I believe the scientists have missed a crucial factor in their search for juvenile genius; the lack of being dropped onto the pavement cokeynut first.
I've started DENSA; you can only join if you if you must give yourself 15 minutes to tie your laces.

You could inject all rangers fans with these genes...it might civilise them

As well as their fellow Unionists at Parkheid?

Intelligence is not genetic. I know lots of people with learning problems who have produced children more capable than they or their parents ever were.

Starting their education while they're still young is the key. Cultivate the hunger to learn. Get them on to reading as quickly as possible and don't make a chore of it! Show them that learning can be fun and kids will take to it!

They're either bright or they're not! If not ... then ...
enrol them with my organisation. DENSA!!!

#1. Sorry Scullers ... but I started DENSA years ago. I'll klet you have the Canadian Branch though. The rest is mine! So hands off! :)

Rulesbutnorulers, those points are all incorrect.

"Absence of proof is not proof of absence" is correct as a statement, incorrect as a point in this case. The research is about correlation, as are the conclusions; so "hard proof against" has no relevance.

The "bell-curve" (Gaussian distribution, except where dumbed-down across the Atlantic): as someone once said [paraphrasing], experimenters believe it to be a theoretical principle; theorists hold that it is established through experiment. It is a poor approximation for intelligence distribution, even using IQ as the metric.

You dull/bright families statement ipso facto conflates heredity with environment; which is quite droll, as this is the historical battleground for intelligence determinance. By binding at the family level, you remove any chance of isolating different mechanisms that are bound together via family: the most obvious are of course heredity and environment.

Finally, and most incorrectly, no observation can ever be evidence for a hypothesis "if no other reason can be agreed": science is not based upon consensus.

30TH NOVEMBER 2007

HOOTSMAN BOYCOTT DAY

AM2 WILL HAVE NOBODY TO TALK TO!!! YAY!!

Suggsy, I am a Mensan and achieved a score of 99th percentile in a supervised Mensa test in 1988, but I got no idea what you are talking about...perhaps you could expand on it a little bit more.

According to the discoverer of the DNA code and Nobel laureate James Watson and others , intelligence IS genetic, but this goes contrary to the PC thought control currently prevailent in our multi-cultural society.

Thank you Rulesbutnotrulers for bringing some informed opinion into what is obviously above the heads of a few of the correspondents and against the politically inclined "science" of at least one other.
The reason why heredity must be excluded from a formative role in human mentality is because it exposes the myth of human innate equality. We are all born unequal to a greater or lesser degree. Our environment and nurture may compensate to some extent for inherited shortcomings but commonsense and age-old observation dictates that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

No mainstream researchers in intelligence suggest that it's completely genetic or completely environmental. It's acknowledged to be a combination of and interaction between both.

#4 is correct in that because particular genes are found to have only a small influence doesn't mean that other genes or genes in combination don't have a large influence.

At the environmental end of the scale, J. R. Flynn thinks intelligence is only about 20% inherited. At the other end of the scale, Murray and Herrnstein think intelligence might be as much as 80% inherited.

In "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability" Rushton and Jensen find that a 50/50 model matches data well.

A realistic model to use for the inheritability of intelligence depends hugely on what people are being compared.

In Western societies, environment has generally recognised to have improved substantially with regards to nurturing, education and nutrition. Because of diminishing returns in the effect of improving the environment on IQ, a side effect of this improving environment is to make heredity more important.

On the other hand, where malnutrition is a problem, we should expect the influence of environment to be very important.

5. Boy Wonder
It is indeed possible for a child to inherit high intelligence from two parents of lower intelligence in the same way that a child of two dwarves may be of above average height. Particularly if some abnormal trait such as mental retardation or dwarfism is as the result of a recessive gene, it’s very common for the children of the person with such a condition to appear normal – despite being a carrier of this recessive gene.

Boy Wonder

Thanks but no thanks, thank you very much.

We have enough semi-literate and borderline-personality politicians here and don't need to empower them by recognising their innate stupidity and ignorance.

Our brains come from the herring. And perhaps our capability for thinking, fun and frolics from the constellation Puma.