Well, having just arrived at this thread after a long weekend camping, all I can say is of COURSE it's genetic, how do you think we got to be human fa crying out loud. This is like saying How surprising, life seems to have a genetic basis, it runs in families. And we should not use this knowledge to label people.

Sorry, bigots and non-bigots like, some people are alive and some are dead. You can call them "passed away" if you like to but that doesn't make them any less dead.

Replace most of that with statements about intelligence and it's still true.

Evidence shows that that poor nurture can, in many many many ways, *decrease* the degree to which a person can USE their native intelligence, or decrease that native intelligence itself (Pb poisoning, boring childhoods, etc).

There is no good evidence that good nurture can increase it, though. You get served your cup as full as it gets.

For instance, there is evidence that monolinguism decreases intelligence, or at least performance on intelligence tests. Simply having your child learn more than one language before starting school makes that child less unintelligent than they would have been without that second language.

Anything that *seems* to increase intelligence may, instead, be reducing the degree to which life dumbs you down.

Illegitemi non carborundum!