Rags to Riches Dream an Illusion

[Sethomas]

I read a few weeks ago in a highly slanted article about IQ that as long as human breeding is done the old fashioned way, being that we can't isolate smart genes and manually force them into a zygote's genome quite yet, both extremes of the intelligence spectrum will favor a shift toward the norm with every progressive generation. Wikipedia even provided a nice equation to calculate the most probable IQ for offspring given the parents' IQs and the norm for their respective culture. Low IQ parents will have children smarter than them, and high IQ parents will have kids dumber than them. I found this to be a surprising concession for an article that seethed of eugenic attitudes. I don't know how accurate the equation is for describing large populations at a purely statistical level, but it's starkly obvious that it doesn't mean shit for individuals. My father is a brilliant man who nevertheless grew up very apprehensive of intellectualism, prefering old-fashioned work ethics, loyalty, and integrity. Most people who talk to him think he's an idiot until he explains any of several medical imaging technologies to them, talking about technological applications of physics most people have never heard of. My mother's IQ is probably a little less than 100, but her determination to become a nurse paid off and she's perfectly capable of her tasks in the operating room. According to that equation, my IQ should be somewhere in the middle, but it's not. It's just too bad I didn't inherit my parents' work ethics, lest I actually make something of myself someday.

A kid I knew in high school had a father who was a brilliant and affluent architect, but the kid himself was dumb as rocks and couldn't blame it on chromosomal disorders. In French class the only base knowledge he ever displayed was that he recognized Mont Blanc as the namesake of his daddy's pen collection, and he didn't stay in the foreign language program long after it was made clear that he had no competency in English in the first place.

If you want to draw an association of IQ with income, as many love to do and many others hate to do, I think the numbers presented in this article are realistic.