/sci/ - Science & Math

Long time lurker, have only posted a few times over the last 10ish years.

One thing I've noticed about /sci/ is that IQ gets mentioned quite frequently (going through most of the threads right now almost all of them mention it) yet no one really seems to have a working definition for it, eg. if its genetic or not, how to actually increase it, if its even possible to increase it, ect.

My question is fairly specific. My mom has a tested IQ of 162 and gravitated towards music rather than any of the sciences. Her brother is a government contracted chemist and also seems insanely smart, though has never taken an IQ test. They both are high IQ, yet one expressed it very differently than the other.

Now, my mom is also emotionally dysfunctional and was abused most of her life, causing her to become white trash in her later stages of life.

What this means is she didn't push education on my brothers or I, and I grew up in poverty for most of my life until I was able to escape it by working construction at the tender age of 15. I dropped out of highschool and got my GED and enrolled in a community college when I was 20 and am now 30 with a philosophy degree ( I am aware this is a meme degree, but it helped me understand the world and not be such an angry individual) and am back in school working on my BS in biochem so I can go to med school. My GPA has steadily risen since I first started attending school and there is a positive linear relationship correlating to the amount of time I've spent there. I ended my associates degree with a 2.3, my philosophy degree with a 2.9, and now have a 3.6 working towards biochem. What is the likely hood that my mom's IQ was passed down to me and would my success in school indicate that?

tl;dr my mom has a very high iq but was a lazy drug addict later in her life, did that fuck my iq or did genetics save me?

random pic from google images