43: Intelligence, IQ Testing and Genetics

Stuart Ritchie on the show. Stuart is a post doctoral research fellow at the Center for Cognitive Aging and Cognitive Epidomology in the University of Edinburgh's Department of Psychology. I'm sure he'll tell me I mispronounced that word. His research focuses on how intelligence develops and changes across the lifespan, what might influence it in childhood, and how we might

prevent it from declining in later life. His studies of intelligence have been published in journals such as Psychological Science, Current Biology, Child Development, and Intelligence. Thanks you being on the show, Stuart, my pleasure. Hi is it Edinburgh? Did I toy? Miss? We would say Edinburgh, which I realize Americans have real difficulty with. But Edinburgh Edinburgh, Okay? That's very good. Yeah, I've tried to like mix it with

the accent a little bit. Okay. I love I love getting my American friends to do at Scottish accents because very very they sometimes go English, they sometimes go Irish. It's very difficult for them to get a Scotch accent, right, they could go many directions. So you're Scottish by background. Yes, I'm just from near Edinburgh. I'm one of these really boring people that goes to the university near where he's from. Yeah, but it happens to be a world class university. It

says not just you're being very modest there. It's a good place and it's a good psychology department. We've got some great people including I mean, I imagine we're going to discuss this, but we've got people like Ian Deary in our department, who's a big researcher in the world of intelligence. I guess we'll talk about our Loath and birth cohort studies at some point. Oh, yeah, which is what I'm working on at the moment. Great. So, how did the scottishill ads such as yourself get interested in

intelligence research? Well, I think being in the presence of people like Ian Deary actually is very influentious. So we had the end when I did my undergrad degree, we had Ian Deary give us his lectures and he's a fantastic lecturer, fantastic speaker. I don't know if you've seen him talk. There's plenty of videos online if anyone wants to go and look those up. But he's extremely inspiring.

And so I did my PhD at Edinburgh as well, not with thean, but as I was doing my PhD, I kind of gravitated towards intelligence research because we started doing some individual differences stuff and then we got chatting and we talked about this data that he had available, and so it's one of the it's one of the most interesting studies around. And so that's kind of where

I ended up. So you didn't enter you did your undergrad there as well, right, I did again, super boring grads, PhD and post dog on the same right, the whole shebang. So you didn't enter as a fresh faced freshman like saying I need to study the determinants of IQ. That's

all not at all, I know. I was interested in psychology more generally, and in fact I did my undergraduate dissertation on psychopaths, psychopathy and predicting like people's It was a kind of it was a kind of cognitive psychology type experiment where we're sort of predicting people's reactions to fear stimuli and things like that. So it wasn't even IQ wasn't even a big part of that. And it's, as I say, I slowly sort of shifted towards doing

intelligence research from there. Sure, so your book is very enjoyed. It It's an easy read. I highly recommend it for people who want a sensible introduction to the topic. You kind of ended the book on the question why is

intelligence research so controversial? But I'd like to start this interview with that question because I think it kind of paves the way for a lot of our discussions today why this is certainly the case in the United States of America and is it still I didn't find it as controversial when I so, as you know, I did my master's thesis with Nick Macintosh and go into capers.

I didn't find that research as controversial over there. In fact, I found the media was the media was fascinated with the research, but I didn't find like they actually treated as those controversial or racists or sexist. So do you do see that in your own country it's coin Yeah, No, you do see it a little bit. And especially when you bring any kind of biological aspect, whether it's brain

related or genetics related. Whenever you bring any of that stuff in, people get this kind of this kind of specter of determinism starts to appear and people really start to freak out. Well, let's unpack that. Let's unpack that, because I'm not convinced that I think there's and I really want us to get at the root of this, because I saw a study, you know, studies that they're on the biology of compassion. No, it's not controversial. People

people are like, you love that research. See I told you that kindness is in neat, right, and people like that. So there's something specific about the biology of intelligence I think is uniquely different. So I think there's a I mentioned this in the book a little bit. I think there's a kind of historical problem with intelligence research or intelligence testing in the UK because of the way that

the education system used to be here. We had the eleven plus test up until the nineties, I think, and it was an IQ test which you had to do when you were eleven, which determined whether you would get into a grammar school, which is the school for you know, people who are going to go on and study more difficult subjects, no pressure classic exactly, or you would go to a secondary modern and that was the other kind of school. And so the weird thing about that is that, well,

perhaps not the weird thing. The bad thing about that was that the secondary moderns were really really badly resourced. They were kind of notoriously bad, falling apart. Teachers were not so good, you know, didn't have any resources for the kids. They were supposed to prepare people for more vocational career paths, and they didn't do that at all. And grammar schools got all the focus, all the attention,

all the resources. And so I think a lot of people who saw that system and felt that pressure and in some cases failed the eleven plus themselves and ended up in a really bad school come to view IQ tests as a kind of a tool for dividing people and separating people. And so we don't have that education system anymore in the UK. That's we have comprehensive schools now where everyone goes to the same school. There are a few grammar schools that are still selective, mainly in England.

There are a few grammar schools where you know you have to do the IQ test to go in. And there obviously are private private schools that you can send your kids to you if you pay, but normally people go to a comprehensive school where people of all abilities are all together. And so yeah, I think there's a generation where the eleven plus and generally IQ testing represents a way to split people up and divide them, and I think that's where a lot of the reaction comes in.

And then when you add biology on top of that, you're saying, well, okay, I'm determined to fail my eleving plus, I'm determined not to get into school. And of course that's not what it means, but I think that's how it's understood by a lot of people. Good good that, I'm really glad that you said that. So it's good to, I think, separate all these different threads of research and

application on intelligence research. So, for instance, you know, I've tried to wear multiple hats and try to tell people they're not necessarily contradictory from each other. I mean, you can be in mentally interest in understanding the science of intelligence and do very good research on that, and then you can also be very interested in the best mechanisms for selection for various programs and things. And they're separate issues.

One if you do one doesn't mean that you're not allowed to do the other or absolutely absolutely, And I know that we know that things can have you know that effects in the scientific listaure that are really well replicated. When you try and roll them out practically, they can have terrible consequences. So I was thinking about this the other day and when I read some stuff on breast

cancer screening. So there's a lot of controversy about whether breast cancer screening, which we know that we can to some degree, you know, screen for breast cancer. And there are those vans that turn up in you know, supermarket parking lots and you'll scan people and so on. I don't know if you have that in the UK. In the US, it happens here that can create so many false positives that actually it can be a dangerous thing to people go in and have surgery when they don't

need it, and so on. So the practical rule out of that scanning and that sort of selection process was actually really quite at least it arguably very very negative. So just because we know something in the scientific literature is predictive to some extent, it doesn't mean that we should automatically roll it out and start using it to select people and so on. So you know, there isn't

a logical necessity from theory to practice. Yeah, and I think that we've had some seminal figures throughout the history of education in our country, in my country, I should see our country in my country where the two did become synonymous. And so yeah, the history is intertwined with

all of this. So I'm really glad we're discussing. You know, what was Terman for instance, I mean, his own theory was that if you're going to select for genius, you're going to select for giftedness, you know, take his tests and take the stand for benet and that's what he focused on. That's this one person making this decision. His test did happen to be reliable and valid, and it's

still isable or valid. But you could have equally have seen someone else, you know, who came up with a test of character in some way and a test of you know, just a conscientiousness personality test and showed correlations between that in academic achievement and said that's what we need to do to do single selection. So I think the ultimate, you know, and the best approach is to look at multiple perspectives. But yeah, it doesn't mean that

if you study the science of intelligence you're evil. Doesn't mean you're that you even have an opinion about how it should be applied whatsoever. Most intelligence researchers I've met, by the way, don't have an opinion. Yeah. Absolutely, they're interested in understanding because intelligence is a kind of not uniquely but very human capacity that we're all interested in understanding how it's insentiated in the brain, and how it works biologically, and how even the structure of it looks

in a in a coulrestive psychological sense. And so yeah, you can be totally interested in that without having any practical, you know, aspirations to your research. Part of it is and you do such a good job cutting this down on Twitter is like media sensationalistic media headlines, Right, You're very good at calling people out on that, And I

think it's important. I think there's a role for for you a big role because you know, I see pressure myself, like when you know, whenever I want to write something, a book or something, and I'm just just say, I just want to talk about how interesting the research is. Is no, no, tell us what are the five practical takeaways? And it's like do I have to exactly exactly? So I felt some pressure and putting, you know, putting this into the end of the book is you know, why

should we study this stuff? And you know, one of the main ones I had there was because it's interesting, and that's one of the that's one of the main reasons. But that doesn't seem to be a reason that the media and the publishers find an interesting reason in itself.

Not just media and publishers, but grant funders too, write people who know, when you write a grant to apply to, you know, in the in the US and the Institute of Health in the UK, the research councils, you know, you've got to have something in there about how to how your research is going to be practically applied and how it's going to be super important for medical research or whatever it has to be. And and so that's

easier in some in some aspects of selling research than others. So, for instance, if you do cognitive aging stuff like I've been doing, there's there's there's a clear practical consequence to the research there, which we can discuss later if you want. But when you're just wanting to understand for the sake of understanding, it's much more difficult. You do feel that pressure to kind of say, well, I guess in some way it's going to be helpful for understanding selection, and

then you get into selection immediately and it's really tough. So, yeah, I think there's a big pressure in the media and from funders, and you know, you see this when scientists write pressure releases about their work. You see people saying, oh, this new genetic variant that we've found is going to lead to massive breakthroughs in medical research to help people with dementia, and you know, really, is it or is it just one small step on the way to to

to doing that? And so it's a big pressure and it's one of the major problems in you know, in science and scientific publishing at the moment, is this pressure to big up your findings and make them seem way more important than they actually are. Yeah, I'm really glad

you said that. And you know, these genetic findings we're talking correlations or effect sizes that are like so minuscule that in terms of like if you're going to sensationalize it, geez, Like, that's the least finding you should sensationalize, because I mean, if you like, just think about the statistically, like if you put a confidnsiderable around some of those single gene correlations with a trait, I mean we're saying, like you've a better chance of developing a disorder with that gene

if you like, I'm sure we can come up with something funny, you know. So, Yeah, I mean we're starting to make much more progress with the genetics stuff, and now you can you can kind of gloam together all these genetics findings that we've had into a pologenetic risk scores, and there's lousical stuff on that, which again we can discuss if you want. We've got some calls stuff we

could talk for five days. Absolutely, But yeah, often some some humility I think is required in a lot of these a lot of these studies, but the structure of the scientific system, unfortunately is not really set up like that because we're always trying to get papers in high impact journals, We're always trying to get new grants and so on, and so you know, bigging up your finding

is a kind of pervasive problem. And you know that's why when we see these headlines and when we see news stories that scientists are quoted in and so on, we do have to have some degree of skepticism about these findings. Absolutely. So, now that we got that out of the way, maybe we should say, what is intelligence? Maybe I'm talking about that. What parameters or boundary conditions do you put around this seemingly nebulous concept, do you know?

I mean I opened the book with this kind of consensus definition of intelligence from the yeah, the Govers paper, which I think is a nice definition, which is, you know, I don't know if it's if you've got there yeah yeah, yeah, ability to catch on stuff. But maybe I should read it because they don't have a perfectly memorized yeah. Yeah, yeah. Just I've got the PDF of my book here and can go through. I gave way all my copies of the book. I don't actually have any companies. Yeah cool,

so yeah, here it is. Yeah, I didn't have any more copies of my book Wired at Create, and I had and I wanted to buy a present for someone. I went to the bookshere. I was like, bloody hell, this costs two may five dollars to buy my book. I bought five copies and I ended up paying one hundred and thirty dollars. And I was and I haven't done any royalty statements yet at all, because I haven't paid back the advance and I probably won't for a while.

So I literally paid one hundred and thirty dollars for writing the book. Yeah, yeah, I feel Yeah, here we go. The definition intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience. Is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or

test taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings, catching on, making sense of things, are figuring out what to do now. I present that definition in on Gifted, and I say, it's one thing, and I think it's a reasonable definition of intelligence. By the way, it's one thing to say that's a reasonable

definitely telligs. And then it's also another thing to accurately measure it or to really yeah, and you know these are things obvious to you, but you know maybe are listeners. It's use it's useful to distinguish that, you know, I think what that definition is nice. It captures our intuitive theories when we say someone's smart or someone's not smart. But then it gets trickier when you start, you know, going to the nittgree of each one of those components

and be like, what's the best way of measuring that? Yeah? Yeah, absolutely, And you know some testers are better and some testers are better at doing that. And I know you discussed in the book and the idea of intelligent testing that is not just intelligence testing, but intelligent testings, right, And you know, I think anyone who just has tested some kids or whatever on these kind of tests will will know that the situation that they're in can often change

the IQ by quite some substantial margin. Right, there's going to be a true IQ that that person has. And I'm doing finger quotes and people won't be able to see it. I'm doing finger quotes that have actually one

never knows what true yeah, because of error. But there's always going to be error, and there's always going to be error, and a lot of that error is to do with the kid's motivation, whether they're looking out the window at the time of doing the test or concentrating on it, the attitude and the capability of the tester to get them to concentrate and put them in the right their bedside manner. In many ways, you would say

if you were talking about a medical situation. So yeah, I'm totally with you that measurement can have a serious effect on this, and not even just that kind of measurement, but the actual physical aspects of the tests. So the psychometrics of the test. We've got this big sample now in the UK UK Biobank it's called which is going to be five hundred thousand people, all tested using conc of tests, the test themselves and a bunch of other stuff. By the way, I mean, it's a huge study with

all sorts of measures. The congctive part is just one part of it. But the tests themselves are very very brief, they're very very easy. They go by in the blink of an eye, and so they don't really have very good, as we would say, psychometric property. They don't really get to measuring all that stuff you just said about catching on, thinking of new you know, reasoning through problems and so on.

And so we're actually now actively putting some new tests into that sample, and we're going to retest some of the people with some better tests. So there's all these problems that I think a lot of people don't don't realize. They think that an IQ test is an IQ test, and that's you know, it's whatever they've had experience with.

But in psychology, a lot of the trouble when you're reviewing papers, when you're reading papers in the in the psychology literature is saying, well, how have you measured IQ? And is the test you're using adequate? And was it tested in a decent way? Was it tested in a way that the people are going to be motivated to succeed and paying attention and so on? So yeah, I

absolutely agree. Cool, And I thought of a question I wanted to ask you tell me if this question even makes sense to you, can ones intelligence succeed their true IQ score? It's partly phiosophical, it's something that we could never answer scientifically, but I want to know, you know, what if in terms of because, for instance, I don't equate IQ with the idea with the construct of intelligence. I do say IQ is something and it's something important,

and it's reliable and valid. These tests are reliable, valid, and it measures a significant slice of cognitoobility. But I wouldn't actually from a conceptual point of view, I would put in things like intellectual engagement like I talk about in the book, or like a drive for curiosity in touch of curiosity and stuff. So I do wonder, can someone's let's say your true let's say we measure you perfectly, reliably and valid. I know it's impossible. Let's say theoretically,

let's do a thought experiment. Let's say your IQ is your true IQ is one ten. Let's just throw that out there. And in the real world, let's say you become a Nobel Prize wing physicist. Let's do it. Let's do a thought experiment. Now, would someone say, Wow, you've really cheated. That person's really cheated cheated the laws of nature? No, I mean do you know what I mean? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think there's probably some boundary where there won't be very many Nobel Prize winners

with IQ's as low as that. So there's probably some boundary where you can't get a Nobel Prize or be Mozart or Beethoven or or or Brands or malor if you're below a certain level. I those thresholds might differ by the main for instance, quite quite absolutely. But I think definitely if you take into account all the other psychological aspects that are important, as you said, academy engagement, various aspects of personality, conscientiousness or grit as I see

it's being called these days. And I know there's some disagreement over whether grit is just contrasentiousness, conscientious what's something else or right, there's there's contradictory it's probably just a facet of conscientiousness. Yeah, I think. I mean, there's some there's some evidence that would say it's something it's something separate in some evens that would say it's the same. I mean, I haven't made my mind up but that I don't. I don't think it's enough enough research that.

But anyway, if you take into all these things, yeah, I think someone's achievements in the real world can go beyond what we would predict from their I level. Absolutely, Yeah, given a constellation of other psychological aspects. So I think maybe the crux of the issue though, is how do

you conceptualize that situation? So do you conceptualize it? It sounds like you could satialize the situation as well that person has brought in other characteristics to achieve what they did, whereas I'm throwing out the idea that maybe it's they've brought in other aspects of their actual intelligence that wasn't captured well by that test. Yeah, I think that's, uh,

just get semantic at the end of the day. Is that I think it might and I think it might get to the point where it's more useful to kind of differentiate split things up, yeah, can reduce things a

little bit. So I always imagine these things as a kind of a little diagram with boxes and lines, where there's the really the you know, the cognitive aspects, and even within the cong of aspects, you're going to have spatial ability that's been shown to be really important for some creative perfect right sure, And you're going to have you know, veriable ability, and you're going to have mathematical ability, and all these different abilities that are all correlated together

because they're part of the general factor of intelligence. I see those as having lines that that, you know, arrows that point into whatever you want to call it, accomplishment in your life. But I also see arrows for conscientiousness coming in there, which is a you know, a non cognitive or the word I like to use is conative. I doan you've seen that. Richard Snow used that term, right, right, don't. I don't think it gets used enough. It's great word.

And you know, other arrows for other parts of people's you know, backgrounds, so things like their social up there, they're you know, the social class of their parents and so on. Then some of that can be traced back to genetics, and some of that's going to be traced back to different environments and so on, and eventually you're going to I kind of view the sciences building up to eventually understanding both the biological and environmental aspects of

how people accomplish things in real life. And we're only at the very start of understanding that now, especially if you want to know, you know, specifically, what the biological pathways are they're involved. We're just making tiny steps into understanding that. But yeah, I kind of you think, I kind of want to reduce things to the lowest level and build this big complex diagram of what makes someone achieve well in their life. Yeah, no, that's that's totally fair.

And I knew this interview would go better if we just did it like this, like organically, as opposed to I mean, I have this whole page of questions, but I knew it would go better if we if we did it if we did it like this. So I want to talk through some myths in this book that you debunk. And these myths, what they are is they're just extreme statements, right, I mean, that's what they are.

And I find a lot of scientists really just are looking for the kind of the most the most reasonable statement, you know, but that's not the statement that ever gets publicity. So, for instance, Dean Simonton did this study where you found that the only ideas that ever made it through the next generation about the nature nurture to be where those came from people who either said it's all nature or it's all nurture. Everyone else. Everyone else just gets forgotten

and ignored. Yeah, and I say something so much that the book that there's all these people, you know, screaming each other on the really hard environmental line and the really hard biological line, and the people who are just doing the day to day work and you know, publishing you know, important studies and so on, but that aren't making extreme statements, are kind of standing on the sidelines,

kind of wondering what's going on. They're not the people usually that want to, you know, jump into a big political argument about this stuff, you know, between right wing and left wing people who are arguing over this stuff, because unfortunately, that's one of the problems is it gets correlated with you know, political beliefs and so that, and

it becomes even more explosive because of that. So yeah, I think the extreme statement are often so for instance, I wur a review of a book that came out in the UK, and I don't know how Oh, I'm very aware of that review. A lot of people are sharing on Facebook. You're kind of here to be said. Yeah, so this is a book by Oliver James, who's a clinical psychologist in the UK, who I think is is

just completely wrong on genetics. He makes very extreme statements where he says things like the new biological studies of intelligence or psychological traits have shown that there is no genetic effect on any psychological trait. And it's just like, you know, comically extreme statements like that that just cannot possibly be right given all the research that there is that are thrown out there. And yet he appeared on

the media a lot in the UK. He was on the BBC, sometimes with someone there to argue with him, but sometimes completely unchallenged to spread this stuff. I kind of despair when I see this stuff, because there's a reasonable position that takes into account the evidence that says, look, there are genetic effects on psychological behaviors. It's one of the most important things that we know about behavior genetics. It's been called a law of behavior genetics that all

psychological traits have some genetic influence. How we interpret that, though, is extremely important, and how we understand how these genetic effects are manifested in different environments and how the environments have effects on behavior, you know, is all part of the science of this, and so making a statement like there are you know, these things are one hundred percent

in environmentally determined is just silly. Likewise, saying that there are one hundred percent genetically determined is silly too, Although there are far fewer people that say that. I just think that a lot of people think that people are saying that when they talk about genetics, they think whenever you mentioned genetics that what you mean is, oh, well that's one hundred percent determined, that's that's exactly right. And

I'm just trying to think this through. I wonder like if we did like some sort of study, like could we find that it'd be inevitable that the most reasonable position is always going to be the most ignored position. Can we logically think this through because it's the average position and in order to stand you need to be unique, or you need to say something to stand out in order to get the attention of the media. You know, you could see like need experimental studies where we actually

try to test to that hypoposis, you know. Or I bet some political you know, scientists could look at how, you know, politicians who make although I think there's some argument in politics where you know that the people in the center are certainly for a time in America. Are we talking about America for a second, I'm thinking about the UK. You know, someone who's very successful, like Tony who won three elections, pitched to this to the center, and you know, didn't go the extreme right or the

extreme left pitch in the center. Nowadays though, you know, there are a lot of politicians that are getting influenced who are very very left wing, like Jeremy Corbyn in the in the UK, or very very right wing like the from Nationale in France, and we could discuss Donald Trump. I guess. I mean that's the obvious, so that's probably the center. It's not always that's true. Yeah, I put that out there cheekly because I just wonder if that's

a hypothesis. But I but that's the same question. But then I and you said, that's a question, fair question. It's a fascinating, quascinating question. Think about how you know, how ideas that are extreme or moderate get kind of fed into the kind of stream of societal discussion. So fascinating. But it no more I think about it. Yeah, it's true.

It's not going to explain like one hundred percent of the variants, and in this particular instance, because there is something unique about the saying something people want to hear as well, So there's that element too. And like you said, the person who like is unique. Like if my hypothesis was like you could also predict that the person who uniquely says that's one hundred percent genes would be popular too, But that person's usually crucified and not really popular at all.

So you know, I'm just trying to do the counter argument to what I said. And so there is something about that, right about saying that, you know, the new science says, So people convert that in their head to think, oh, that means there's hope for all of us. Is that is that what it is? They say? I think, I mean, that's absolutely what it is you until you step back

and really think about it. So, you know, this Oliver James book about it was mainly about parenting, so he actually phrased it in the terms that you said, there is hope because parents can completely determine the psychological traits

and mental health of their children. Now to him that might sound hopeful, but to me that sounds quite possibly offensive to parents who have you know, who have children with autism and so on, who for many many years were blamed for you know, being refrigerator mothers and so on, were blamed for their children's you know, and autistic traits. And we now know that a lot of that is substantially under genetic control, and so the kind of the blame is lifted off the of the parents because it

never should have been on there. And so what all over James and people like him who don't want there to be a genetic effect on these traits, what he is doing is is kind of adding this this blame back, and he doesn't ever ever, you know, come out outright and say you are this means that autism is caused by parenting. But the implication is there, and it's it's it's a kind of an ugly thing to think about.

I think. No people have these intuitive things that and they just immediately like captures their emotions, so they're not thinking through the implications. I mean stam Picker obviously and blank Slate talks about this a great length, but that have you all thought about what it would mean if we actually live in society where genes didn't determine, eric influence anything exactly. That would be a horrible world. Governments could completely control their citizens, you know, outcomes by using

propaganda and so on. I mean, it's what it's what the ussre and so on so to do to fully control as people. So where are we at right now? You're on the cutting edge of this with the nature nurture and development of intellectual capabilities. Where are we right now in that Well, there's some big papers that have come out recently that are now starting to find the start of the genetic basis for differences in people's cognitive abilities.

So we know, I guess we should say just in case anyone who's listening is not familiar with this stuff. I mean, we know that there are genetic effects on things like intelligence because of twin and family studies, so twins, adoptees, and family pedigree studies. We know from looking at these kind of research designs that a lot of the variation and you know, the reasons people differ in their intelligence is due to genes, but we don't know specifically what

those genes are. So we've been looking for a long long time to try and find out what these genes are. For ages. We had kind of this kind of candidate gene idea where you know, there was some theory gene that would be associated with intelligence, which turns out actually it turns out to be very very difficult to replicate a lot of these findings. There's one that we know that seems to replicate almost every time, which is APPOEE,

which increases risk for Alzheimer's disease. It also seems to lower comfortability, especially in older people, even outside of Alzheimer's disease. But other than that, we don't really know, and so we have to now put together these massive studies, these genome wide association studies. GUS is the necron which people might have seen in the media to try and uncover these genetic effects, because none of them are very big,

they're all very very small effects. There might be tens of thousands of very very very small genetic effects and intelligence that all kind of add up to the reason people differ. So some of them might be, you know, increase the myelination of neurons a little bit. Some of them might be responsible for neurogenesis in childhood, some of them might be responsible for being receptive to information. All sorts of things like that all add up to make

someone intelligent. And also a lot of them might stop damage from happening to the brain. So it's like a kind of an idea where everyone has a certain level of intelligence, and then some of the genes are damaging and we want to avoid those damaging genes to have. So it's a really really complex picture. But a couple of studies have appeared recently, one by US on this UK Biobank sample, which is one hundred thousand people have

been genotype so far, we found several hits. That is, we found several genes that are genetic variants I should say, that are related to differences in intelligence. I wish the IQ testing was a bit better in that sample, as I mentioned before. But there's also another study on the way it's going to appear I think in the next few months, that has an even bigger sample and that finds even more genetic variance linked to intelligence. And I'm not sure how much I can say about that study

because it's still not released. I know it's been accepted at a journal, it's not peer yet, but it finds a substantial number of these letter variants in the DNA that relates to intelligence. So we're making progress. It's slow progress, and I think the only way that we're really going to start to advance our knowledge of this is if we drill down further than these GUS studies, So we drill down into what are these genes actually doing. So is this a gene that, as I say, you know,

is related to neurogenesis. Is it a gene that's related to some other synaptic mechanism in the brain. And to do that, we're going to have to do more lab studies. We're going to have to work with neuroscientists and biologists. We're going to have to do things like growing stem cells to test the differences between intelligent and less intelligent people's brains. There's going to be a whole panoply of scientific methods that we're going to have to use to

really understand what's happening here. But for now, we're making slow progress in understanding genetics. Now I say slow, but it's only slow in terms of, you know, we have to wait several months between every paper like these are coming pretty fast now. The first ever genome wide association study of a kind of social trait like intelligence was twenty eleven, and with a larger one in twenty thirteen. We published one last year in twenty fifteen. We've now

published another one twenty sixteen. There's going to be another one in a few months, so they're coming pretty quickly, but it becomes little more difficult to put together these large samples to have the satistical power to detect these small effects. But we're getting there. Yeah, we're getting there. And I was going to just cheekily say, so, what's

the practical implication of these findings? I'm just joking. Well, no, no, I mean it's a fair question, but it's like, it's obviously not the only reason why you're doing this research. So no, absolutely, And we've discussed you know, the desire for practical stuff, but the design designer babies. Well, I mean that's as I say in the book, right, we need to have a serious talk now, like a serious

debate in's society about these findings, because they're coming. There's nothing that we're going to you know, we're not able to stop this research from happening, and we need to just discuss now what's happening in terms of our ethical obligations here. But what I was going to say was, we found these you know, this this genetic basis, and what we can do now is we can take the genetic basis that's discovered in one study and then apply it to another set of people using what's called a

pologenic risk score. So basically, you say, well, okay, you've got an A here, and we know that A people are slightly hiring intelligence. And you've got a C here, and we know that C people are of lower intelligence.

And add those up across maybe four hundred and fifty thousand letter variants in the in the genome, and then I could apply it to you or me or anyone else, and that gives you this pologenic score for intelligence or educational attainment or whatever you happen to look at, and then you can use that score to predict other stuff. So we've just submitted a paper for publication that uses

one of these pologenetic scores to predict people's mortality. Actually, the method we use was predicting their payarents mortality or longevity if you want to put it right, you know, positive spin on it. So actually using this, even though we've only got a little part of the picture in terms of genetics, we can still make meaningful predictions about people's lives from these What are we talking what's the

effects size there? So the effect size was that if you are one standard deviation higher on the Pologenic profile score for educational attainment, your parents were four percent less likely to be dead at any at any point. So like people who are if you split and if you split the A up into kind of thirds of the of the of the data, people in the highest third of the apologenetic score had parents that lived er point

seventy five years longer. Okay, so the course of a year longer than people who are in the lowest third. So we think this is a really quite big effect. So that's under review. How does that compare to effects in the medical literature on like cholesterology and stuff like that, Like I don't actually, I don't actually know if anyone's used this direct approach and looking at cholesterol genes or so. I mean, there's there's plenty of large effects we know

on mortality and things like smoking, right, social class. But i Q is not the same level as smoking. Sure, and i Q i Q is there, but we're not we're not talking about measurements of i Q. We're talking about measurements of genetics that we know that are related to IQ, which is which is a totally different thing. And that's a very good point. And those are pretty

large effects considering what you're looking at. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And we replicate that in three different large samples we're really quite excited about it actually, about that, about that finding showing that you can usually so if I was an insurance company, I would be thinking, huh, how do we use these scores to you know, give people a higher or lower premium? Which is a scary thought, but it's something that again we're going to have to start considering.

If we know what these genetics are, people are going to want to use this information, and so so we need to we need to talk about the you know, the ethics of of of of using that and have

a proper debate on this stuff. And I know a lot of people are put off by this, and and I really don't want to do want to think about it, but the science is advancing to the point that we're going to have to talk about There are a lot of Yeah, absolutely, I mean there's so many a couple of things nobody want to talk about, like global warming. Nobody wants to talk about it. You know, a classic example, classic says, let's just it's something that we can't really

observe happening, so let's just not talk about it. Yeah, you know, it's it's a slow process that is very difficult to observe. You know, right in front of us right now, so someone else can deal with that. It does seem like nobody really wants to talk about intelligence differences. You know, my colleague, who I do have respect for, a lot of respect for, Angela Duckworth, does work on GRIT as you know, her office is actually right next door to mine. So yeah, I hear about GRIT a lot.

But this is nothing to say about her, but has to say about the public. So we have no problem time about differences in GRIT. We do kind of sweep under the rug differences in cognitiobility. But there's no evidence that I've ever seen that GRIT is any more or less immutable or can be developed than IQ, right, I mean,

there's no evidence of that whatsoever. Absolutely spot on, and that's you know, the reason people are scared about to think about IQ is that they get this kind of oh, well, it must be immutable because we know it's related to genetics.

But there was a paper published by Kylie Rimfeld and Robert Pluman just recently, maybe a month ago, that showed that GRIT measures of GRIT are substantially heritable too, and in fact they also showed that they don't really predict academic achievement beyond stuff that we already know likes conscientiousness. Although there is a paper from our departments Timothy Bates, Tim Bates, Yeah, who does seem to show that it

does predict. And and I would add the cool thing about his paper is he actually a creative creativity creative achievement. That's right, yeeah. Yeah. So in terms of me personally, I love that paper, no wonder So, yeah, he's a friend and colleague of mine does does really great stuff. Yeah uh And so yeah, the debate that I would say, the jury is still out on that. But but what I wonder about, and in relation to what we've been discussing, is the the kind of antagonistic way that a lot

of the GRIT stuff is is framed. So often you'll hear things like, you know, GRIT really knocks IQ out of the park when it comes to when it comes to, you know, predicting academic achievement, or there's a well about GRIT is like the antidote to the cult of IQ. We'll go deeper than that, because this is a let's look an overarching pattern here. So when Daniel Goldman's book was a runaway bestseller, the cover said why emotional intelligence

matters more than IQ. When when Howard Garner's but Frames of Mind came out and it became an instant bestseller, they marketed it as why multiple intelligences why a single intelligence doesn't exist? So there's something like like these runaway best sellers, all they all kind of pit it directly against IQ as opposed to say, well, because is it because of the boring to say, like, oh, well, success

is complex. It's going to be a combination of I mean, I say that in my book never became a bestseller. So yeah, no, I mean I think, seeing well, we could probably build a structural equation model out of many many But is that the truth? Is that the truth? I edited an academic volume called The Complexity of Greatness Beyond Talent or Practice. Like five people have read that, but it is expensive, So maybe that's one of these

academic books. Yeah, But I mean it's like, in the conclusion of that book is, yeah, greatness the determines the greatest complex But the best sellering books are the ones that have the following cadence to it. I did X and X researcher I taught in the classroom. I And what I saw is that it wasn't intelligence, it wasn't talent, it was X. And whatever that X is, that's gonna be a best selling book, absolutely, right, am I Right? I think I think that is the kind of cynical

strategy that's used by marketers. That they know that people a like a like a new novel idea, they be they like something that means that they can manipulate it, that they can change it, that they can they can you know, pull themselves up by the bootstraps. And they also hate the idea of intelligence and differences between people in something as outdated and boring and and and discredited

as intelligence. And so yeah, And I guess I wonder with people who are taken in by that if they just took a step back and thought, you know, do we think that people who you know, the kid in your in your school class who's just absolutely you know, racing through all his math stuff or or writes these beautiful essays that she hands him to the teacher like half an hour before everyone else, do we think that that's not a meaningful difference between someone who's really really struggling.

And do we think that that that that doesn't tell us anything about that person who's going to do in the future. Not in every single case. Obviously there are there are exceptions in every way, but do we not think it tells us anything? And so I often want to ask people that and see what they're see what their reaction is. Absolutely, so, look, I want to be mindful of your time and the listener's time. And I

have five hundred and fifty five more questions. So maybe another maybe some other time, me and you could just like drink a drink a beer and just chat. Sure, because I really enjoyed this chat. I want to end with this, which I think ties up a lot of this. This says on the cover all that Matters Intelligence? Now that was was that a marketing ployee? By the way, sadly, sadly that is not to be a hypocrite. Yeah, there is. There is a series of books called All That Matters.

I know that it's one called like Modern Japan or that's hilarious because that's not what you're saying. I know exactly that said. By the way, I'm not saying that's really unfortunately, you know, introduce me on like little I've done little radio things wherever they say, su Richie, they although all intelligence all matters, And I go to the second I would say that this whole book is making the argument that's much more modest, which is intelligence matters.

That's it, period. And I think that's what frustrates most intelligence researchers is that they're not making the argument that intelligence is all that matters. They're just making the argument that it matters. So I, you know, when I, when I was trying to think of how can I, you know, redefine intelligence bah blah and I and I quoted some of these other components like intellectual engagement and passion and

three personal goals. My colleague Colin de Young made a very interesting point to me, which I still think about to this day. He said, you know, Scott, why are you trying to expand the concept of intelligence so much? Why don't you just make it your mission to just to explain to people its proper place and say that people value it too much in our school system and other areas. And you know, I didn't go that, Rudin, and I wrote this book gift that I can't with

this more expand definition of intelligence. But I often wonder if I was wrong in that approach. I often wonder if if it actually would be a more worthy not mission. But you know, when I just when I talk about this stuff, just to make it clear that you know, this variable that a lot of that has been studied for the past one hundred years. It matters, It predicts various things, but it's certainly not all it matters, and it's the public and individuals who make more of it

than probably the scientists themselves. Would that be fair, Yeah, I think I think not necessarily just the public. But but you know, journalists and as I say, kind of as I said earlier, sort of antagonistic reactions to this stuff from other scholars and other and other disciplines. You know, for instance, go to any education school and tell them that you study IQ, and you know, they will freak out.

You know, if you go to an education school and talk about this stuff, they just don't want to They don't want to hear it. I mean, it's often the case the education schools are going down that kind of quite political line, off in a very left wing political line, and they're not into this stuff. And when whenever they talk about IQ in public, they will denigrate the idea of it, they'll say, you know that this old you

know cult of IQ, and and so on. So if we could get to the stage where people, as you said, understand that IQ is just one aspect of success, one aspect of academic performance, one aspect of life, and a very important one. It is too, I mean, for heaven's sake, it predicts how long you'll you know, an IQ test taking in Chelsey predicts how long you're going to live. But not so do other things. But so does loads

of other stuff. And to build up a full picture of you know, the reasons people differ and the ways that we might be able to intervene to help people, we've got to we've got to take into account loads of stuff beyond IQ. But please just take into account IQ. I guess that's the message in my book. Yeah, well, thanks for putting it in such an easily Well it

was easy really for me. I don't know, because I know the research The plan is to make is to make it some you know, something that people can can read in just a couple of settings and or maybe even just one sitting and and just you know, be pointed on to some of the older stuff, the textbooks and some of the recent research. And so my bible, my bible when I was a twenty three year old or thereabouts, was Ian Darius Short History or short Brief

Introduction to Intelligence. I mean that was my like, I remember reading that in the in the car of my parents. I actually have these memories, and so I think in a lot of ways. You know, I'm sure you've made Ian proud, and this book is kind of like an update in that in that spirit, right, No, similar, it's you know, his book is brilliant and it's worth reading for anyone who's interested in this stuff. But it came out in two thousand and there's been a lot of advans.

There have been a lot of advents. Oh my god. Yeah, I was literally twenty one years old. Oh my god. Right right there you go. And so this book I wrote was attempting to you know, I can't and there's no way that I could write as beautifully ass as Ian does. But it's attempting to update on some of the more recent stuff that's happened. You know, you have your own style and you should own that. You should

own that. I mean, maybe what this interview by saying how I first met you it's because you flamed me on Twitter, and I thought you were saying some sensible things actually, so I said you because you know, I try to take my ego out of this stuff, because I'm interested in the truth as well. So I emailed you and I was like, I don't know if you said the stuff you said about me, I don't think that was one hundred cent truth, but I thought you had.

You did tend to. Like when I looked at your whole body of tweets, I was like, wow, this is this He's saying a lot of interesting things except for that tweet about me. But it was something like a working memory study, like a trained working memory train study. They said that you were like, I think maybe a bit more positive, better than I would have been. I think that's it's probably it's funny, but anyway, it's a it's it's a delightful chatting with you today, And thanks

for getting that show. Yeah great, Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just to stop provoking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can go to the psychology podcast dot com bumpy bony bo b