What is the main factor that determines intelligence?

Chemically, I dunno, but in practice, pattern recognition is huge. Once one has figured out the solution to some problem, and recognizes the same problem again and again, s/he presents his/herself quite intelligently.

Your mother.

Actually, it’s up in the air as to whether intelligence is something that can be measured in a deterministic way. Some people, like the anarchist philosopher Ranciere, even believe that all intelligence (in humans; I don’t know what he’d say about other species) in individuals is equal. He actually has some cool evidence to base this hypothesis on: from Wiki, regarding his article “The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991): This book describes the emancipatory education of Joseph Jacotot, a post-Revolutionary philosopher of education who discovered that he could teach things that he himself did not know my interjection: Jacotot went to a different country where he didn’t speak the language, and his students (who only spoke the native language) still learned the stuff that he taught them (the stuff that he knew nothing about). The book is both a history and a contemporary intervention in the philosophy and politics of education, through the concept of autodidactism; Rancière chronicles Jacotot’s “adventures,” but he articulates Jacotot’s theory of “emancipation” and “stultification” in the present tense. ISBN 0–8047-1969–1.” You can download “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” here.

I would say pattern recognition is the closest to an overriding main principle and likewise the application of solutions to those patterns. But there is no one factor as there are some many different types of intelligences-whether they be spatial, kinesthetic, artistic, quantitative etc.. There are conditions such as savantism where an individual can show islands of extremely high functioning behavior and have very low functioning in other areas. What’s maybe clearer is what intelligence is not. I would say that acting in a way that is detrimental to one’s own interest isn’t intelligent if it causes undue suffering to self or others.

There is no definitive answer. One reason is that experts are not agreed as to what, exactly, intelligence is, and how it is measured. Many psychologists believe that IQ tests measure your ability to take IQ tests.

But, lets assume we know what me mean by intelligence, and we know how to measure it. My educated guess is that in a random selection of people, intelligence will be distributed on a normal curve, which suggests that it is a product of interactions between genetics and experience, with the genetics setting a capacity, and environment enabling or disabling one in terms of reaching that theoretical level.

Head Start, for example, seems to help people learn, which may be considered to be part of intelligence. Enriched environments, work similarly, and deprived environments without a lot of benign sensory input, love, affection, pleasant physicality, human attachment, etc. militate against reaching capacity.

In any event it is almost certainly polygenic, meaning there is no “intelligence gene” but the information in many alleles at multiple loci all contribute together.

Some psychometricians posit a “g-factor” that constitutes a general intelligence underlying specific cognitive abilities. Intelligence, then, would seem to be the ability to consistently locate the “g-spot” quickly.

Depends on who you ask. Brilliant cognitive scientist and writer Steven Pinker thinks it might be some factor that occurs during the prenatal and early postnatal stages of life. Other people think it has a lot more to do with environment.

Using my own family as an example, my brothers and I are pretty much the only members in our extended family who read on a regular basis. We all excelled in school and generally are attracted toward intellectual pursuits. The other members of my family, to put it bluntly, are dumbasses. What did my mother and father do differently with us? It’s not clear. They did well enough in school, but were both raised in non-intellectual families and did not pursue intellectual careers. They didn’t push us as hard or check our homework like other children’s parents. From what I can gather, the only thing they did differently from other families related to us is that they read books, at least early on (after the third and fourth child were born, they no longer had time to read). Is this the factor that made my brothers and I different? Maybe. Another thing to consider is that my father was from a different country than my mother, whereas the rest of my extended family all came from the same country. Could the mixing of gene pools have created intelligence? Also a maybe.

I wish we knew more about what determines intelligence because I find the subject fascinating.

Planning the future.

Intelligence is a relative thing and it encompasses many areas.

Test scores.