I don't think it's absurd, I only think initially that it was wishful thinking, now I see that it was only a poor example to a good idea that he explained later.
Yes intelligence has to do with heritability, there was initially an animal with had cognition (a word I much prefer instead of intelligence) this animal actually had descendants some of which are humans, we initially inherited this intelligence from him but also from other ancestors that developed this cognition latter as well.
You provided that we do not have a physiological model for intelligence, and I believe we will not have one for some decades at least if I'm to be optimist. That's a real large problem, another one is to relate this to genetics and environmental development, these would be a hard problem as far as I was told by some friends that are biologists.
My point regarding not having a model was to bring the genetics/environment statistics onto the same footing - the black box statistical evidence does not accept that genetics is a factor in measures of intelligence, but does accept that environmental factors such as income and health are.
Yes intelligence has to do with heritability, there was initially an animal with had cognition (a word I much prefer instead of intelligence) this animal actually had descendants some of which are humans, we initially inherited this intelligence from him but also from other ancestors that developed this cognition latter as well.
You provided that we do not have a physiological model for intelligence, and I believe we will not have one for some decades at least if I'm to be optimist. That's a real large problem, another one is to relate this to genetics and environmental development, these would be a hard problem as far as I was told by some friends that are biologists.