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. 2015 May-Jun:50:159-163.
doi: 10.1016/j.intell.2015.04.002.

The more g-loaded, the more heritable, evolvable, and phenotypically variable: Homology with humans in chimpanzee cognitive abilities

Michael A Woodley Of Menie #  1   2 , Heitor B F Fernandes #  3 , William D Hopkins  4   5
Affiliations

The more g-loaded, the more heritable, evolvable, and phenotypically variable: Homology with humans in chimpanzee cognitive abilities

Michael A Woodley Of Menie et al. Intelligence. 2015 May-Jun.

Abstract

Expanding on a recent study that identified a heritable general intelligence factor (g) among individual chimpanzees from a battery of cognitive tasks, we hypothesized that the cognitive abilities that are more g-loaded would be more heritable and would present more additive genetic variance, in addition to showing more phenotypic variability. This pattern was confirmed, and is comparable to that found in humans, indicating fundamental homology. Finally, tool use presented the highest heritability, the largest amount of additive genetic variance and of phenotypic variance, consistent with previous findings indicating that it is associated with high interspecies variance and evolutionary rates in comparative primate studies.

Keywords: CVA; chimpanzee; general intelligence; heritability; primate intelligence.

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