PIXABAY, PUBLICDOMAINPICTURESIn a meta-analysis published May 22 in Nature Genetics, scientists have identified 52 genes associated with human intelligence, 40 of which had not been associated with the trait previously.
Intelligence research has always been controversial, with some debating whether it could be measured at all, University of California, Irvine, neuroscientist Richard Haier told Science News. Now “we are so many light-years beyond that, as you can see from studies like this,” said Haier, who was not part of the work. “This is very exciting and very positive news.”
The study’s lead author, Danielle Posthuma, a geneticist at the Vrije University Amsterdam, had done twin studies showing that identical twins had more similar intelligence scores than fraternal twins. Other research, too, supported the idea that intelligence had a genetic basis, as The New York Times reported. But previous genome-wide association studies had failed to link genes to intelligence, and Posthuma was not optimistic that this ...
