Heritability of Intelligence

Is intelligence heritable? Karl-Friedrich Fischbach and Martin Niggeschmidt show that "heritability" means something different in biological terminology than in everyday language - which almost inevitably leads to misinterpretations. They explain why twin studies are controversial - and why genetic predictions of IQ and "educational attainment" must be treated with skepticism.

This book is a translation of the original German 2 ^nd edition Erblichkeit der Intelligenz by Karl-Friedrich Fischbach & Martin Niggeschmidt, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further thedevelopment of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

The Authors:

Prof. Dr. Karl-Friedrich Fischbach is a developmental biologist and neurogeneticist. He was professor of biophysics and molecular biology at the University of Freiburg from 1985 to 2013, including two years as executive director of the Institute of Biology III.

Martin Niggeschmidt is an editor in Hamburg.