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Twins, genetics and intelligence

August 31, 2001

It doesn't make psychological sense to pin human intelligence down into a single factor, so called 'general intelligence' which is supposedly highly heritable. This finding is presented today, Friday 7 September, by Dr Sarah Norgate, Centre for Childhood, Development and Learning at The Open University; Professor Steven Rose, Department of Biological Sciences at The Open University; and Dr Niall Adams and Professor David Hand, Department of Mathematics at Imperial College of Science and Technology.

Dr Norgate told The British Psychological Society 's joint Developmental and Education Sections' Conference at University College, Worcester that packaging intelligence into a single ability, measurable by IQ tests, makes suspect many of the claims of those who study the genetic basis of human behaviour.

The research team looked at data from 9304 twin pairs aged between two months and 88 years taken from studies published between 1970 and 1997. Their review showed that in the past, other researchers had been prepared to determine the extent of the genetic basis of people's individual differences in intelligence by wrongly boiling down results of research comparing the IQ scores of identical and non-identical twins into a single numerical index. In fact the correlations, and hence any heritability measure, turned out to be highly sensitive to the type of IQ test used. Such sensitivity casts doubt on the reliability of the popular claims that general intelligence can be linked with a sizeable genetic component.

Dr Norgate says that, 'given the notorious use of IQ scores as predictors of educational, occupational and social success, simplistic conclusions about the unitary nature of intelligence and its associated high heritability must be treated with great caution'.

British Psychological Society (BPS)

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