No, intelligence is not like height
But over the past five years it has become clear that IQ and educational attainment are not like height in fundamental and meaningful ways, and the reason behind this difference is one of the most important and interesting results to come out of modern behavioral genetics. So let’s go through it piece by piece.
IQ is much less heritable and more confounded than height
We’ll start with the specific point made in The Atlantic article (and the Vox article that it is citing) that, unlike height, adding up all of the genetic variants only predicts a small fraction of IQ score. This is just objectively true: the largest genetic analysis of IQ scores built a predictor that had an accuracy of 2-5% in Europeans, depending on the target cohort [Savage et al. (2018) – Table S9] whereas the largest genetic analysis of height build a predictor that had an accuracy of 45% in Europeans [Yengo et al. (2022) – Figure 4A]. I’m quite certain that 45% is larger than 5% though perhaps the race scientists will come up with some new math to debunk this.
