While the study does not refute previous findings that DNA impacts intelligence, it does prove that environmental influences play a significant role in cognitive ability as measured in early adulthood.
The study compared the cognitive ability – as measured by IQ – of 436 Swedish male siblings in which one member was reared by biological parents and the other by adoptive parents. The IQ of the adopted males, which was measured at ages 18-20, was 4.4 points higher than their nonadopted siblings.
The findings were published online in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on March 23.
“In Sweden, as in most Western countries, there is a substantial excess of individuals who wish to adopt compared to adoptive children available,” said joint first author Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D., professor of psychiatry and human and molecular genetics in the Department of Psychiatry, VCU School of Medicine. “Therefore, adoption agencies see it as their goal of selecting relatively ideal environments within which to place adoptive children.”
The adoptive parents in the study tended to be more educated and in better socioeconomic circumstances than the biological parents. In the study, parental education level was rated on a five-point scale; each additional unit of education by the rearing parents was associated with 1.71 more units of IQ. In the rare circumstances when the biological parents were more educated than the adoptive parents, the cognitive ability of the adopted-away offspring was lower than the one who was reared by the genetic parents.
“Many studies of environmental effects on cognitive ability are based on special programs like Head Start that children are placed in for a limited amount of time,” said joint-first author Eric Turkheimer, a U.Va. professor of psychology. “These programs often have positive results while the program is in place, but they fade quickly when it is over. Adoption into a more educated household is the most permanent kind of environmental change, and it has the most lasting effects.”
Previous studies have found that educated parents are more likely to talk at the dinner table, take their children to museums and read stories to their children at night.“We’re not denying that cognitive ability has important genetic components, but it is a naïve idea to say that it is only genes,” Kendler said. “This is strong evidence that educated parents do something with their kid that makes them smarter and this is not a result of genetic factors.”
Turkheimer is the author of a landmark study in 2003 demonstrating that the effect of genes on IQ depends on socioeconomic status. The most recent study further affirms that finding.
“Differences among people in their cognitive ability are influenced by both their genes and environments, but genetic effects have often been easier to demonstrate because identical twins are essentially clones and have highly similar IQs,” Turkheimer said. “Environmental effects have to be inferred, as in the rare event when pairs of siblings are raised by different parents in different socioeconomic circumstances. The Swedish population data allowed us to find that homes led by better-educated parents produce real gains in the cognitive abilities of the children they raise.”
The PNAS study is titled “The Family Environment and the Malleability of Cognitive Ability: A Swedish National Home and Adopted Co-Sibling Control Study.”
In addition to Kendler and Turkheimer, contributors to the study included Lund University researchers Henrik Ohlsson; Dr. Jan Sundquist; and Dr. Kristina Sundquist. Sundquist and Sundquist also have affiliations with the Stanford Prevention Research Center at the Stanford University School of Medicine.###
About VCU and the VCU Medical CenterVirginia Commonwealth University is a major, urban public research university with national and international rankings in sponsored research. Located in downtown Richmond, VCU enrolls more than 31,000 students in 226 degree and certificate programs in the arts, sciences and humanities. Sixty-seven of the programs are unique in Virginia, many of them crossing the disciplines of VCU’s 13 schools and one college. MCV Hospitals and the health sciences schools of Virginia Commonwealth University comprise the VCU Medical Center, one of the nation’s leading academic medical centers. For more, see www.vcu.edu.
About the University of VirginiaFounded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, the University of Virginia sustains the ideal of developing, through education, leaders who are well-prepared to help shape the future of the nation and the world. The University is public, while nourished by the strong support of its alumni. It is also selective; the students who come here have been chosen because they show the exceptional promise Jefferson envisioned. For more, see http://www.virginia.edu/.
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