The Genetics of Intelligence

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2015

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Professor Robert Plomin talks to Jim al-Khalili about what makes some people smarter than others and why he is 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 is one of the most cited psychologists in the world. He specialized in behavioural genetics in the mid '70s 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 10,000 pairs of twins which continues to this day. In this study and in his other work, he has 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.

(Photo: Children in classroom)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:03.0	The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use,
0:07.0	go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts.
0:11.0	This is Discovery from the BBC. broadcasts. their child isn't clever. To be told that to a large extent this is down to their
0:27.6	genes can just make matters worse. But according to my guest today, leading psychologist Professor Robert Plowman, the evidence on the inheritance of intelligence is clear.
0:37.0	Much as we like to think that good parenting and good teachers make all the difference, they don't. The most significant influence on academic
0:45.0	achievement is written in our children's DNA. Born and raised in Chicago, Robert came to the
0:50.2	UK in 1994. A year later he launched the largest longitudinal twin study in the world,
0:56.7	known to those in the know as the TED study. Professor Robert Plowman, welcome to the Life Scientific.
1:02.2	Thank you very much, Jim.
1:03.7	So Robert, I mean that's quite humbling, it's rather alarming.
1:07.0	All the work we can do in guiding the children, giving them advice, sending them to the right school,
1:12.0	and it's already there
1:13.0	imprinted in their genes.
1:14.4	Yes, in the past I've really hated to pit nature
1:17.3	versus nurture because they are both important.
1:20.7	But when you've got people so worried about, say, differences between schools, you know, the
1:26.6	league tables, that at most accounts for 20% of the differences between children and school
1:32.0	achievement. Genetics it counts for well
1:35.6	over half, maybe two-thirds of the differences. So at some point I think you got to say, we're
1:40.9	not talking about little effects here, we're talking about by far the biggest
1:44.5	predictor of children's performance and I think it's important for parents to get that
	...

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