There is a particularly idiot belief over in some corners of the left that we human beings are just tabula rasa. The human being, at birth – or perhaps conception – is not just equal in moral worth to all other humans but is equal in all manners. Particularly and specifically, all of us are equally intelligent. This is why we must all have the same education – for it is only environmental factors that lead to differences in either intelligence or life outcome.
The problem with this being that it’s the purest colei*. Unless intelligence is at least in some manner genetically influenced then how can it ever have arisen? Further, all the work we do to study the inheritance of things like IQ – say, twin studies, adoption and so on – tells us that a substantial part and by no means all of intelligence is genetically determined.
It’s even possible to add in personal experience – I’ve not reached my God-Like powers of omniscience by doing anything approaching real or hard work.
Just to add more to our information base here, we can in fact track the inheritance of intelligence in donkeys:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Scientific evidence for intelligence in donkeys could expose their historical unmerited cognitive derogatory status. Psychometric testing enables quantifying animal cognitive capabilities and their genetic background. Due to the impossibility to use the language dependent scales widely used to measure intelligence in humans, we used a nonverbal operant conditioning problem-solving test to compute a human-analogous IQ, scoring the information of thirteen cognitive processes from 300 genetically-tested donkeys. Principal components and Bayesian analyses were used to compute the variation in cognitive capabilities explained by the cognitive processes tested and their genetic parameters, respectively. According to our results, IQ may explain over 62% of the cognitive variance, and 0.06 to 0.38 heritabilities suggest that we could ascribe a significant proportion to interacting genes describing the same patterns previously reported for humans and other animal species. Our results address the existence of a human analogous heritable component and mechanisms underneath intelligence and cognition in probably one of the most traditionally misunderstood species from a cognitive perspective.[/perfectpullquote]Interesting news for the dumbasses who design education systems…
*Gibbon
In other news a story yesterday on Radio 4 news said that a survey of salaries by ethnicity showed disparities. Looks like Chinese and Indian peops do better than whites, Pakistanis and Blacks worse. Trevor Philips was in favour of annual reporting and action to be taken for firms that were out of line. Which seems far more reasonable than opening the possibility of racial differences on IQ. Trevor oughta read the Bell Curve.
Indeed, Rhoda. But, like the ‘gender pay gap’, there are also different propensities to work in different trades. Bangladeshis were bottom of the list, in part (I’d bet) because many of them work as waiters in the family curry house for less than minimum wage.
It occurs to me to wonder what we could achieve if we selectively bred cats and dogs for intelligence rather than looks. If YouTube videos are to be believed, some of them are already showing amazing perspicacity.
Cats who were more intelligent? Fraught with danger.