Thank Your Mom Because You’d Be An Idiot Without Her

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It’s not a mystery to the general public that you owe a lot to your parents. In between monthly quarter-life crises, the next steps in life become much more vivid realities than maybe-next-years. For the better part of my life, I took for granted that my parents cleaned up my messes (both literally and figuratively). At this point in our lives, the idea of having a little whippersnapper asking for five bucks so they can go buy some candy is more annoying than the thought of buying a drink for a girl only for her to remain unimpressed with you.

While the list of things you need to thank your mom for are endless, there’s now something you need to add to that list: your intelligence.

Recent research has shown that, despite what your dad will tell you, your intelligence genes are more likely to come from your mother rather than from your father. Yeah, seriously, as if your dad needed another thing for your mom to hold over his head.

Jennifer Delgado Suárez wrote for Psychology Spot that your IQ is heavily linked to your mother. As someone who got steady Bs throughout high school biology purely because I road my smarter and older sister’s coattails, allow me to explain in the simplest way one can possibly explain this study.

When it comes to intelligence and children, it’s all about the X chromosome. As we learned in the aforementioned high school biology class, women have twice as many X chromosomes than men do which, in return, means it’s much more likely that a child will inherit those chromosomes from their mother rather than their father. Make sense? Okay, let’s go further.

Bustle explains that, “genes related to intelligence may only really ‘work’ when they come from a female, so that, even if you do inherit intelligence genes from your dad, they won’t actually affect how your IQ develops.” So, yeah, take a seat and let mom handle this one.

Suarez goes on to clarify that “[S]ome of these affected genes work only if they come from the mother. If that same gene is inherited from the father, it is deactivated.” Suárez is kind of an expert when it comes to this stuff, and in a study where they took 12,000 subjects, it was proven that “the best predictor of intelligence” came from – you guessed it – the mother.

Now, while I’m still not entirely sure what this all means at a molecular level, what I do know is that I learned a lot from my mother and father growing up (especially when they threatened to pull the car over if we didn’t shut the hell up). Only between 40 and 60 percent of our intelligence comes from our genes, so the rest can be chalked up to good parenting. See? This isn’t all dad-bashing.

But they say that behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes, and that’s probably because she knows better. Sorry, dads out there – considering science proves this theory, you might want to pick your battles and move on.

[via Bustle / Psychology Spot]

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Will

Will (Twitter / Instagram) is the host of The Sunday Scaries Podcast.

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