I suppose I'm having trouble agreeing with this conclusion. The earlier research linked in this article feels a lot more tangible to me. So really, this is more about comparing similarities between twins in academic performance. A lot of people will be thinking "parent intelligence --> child intelligence", when I'm not sure how applicable this is to that kind of relationship. I probably know next to nothing about this field, but it just doesn't seem right to me.“Basically [the study showed] that monozygotic (identical) twins heritability are more similar in school performance than dizygotic (non-identical) twins,” he said.
Same here. If mom and/or dad value reading and math, the kids will pick it up. If mom and dad don't read, are not curious about knowing things and don't value education, then the kids will not either. This is why it is so frustrating when people want to throw the "Just world" stuff at you. Kids cannot choose their parents. A good parent can do wonders, as I have seen in adoptions. A terrible parent can retard your societal growth significantly. As much as I read about nature vs nurture, honestly, we humans are so close to identical genetically I'm having a hard time not jumping to the Nurture camp.
I've generally been in favor of the nature via nurture idea. I think we all come with the capability to be a lot of things but unless a certain thing is nurtured in time it's not going to happen. I was actually just reading a part in this book I've been slowly getting through talking about the social skills of Romanian orphans from the 90's. Many of these babies interacted very little with adults if at all and the conditions where not good. They studied them throughout their lives after they were adopted and found that babies who where under 6 months when taken from the orphanages grew up to be very similar to regular kids. However the babies who were over that age when adopted had a more difficult time with social interactions and relationships as they aged. I'll check the sources in the book if that stuff interests you.
I think that 100% of your capability to learn reading skills and math are genetic. Whether that capability is utilized or not is an entirely different matter. You need both the ability and the support to get anywhere.