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Adrien Lucas Ecoffet
Adrien Lucas Ecoffet, Frenchman. Americanophile.
Updated 26w ago · Featured on Forbes · Upvoted by Steve DeBerry, Worked for 35 years as a Clinical Psychologist and Michael Soso, BA Berkeley Physiology/Biophysics 1967, PhD Neurophysiology UW 1975 and MD Stanford 1979, 30 years … · Author has 554 answers and 6m answer views

They did, to an extent.

But first let's step back a little bit and talk about IQ heritability.

IQ is highly heritable, and that heritability is largely driven by genes (from 50% to more than 70% according to most estimates, some going as high as 90%).

However, there are a few things to take into account when you are talking about exceptionally intelligent people.

First, you have the fact that Einstein's children, obviously, also have a mother, and therefore inherited their IQs from her as well. Now, Mileva Marić, Einstein's wife, was also pretty smart. In fact, she contributed to some of Einstein's work. But assuming she was less smart than Einstein, that would have been a factor driving the children's IQs down.

Secondly, there is the concept of regression towards the mean. What this tells us is that if both your parents are exceptional in a certain respect, you will probably be exceptional in that respect as well but not as much as your parents. So if both your parents are geniuses, you might be just as smart as them, you might be even smarter than them, but more likely you will be pretty smart, but not quite as smart as them.

Now on to Einstein's descendants.

The thing you have to understand is that the Einstein family has been plagued with health problems. You see, Einstein had three children:

Lieserl, who died in infancy (probably when she was one year old). Not much can be said about her intelligence obviously.

Eduard was a promising medical student, but then started developing schizophrenia. He was institutionalized for a large part of his life and the primitive treatment methods he was subjected to deeply affected his cognitive abilities.

Hans Albert Einstein

Then you have Hans Albert Einstein. Hans Albert was a pretty brilliant scientist. He was a professor of hydraulic engineering at UC Berkeley and the world's foremost expert on sediment transport. That might not sound as impressive as his father's achievements, but that still makes him a pretty smart person.

Hans Albert's children, again, had many of the health problems that characterized the first generation of Einstein descendants. You see, Hans Albert had four biological children, but only one of them, Bernhard Einstein, survived to adulthood.

Bernhard Einstein

Bernhard was a pretty smart guy. He became a physicist, worked in engineering for Texas Instruments and Litton Industries, and received half a dozen US patents in his life. That's pretty decent, but that's not quite as great an achievement as his grandfather's.

Bernhard had five children, but I was unable to find information on any of them. I assume they had lives similar to their father's: pretty successful by normal standards, pretty unsuccessful compared to their great-grandfather.

Here's the thing: I have the IQs of none of these people, not even Einstein's, and I don't want to be judging their lives.

However, at least with regards to their scientific achievements, you could say that this is a good example of regression to the mean: from the greatest physicist in the world to the foremost expert in a relatively restricted scientific field to a pretty good engineer. That's what the Einstein lineage looks like.

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I can think of three good reasons. One is the regression to the mean over time, well explained by other respondents. Another is that Einstein may not have been anything spectacular, IQ-wise. People with stratospheric IQs are more liley than 'normal' people to join MENSA, but otherwise are pretty likely to have a normal lie for their socioeconomic background - itself the single strongest determinant for 'achievement.' The way to create a character like Einstein is to take an intelligent and intellectually precocious child and kill its mother when the child is just below the age of puberty. As appalling as that sounds - and I phrased it fliply, but the death of your mother's no joke as an adult, let alone as a child - the evidence is there to support it. People like Einstein are driven by profound, powerful psychological forces, far stronger than the desire for success, recognition or material gain that impel most of us, and their achievements reflect this impetus - as, commonly, does their suffering.

The third reason is colder. Some of it is dumb luck. Winston Churchill, 'Vinegar' Joseph Stilwell and Franklin Roosevelt illustrate this very well. Churchill spent the years after the First World War as a political outcast. His vociferousness and belligerence were regarded as a liabilty even by his own party and his constant harping on about the dangers of fascism and the necessity of resisting it with military force made him unpopular with everyone from the pacifist left to the fascist-friendly right. Absent the Second World War he would have become an irrelevance much sooner and would not now be famous.

Roosevelt almost died of polio. Had he died, or had his speech been very greatly affected, the mercurial qualities that allowed him to perform as he did might never have been discovered or might even never have developed.

Stilwell was to become the head of theater China and have policy influence over the conduct of the war in China and the Far East (though not as much as he wanted), and some of his small unit infantry tactics were so effective and innovative that he remains a subject of study at West Point. In the late 1930s he was an obscure colonel a couple of years from retirement and the end of a mediocre military career whose high point had been a mapmaking expedition to the Orient. Again, absent the Second World War his achievements would never have happened.

One way or another, a lot of us are like this. People who become famous writers need a literate population to read their work. People who become movie stars need to get in front of a camera somehow. People who become famous scientists need to have the aptitude and the drive, and they also need to have the opportunity. Where would Newton have been in the twelfth century? Perhaps an obscure monk. How many maybe-Newtons have we forgotten, or never heard of? Einstein came to physics at a time when it was ripe for his revolutionary work on optics, gravity and more. He presented a total 'paradigm shift' in the field, one which has now been experimentally verified, and much of the field now consists of mopping up after the twin catastrophes of quantum mechanics and relativity, and of finding some way to make them mutually intelligible - physics right now isn't a place for an Einstein (arguably: more knowledgeable people are invited to explain to me why I'm wrong about this).

Without his unusual drive which allowed him to develop his very high ability, without his peculiar character traits, and in a different intellectual environment, Einstein's children had a lot more to contend with than the regression to the mean we'd expect to find in their genetic inheritance.
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Sherif R. Fahmy
Sherif R. Fahmy, Interdisciplinary researcher in science/engineering
Updated 230w ago · Upvoted by Adriana Heguy, I have worked in genetics and genomics for the past two decades · Author has 498 answers and 819.2k answer views
This is adapted from a comment I had made on Adrien Lucas Ecoffet's excellent answer. I was then alerted that the comment should be put as an answer.

I think it can be argued that the career outcomes of Einstein's descendants are almost inevitable - well, not the particular outcomes, but the fact that they seem to be far below the achievement of their father/ancestor. It probably can't be explained in terms of a regression toward the mean concerning raw intelligence. Here's why:

In terms of achieved career success (not raw intelligence), regression toward the mean is almost logically necessary because Einstein's achievements set a pretty hard upper bound (you can't go any further up). Additionally, Einstein was brilliant and lucky to have the set of circumstances that led him to study problems that he happened to be deeply insightful about, that also happened to be of tremendous importance to physics (a very broad and higher-profile field than say engineering specialties). He could have himself ended up studying hydrodynamics, and would have put genius ability into that, but would have ended up virtually unknown in comparison to his renown given that he was involved in high-level theoretical physics.

In other words, his descendants could have had just as high or higher intelligence, but their chances of achieving the same level of success in the real world are strongly bounded by factors completely unrelated to their intelligence. These bounds get harder and harder the closer you get to the level of success of Albert Einstein. In other words, factors reducing the probability of greater success increase dramatically the greater we raise the bar for success. They become nearly insurmountable if we raise the bar to the level of Albert Einstein's success.

One of the biggest such factors is the choice of topic:

A really intelligent person might have a mind with an affinity and ability to solve certain kinds of problems. There is probably a very important problem in some field that is just perfect for this one individual to solve given the way s/he thinks, which could result in great recognition and accolades if solved. Yet, we get such a narrow exposure to different fields and different problems in those fields that chances are we don't even get exposed to a problem we'd be so good at solving. One might argue intelligence can do great in any field, but I argue that to revolutionize a field, not only do you need intelligence, but you need a difficult problem that is (a) solvable, that is (b) more readily solvable by you and your unique personality than it is by someone else, and (c) you need some random luck and other factors to get you spending countless hours on that specific problem, to get you the right mentorship, to have had previous work done and published on that problem that is sufficient to inform your contribution past that edge, etc. (d) Of course, you need to be positive, hard-working and to "believe" you can make a great contribution: a person may be hugely intelligent but plagued with self-doubt or laziness, or she can just have other perfectly valid priorities, like service, entrepreneurship, or family life.

In short, if you inherit great intelligence from a guy who was probably the most recognized worldwide in a high-profile highly selective field, you definitely cannot exceed that: at most you'll also be number 1 in an important field! So, all the mass of the probability distribution for your success is below number 1, and this is an infinitely hard bound in spite of even possibly having greater intelligence than your ancestor. Coming at number 1, or just slightly short of number 1 is not infinitely hard, but is incredibly hard - the challenge asymptotically approaches a vertical climb as you get closer to number 1. It becomes continuously less steep the farther you go below number 1. However, the probability distribution of your potential level of success is affected by many other factors besides intelligence, many of which you cannot control. So, it might be difficult to deduce information about the intelligence of Einstein's descendants particularly based on their career achievements. In fact, I think if you research anyone who was successful in anything to the level of extreme fame, you will almost never find her descendants to be nearly as famous as she: look at scientists, actors, politicians, humanitarians, etc. And I think this is mostly attributable to this effect I've explained.
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Aditya Badonia
Aditya Badonia, studied at Integrated Programme in Management, IIM Indore

One Simple Answer : Regression to the Mean

Many others have mentioned it before but here’s a simpler explanation as to why it occurs-

This is a purely statistical concept (and not biological), according to which if a population characteristic follows a Bell Curve (or a Normal Distribution), and you start picking out random points from this population- most of them will lie close to the population average and very small number of them will lie further from this average. The farther you go from mean - the lesser and lesser chance you have of finding points there.

Suppose that Einstein’s lineage (a clan of direct ancestors) is that population you are considering , and the off springs of this lineage (Einstein himself being an off spring of this lineage) are the randomly selected points. Now suppose this is a lineage of relatively smart people - say an average IQ of about 140 ( Mind you, average has been calculated by speculating the IQ’s of 10’s or 100’s of generations of this family - just suppose!). So we’re quiet sure that this is the actual average IQ of the lineage. Maybe this is because they have a specific gene that enables this particular trait.

Now comes the fun part. This IQ is a random variable. In our context it is safe to assume that it has two factors responsible - the genetic factor , which is relatively constant; and the random environmental/natural/psychological factor that either boosts this average value or dampens it. So some of the off springs are likely to have an IQ >140 while others will have <140. But almost >75% will likely lie in the range of 130–150, the reason being the same - Normal distribution or the Bell Curve.

But some of the off-springs will be outliers, say IQ>165 or IQ<115, either of them will have less than 5% chance of ever occurring(by simple statistics). And having an IQ even more( say>170) will have an almost zero (about 0.5 %) chance. This is true the other way round too i.e., IQ<110 is also extremely unlikely.

This is the reason for the fact that even if Einstein was an outlier (which he certainly was), his offsprings will still stick to the family’s or lineage’s average IQ (the same gene pool) and not his own. Now this is only half the picture - you’ll have to adjust it for the mother’s half too. Then for an off-spring to be an outlier he/she’d have to be in the outlier zone for both the families (assuming that the mother’s family also has a similar IQ level) which is even half as likely as the earlier possibility viz <2.5% chance. This also the reason why the children of intellectually less able (or Down syndrome) people are most likely too be much smarter than themselves (Ofcourse assuming that it doesn’t run in their family, which is generally not the case).

Now there are bunch of other uncontrollable biological factors too. If you take everything into account - you’ll see how unlikely that is.

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Thaine Rowley
Thaine Rowley, Entrepreneur, Research Assistant, Bioinformatics Technician
Answered 192w ago · Author has 70 answers and 825.6k answer views
If you generalize this question it kinda becomes a fact of "why aren't children as smart as their parents."

This, in essence, is actually the point of quite a bit of research right now.  Before we actually delve into the fact of why children aren't smarter (or as smart) as their parents, I think there are a few points to bring up.

A)  There are actually quite a few smart people out there that never do anything with their lives, at least that you can measure.  If you look at mensa, there are quite a few members that are just normal mechanics, engineers, custodians, etc.  This is because not every genius feels the need to contribute in a scientific way.  They might feel fine coming up with the best formula for removing sharpie from a couch (which, by god, is freaking awesome).

B)  Taking quite a few biological courses in the past year, I've learnt that we don't know crap about anything.  We just recently (past 5-10 years?) learned that smoking affects methylation on your DNA, which can affect your children's intelligence.  From my professor, it can be up to as much as 6 IQ points...Which might not seem like much, but were measuring on a scale of "figuring out the world" to "I can make that better."

C)  Your also assuming that people of great IQ have children that have the same problems to deal with.  This might seem like an easy answer, but if you think about it...Every time someone figures out the next "big thing", we are actually a little bit less impressed (and have even harder questions to figure out).  Back when Albert Einstein was doing research, we had no clue about gravity and light/time.  He gave us something huge.  There are actually quite a few breakthroughs today, that are just as impressive, but get less media. 

So, lets get back to the actual, generalized, question.  Why aren't children as smart as their genius parents?

It depends on each person.  Albert Einstein had a passion, and he followed through with that to an extent most people can't.  I've, personally, been told I could accomplish great things.  However, for better or for worse, I've kinda taken a side trip looking for other things that aren't as easy.  Mainly, love. Each person, whether or not they have a high IQ, has to take their own path.  Some choose to go into science, and try and break through some impermeable wall, some choose to live quiet lives, seeking out answers that are even harder to prove.
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Bob Glaser
Bob Glaser, thinking, analyzing, solving, creating
Answered 272w ago · Author has 173 answers and 148.9k answer views
I  will start by referring to his intelligence instead of IQ (which is an  arbitrary and fairly useless measurement beyond a general definition of 'average'  intelligence of a specific culture and time.)

The capability of great intellect and the acquisition of knowledge, reasoning, and application are not automatically combined.

Great minds are not born (though the capability must be there.) They are created through dedication to a field (or several)  of study, the want to learn and understand more, they have love of  learning, and realization that failure is part of the learning process,  and the ever present understanding that what they know might be wrong  and they will have to learn more.

Often,  great minds develop from above average to brilliance because of real  life obstacles, whether it's poverty, disease, or other loss. Sometimes,  it's merely intense boredom with everyday life that instigates an  escape that is productive in unexpected ways. There's a small amount of  random events that may play a part in the development (or preventing the development) of a great mind.
 
So  you can inherit money, looks and other attributes that you are born  with, but knowledge and experience is acquired from outside the genetic  pool.
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David R Holt
David R Holt, worked at Self Employed Studio Owner
Answered 203w ago · Author has 315 answers and 536.8k answer views
This question does, indeed, open up a very complex debate.

IQ (as everyone knows) stands for "Intelligence Quotient" but does everyonereally know what each of those two words mean?  I suspect not nearly as many.

What actually IS intelligence?  I have always understood the word to refer to an individual's capacity to adjust his/her thinking to new situations, learned facts or events.  It is cognitive ability, if you like.  but it doesn't entirely end there.  Speed of cognitive ability has a large bearing on it too.  In other words, whilst a person with a low IQ may eventually reach a very sensible conclusion, it may take a lot more thought (and thus, time) than a person with what is referred to as a "normal" IQ.    On the other side of that coin, so to speak, more time spent in deep consideration may well produce a much better answer that one made on the spur of the moment!  So a high IQ could be indicative of a person being able to consistently make sagacious decisions very quickly.  But that shouldn't mean that people reaching the same decisions slower are idiots!

Quotient is actually a mathematical term used to refer to the result of division or, put simply, the number of times one number is contained in another number.  When applied to "measuring" intelligence, first of all, a "base" or standard has to be set.  There are several systems of measuring intelligence where those base numbers are different but, for the purpose of this debate, let's use the most typical of 100 being "average" intelligence.

But it doesn't stop there either.  Any form of measurement is, in reality, merely a means of comparison.  So someone had to determine what was "average" in the first place.  Intelligence tests naturally reflect the "intelligence" of those who set them and, as I have found, the lateral thinking ability of those setters sometimes seems to be very limited.  For example, let us look at just one typical IQ test question.

Pick out the odd one.              Sun,  Moon,  Candle,  Light bulb.
The expected answer is Moon based on the rationale that all the others are light sources whilst the moon is merely reflecting the light of the sun.  But what about the idea that a candle is different (the odd one) because it gets smaller as it burns down?  You can't argue with the logic can you?  But, if you gave the answer "candle" in an IQ test, you would automatically be marked down because most IQ tests don't ask you to give your reasoning.

Most IQ tests deal with everyday topics as opposed to complex scientific facts but they still  demand a certain level of knowledge.  For example, if the aforemention question were asked of a four-year-old, it would very much depend on whether or not that four-year-old's mummy or daddy had ever told him that the moon reflected light from the sun.  There's no way he could work it out whilst taking the test.  (He would possibly also say "Candle" because the other three are basically spherical from where he views them!) 

This then, brings in yet another aspect to the debate - memory.  Is a person's ability to recall information previously received a determinant of their intelligence?  It would seem so.  If you are playing a trivia game and the question is (for example), "Who played Forrest Gump in the movie of the same name?"  (I can just hear everyone reading this yelling the correct answer right now!)  but what about the person who has nothing more than a mental block (are you there too?) and, even though they know the answer as well as they know thair own name, cannot, for the life of them, remember it?  Does that make them an idiot?  Of course not.

So, to get to the actual question about Eistein's descendants, the asker is assuming that intelligence is genetic and, as I am not a psychiatrist, I honestly have no idea about that.  Although I do remember, many years ago, reading about a Korean child who had an enormous IQ whose parents were both eminent holders of several doctorates between them which would tend to suggest that there is some genetic component involved. 

However, one question that comes to mind is, "Was Einstein a genius at everything or just the physics that he is famous for?"  Again, without doing the research, I don't know.  I don't see any reason (other than genetics) why a person should be the same as their parents though.  A major factor wqould seem to me to be interest.  If a person doesn't have any interest in what his or her father or mother were interested in then it is highly doubtful that they will ever excel in that field.  I am also presuming that, since the question clearly states the Einstein's descendants didn't inherit his IQ, that is a fact.  However, it may be that some of his descendants excelled in totally different fields to their ancestor.

Another aspect to this is what we (the general populace) deem to be geniuses and what we don't.  For example, whilst people like Einstein who proposed major thought-changing hypotheses (remember, E=Mc2 IS a theory) are though of as geniuses, people who do other great things in other fields are not and, if they are, it is often very subjective!

I'm also assuming that none of the descendants referred to were or are intellectually handicapped people here whose mental capacities are impaired by genetic malformation or damage but I don't believe the original question was about such people either.  (Have you - the person who couldn't think who played Forrest Gump - remembered yet?  If not then your frustration is probably as great as any low IQ person's when they can't remember something.  (You'll just have to look it up on Google!  But remember, you couldn't do that at the trivia game any more than a person who scores low in an IQ test can.

Is a person with an eidetic memory a genius or just lucky?  Such a person can still only remember what he has been told, read, seen or experienced.  He can't remember what he never learned in the first place - and there is a awful lot to learn in this world!  The only advantage that such a person has is that he doesn't need to be told twice!  So, if such a person had enough interest to dedicate a large proportion of his life to learning, I suppose it is possible that he could end up with an IQ that was almost immeasurable using standard techniques.  And a question that could be asked is, "Is an eidetic memory a mental disorder?"

Finally, is intelligence "selective"?  I ask this because my IQ (as tested by Mensa) is 150 but, for the life of me, I cannot get my head around the speed of light being finite.  And that brings up two words that I can't really mentally conceive - infinity and eternity.  Maybe someone with an IQ of 60 can explain those words in understandable terms to me!
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Robin P Clarke
Robin P Clarke, Have published a theory of general suppression of gene-expression causing autism
Answered 154w ago · Author has 272 answers and 219.6k answer views
So many questions on Quora involve faulty assumptions, and Quora's system often doesn't do a good job of highlighting their unpicking.

What made Einstein different was not a particularly high IQ (he didn't ever do a test anyway), but that he produced works of creative genius.  The distinction between high IQ and creative genius has been recognised by just about all IQ-research specialists, such as Spearman, Cattell, Jensen, Eysenck, Brand, Lynn (and others deserving mention here).  Genius tends to need quite high IQ but most people with very high IQ are utterly uncreative in the historical sense.  Genius creativity requires additional other qualities such as freedom from conventional conformity, freedom from pretentiousness, freedom from superficiality, freedom from wishful thinking (uncritical delusions that your work is "great"), and more.  The article downloadable from The gene-expression theory of autism (antiinnatia theory) explains some more about this.

By the way, the reason why IQ is not 100% heritable is answered quite well here but  I will add my own silly idea here.  A person's IQ is partly determined by the separate genes, added together.  But the interaction between genes is not entirely additive.  The effect of the genes also depends on the specific combination, such that gene x might be IQ-raising within one combination but IQ-lowering within another.   You inherit the specific genes from your parents, but you do not inherit the entire combination.  And that causes part of the genetic IQ to be non-hereditary, hence the heritability is less than 100% and so there is "regression to the mean" even if all the parents are at high level. 

You will see that others here also tell you about this regression to the mean, but no-one else explains WHY that regression happens anyway.
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