Intelligence Is An Important Factor - 2095 Words

Intelligence can determines what classes you take, what jobs you get, your level of education, your type of lifestyle, your future and etc.†¦ Intelligence is an important factor in our lives but what exactly is it? Intelligence has many different meanings due to different investigators having numerous definitions of it. For example, in a 1921 conference, American psychologists Lewis M. Terman and Edward L. Thorndike contrasted over the definition of intelligence, Terman believed that intelligence was the ability to think abstractly while Thorndike alleged that intelligence was learning and the ability to give good responses to questions (Sternberg, 2014). Overtime, psychologists have been able to come up with a general meaning, which is†¦show more content†¦These dispute first initiated in 1865 with an English scientist, Francis Galton who began studying the correlation on hereditary and success (Behavioral Neuroscience Web Ring Macalester College). Convinced, based o n his evidence, that success and other abilities were mostly based on hereditary factors, he deduced that â€Å"intelligence must be bred and not trained† (Wilderdom, 2005). He then opposed those who believed in the environmental effects on intelligence (Behavioral Neuroscience Web Ring Macalester College). For centuries, this debate had no clear conclusion but many theories and hypothesis. Although both the nature and nurture side has find great amount of evidence, it is still undecided which side has more effects in one’s intelligence. First, the theory about how genes can affect your intelligence can be tested thanks to the birth of monozygotic or identical twins born from the same cell (Behavioral neuroscience Web Ring Macalester College). Because children share 50% of their genes with each of their parents, this then becomes an interesting area of research because they could compare monozygotic twins who share 100 percent of their genes. This is good because they both obtained 50% of their parents genes plus they are identical twins so this gives a great window to research. In