I wanted to ask a question which you actually touched upon in your Jumadis today. It’s about intelligence and psychology and that sort of thing. We’ve got a scholar at our college who says that the scientific evidence is overwhelming to show that intelligence is to a large degree genetically inherited and this came as a considerable shock to me. What they mean by intelligence is not applied intelligence but potential intelligence. Potential intelligence. They are completely two different things.
By potential intelligence it is meant that the capability of the brain to store memory and the efficiency of transfer of information from one cell to the other, etc., these are factors with which a person is born. But he’s not born with an applied intelligence. He’s only born with possibilities and those possibilities cannot be extended. There are limitations imposed on every person. He can go to a certain limit and not beyond. That is what they mean.
But if you probe them further they will also tell you that most of us use very little of our potential intelligence. So it is not only possible but it may be very common that those who put in a lot of labour in developing their faculties, they may have been granted a much smaller great issue from God, yet they are much more intelligent in practice than those people who are born with large craniums and much more grey matter in their heads. Because one has applied it and put it to proper use, the other has not applied it.
So the living, real, actual intelligence is completely a different thing. And the potential intelligence is a different thing. And this is what they speak of when they say that you are born with intelligence. Q. He was implying that it’s hereditary as well, to a high degree it’s hereditary. A. This is a debatable question. As far as the hereditary issue is concerned, everything is hereditary in a sense. The whole being of a child is hereditary. He has inherited his bone tissue, his muscle tissue, his skin tissue, his eyeball tissue, everything. So everything is hereditary. And the quality of not the parents, but of a very long line, may have got imprinted into the genes to a degree that that man may become distinctive in that particular feature.
But he may not inherit it at all, because there are so many lines and bloodstreams which are joining at every couple, juncture of every couple, that it becomes very, very difficult, almost impossible, to determine what sort of a child would be born to intelligent parents, because both of them have some dominant features in their genes and some recessive features. And they themselves are a complex being, each one of them is a complex being, which may have many, many possibilities.
So how those possibilities will develop ultimately into a particular child, nobody can say. So even this claim is very vague, that people are born with intelligence, they inherit things. Everybody of course inherits everything, but how much can one inherit and whether somebody is really at a great disadvantage over the other, apparently they may be the same, but because of only hereditary reasons, that is not easy to determine, in fact it is impossible to determine.
But what is possible is, and very possible, I mean this is a commonplace thing, it is possible to determine whether somebody has applied his gifts from God usefully or not. If he does that, he has so much scope for developing his intelligence, that it is almost impossible for a man to claim that all the grey matter which was provided to me by Allah and all the hereditary features which were given to me at the birth, have been exhausted, and yet I can apply more labour, but I have no way to expand, because everything, I find no elbow room for the development.
This is what is not possible, because everybody is provided with so much by God, that even the man at the lowest level has many possibilities unexplored. In view of this I understand there wouldn’t be any question, or maybe later on. You digest this, assimilate it and then find out what you have to ask.
