How pleasant it is to live in the 21st century, enlightened, no longer scared of science. We can marvel at the diversity of life with David Attenborough; face the vastness of the cosmos with Brian Cox. These days we talk of colliders and particles as casually as we shop for milk. Science is our oyster.
Except of course when it comes to genetics. Just try starting an excited conversation about gene therapy, or about the young Chinese genius Zhao Bowen, who is, right now, hunting down the genes for intelligence. Faces will fall, there’ll be talk of eugenics, perhaps a sudden burst of inexplicable fury. This I know because I’ve felt it myself.
I felt it first with a friend who tried to tell me about the research being done by Professor Robert Plomin — who I’m now here waiting to meet. Professor Plomin is one of the world’s leading behavioural geneticists, which means he studies genes; not down a microscope, but by looking at the population and how we behave.
He’ll pick some interesting and measurable traits: weight, height, intelligence; and survey thousands of kids. Then take the spread of results — the variation — and figure out to what degree nature or nurture is responsible. He’s asking: why do we differ from each other?
Twins are obviously useful in studies like these — especially identical ones because they share 100 per cent of their DNA — and Professor Plomin runs the Twins Early Development Study (Teds) of all twins born in England and Wales from 1994 to 1996.
And what his research shows time and time again (said my friend) is that nature is often more important than we like to think, particularly in the contentious area of IQ. Yes, there’s a complicated interplay of genes and environment, but even so, it’s striking how heritable IQ is.
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