If Intelligence Is Determined Primarily By Heredity

This sample essay on If Intelligence Is Determined Primarily By Heredity offers an extensive list of facts and arguments related to it. The essay’s introduction, body paragraphs, and the conclusion are provided below.

Heredity can be defined as a process of transmitting biological traits from parent to offspring through genes, the basic units of heredity. Heredity also refers to the inherited characteristics of an individual, including traits such as height, eye color, and blood type. On the other hand environment is defined as, all of the external factors affecting an organism.

These factors may be other living organisms (biotic factors) or nonliving variables (a biotic factors), such as temperature, rainfall, day length, wind, and ocean currents.Development is a pattern of change over time which begins at conception and continues throughout the life span. It occurs in different domain such as biological (change in physical being), social (change in social relation) emotional (change in emotional understanding and experience) and cognitive (changes in thought processes).

It is widely believed that development consists of two processes namely; integration and differentiation. Integration being the process of coordinating separate personality elements into a balanced whole or behavior compatible with somebody’s environment.While differentiation refers to the idea that development involve the progress to make more distinction among things. Nature – Nurture. Nature vs. Nurture is a theoretical debate over what portion of behavior or perception is learned and what portion an organism is born with. The nature – nurture question ask how much nature- hereditary or genetic factors and how much nurture – environmental factors contributes to the development of intellectual, emotional, personal and social abilities.

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How does heredity and environment influence intelligence?Intelligence, a term usually referring to a general mental capability to reason, solve problems, think abstractly, learn and understand new material, and profit from past experience. Intelligence can be measured by many different kinds of tasks. Likewise, this ability is expressed in many aspects of a person’s life. Intelligence draws on a variety of mental processes, including memory, learning, perception, decision-making, thinking, and reasoning. Intelligence is also the ability of an individual to solve problems in a new situation or adapt to new environmental changes.Intelligence quotients (IQ) are designed to measure intelligent. Mostly widely used is Stanford – Binent intelligent test. Few topics in the social sciences have produced more controversy than the relative influences of nature and nurture on intelligence. Is intelligence determined primarily by heredity or by one’s environment? The issue has aroused intense debate because different views on the heritability of intelligence lead to different social and political implications.The strictest adherents of a genetic view of intelligence believe that every person is born with a fixed amount of intelligence. They argue that there is little one can do to improve intelligence, so special education programs should not be expected to produce increases in IQ. On the other hand, those who see intelligence as determined mostly by environmental factors see early intervention programs as critical to compensate for the effects of poverty and other disadvantages. In their view, these programs help to create equal opportunities for all people.Perhaps the most controversial issue surrounding intelligence has been the assertion by some people that genetic factors are responsible not only for differences in IQ between individuals, but also for differences between groups. In this view, genetic factors account for the poorer average performance of certain racial and ethnic groups on IQ tests. Others regard genetic explanations for group differences as scientifically indefensible and view as racist the implication that some racial groups are innately less intelligent than others.Today, almost all scientists agree that intelligence arises from the influence of both genetic and environmental factors. Careful study is required in order to attribute any influence to either environment or heredity. For example, one measure commonly used to assess a child’s home environment is the number of books in the home. But having many books in the home may be related to the parents’ IQ, because highly intelligent people tend to read more. The child’s intelligence may be due to the parents’ genes or to the number of books in the home.Further, parents may buy more books in response to their child’s genetically influenced intelligence. Which of these possibilities is correct cannot be determined without thorough studies of all the factors involved. Scholars have long debated the relative importance of nature (hereditary influences) and nurture (environmental influences) in child development. It was once assumed that these forces operated independently of each other. Today developmental scientists recognize that both influences are essential and are mutually influential.For example, how a child responds to parenting—an environmental influence—is partly determined by the child’s temperament and other inherited characteristics. Likewise, the environment influences how hereditary characteristics develop and are expressed. In answering the nature-nurture question regarding intelligence, researchers compared IQ scores in siblings (brothers and sisters) and in fraternal and identical twins. Fraternal twins, like siblings (brother and sisters) develop from separate eggs and have 50%of their genes in common.Identical twins develop from a single egg and thus have identical genes, which mean that they have 100% of their genes in common. If genetic factor make a significant contribution to intelligence, then IQ scores of identical twins should me more similar than those of fraternal twins. 100 separate studies on over 10000 pairs of twins and siblings have been carried out. The consistence finding from all these studies is that identical twins whether reared apart or together, were more similar in IQ score than were fraternal twins. In turn, fraternal twins were more similar in IQ scores than siblings.Based on these kind of studies, researchers have concluded that genetic factors (nature) contribute about 50% to intelligence (IQ scores) and environmental factors (nurture) contribute about 50%. Researchers believed that genetic influence on intelligence would be greatest in childhood but would decrease with increasing experience. However a study of 240 twins, who were above 80 years or older, found that genetic influence on intelligence remained relatively constant throughout life and did not change with increasing experience.During the past century, for example, there have been significant increases in average height because of improved nutrition and medical care, even though individual differences in height are strongly influenced by heredity. The conclusion that strongly inherited characteristics are changeable has important practical implications. For instance, even though many features of personality are based on inherited temperament, the family environment is an important influence on a child’s personality development.Thus, even a child with a difficult temperament can develop positively in a warm and caring family environment. Over the years, many researchers have studied the interpersonal problem of human aggression. Some research focuses on the ways in which aggression is programmed into human nature by instincts, genes, hormones, and other biological factors. For example, crime statistics all over the world reveal that men commit more violent crimes than women do. One possible basis for this difference is that aggression is linked to the male sex hormone testosterone.Most social psychologists who study aggression emphasize the roles of family, culture, peers, and other environmental factors. In particular, these researchers have found that aggression can be triggered by frustration, noise, hot weather, physical pain, and other unpleasant states. Other situational factors that may trigger aggression include the sight of weapons, feelings of anonymity in a large faceless crowd, and the consumption of alcohol and other drugs. Over the years, hundreds of studies have also shown that viewing large amounts of television violence can increase aggressive behavior, particularly in children.