Childhood Intelligence: A Comparative Analysis

Superior Essays
Based on personal opinion as well as on scientific, peer-reviewed published evidence I conceive that nature and nurture both cooperate to shape prenatal development. Nature and nurture hold a close relationship where without the other, each on its own, is not capable of providing empirical evidence for development itself. Genetics and the environment work alongside to shape children’s intelligence quotients (IQs) where factors such as: schooling quality, parental education and birth weight highly contribute to the changes in the IQ of individuals (Pacheco, Hedges, Schilling, & Morton, 2013). Teratogens such as the nicotine chemical found in cigarettes has been linked to many perinatal problems in infants, such that include: low birth weight, …show more content…
In the study, “Pre- and Postnatal Drivers of Childhood Intelligence: Evidence from Singapore,” researchers intended to answer whether genetics or the environment in a child’s early life determines its intelligence and if so, to what extent. The study was composed of 662 children between the ages 7 to 9; 342 children from a bottom-ranked north-eastern school and 320 from top-ranked south-eastern and western schools. This longitudinal study took place in Singapore, started in 1999, and was carried out over a period of 3 years, throughout which The Singapore Cohort Study of the Risk Factors of Myopia (SCORM) was used as a data source. First, the participants were tested in non-verbal reasoning ability following the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices. The parents of the participants were then given a questionnaire to help assess certain demographics, they were also asked questions regarding the mother’s work status and if the child had been breastfed. All 662 children were tested for the same independent variables, though the half sample (n=320; from the top-ranked school), included other variables as well. Once the participant’s IQs were recorded at the age of 11, the researchers analyzed the possible drivers that led to the changes in score among the …show more content…
In the study, “Epigenetics and Maternal Nutrition: Nature v. Nurture,” researchers tested the transcription factor 7-like 2 gene to identify its implication in type 2 diabetes (T2D) and birth weight. This study comprised 24,053 participants in total from six joint studies altogether. Literature from the six studies was analyzed and it was demonstrated that there is a genetic element to diabetes. The researchers found that there is an association between low birth weight rates in infants and T2D. The study explains that fetal growth is affected by insulin and monogenic disorders, which occur as a product of one defective gene on the autosomes. These mutations can cause low birth weight and later onset of diabetes in children. Genetic factors and hostile fetal environments can lead babies to be born small for gestational age (SGA) which in turn can lead infants to accumulate body fat and have a higher vulnerability to T2D. Environment has the power to generate epigenetic alterations that can cause insulin resistance and possibly cause T2D as some key genes can be inhibited or expressed. The way mother’s genes are expressed can produce variations in fetal environment and distress gene expression, which both in fact impact birth weight in children

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