The more we succeed in giving every youngster a chance to develop his or her latent cognitive ability, the more we equalize the environmental sources of differences in intelligence. The irony is that as America equalizes the circumstances of people’s lives, the remaining differences in intelligence are increasingly determined differences in genes.#
Heritability describes something about a population of people, not an individual. It makes no more sense to talk about the heritability of an individual’s IQ than it does to talk about his birthrate.#
The impulse to think that environmental sources of difference are less threatening than genetic ones is natural but illusory.#