Fraternity Big Little Quotes

Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia discovered a database of very poor twins. All the earlier twin studies involved middle-class children. It turns out that IQ is far more heritable for rich children than for poor children. In fact, for poor children the effect of genes on IQ almost disappears—there is little correlation between how smart parents are and how smart their children are, and identical twins’ IQ is no more similar than that of fraternal twins. So it seems that poor children’s IQ is less affected by their genes than rich children’s IQ. But how can that be? Surely poverty can’t change your DNA? The answer is that small variations in a poor child’s environment—going to a better or worse school, for example—make a big difference to their IQ. Those differences swamp any genetic differences. Rich children are generally already going to good schools, so the differences between them are more likely to reflect genetic variation. Notoriously, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve suggested that the heritability of IQ meant that programs such as Head Start were futile. But, in fact, the new heritability results lead to just the opposite conclusion: changing a poor child’s environment can have enormous effects.