Robert Plomin on the genetics of intelligence

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Professor Robert Plomin talks to Jim Al-Khalili about what makes some people smarter than others and why he's fed up with the genetics of intelligence being ignored. Born and raised in Chicago, Robert sat countless intelligence tests at his inner city Catholic school. College was an attractive option mainly because it seemed to pay well. Now he's one of the most cited psychologists in the world. He specialized in behavioural genetics in the mid seventies when the focus in mainstream psychology was very much on our nurture rather than our nature, and genetics was virtually taboo. But he persisted, conducting several large adoption studies and later twin studies. In 1995 he launched the biggest longitudinal twin study in the UK, the TED study of ten thousand pairs of twins which continues to this day. In this study and in his other work, he's shown consistently that genetic influences on intelligence are highly significant, much more so than what school you go to, your teachers or home environment. If only the genetic differences between children were fully acknowledged, he believes education could be transformed and parents might stop giving themselves such a hard time. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
0:06.2	I'm Jim Alleili and my mission is to interview the most fascinating and important scientists
0:11.6	alive today and to find out what makes them tick.
0:15.0	No one wants to be told that their child isn't clever.
0:19.0	To be told that to a large extent this is down to their genes can just make matters worse.
0:24.9	But according to my guest today, leading psychologist Professor Robert Plowman, the evidence
0:29.2	on the inheritance of intelligence is clear.
0:31.9	Much as we like to think that good parenting and
0:34.0	good teachers make all the difference, they don't. The most significant influence on
0:38.8	academic achievement is written in our children's DNA. Born and raised in Chicago, Robert came to the UK in 1994.
0:46.0	A year later, he launched the largest longitudinal twin study in the world,
0:51.0	known to those in the Professor Robert Plowman, welcome to the Life Scientific.
1:02.8	Thank you very much, Jim.
1:04.0	So Robert, presumably the twins, all 10,000 pairs of them, have now done their A-levels.
1:10.0	So what's the latest news?
1:12.0	Yes, we're very excited about this because no one studied A levels before and only half the students take A levels.
1:18.0	So I really didn't know how the results would come out, but in terms of the grades themselves after two years of
1:23.5	A levels it's much as we found in previous years that is most of the differences
1:27.4	in children's performance can be attributed to DNA differences between them.
1:31.3	I mean that's quite humbling.
1:33.0	It's rather alarming in fact, isn't it?
1:35.0	Absolutely.
	...

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