Question: Is intelligence genetic or influenced by the environment?

Caspar Addyman answered on 22 Mar 2011:

It’s a bit of both.. In fact it is a lot of both.. One of the most important factors determining how intelligent someone grows up to be is how their genes and their environment interact. This is also true for lots of other skills, talents and preferences in life, like sporting skill or musical, artistic or language ability. Let’s take sport as an example but the same reasoning could apply to intelligence.

It definitely seems that sporty parents have sporty children. So genes are important but for most abilities like sport, music or intelligence, there are lots of different genes that all play a part. But the genetic code is just the recipe to make person, just as important is how you bake the cake.. Growing up healthy makes a huge difference to how well your genes can do their work.. This includes the time in the womb and afterwards. This is more obvious that you have to be fit and well for good sporting ability but being healthy affects many other abilities too. That is the first part of the environmental influence.

The second part might be that because you have sporty/musical parents they encourage you to play more sport/music etc. Or maybe your school does it. So that is also an environmental effect.

But to become really good at anything you have to do a lot of practice and this is where gene-environment interactions start. Very simply. people like doing things they are good at and the more you do something the better you get which leads to a cycle of getting better and better.

Or possible a cycle of getting worse and worse.. because if there is something you aren’t good at or don’t like you will probably avoid it at get worse and worse compared to someone who does like it.

We might say that your genes start you down a particular path but then your choices after that can reinforce that speciality.

But the good news is that if people who work at things get better at them whatever they are then potentially we can all work at things and we too will get better. It might be harder for us if we don’t start out with some natural ability but remember that Tiger Woods and David Beckham not only have a great talent they have also spent their entire lives practicing and improving their skills.