Despite what many people think, your social environment can also play an

important role in the development of your intelligence. Geniuses arent only born
they can be made too. Certainly, you are born with a certain amount of
intelligence and you may never achieve the intellectual abilities of someone else
born with a different set of genes but equally, poor social nurturing can mean
that you may never full realise the potential in your own genes.
The Heritability of IQ
It is widely accepted that intelligence is a trait that is passed down through the
generations and the degree to which the intelligence quotient (IQ) is dependent
on your genetic background has been extensively researched. For example,
several traits are known to be primarily genetic, such as adult height or eye
colour whereas other traits have low heritability, meaning that they are heavily
influenced by the environment such as depression in men. The way this is
measured is by seeing how much a certain trait varies in people with very similar
or different genetic and environmental backgrounds.
Thus, it is believed that genetics can account for 75% of your adult intelligence,
with the environment being responsible for the remaining 25%. However, what is
interesting is that research has found only a few specific genes which have a
distinct, substantial effect on IQ which means that intelligence is probably the
result of the action of numerous genes, and their interaction with environmental
stimuli, rather than the product of a specific intelligence gene.
The Social Development of IQ
Despite the big role that genetic plays in determining intelligence, social and
environmental factors can have an important influence too. In fact, research
shows that aside from genes and formal education, early family environments
also play a crucial role. Evidence shows that a babys intelligence is not fully
developed at birth but gradually evolves and changes, especially throughout the
early elementary school years.
Parents actually a greater impact on their childs IQ than any other person or
institution in the childs life, including schools and this impact is greatest during
infancy and childhood, up to the age of eight or nine, after which parental
influence diminishes. Things parents can do to improve their childs IQ include:
maintaining your own education, getting good nutrition and prenatal care,
spending as much time with the child as possible, interacting and stimulating his
mind through reading, shapes, numbers, colours, etc and exposing the child to
experience outside the home.
Certain studies have linked specific activities with improved mental function. For
example, one piece of research suggests that musical training can lead to the
development of higher brain functions and in particular, better mathematical
ability. Music is believed to enhance the brain's ability to visualise and transform
objects in space and time, as well as the hard wiring' for spatial-temporal
reasoning. Another study showed that babies brought up in a stimulating

environment (starting from in the womb) were more dynamic, alert and curious,
with good hand-eye coordination and high social skills.
Keeping up the Challenge
Many researchers believe that human and animal brains remain plastic
throughout their lifetimes, with a great capacity to change. This means that our
brains remain strongly influenced by environmental conditions. In fact, studies
have shown that stimulating environments increase brain thickness, the number
of neurons in the brain and the number of connections between these neurons.
In addition, putting the test subject back in a boring environment produced a
decrease in responses by as much as 60% within a week. All this supports the
advice to continually stimulate your brain throughout your life, even after
reaching adulthood, and to promote the development of a broad range of
interest and skills which are mental, physical, aesthetic, social and emotional.
..
Intelligence: Heredity-Environment Debate Resolved?
According to neuro and cognitive scientists, different intellectual abilities are
based on neural circuits that require environmental stimulation for development
-- and are open to change.
However, intelligence researchers argue that there is a general factor of
intelligence ("G") that is highly heritable and defines intelligence as an overall
innate ability to perform well on different measures of intelligence -- which are
not open to change.
This debate is reviewed in an analysis of 124 studies of the underlying basis of
intelligence in the January issue of Psychological Review published by the
American Psychological Association.
Does one have to be a child Einstein to be an adult Einstein? Yes, if the
developing brain has the ability to make the right connections, according to this
theory.
"You could present a person with an IQ of 200 with the appropriate phenomena
when they are 20 years old, after the critical learning period, and they would not
have the capacity to adapt their brains to the new phenomena,"

Intelligence varies with at least 21 factors

Some of the other circumstances and attributes that have been found to vary to
a greater or lesser (but always significant) extent in relation with IQ (Bouchard &
Segal, 1985; Liungman, 1975) - note that not all of these relationships support an
environmental view.
Intelligence varies with:

 Infant malnutrition (-ve)

Birth weight
Birth order
Height
Number of siblings (-ve)
Number of years in school
Social group of parental home
Father's profession
Father's economic status
Degree of parental rigidity (-ve)
Parental ambition
Mother's education
Average TV viewing (-ve)
Average book-reading
Self-confidence according to attitude scale measurement
Age (negative relationship, applies only in adulthood)
Degree of authority in parental home (-ve)
Criminality (-ve)
Alcoholism (-ve)
Mental disease (-ve)
Emotional adaptation
"No single environmental factor seems to have a large influence on IQ. Variables
widely believed to be important are usually weak....Even though many studies
fail to find strong environmental effects....most of the factors studied do
influence IQ in the direction predicted by the investigator....environmental effects
are multifactorial and largely unrelated to each other."
So, it would appear that there are many psychological and biological factors each
contributing a small a small fraction to the variance in IQ scores.

So, what can we say about nature vs. nurture as causal determinants of
intelligence?:

"In the field of intelligence, there are three facts about the transmission of
intelligence that virtually everyone seems to accept:

1. Both heredity and environment contribute to intelligence.

2. Heredity and environment interact in various ways.
3. Extremely poor as well as highly enriched environments can interfere with the
realization of a person's intelligence, regardless of the person's heredity.
Although most would accept a causal role of genetics, the exact genetic link and
how it operates is very far from being understood - another point that most
psychologists would agree on. It is certainly not a single gene, but a complex
combination of smaller genetic markers.
5. But likewise, it is difficult to pin-down single, identifiable elements of the
environment which directly influence IQ scores. Several environmental factors
influence intelligence.

So what have we learned about intelligence: that its difficult to define but that
there is SOMETHING we call intelligence that appears to relate to ability to
reason abstractly, to learn and to adapt. That we can measure some part of it,
although poorly; that its
partially caused by genetics, partially be environment; that the real causes are
the complex, not well understood interplay between genetics and environment;
that it is somewhat though not greatly modifiable; that sometimes what we learn
from tests is used inappropriately but that IQ tests can be useful in helping
children attain their potentia