I agree that there may be a concept of innate intelligence as you describe it. I have no idea if IQ is an effective measure of it. My uninformed lay-person's in

I agree that there may be a concept of innate intelligence as you describe it. I have no idea if IQ is an effective measure of it. My uninformed lay-person's instinct is that IQ is correlated with intelligence (with this new evidence we can add the proviso: at the time that the test is taken). What this study seems to say is that IQ is more variable over time than first thought. Perhaps the variability over time is itself hard-coded. Regardless of the cause of this variability over time, I do hope that this study leads to more open-mindedness, and less labelling of kids based on early academic performance or single cognitive scores.