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Editorial: Born bright? / Don't overreact to the latest data on intelligence
Monday, November 12, 2001
Explaining his powers of deduction, Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie's fictional detective, credited his "little gray cells."
Apparently M. Poirot was as good a scientist as he was a sleuth. According to a study reported in the Post-Gazette last week, a plenitude of gray matter in the frontal lobe of the brain is indeed correlated with high intelligence. What's more, it seems to be determined by heredity, suggesting that detectives, fictional and otherwise, are born and not made.
Dr. Paul M. Thompson, the leader of a research team at the University of California at Los Angeles, analyzed magnetic resonance images of the brains of fraternal and identical twins in Finland.
The identical twins, who share a genetic profile, had the same amount of gray matter in their frontal lobes, while fraternal twins (who are no more closely related than are ordinary siblings) varied in the amount of gray matter in a particular brain "module." The variation was even greater among unrelated individuals.
But does size really matter? Another part of the study involved administering intelligence tests to participants. The conclusion: the more gray matter, the higher the IQ.
Like previous research involving the relationship between heredity and intelligence, this study is already making some people nervous. In the past, after all, pseudo-scientific attempts to link intelligence with brain size were used to justify racial, gender and class discrimination. And pessimists will see in Dr. Thompson's research the specter of a society in which children are assigned to a particular social caste based on MRI scans of their gray matter.
Granted, human beings are capable of exploiting real and imagined differences to mistreat others. But there is less to Dr. Thompson's discovery, even if it survives scientific scrutiny, than meets the eye. The notion that heredity plays a significant part in cognitive ability is generally accepted, though the relative influence of nature and nurture still inspires debate -- and probably always will.
Linking the hereditary factor to a particular part of the brain doesn't change the underlying assumption. So some individuals are born brighter than others? So what? An enlightened society will commit itself to educating every child to his or her potential, while recognizing that IQ is not the only or even the most important measurement of human worth. To think otherwise is stupid, regardless of how many little gray cells one is blessed with.
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