically inferior, which is reflected in their social status (Gould, p. 60). Both Darwin and Mendel contributed to biological determinism and scientific racism, is that both opened the doors to new anthropological scientific

He applied statistical concepts to problems of heredity with the belief that intelligence could be measured in terms of a person’s sensory capabilities, which he proposed would provide a correlation between higher test scores in sensory functioning resulting in higher scores of intelligence. The data he collected would verify his theory and validate his claims. data revealed that smart and gifted men have a higher probability of fathering smart and gifted sons than do the average man. He argued that smart and gifted, or the lack of it was solely a

Identical twin studies are most useful in determining genetic influence on intelligence. Since the identical twins share the same exact genes, the straightforward comparison of intelligence can display if this human trait is truly heritable. Similarity of intelligence scores between identical twins supports the genetic influence on intelligence. According to Myers (2007),

In 1905 Binet and Simon tested their measurements on another fifty children whom their school teachers considered to be of average intelligence for their ages. This test was to enable Binet to examine the levels of intelligent behaviors between children of the same age. Some of the tests on Binets scale were very simple, including asking a child to follow the direction of movement of a lighted match, and then maybe slightly harder was to repeat back a three digit sequence of numbers or sentences. There were a few harder tests involved which would require a child to make a sentence out of maybe three or four words, or to reproduce a drawing from memory.

Binet. Another key individual in the development of intelligence is Alfred Binet, who was a very influential psychologist of the early twentieth century. He was a French psychologist who is known especially for his work with intelligence and is remembered as the father of the first intelligence test (Binet, 1903). He was a self-taught psychologist who was studying medicine (but did not finish his medical studies) and later shifted into psychology because it was much an interest to him (Zusne, 1957). He was interested in the development of his children and in 1903 he published a book L’étude expérimentale de I’intelligence (Binet, 1903) which included empirical data of the observations he made with his children and an extensive