Genetic determinism holds that cognitive development is determined by innate genes, and the process of human development is only the self-expansion process of these innate genetic factors, and the role of the environment is only to trigger, promote or delay the realization of this process. The typical argument of its founder Gao Erdun is: "A person's ability is hereditary, and its degree is determined by heredity, just as the shape and body tissue of all living things are determined by heredity." Genetic determinism overemphasizes the role of congenital genetic factors in children's cognitive development.

Gao Erdun is the founder of the school of biostatistics. After the publication of his cousin Darwin's masterpiece The Origin of Species, he was inspired to study the genetic evolution of intelligence by statistical methods. For the first time, mathematical methods such as probability and statistics principle were applied to biological science, and the word "biostatistics" was clearly put forward. The concepts of "correlation" and "regression" in statistics were first used by Gao Erdun. How did he come up with these concepts? In 1870, when studying the inheritance of human body length, Gao Erdun found the following relationship: the height of children of tall parents is often lower than that of their parents, while the height of children of short parents is often higher than that of their parents, that is, there is a trend of "regression" to the average, which was originally the meaning of "regression" in statistics. Gao Erdun revealed that statistical methods are useful in biological research. The concepts of regression straight line and correlation coefficient are introduced, and regression analysis is established, which is the first in biostatistics research. In 1889 natural genetics, he used percentile method and quartile deviation method instead of deviation measurement. At present, there is a Gao Erdun-Watson process named after his surname (G-W process for short).