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Uberfacts, a Twitter account with 9.43M followers claims that 80% of a child's intelligence is acquired from the mother. How true is this?

Gizmodo doesn't do a very good job of debunking this:

FALSE. This fun fact is a favorite of those who think that intelligence is mostly genetic, and yet don't cite any reliable sources. That 80 percent figure seems to be pulled from thin air, no doubt an incredibly warped version of something that may actually be true.

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    What is "aquired from the mother" supposed to mean in this context? – Christian Feb 13 '15 at 13:06
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    @Oddthinking It's related but not a dupe. That questions if IQ is decided by nature and not nurture. This, assuming the former, pits mother vs. father as the source of the child's IQ. –  Feb 13 '15 at 13:30
  • @Christian Presumably, genetics. –  Feb 13 '15 at 13:32
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    @coleopterist If the claim were true, the cause could still easily be nurture rather than nature: assume for example that mum is the primary caregiver, and that development of intelligence in the infant (as the result of interaction with their primary caregiver) is paramount. – ChrisW Feb 13 '15 at 13:52
  • @ChrisW I agree that that could be an interpretation. But it seems like the less likely one. –  Feb 13 '15 at 14:01
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    Related (closed) questions [1](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/23142/19407) and [2](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/18523/19407) – Is Begot Feb 13 '15 at 16:01
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    Why's this so heavily downvoted? Seems like a claim worth investigating – user5341 Feb 13 '15 at 18:12
  • @DVK - because it's completely nonsensical as a question, we don't "acquire" intelligence. Intelligence is a combination of genetic aptitude, education, interaction and upbringing. You could argue that a mother *usually (but not always)* has a more prominent role in a child's upbringing, but the entire family, nursery, other children and friends etc all have a major impact. – Jon Story Feb 17 '15 at 12:49
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    @JonStory - nature vs. nurture isn't exactly resolved. And intelligence is shown to be heritable. – user5341 Feb 17 '15 at 16:21
  • @DVK - exactly. Without the nature vs nurture debate, and without a quantifiable way to measure to what extent intelligence is hereditary, this question is complete nonsense. What's 80% of an unknown, arbitrary, unproven number regarding an unresolved, apparently unverifiable supposition? Even accepting that intelligence is 100% hereditary, it's not a quantifiable number (IQ is the best we've come up with, and it's sure as hell not a measurement). Tell me what it is we're measuring, and maybe we can decide what 80% of it is. – Jon Story Feb 17 '15 at 16:24
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    @JonStory - IQ is a measurement. Whether you find it the best measurement or not, is a different story. But it's a quantifyablle measurement. And its heritability CAN be measured. And has been. And the breakdown between parent's IQ can be measured as well. Seems eminently answerable via a study. – user5341 Feb 17 '15 at 16:29
  • IQ is a relative placement within society, not an acquirable quantity. This question would imply that if I have a father with an IQ of 100, and a mother with an IQ of 200, my own should be 180 (20 from my father and 160 from my mother)? It's utterly nonsensical. Without empirical data on nature vs nurture, the role of the intelligence of the parent on the subsequent nurture of the child, or a non-subjective measure of intelligence we can't directly compare people in this way. – Jon Story Feb 17 '15 at 16:33
  • I mean, we could produce a study: take 50 men and 50 women with known IQs, produce a child from each possible couple, raise them all with clinically controlled, strictly identical upbringings, then measure their IQ in 20 years and see if there's any definitive evidence there... but sensibly, there's no way we're ever going to be able to answer this question. The only way it can be answered now is if we compare the IQ of children to both parents, but we're not taking into account any element of their upbringing, or division of parental responsibility. – Jon Story Feb 17 '15 at 16:34

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