[reasonishy]

Genes are by far the most important factor. If you've bred animals, you'll understand this. Take a couple of poor animals and breed them. They'll have poor offspring. You can do all you like in their environment, but they'll still be poor. Select high quality parents, and you'll have high quality offspring. Selective breeding works extremely well to produce the best quality animals/plants.

I have no idea why we're in an age where it's so un-politically correct to say this about humans. Some people just seem to have their fingers in their ears when it comes to inconvenient facts that don't mesh with their "everyone is equal!" agenda.

edit: Downvote away. I'm sure that'll change the obvious biological facts.

[maxucho]

Genes may play a factor, but they are certainly not the most important one, or even a significant one in this context. If you grow up in a poor family / poor neighborhood, you won't have access to the same education as those who grow up in middle-class areas. Education is far more important to what we consider "intelligence" in this context. Basic math, financial literacy, or even reading comprehension is far more a result of your education than it is of your genetic material.

It's easy, as a product of good education and a safe environment, to look at people in poverty and say "I guess they're not as smart as me." This hides a far more uncomfortable truth, which is that everyone who doesn't grow up in poverty has access to better education, better opportunities, and a better environment than those in poverty. Try as you might to claim that people in poverty are just "stupider", it's simply impossible to make this comparison given that people on opposite ends of the financial spectrum grow up in totally different environments. It's short-sighted to attribute this to genetics and nothing else.

I'm just going to hazard a guess that you didn't grow up in poverty, am I right? If you had, I'm sure you would have a very different idea about how difficult it is to grow up without all the advantages of a middle-class upbringing.

[Thriptic]

I don't think it's correct to say one way or the other what the critical driver is, as to my knowledge we don't have the necessary data to make such statements. Both genetics and environment likely play a role. We as a society have decided that it is unethical / not in our societal best interest to perform the experiments necessary to further investigate the mechanism, and so we should focus our efforts on alleviating environmental drivers of the problem. With that being said, to write off theoretical heritable causes of poverty or low intelligence just because they makes us uncomfortable would be bad science. We should be transparent about the limitations of our data and admit that as a society we are content with not knowing the answer to this question.

[reasonishy]

The other issue is that society has become so detached from nature that a lot of people are completely oblivious. If you breed animals, questions like this are pretty obvious and easy to answer.

[reasonishy]

I grew up in a reasonably poor household. We certainly weren't wealthy. I couldn't care less about poverty or not poverty, it's irrelevant. I was incredibly lucky to have good parents, with 'smart' genes.

[runamok]

They seem to have accounted for that: > These differences weren’t present at birth, Wolfe says. “We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same, regardless of whether or not they were growing up in a poor family. But then as we traced them to age 4, we found areas that were developing more slowly among infants in low-income families.”

I don't think anyone discounts genetics completely. I just think for something like your mental capacity as a human will vary dramatically by your upbringing and teachings.

Take your 'high quality animal' and starve it occasionally. Wake it up with sirens. Beat it regularly and capriciously. Injure it. Compare that to one that is treated well but 'poor quality'. Also are we testing these animals in a maze or just size, speed, strength?

[reasonishy]

“We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same, regardless of whether or not they were growing up in a poor family."

What does that show? I'm sure if you checked the sperm and egg you could say "they're basically the same". All that means is the brain isn't fully developed before the age of 1. Big whoop.

[themartorana]

Well obviously because this is how the pro-eugenics conversation begins. After all, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons have a place in society.