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Genes, intelligence and education: a heady brew of issues. Add class, race or gender, as has happened so many times over the past 100 years, and you have a simmering mixture ready to boil over at any moment.

The last time this occurred in Britain was in the 1970s, when psychologist Hans Eysenck, whose books were standard reading for young teachers, published Race, Intelligence and Education. But in recent months the debate over IQ, school performance and genetics has been revived in new form, mixing the classical human genetics of the past century with the modern molecular genomics that developed after the sequencing in 2003 of the 3 billion DNA bases that comprise the human genome.

The first public sign of the re-emergence of this debate came last October, when a 237-page letter to England’s education secretary Michael Gove from his departing adviser, Dominic Cummings, was leaked to the press. In it, Cummings excoriates the British educational system for failing both the brightest and the least able students.

For Cummings, teachers are part of the problem, but much of it...