Is it born intelligent or does it become so? And besides, do we have the necessary capacities to progress? Since Antiquity, this Byzantine debate opposes philosophers and scientists, who question the part of the innate and the acquired intelligence, not without ulterior motives ...
Summary
The predominance of the innate: a theory of another century ...
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Childhood, a key learning period
The acquired stronger than the innate?
innate or acquired intelligence
Whatever the time spent reviewing his courses, Jerome can do nothing, it does not fit. "I do not have the math bump," he says. No problem on the other hand for Isabelle who never opens a manual and always gets well exams. "Normal" retort supporters of the innate position. For them the intelligence is mainly of genetic origin, at 80% estimates precisely Arthur Jensen, professor of psychology at the University of California. Individuals would therefore have at the birth of a certain capital. Without this legacy, which offers them the necessary predispositions, any attempt at learning is futile and doomed to failure.
The predominance of the innate: a theory of another century ...
The theory of the innate origin of intelligence flourished in the nineteenth century, driven by two major events: the new growth of colonial expansion and the development of science. Faced with the discovery of new peoples and their ways of life, sometimes so different and so confusing for European mores, scientific works seek to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of Westerners. The movement also exerts its influence in France. Emile Zola is inspired in his novels works on inheritance in progress at the time. The Rougon-Macquart series presents the study of the impact of neurosis and alcoholism on the five generations of a family.
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Some advocates of innate positions drift towards eugenics, assuming that less intelligent individuals would weaken the average level of the population. The book "The Bell Curve", published in 1994, seems to bring these theories up to date. Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein demonstrate, with supporting statistics, that Blacks generally have lower IQs than the average of other communities, which would explain their lower economic and social status. They continue the demonstration by judging that, since intelligence is innate and intellectual destiny is determined, it is useless to continue to financially support these populations ... This new social Darwinism therefore proposes to dismantle the policy of positive discrimination in force in United States. "The conclusions of this book went well beyond a scientific observation" notes Michel Duyme, researcher at INSERM.
Childhood, a key learning period
Proponents of the importance of the acquis on the development of intelligence estimate, unlike child psychiatrist Fitzhugh Dodson, that everything is not played before 6 years. This is what Michel Duyme and Marie-Annick Dumaret proved in their survey published in 1999, after observing children adopted late by parents of a higher social class. "Even though early childhood remains a key learning period, IQ can evolve positively in a more favorable socio-economic environment until adolescence," they explain. The environment in which we live is very important because it provides support. It is the family that transmits the taste and the will to learn and to know.
The acquired stronger than the innate?
American neurophysiologist Glenn Doman goes further and argues that all children can learn to read early with proper stimulation. According to him, the brain of a child of 5 years would already reach 80% of its adult weight. "In a word, this is the privileged time to learn, because the child is biologically already very capable of intelligence," he says. Arthur Ramiandrisoa's 11-year-old son's parents claimed that their son was not born gifted, but had become so through the educational method they had developed.
Asked by a class about the best method to become intelligent, the French geneticist Albert Jacquard replied: "It is very easy not to become intelligent by falling asleep in the passivity of the answers learned, giving up the effort of formulating one's own Questions". Innate and acquired, is it possible to precisely delineate the part that belongs to each?
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