Thursday 22 August 2013

Heredity grows on you (lecture snapshot)

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As people age, the influence of genetics on their intelligence increases, and the effect of shared family environment disappears. The remaining unique environment is created by individuals’ preferences, many of which are partly driven by intelligence, like deciding to work at a university or research lab.

(from Ian Deary’s lecture on intelligence).

1 comment:

  1. Maybe. Or alternatively, as people with similar 'intelligences' (note, by intelligence, what he actually means is performance on a handful of cognitive tests) age, the environmental variability becomes less. i.e. steady jobs, cultural norms (house, suburbs, children), social stratification, retirement etc. We all know (or at least I hope we do) that heritability is a function of genetic and environmental variability, therefore as environmental variability decreases (as it does with age), H2 increases. Note, this is not the same as saying that gene's exert an increased influence.

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