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Are some people born clever, and othersborn stupid? Or is intelligence developed by our environment and ourexperiences? Strangely enough, the answer to both these questions is yes. Tosome extent our intelligence is given us at birth, and no amount of specialeducation can make a genius out of a child born with low intelligence. On theother hand, a child who lives in a boring environment will develop hisintelligence less than one who lives in rich and varied surroundings. Thus thelimits of a persons intelligence are fixed at birth, but whether or not hereaches those limits will depend on his environment. This view, now held bymost experts, can be supported in a number of ways. It is easy to show that intelligence isto some extent something we are born with. The closer the blood relationshipbetween two people, the closer they are likely to be in intelligence. Thus ifwe take two unrelated people at random from the population,it is likely thattheir degrees of intelligence will be completely different. If on the otherhand we take two identical twins they will very likely be asintelligent as each other. Relations like brothers and sisters, parents andchildren, usually have similar intelligence, and this clearly suggests that intelligencedepends on birth. Imagine now that we take two identicaltwins and put them in different environments. We might send one, for example,to a university and the other to a factory where the work is boring. We wouldsoon find differences in intelligence developing, and this indicates thatenvironment as well as birth plays a part. This conclusion is also suggested bythe fact that people who live in close contact with each other, but who are notrelated at all, are likely to have similar degrees of intelligence. | 
