Intelligence is influenced by many things. Often times, in science, we speak about nature versus nurture. However, abstract concepts like intelligence cannot be attributed to a single factor. Intelligence is nature and nurture, determined by all of the following: the environment you grow up in, life circumstances, and the genes that your parents pass on down.

That being said, there have been numerous research studies in the past suggesting that intelligence may be largely determined by the genes inherited from your mother. In as early as 1984, a study published in Nature concluded that "while the paternal genome is essential for the normal development of extraembryonic tissues, the maternal genome may be essential for some stages of embryogenesis." This was based on their finding in mice that when the pronucleus from a father and a pronucleus from a mother were reconstituted into an egg, about half of the eggs developed to term; however, when two pronuclei from a father were reconstituted into an egg, none of the eggs developed to term. In a 1996 study, researchers focused on genomic imprinting, which is an epigenetic process in which genes are expressed based on which parent it is inherited from. They found that the androgenic cells, with paternal genes, was found in the "hypothalamic structures and not the cortex," whereas the gynogenetic cells, with maternal genes, "contributed substantially to the cortex, striatum, and hippocampus but not to the hypothalamic structures." The hypothalamus is primarily involved in hormone control, whereas the cortex is involved in language processing and cognitive thinking, the striatum is involved in reward experiences, and the hippocampus is involved in memory consolidation. They concluded that these were perhaps the different roles maternal and paternal genomes played in mammalian brain development.

Controversies surrounding this topic still exist, and I am not completely convinced either. While humans are mammals and mice models and cells are convenient tools in science, these results cannot be definitively stated to be the same in humans. Despite its origin, intelligence is unarguably something we can build upon and therefore should be something we strive to improve, rather than placing blame on our mothers for our incompetence or marginalizing our fathers' contribution to our own intellectual growth.