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Born to be brainy?

09 May 2014

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IN MY student days, I had a friend who wore the densest, chunkiest glasses that money could buy. The joke went that he must have had superb eyesight to be able to see through those thick lenses. It is a line that came back to me as I listened to Intelligence: Born smart, born equal, born different (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week), in which Adam Rutherford attempted to pick his way through the political history of genetics and intelligence.

Amid the hand-wringing that accompanies any assertion by scientists that intelligence is passed on from parent to child, it is important to stop and think what such an assertion actually means. Does it mean that the genetically stupid are damned to lives of mediocrity? By what name should we identify that quality by which the genetically unintelligent might rise to lead fulfilling lives? Could it, perhaps, be named . . . intelligence?

To take an example quoted from the programme: the UK is supposedly 26th in the global intelligence league. You do not need to be a jingoist to believe that, in many areas of research, technology, and artistic achievement, the UK does pretty well. We are good, it seems, at punching above our genetic weight: applying some kind of cunning or intelligence to overcome our natural deficiency in intelligence.

This was an exasperating programme: one in which Rutherford, announcing himself as a scientist, failed to negotiate even the most basic disciplinary problems. What, for starters, is "intelligence"? He declared that, by whatever criterion it is defined, studies of the hereditability of intelligence came out the same. That is hardly satisfactory: without hard and fast definitions, we can substitute for intelligence only the vaguest of synonyms - "aptitude" perhaps, or the Darwinist "fitness".

And without these, what are we to make of Professor Robert Plomin's recent study, which tells us that intelligence is 50 per cent hereditable? (That, incidentally, is "hereditable", not "inherited".)

There was a tantalising moment in the programme when Steve Jones tried to explain that this was a statistic that related to averages within a population, not individuals. Had he been allowed to continue, we might have learned something about how such studies should be read more like census reports than the genetic mechanics of inheritance. Instead, Rutherford weighed in with the kind of executive summary that overrides all those nuances he himself avowedly wished to present.

Nuance and perspective are things that one does not readily associate with Jeremy Clarkson, who, it is alleged, used the "n-word". British phone-in shows have been reverberating with opinions over the past few days; but the place to get a truly global kicking is World Have Your Say (World Service, Friday), in which contempt is harvested from Tobago to Timbuktu.

In this instance, however, it was the studio guests, from Russia and India, who were wielding the boot. The international callers were prepared to give Clarkson a break. "But it's not just the fact that he used that word," the studio journalists protested: Clarkson has form. Or, put another way, he's a plonker, and the world knows it.

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