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Understanding the determinants of healthy mental ageing is a priority for society today^,. So far, we know that intelligence differences show high stability from childhood to old age^, and there are estimates of the genetic contribution to intelligence at different ages^,. However, attempts to discover whether genetic causes contribute to differences in cognitive ageing have been relatively uninformative^,,,. Here we provide an estimate of the genetic and environmental contributions to stability and change in intelligence across most of the human lifetime. We used genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data from 1,940 unrelated individuals whose intelligence was measured in childhood (age 11 years) and again in old age (age 65, 70 or 79 years)^,. We use a statistical method that allows genetic (co)variance to be estimated from SNP data on unrelated individuals^,,,,. We estimate that causal genetic variants in …