Skip to content

Comment on Relationships between Depression and High Intellectual Potential (2012)parent

Comments

Well that makes sense because IQ is dependent on a wide variety of factors in addition to genetics. The nutrition of the mother as well as exposure to certain chemicals during the pregnancy plus actions/drugs used during the birth can play as large if not greater part in the IQ of a child as genetics.

The child's treatment during formative years 0-7 will have an immense impact on whether certain predispositions (I.E. psychopathic tendencies) are expressed later in life.

Dr. James Fallon, who was part of a documentary I saw a while back, was describing how he was shocked to discover that he had the brain of a psychopath, but his life turned out very differently because (and I'm paraphrasing) "when I look back at picture albums of my childhood, I'm always seeing smiles".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fallon

The nutrition of the mother as well as exposure to certain chemicals during the pregnancy plus actions/drugs used during the birth can play as large if not greater part in the IQ of a child as genetics.

Interesting. Identical twins raised separately have a correlation of .76, while fraternal twins raised together have a correlation of just .55 and non-twin siblings raised together have a correlation of .47[0]. To me that suggests a strong genetic (though not necessarily heritable) component. And perhaps the .08 difference between fraternal twins and non-twin siblings is explained by differences in the mother's nutrition.

How do you measure the effect of nutrition? What studies are you looking at?

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlations...

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.