Nature, Nurture, and IQ…

There’s an interesting piece over at Wired today regarding IQ. Specifically it involved the fact that we as humans seem to be getting increasingly more intelligent as the decades wear on. What I found interesting, however, is the notion that the methods we used to determine the level of inheritablity of g may not have been sound.

This piece below follows the description of a star basketball player who had a slight height advantage as a child, was noticed, nurtured, and made it to the NBA:

“Now imagine this person has an identical twin raised separately. He, too, will share the height advantage, and so be more likely to find his way into the same cycle. And when some imagined basketball geneticist surveys the data at the end of that cycle, he’ll report that two identical twins raised apart share an off-the-charts ability at basketball. “If you did a genetic analysis, you’d say: Well, this guy had a gene that made him a better basketball player,” Dickens says. “But the fact is, that gene is making him 1 percent better, and the other 99 percent is that because he’s slightly taller, he got all this environmental support.” And what goes for basketball goes for intelligence: Small genetic differences get picked up and magnified in the environment, resulting in dramatically enhanced skills. “The heritability studies weren’t wrong,” Flynn says. “We just misinterpreted them.”"