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The factoid that intelligence is passed down only through your mother has been carelessly meandering across social media users' trending bars after a September 14th, 2016 article published on a site called Second Nexus was reposted bynotable accounts, including George Takei's Facebook page: As savagely reported by Forbes’ Emily Willingham, the Second Nexus article’s main source of information for this new research was a woefully unintelligible March 2016 post from Psychology Spot, which cited a collection of studies that are decades old: The other source alluded to was a Cosmopolitan/Good Housekeeping article (the same article with the same byline appeared on both web sites) that circularly led with the same misleading suggestion that new research had been performed, citing that same problematic post as their source: These articles threw around a variety of impressive-sounding terms such as conditional genes but failed to make a coherent case from the outdated studies they cited. To reach their conclusions, they made the following assumptions: The first notion to untangle is the existence of discrete intelligence genes in the first place. Researchers can point to decades of work showing that a large part of what they refer to as general intelligence (a psychometric they call g) variability can be explained by genetic variability. In a 2010 Molecular Psychiatry paper covering this topic, scientists stated: However, this does not mean we have a detailed understanding of which specific genes reliably relate to intelligence, nor do we have a great idea of how a variety of different genes would work in concert to build what we conceive of as intelligence. A 2012 article published in Psychological Science attempted to replicate the results of studies citing specific genes as predictors of intelligence. Failing to do so in almost every case, they concluded: The second notion to dispel (already compromised by the fact that we don’t have a good handle on which genes work together to drive intelligence) is that these intelligence genes are all located on the X chromosome. This view comes primarily from the observations that: Psychologist Wendy Johnson and her colleagues make a summary of the latter argument in a 2009 paper published in Perspectives in Psychological Science: While an interesting explanation for this potential variability in intelligence, the authors of this same study (and subsequent others) do not conclude that all genes for intelligence lie on the X chromosome: The last bit that needs clarification is the idea that any gene on the X chromosome, de facto, would come from the mother. Sex is determined by which set of sex chromosomes you are given by your parents, as the genetic testing company 23andMe explains: So for biologically female individuals, one of your X chromosomes is coming from your dad, and in that case it is just as likely (going along with the unproven assertion that intelligence genes lie solely on the X chromosome) that any genetic coding for smarts comes from either parent’s X chromosome. The three arguments used to make the claim about intelligence coming solely from your mother each fail as all-encompassing statements and rely on a flawed understanding of science, a misrepresentation of scientific consensus, or both. It is misleading, at best, to say that we know anything about which parent is (more) responsible for an offspring’s intelligence, let alone which genes. Looking at the even bigger picture, we find that none of the assertions provided in any of the viral news stories took into account the interplay between genetics and environment, which scientists view as intrinsically important.
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