It might seem odd that a geneticist should want to downplay the significance of genes, but the fact is that we are social beings who have offloaded so much of our behaviour from our bodily hardware to our cultural software, and nowhere is this more apparent than in our intelligence. There is no secret truth waiting to be revealed, no grand conspiracy of silence from geneticists. People are born different, with different innate capabilities and potential. How these abilities cluster within and between populations is not easily explained by fundamental biology, by genetics. Instead, when digging
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