Ed West Ed West

Intelligence is just another privilege you inherited from mummy and daddy

I’m starting to get the impression that the Guardian isn’t very keen on Michael Gove, and may not give him the benefit of the doubt in their reporting. The latest offering was this, ‘Genetics outweighs teaching, Gove adviser tells his boss’, which was presumably designed to infuriate teachers, about an essay written by Dominic Cummings. This was followed up by a Polly Toynbee piece denying the role of hereditary factors in intelligence and claiming that it was all part of some government plan to keep the poor in their place.

Others have waded in, raising the spectre of eugenics, and I imagine someone is right now composing a comment piece about Dr Mengele’s legacy with the headline MICHAEL GOVE’s ‘FINAL SOLUTION’ FOR POOR CHILDREN.

Dominic Cummings had in fact used an accurate definition of heritability, as he states here, and the point he was making was that journalists routinely misunderstand genetics. What’s strange is that he was saying nothing that isn’t widely accepted; the very significant influence of heritable factors on differences in IQ within a population has been well known for four decades, and yet for political reasons it is ignored in education policy, both here and in the US.

The Guardian reporter called these findings ‘eye-catching’, yet there’s nothing remotely surprising that nature plays a large part in differences in intelligence, any more than it would do in height. Recognising that tall parents often have tall kids would not be to say that diet ‘doesn’t matter’, yet in the study of intelligence a false dichotomy is presented — nature v nurture, rather than nature and nurture.

For anyone with even the slightest interest in evolutionary biology it would be exceptionally strange if the human brain, uniquely among mammalian organs, was not affected by heritability, but had instead been created by a New York Times-reading God who thought that evolution was offensive.

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