Gardner also seems to exclude categories that might be considered types of
intelligence. Why is there not a category for religious intelligence? Have
not virtually all cultures developed religion? Or for culinary intelligence? Is
not food preparation essential to survival and is it not related to the brain
mechanisms underlying olfactory and taste perceptions? Why not a category
for practical intelligence? Are not measures of practical intelligence related to
performance on the job (Sternberg, Wagner, Williams, & Horvath, 1995)?
It seems, then, that there may be an inherent arbitrariness to picking catego-
ries of intelligence. The concept of intelligence seems to reflect the values and
ideology of a culture, or of an institution within a culture. Different value sys-
tems imply different notions of intelligence and different ways to measure in-
telligence. Advocates of this intelligence-as-ideology position include Garcia
(1981), Berry (1974), Heath (1983), Helms (1992), and Keating (1982). From their
perspective, the notion that one possesses a single kind of intelligence may be
regarded as absurd. People possess skills of varying kinds that may be mea-
sured in many ways. Actually describing a skill and inventing a way to mea-
sure it reflects the values and goals of institutions, and not some essence of
intelligence residing in a person. IQ tests tend to reflect the value the academic
culture places on verbal and abstract reasoning skills, and on the objective
measurement of people.
I think, then, that the unitary or generic view of intelligence is misleading.
Instead, intelligence is multifaceted; it reflects performance on particularized,
relatively autonomous skills. As I mentioned before, the multifaceted model
of intelligence is reminiscent of the domain-specific nature of problem solving
(discussed in the previous chapter). Just as there is no generic problem-solving
system that kicks into action whenever a problem is encountered, there is no
single unitary trait that permeates all of human cognition and gives rise to in-
dividual differences in intellectual performance.
36.4 Is Intelligence Determined Primarily by Genes?
Explicit in the hereditarian theory of intelligence is the idea that intelligence is a
genetically determined intellectual potential. IQ is supposed to be an approxi-
mation of the amount of this potential. In this view, then, intellectual differ-
ences among people are largely attributable to their genetic differences. Most
advocates of the genetic basis for intelligence concede that the environment can
either nurture or thwart the acquisition of intellectual competency. But they
contend that genes are the primary determinant of one’s intellectual potential,
and that in most cases IQ performance provides a rough index of this potential.
The hereditarian claim is often taken to imply that: (a) environmental inter-
vention is not likely to help people who are ‘‘intellectually at risk’’ and that (b)
ethnic or racial differences in IQ performance are caused primarily by genetic
differences, and not by social or cultural factors. It is important to see that
advocates of the hereditarian theory need not draw these implications, as I will
discuss later. Indeed, my main purpose in this section is to demonstrate that the
evidence for a genetic component to intellectual differences does not support
these two claims.
794 R. Kim Guenther