|
| quote: | Originally posted by Domesticated
So I'm doomed to have stupid kids? Nooooooooo....
Seriously though, do you have a study supporting this? Two reasons:
a) It seems completely at odds with the idea of "natural selection" and valuable traits being passed on.
b) My own experience says that this is wrong. All the smart kids at school seemed to have intelligent parents too, though I guess that leads towards the whole "nature vs nurture" debate. |
I think you misunderstood me. The kids of smart parents will still tend to be smarter than average, they just probably won't be quite as smart as their parents. So if you pair up with a smart woman and have kids, then they'll probably be smart, just not quite as smart as the two of you.
This holds for phenomena other than intelligence, too, like height. If two really tall parents have kids, the kid will probably be taller than the general population, but shorter than the parents. This is because when the genes get shuffled around in mating, the rare combinations that lead to things like extreme height and extreme high or low intelligence don't happen all that often. They're more likely to happen if the parents have an abundance of "smart genes," but still fairly unlikely when you look at the population as a whole.
This is all assuming that intelligence has a heavy genetic component, of course. The smart kids you're talking about were, presumably, raised by their smart parents, growing up in an environment of intelligent conversation and respect for mental pursuits. Who knows how they would have turned out if they had the same set of genes but had been raised by an illiterate mother who thought education was a tool of the devil?
|
