As savagely reported by Forbes Emily Willingham, the Second Nexus articles main

source of information for this new research was a woefully unintelligible March 2016
post from Psychology Spot, which cited a collection of studies that are decades old:
The post itself took its trash can spark from two places, the first a blog
at a site called Psychology Spot. The Psychology Spot post is in turn a
dumpster fire of poor information about genetics and embryonic
development, citing 14 references to support its hodgepodge of
claims. Of these citations, only one was published this decade (in
2012) and relates to maternal support in the first years of life, not
brain genetics. There is no new research at all here.
The other source alluded to was a Cosmopolitan/Good Housekeeping article (the
same article with the same byline appeared on both web sites) that circularly led with
the same misleading suggestion that new research had been performed, citing that
same problematic post as their source:
When it comes to your IQ, "I got it from my mama" couldn't be more
accurate. New research featured in Psychology Spot says people are
born with conditioned genes that work differently depending on if
they're from your mother or father and when it comes to your
intelligence, those genes are from mother dearest.
These articles threw around a variety of impressive-sounding terms such as
"conditional" genes but failed to make a coherent case from the outdated studies
they cited. To reach their conclusions, they made the following assumptions:
1. There are specific and discrete genes that universally determine intelligence.
2. Those genes are located on the X chromosome.
3. That means that the genes must come from your mother.
The first notion to untangle is the existence of discrete "intelligence genes" in the
first place. Researchers can point to decades of work showing that a large part of
what they refer to as general intelligence (a psychometric they call g) variability can be
explained by genetic variability. In a 2010 Molecular Psychiatrypaper covering this
topic, scientists stated:

[M]eta-analysis of [studies comparing identical and fraternal twins]

yield heritability estimates of about 50%, indicating that about half of
the total variance in g can be accounted for by genetic differences
between individuals.
However, this does not mean we have a detailed understanding of which specific
genes reliably relate to intelligence, nor do we have a great idea of how a variety of
different genes would work in concert to build what we conceive of as intelligence. A
2012 article published in Psychological Science attempted to replicate the results of
studies citing specific genes as predictors of intelligence. Failing to do so in almost
every case, they concluded:
Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other
traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until
they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Failing to exercise
such caution may hamper scientific progress by allowing for the
proliferation of potentially false results [... which may lead to] incorrect
perceptions about the state of knowledge in the field, especially
knowledge concerning genetic variants that have been described as
genes for traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of
effect size and statistical significance.
The second notion to dispel (already compromised by the fact that we dont have a
good handle on which genes work together to drive intelligence) is that these
intelligence genes are all located on the X chromosome. This view comes primarily
from the observations that:

Around 20% of the genes scientists currently associate with mental

retardation are located on the X chromosome.

Males, generally, exhibit greater variability in intelligence than women, which is

viewed by some scientists as the signature of a gene that would exist only on
an X chromosome.

Psychologist Wendy Johnson and her colleagues make a summary of the latter
argument in a 2009 paperpublished in Perspectives in Psychological Science :
In heterozygous females, the effects of any activated deleterious allele
from one X chromosome in some cells of the body are likely to be
offset toward the population mean by the effects of the corresponding

allele on the other X in other cells of the body. Males experience no

such buffering effects: any deleterious alleles on their single X
chromosome are expressed in all cells throughout the body.
While an interesting explanation for this potential variability in intelligence, the
authors of this same study (and subsequent others) do not conclude that all genes
for intelligence lie on the X chromosome:
To date, conventional genetic linkage and association (including
genome-wide association) studies have been singularly unsuccessful in
identifying the genes associated with general intelligence (e.g., Butcher
et al., 2008). Many candidate genes have been identified, but
replication across samples has been poor. None of the candidates
proposed to date is on the X chromosome. We suggest that the X
chromosome be targeted for chromosome-wide (as opposed to
genome-wide) association studies.
The last bit that needs clarification is the idea that any gene on the X chromosome,
de facto, would come from the mother. Sex is determined by which set of sex
chromosomes you are given by your parents, as the genetic testing company
23andMe explains:
One chromosome pair the sex chromosomes is unique. You
don't necessarily end up with a matching pair. Typically females have
two X chromosomes and males have an X and a Y. Mothers always
pass an X chromosome on to their children. Whether your father
passes on his X chromosome (leading to a pair of X chromosomes) or
his Y chromosome (making a mixed set) determines your sex.
So for biologically female individuals, one of your X chromosomes is coming from your
dad, and in that case it is just as likely (going along with the unproven assertion that
"intelligence genes" lie solely on the X chromosome) that any genetic coding for
smarts comes from either parents X chromosome.
The three arguments used to make the claim about intelligence coming solely from
your mother each fail as all-encompassing statements and rely on a flawed
understanding of science, a misrepresentation of scientific consensus, or both. It is
misleading, at best, to say that we know anything about which parent is (more)
responsible for an offsprings intelligence, let alone which genes.

Looking at the even bigger picture, we find that none of the assertions provided in any
of the viral news stories took into account the interplay between genetics and
environment, which scientists view as intrinsically important.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 11 October 2016
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Alex Kasprak

Alex Kasprak is a freelance science writer into space, fossils, deep time, and obscure
historic events that in some way involve a modicum of science. Based in Los Angeles,
he is the real-life basis for that kid Dr. Grant scares with a velociraptor claw in the
beginning of Jurassic Park.