The Innate Trait

Some may say intelligence is an innate trait, but really intelligence is not innate. Innate means that you are born with it. Intelligence isn’t something that you are born with, as one grows so does your intelligence. If you train your brain in a specific topic it could be math, science, history, etc. you can become more intelligent, but first let’s back track for a bit.

Intelligence. We all have heard of this word. Do we really know what intelligence is? One can grab a dictionary, look up intelligence and it will say that intelligence means “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills”, but it also it all depends the dictionary you pick up they all differ. One thing I pulled out of them was the knowledge one person obtains. When we are born, none of us know how to either walk nor talk, so how in the world are you going to be born intelligent. I mean if someone comes up and gives me proof that their child came out saying the logics of physics, then I’ll stand corrected, but until then there is no proof for me to believe that people are born intelligent.

Newborns. When they come into this world they, day by day, learn about the things around them. A little boy might see an iron for the first time. He’ll touch the hot iron and burn himself, but he doesn’t know better because he’s never come cross an iron before. Once he burns himself he now knows what the iron is and what it can do to him; in that case he won’t touch it anymore. Therefore he learned from his mistake. His mistake being that he touched the hot iron and burned himself and he learned that hot irons shouldn’t be touched. As we experience new things we learn from the outcomes; one reason why people say old folks are wise people, they have gone through so much and have learned about what they have gone through. As we get older we learn new things from our experiences.

Once we start attending school we learn so many new things. From grades pre-K to 12th grade we learn and ready our brains for our future. In school we learn about the sciences, mathematics, and history. None of us are born with all of this information. Since we learn these things for the first time in school and master them over time, we learn new things; therefore, we obtain more knowledge and if we obtain more knowledge it means we are becoming more intelligent. Intelligence is something that is earned; if you don’t work for the knowledge you’re not working to become intelligent. Anyone in this world can be intelligent if they don’t give up in what is needed to be learned. Since we all learn at different paces it takes longer for some of us to get the knowledge than it might take someone else, but there is no reason to give up, you might turn out to be a genius one day, just like Albert Einstein.

Albert Einstein. We all see him as a genius, but not everyone knows his early life. Einstein didn’t speak until the age of three. His school work was mediocre at best, but that didn’t stop him from learning. As a teenager Einstein taught himself advanced math and physics. When he applied to the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (Swiss Federal Polytechnic School) he failed most of his entrance exam, but got exceptional marks in mathematics and physics. Because of that he was accepted. His first job after he graduated was as a patent clerk. He thought the job was dull. The spare time he had, he used it to research, which he eventually earned his doctorate in physics from the University of Zürich. Now, thanks to Einstein, we know the general theory of relativity, the existence of space time. He also showed that nothing moved faster than light, and how a tiny amount of matter can make an enormous amount of energy using the equation of E=Mc². He discovered most of this before his thirtieth birthday (Albert Einstein mini-bio).

Einstein is a great example of a slow learner doing the best he can to learn the advanced math and physics that got him a successful future. Not only a good future, but because of the information he obtained he grew his intelligence since his first word at age three; Einstein became more intelligent which lend him to become the genius he was. Now we learn from Einstein and see that humans aren’t born intelligent. The information we obtain since we are born makes us be intelligent. Yes people are more intelligent than others, but, as Mr. Clark once told my class, if we train our brain then we can get as intelligent as they are, if not even more than them. Which means intelligence is definitely not innate.

Works Cited

“Albert Einstein.” 2012. The Biography Channel website. Dec 01 2012, 10:02http://www.biography.com/people/albert-einstein-9285408.