What I’ve read correlates mother’s but not father’s educational attainment to children’s educational attainment. That’s an indirect measure of intelligence, yes, but I haven’t seen anything about direct measures of intelligence correlating with one side like that—not saying it isn’t out there, just saying I haven’t seen anything that says that. Any pointers to the research?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/brainy-sons-owe-intelligence-to-their-mothers-1339099.htmlhttps: This article talks about intelligence on the X chromosome and why males get their intelligence from their mothers. Other articles out there about this.
//www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201109/the-incredible-expanding-adventures-the-x-chromosome This article explains how female double XX is passed, one, from paternal grandmother through father to daughter and one, from mother. Depending on which X is expressed in the daughter determines influence on intelligence (since much of intelligence is on the X chromosome).
So if men want intelligent sons, they should mix genes with an intelligent woman. If they want intelligent daughters they should have an intelligent mom and mix genes with an intelligent woman (2 chances that the X that gets expressed will confer intelligence).
Woman need to look at men’s mothers ( for their daughters) and their own level of intelligence (for their sons and daughters).
It also implies that any defect or enhancement in the X chromosome is expressed more fully in males since they have only one.
Really interesting stuff. But you still have to work with what you get, hence, nurture.
This reminds me of Genetics back in college. There was an entire subset of students who struggled mightily with the concept of “nature vs. nurture”. They just couldn’t seem to grasp that both were factors…at the same time.
^^This is because these students had stupid mothers
1 Good Genes (Nature)
2 Good Home (Nurture)
3 Good Attitude (Personal Choice)
I find it fascinating that most (but not all) of these posts have excluded the fact that some of our children (who may have been gifted to begin with I admit) “choose” to be smart (or smarter) through hard work and determination (Grit). I am constantly amazed at the lengths my children are willing to go to be “Smart”.
DC was going to write college essays about grit but decided it had been talked about too much in the media. Still true, nonetheless. And absolutely, the kid has to want to be smart which (usually) involves some concerted effort and responsibility for the end result.
My wife, as part of her practice, does cognition testing, especially on the elderly. Unless you know it’s coming, it is not something that people can prepare for. No amount of grit or competitiveness can change the outcome. From this, she gets a pretty good idea of how agile a person’s brain is.
An example is the animal test; people are asked to name as many different animals possible in 60 seconds. Typical performance is 14-20 going through pets, farm animals, then zoo animals. Cognitive impairment such as dementia ends up with six or seven unique animals, with repeats: “Cat, dog, horse, cow, rabbit … uhhh … cat, dog …”
Occasionally someone shows up with a highly facile mind, reeling off 40 or more with few pauses. I would guess most of the regular posters on here can do this and have kids who can, too. Intellectual pursuits just come easier for these people.
Gee, I wonder how much smarter my kid would be if he had married parents, instead of being raised for most years, by a single mom.
@bookworm - statistically speaking, married parents are an advantage, as is sufficient income. I was trying to acknowledge that it was not all our individual doing as parents. Intelligence and outcomes are not the exact same thing, but I was substituting observed outcomes (education levels) to mean IQ, which is what I thought the question was - How did your kid get so smart? I apologize for offending you and know that statistics do not tell the whole story.
441: I read the actual article that news report is based on, and it doesn't really say what the *Independent* says it says. It's a casual review (that is, not what I'd call a scientific article, really) of the debate over the degree to which intelligence is genetically determined, and where such genetic material might be found. The part where it could be read to say that intelligence is located on the X chromosome actually says that there had been evidence put forward in the past that intelligence has a place on the Y chromosome, but the evidence is actually ambiguous and allows for an X-based interpretation as well.
A quick search for actual serious recent research on the topic came up nearly empty—there’s a 2014 study that basically concludes “it’s messy”, but it almost seems like it isn’t something that’s being actively worked on, or if it is it’s being discussed using words that I (who am admittedly coming at this from outside the field) don’t know to search research databases on.
TL;DR: It appears to me that the jury’s still out on that one, actually.
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep04176
not definitive but has information to support.
It seems reasonable to believe that there is some level of innate intelligence, and some level of “functional intelligence” (I’m making up the term). Functional intelligence being the level of mental work you could do at any particular moment, which would be some function of your innate intelligence, and a series of environmental factors, some long term such as how you were raised and what kind of education you received, and some short term like how tired or hungry you are at the moment. It seems reasonable to believe that an IQ test would be a good indication of your functional intelligence at the time but not innate intelligence. Which would make it somewhat correlated to innate intelligence but not extremely well correlated. It seems reasonable to believe this level of innate intelligence is genetically determined. As far as I know no one has been able to dispute the idea of some innate intelligence.
Most human traits are influenced by more than one gene, so will this be answered, definitively, anytime soon? Probably not.
The question seems to be asking for our thoughts and opinions based on what we know about our kids, our parenting and the world around us.
Numbers fun, I guess I like TalkTo Trees’ criteria. Anyway, I think my son is smarter than me or his father. Even as a single mom, my son was full pay. Among his closest friends, they got full financial aid to P and MIT. The friend who went to MIT/Stanford was a true anomaly. He was smartest in HS, above his siblings, and his parents did everything they could to nourish this orchid. Then you have son’s g/f, adopted. She and her twin have done exceptionally well, a MD and a PhD from MIT, with nurturing parents. So many adoptive children don’t have the genetics, even with nurturing parents, to achieve so much.
In terms of nurture, not all parents are created equal, even among those most oriented to their kids’ successes. I’d say anyone on this thread with kids knows how hard it is to parent.
Where to go with this.
The “basic” level of intelligence is your ability to perceive information from your surroundings. Then, there is the ability to store it and to retrieve and process it. You can think of that all as one thing that you get from your parents.
After that is where things begin to diverge.
Storage , retrieval and processing of information is memory, not intelligence. Subject to loss by injury, insult, diesease, stroke, etc.
LOL. So is intelligence.
They are separate factors.
Not being knowledgeable in this area myself, but this is what somebody I know told me some years ago:
The function of human’s brain is more like a pattern recognition machine than anything else. For almost all people, they are really not very good at reasoning, even when many of them believe they are good at it.
A good example is to play chess. It relies mostly on brain’s capacity of pattern recognition, not so much about the reasoning, as I heard.
Many human beings could be good at their emotion aspect of the brain functions, like love, hate, happy, and sad. It created all the good and bad things in the world.