Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
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Quick answers
Does this atlas rank groups by IQ, race or nation?
No. Pathways and evidence stay individual. Scores are browsing aids — never group biological or racial ranks.
Did Galton settle the question?
Galton named the English contrast and promoted pedigree thinking. He did not have twin or molecular designs. Later work discarded his racial hierarchy project.
What do twin studies actually show?
When raised apart or compared as MZ versus DZ pairs, many cognitive and personality traits show substantial genetic influence and surprisingly small effects of the shared family home — in the environments those studies sampled.
Does a high heritability mean training is pointless?
No. Height is highly heritable and still responds to nutrition. Heritability is not unmodifiability.
Why refuse group IQ rankings here?
Between-group score gaps are not a clean genetic ranking. They confound tests, opportunity, health, language and history. This atlas will not launder that confusion as science.
What is gene–environment correlation?
People seek, evoke and are placed in environments that fit their dispositions — music lessons after a parent hears pitch, or a maths circle after a teacher notices speed. Genes and culture then travel together.
Practice means designed work with feedback — Ericsson’s construct, not Gladwell’s hour ticket.
Where Macnamara et al. 2014 published domain bands (games ~26%, music ~21%, sports ~18%, education ~4%), this page uses those rounded figures and does not invent new precision.
Steps
- Pick an outcome
Name the skill, not “intelligence”.
Specific beats global.
- List environments
Hours, teachers, language, health.
Write them down.
- Find a change score
Retest after teaching, not only once.
Gain is the educational unit.
- Watch elicitation
Notice who gets offered the next challenge.
That is G×E in the room.
- Cap the story
No cranial tales, no race ranks.
If a source offers them, drop it.
- Review yearly
Environments and interests move.
Update the map.
Checklist
- Outcome named — Not a vague “gifted” stamp.
- Teaching tried — Static scores are incomplete.
- Health checked — Sensory and sleep confound tests.
- Hours logged honestly — Opportunity is a variable.
- No group ranking — Editorial and scientific hygiene.
- Sample limits stated — WEIRD twins are not the world.
- Child still a child — Labels are tools, not identities.
- Sources dated — Galton is history, not a methods manual.
Drills
- Two-score diary — Record performance before and after a hint. That is a miniature dynamic test.
- Environment inventory — List who offered the last hard task. Elicitation becomes visible.
- Slogan rewrite — Take a headline “born genius” and rewrite it as variance-plus-practice.
- Domain contrast — Compare a highly trained skill with a barely taught one in the same person.
- History caption — Caption a Galton table with who was excluded from eminence.
Pitfalls
- Percent-of-person talk — “She is 70% genetic” is not what heritability means.
- One-study headlines — Minnesota twins were not a theory of every classroom.
- Eugenic leftovers — Pedigree rhetoric still leaks into parenting forums.
- Ignoring the missing — If a group was never sampled, do not generalise the coefficient.
Tools
- Primary papers — Plomin reviews, Scarr, Vygotsky in translation — not thread summaries.
- Dynamic assessment kits — Feuerstein and later classroom versions.
- Hearing/vision screens — Boring, decisive.
- This atlas’s other topics — Giftedness, practice and identification pages share the same editorial line.
Nature and nurture: design the hour; retire the poster. Education is not a diagnosis.
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