Nature vs Nurture

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Bedadala

Mayur Bedadala        

Ms. Blair

Hon Sophomore Composition

17 October 2008

To begin with what is intelligence?  As Merriam Webster dictionary states intelligence is “the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations”. Some say its nature and some say its nurture. Who is right and who is wrong. From the past decades there is a raging debate going on whether intelligence is nature or nurture, but the results were always inconclusive or full of loopholes. There are many reasons that clearly prove that intelligence is genetic. In this essay the topic that I will be exploring are the differences in intelligence within different races and ethnic groups. Intelligence is clearly more affected by genetics than it is by environmental factors due to the results of twin studies between two different races.

        From many years scientists have been studying the IQ scores of twins between many different ethnic groups. Some results were very accurate and enlightened the scientists a lot. For example in an article scientist Philippe Rushton informs us that some races have average IQ scores that are higher than others. Rushton also said that twins receive over 50% of their intelligence from their family. Also scientists reported that the average IQ scores for white identical twins was 86 percentile, for Asians .99 and for blacks .80. Therefore these results suggested that “heredity largely accounts for the similarity” (Rushton). Therefore it is pretty fair to conclude that intelligence is based on genetics rather than environmental factors.

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        Another article states that after many studies, scientists claim that intelligence is gained genetically. These scientists mostly relied on the information from the studies of people in different races that were adopted during birth or at a very young age. These results showed that the children had no resemblance what so ever to their adoptive parents. They have different tastes, different opinions and even have different point of views. Some people did show some of the characteristics that they got from their inherited parents but compared to the ones that did not it was nothing. In addition race differences appear ...

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