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The debate about the impact of genes on intelligence has resurfaced, and it's more fervent than ever. Can achievement truly be inherited? And should education be tailored to individuals' genetic potential? Neuroscientist Steven Rose investigates.
Genes, intelligence and education: a heady brew of issues. Add class, race or gender, as has happened so many times over the past 100 years, and you have a simmering mixture ready to boil over at any moment.
The last time this occurred in Britain was in the 1970s, when psychologist Hans Eysenck, whose books were standard reading for young teachers, published Race, Intelligence and Education. But in recent months the debate over IQ, school performance and genetics has been revived in new form, mixing the classical human genetics of the past century with the modern molecular genomics that developed after the sequencing in 2003 of the 3 billion DNA bases that comprise the human genome.
The first public sign of the re-emergence of this debate came last October, when a 237-page letter to England's education secretary Michael Gove from his departing adviser, Dominic Cummings, was leaked to the press. In it, Cummings excoriates the British educational system for failing both the brightest and the least able students.
For Cummings, teachers are part of the problem, but much of it is also down to the failure to tune education to the genetic potential of individual students. Intelligence (IQ) and educational achievement are, he asserts, some 70 per cent heritable. For Britain to catch up with its Asian rivals, IQ screening should be used to identify the top-scoring 2 per cent of students, who should be fast-tracked into the sciences, while research to identify high IQ genes should be fostered.
A month later, London mayor Boris Johnson echoed Cummings in his Margaret Thatcher Lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies. We need, he said, to nurture the 2 per cent with IQs above 130, who are the successful innovators - "the cornflakes who come to the top of the packet if you shake it", as he put it. The implication is that the "16 per cent of our species" (Johnson's words) with IQs below 85 are a drain on society.
So where do these figures come from, how meaningful are...