Top Highlights

• Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience. It is not merely book-learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for...
• Smarter people live longer. In study after study, it’s been found that people with higher IQ scores – and, thus, higher general intelligence – tend, on average, to outlive their less intelligent peers. In some studies, IQ score is about as predictive of the risk of death as is smoking.
• But our abilities are clearly on a different level from those in our non-human cousins. The psychologist Steven Pinker (2010) has suggested that humans have adapted to the ‘cognitive niche’:
• consider that natural selection works on differences in our DNA, picking up on genetic mutations that give a fitness or survival advantage. This implies that some genetic differences can be more or less beneficial to our cognitive abilities. Does this mean that genetics might explain why some people today are smarter than others? Different kinds of...
• Excitingly, a new technique called ‘GCTA’ (which stands for Genomewide Complex Trait Analysis, but is also the four ‘letters’ of the bases of DNA – see what they did there?) allows researchers to calculate heritability directly from the DNA of large groups of people, with no need for twins or adoptees, or the assumptions of those kinds of studies. ...