Ability and heritability

The mere mention of measuring intelligence, let alone estimating its heritability, is to many the reddest of red rags. So much so that the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychiatric Association felt obliged to begin its 1995 report on ‘Intelligence: knowns and unknowns’ with the comment that:

…many participants [in the academic debate] made little effort to distinguish scientific issues from political ones. Research findings were often assessed not so much on their merits or their scientific standing as on their supposed political implications.

The incendiary nature of the issue may be because of its lingering associations) and that attempts to measure it are, in any case, invalidated by cultural and linguistic bias. Moreover, the power of tests to predict educational and other outcomes is hardly surprising because intelligence tests, educational achievements, career successes and incomes are all essentially measuring the same thing – the abilities that a particular society has already decided that it most values.