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genes play a very significant role in educational ability

Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

14_Divergent_selection_on_height_and_cognitive_ability_evidence_from_Fst_and_13c3ICJ Pfiffer

Evidence for Recent Polygenic Selection on previous research pfiffer psych-01-00005

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Of course they do. Equation three shows a top model for IQ as the product of a genetic component I and a cultural component C that it a function of I. Hence genes exert a direct effect on raw cognitive power I and an indirect effect on the cultural component (people with more cognitive horsepower can use the cultural apparatus to achieve greater success than those with less horsepower.

To give you an idea of what I mean my culture, consider a test of smarts. Let's say we administer a 10-question multiple-choice test on advanced quantum mechanics applications to two people, one is a hedge fund manager with a tested IQ of 140 and the other is a janitor with a tested IQ of 90. The person with the higher number right wins a $50K prize.

The hedge fund guy is given a textbook and an hour to prepare. The janitor is given the answer key and told to memorize it and then use it to answer the questions on the test.

Who do you think will do better? I'd my money on the janitor. Trying to learn enough of a difficult field like QE to score well in just an hour is a tall order, even for a highly intelligent person. Memorizing an answer key is much easier, even a moron can do it. The answer key here represents culture. Culture gives you tools making problems important for living in your local environment easier to solve.

Take the smartest guy in an Amazonian hunter gather tribe and stick him in New York. He will be completely out of depth and not have any idea on how to be successful here. There's a good chance he would do something that gets him arrested or killed. Similarly take the hedge fund guy and stick him in the Amazon and he probably will end up dead too.

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I agree culture has a strong impact along with other environmental factors and genetic factors. Athough most people I know consider culture a subset of Nurture or Environment in the "nature vs nurture" and "genetics vs environment" discussions.

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Genes are also a subset of environment in that genes evolve into order to adapt to the environment (which is for humans today is largely culturally generated). The evolutionary process is so slow that there is little change on human times scales, so we normally consider genes to be constant.

Culture also evolves in order to adapt to the environment. This evolution proceeds at variable rates. t its fastest cultural attributes can be treated as part of the environment (e.g fads) while others (e.g. language) change so slowly as to be considered metastable over human timescales. (e.g. English books written in the 19th century are easily readable, 17th century, much harder, and 14th century, fuggedaboutit.

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