Crude and dangerous ideas about the genetic heritability of intelligence, and a supposed biological basis for the Black/White achievement gap, are alive and well inside the education policy process but taking new and more subtle forms. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the paper analyses recent hereditarian writing, in the UK and the USA, and…

This paper aims to provide developmental data on two connected naive inheritance concepts and to explore the coherence of children's naive biology knowledge. Two tasks examined children and adolescents' (4, 7, 10, and 14 years) conceptions of phenotypic resemblance across kin (in physical characteristics, disabilities, and personality traits). The…

During childhood and adolescence, increases in heritability and decreases in shared environmental influences have typically been found for cognitive abilities. A sample of more than 2,500 pairs of twins from the Twins Early Development Study was used to investigate whether a similar pattern would be found for science performance from 9 to 12…

A behavioral genetic analysis of general writing ability was conducted using teacher assessments based on UK National Curriculum criteria for a sample of 3296 same-sex pairs of 7-year-old twins. Writing was highly heritable within the normal range (0.66) and at the low extreme (0.70). Environmental influences were almost all non-shared, with…

The authors assessed 2,502 ten-year-old children, members of 1,251 pairs of twins, on a Web-based battery of problems from 5 diverse aspects of mathematics assessed as part of the U.K. national curriculum. This 1st genetic study into the etiology of variation in different domains of mathematics showed that the heritability estimates were moderate…

Investigated genetic and environmental influences on the similarity and differences among five tests of cognitive abilities in 1,958 pairs of same-sex twins born in 1994 in the United Kingdom. Results suggest a developmental trend from modularity to molarity when considered in relation to multivariate genetic results later in life that show that…

Each new baby is scrutinised and their facial features and other characteristics catalogued against known family members. This is essentially a social process: the new family member is recognised and accepted into the tribe. However, people's genetic inheritance--the information in their DNA--is also a serious matter with the potential to…

Discusses various possible ways by which isolated populations might differentiate into species. The interactions between ecological factors and genes with respect to evolution and the role of genetic polymorphisms and other genetics variation are also discussed. (HM)

The Prader-Willi/Angelman Critical Region (PWACR; Chromosome 15q11-13) is of interest as a potential locus for genes conferring susceptibility to autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This report describes a female proband referred for evaluation of a possible ASD. Genetic analyses indicated that the proband, her father and one of her sisters, carried…

Mathematics performance at 7 years as assessed by teachers using UK national curriculum criteria has been found to be highly heritable. For almost 3000 pairs of 7-year-old same-sex twins, we used multivariate genetic analysis to investigate the extent to which these genetic effects on mathematics performance overlap with genetic effects on reading…