innate levels of intelligence are highly heritable. Tabula rasa – the idea that we are born with a blank slate on which our abilities and personalities are drawn – is not correct. And we’ve known this for decades. Estimates vary depending on the study, but the proportion of cognitive abilities that can be attributed to genetics rather than other things is somewhere between 40 per cent and 60 per cent. That means that roughly half of the differences we see are due to differences in DNA. These are not particularly new findings, nor are they very controversial: the slate is not blank – it is
...more
