megapost incoming...
People that don't acknowledge the significant role luck and genetics plays are fooling themselves (and others, often enough).
I acknowledge that luck plays a huge role. In general, I think the role played by genetics is vastly overstated.
Let's review what your DNA does: it tells your body what proteins to produce. That's it. There is a protein that makes eyes blue, so there's a gene for that. There is no protein for being tall, so there is no gene for that. Height, like intelligence, is the result of the complicated interplay between thousands of different genes (and epigenetic factors) and your environment, specifically your childhood nutrition, sleep, and hormone levels and the way they all alter gene expression. The DNA is just the blueprint. The child of the two tallest people on the planet will not grow up tall if you starve him. Environment and experience absolutely count for height and intelligence WAY more than they count for eye color, because eye color is genetically determined and height and intelligence are only genetically available, not specified. Individuals can fall far outside of their parental average, for all kinds of reasons.
One of which is luck. When I started out by saying that talent is finely honed skill, I meant talent for things that can be learned. Having blue eyes is not a talent. Being good at math is a talent, but it is a talent that anyone can learn with enough dedicated practice, because it is a learned skill. There is no genetic component to mathematical ability. If your brain works like an average brain, you can learn math.
A baby has blue eyes on day one. That's genetics. He is not good at music or cooking or sailing on day one, because those are all learned skills. There is no way for protein synthesis to make you good at music or cooking or sailing, so they have no genetic component. This makes the test easy; can you identify the trait when the person is an hour old? If not, it's probably not genetic.
There are some things I've done that I learned incredibly quickly. Horseback riding and fencing come to mind.
I don't dispute that people learn different skills at different rates. I'm arguing that how quickly you learn a skill is entirely based on how well you have previously mastered the prerequisite skills that come before. You're going to learn to unicycle much faster if you're already competent on a bike and a tightrope. You're going to learn the oboe much faster if you're already practiced at cello and piano. For basic coordination skills like fencing, how quickly you learn in grade school is largely based on how much time you spent play sword fighting on playgrounds as a toddler. Ever meet a 15 year old kid who can't throw a football? Did you think it was because his genes prevented him from learning? I think it's because he never spent a thousand hours throwing footballs.
are you really going to blame the kid that gets a terrible start (watching cartoons all day) for the fact that the kid got a terrible start? Much of that "terrible start" stuff cannot be overcome, and goes directly back into the "luck" bucket from the perspective of that kid.
Of course I do not blame the unlucky kid who got a bad start. I also don't blame his genetics. I blame his experiences, which in the case of this example are unlucky ones.
my experience as a trainer/supervisor provides a good lab setting to watch different people try tasks that are completely new and I would say there are absolutely brain differences within normal brains.
NO TASK is completely new. Everything you've ever done is based on something you've done or seen before, or you wouldn't know how to try it.
I've taught over a hundred different people how to juggle. Some of them learned quick, some of them learned slow, but everyone with two working arms can learn. How quickly you learn is based on how comfortable you are with balls, which generally means kids who played a ballsport in school learn quick and kids who didn't learn slow. Baseball players learn faster than lacrosse players, who learn faster than kids from the band, who learn faster than kids who only watch cartoons. There is always a foundation of required skills that you have to master before you can move on to something new.
This is how pedagogy works. If you have a student who doesn't understand math facts, they are going to struggle with algebra. If he can't do algebra, he won't get trig. Without trig he'll fail calculus. But if you find a kid who is failing calculus, that doesn't mean he was born genetically incapable of doing calculus. It means his teachers failed to give him the required building blocks to help him along the required path. You can just give him an F and say he's dumb, but a better answer is to find out where his deficiencies are and address those first, then later you can come back to calculus if necessary.
The same process is true for anything you learn, including being an NFL quarterback. The fact that some people get there faster is entirely due to their particular developmental pathway. They got the fundamentals down right the first time, early, with lots of reps and professional guidance, and that allowed them to move on to footwork and reads and play calling. No baby is ever born knowing how to call plays. Everyone learns. Because there is no protein that codes for play calling ability, there is no genetic component to play calling ability. If you are a "talented" play caller who makes it look easy, it is only because you are incredibly skilled. Not because of your DNA. Talent is earned, not born.
bodybuilding. You can take all the steroids you want and if you train 6 hours a day and never get injured you'll still never look anything like a Schwarzenegger, Coleman, or Wheeler. Because they're just better, and nothing you could ever do in the world would be able to make up for that. Those dudes got lucky in the genetic lottery and took advantage of it.
I'm not sure bodybuilding is a skill, and so I don't think you can be talented at it. You might as well have a "who's tallest" contest. Genes matter in physical traits, not learned skills, and even then they are strongly influenced by environment (in this case diet, training, and roids).
I don't remember the research supporting the presupposition that all morphologically normal infant brains are the same and have the exact same plasticity.
Did I say that? I said talent isn't genetic, and that newborn babies have no skills.
I agree that newborns are not born with identical plasticity. If your momma does crack, you're starting out at a handicap. I don't blame genetics for that, I blame your (prenatal) environment just like I do for most everything else about your brain.
Brains are incredibly complicated. They evolve and adapt over time in response to your environment WAY more dramatically than a bodybuilder's physique does to his. Kids kept locked up in cages turn out stunted, even if they are born with totally normal brains. Kids born to crack moms can turn out totally normal, with the right care. Even people who sustain massive head trauma can adapt entirely new pathways to work around the missing portions of their brains, just like some crash victims can learn to walk again. Masai warrior kids raised in NYC develop a NYC accent and taste in music. Your brain is probably the least genetically predetermined thing about you!
Tom Brady is as good as he is because of practice and ability....he is not the fastest or most athletic. But his processing ability is above all others. Oh yeah...he is 6'4"
Right! He's talented because he works hard, not because he was born that way. Ask Michael Jordan what he thinks about the role of hard work in his success. The role of genetics is vastly overstated by the general public, who mostly don't really understand what DNA is or what it does anyway.
Brady's talent is earned, with practice, not born to him. So is Russel Wilson's, and his early career stats are eclipsing Brady's even though he's only 5'11".
Studies on identical twins separated at birth suggest that intellectual function is mostly genetic and highly heritable
Twin research is seriously suspect, not least because it is blatantly unethical to do the experiments correctly. Separated twins still share identical environments for at least 9 months, and usually longer, and are then most commonly raised in very similar circumstances, in terms of language and education and prosperity, if for no other reason that we don't let Australian aborigines adopt white babies from Ohio. The sample sizes in twin studies are so laughably small as to make any conclusions little more than WAGs. Several of the most well known practitioners are well known racists who used their work to support ridiculous ideas about white superiority. But the work is still sexy and the ideas reinforce our own latent stereotypes, which is why you seem them in popular science articles whenever one comes out.
Color me unimpressed, when it comes to twin studies. Don't be fooled just because you saw it on Oprah.
You're running into the teeth of scientific research here,
How do you figure? I have yet to see any reputable science that reliably ties skills learned as an adult to a person's DNA.
Remember that we're talking about "talent" here, not eye color. I know that physical traits are heritable, but skills are not traits. Skills are learned. When you look at an Olympic athlete and say "Wow she's really talented" what you are really saying is that this person makes their skill look effortless, which is because she's practiced it an insane amount of time. She wasn't born good at gymnastics. Anyone can learn.
You don't look at an 85 pound 15 year old girl with no gymnastics training and call her talented, even if she is an identical twin with a gold medalist. Her physical size and shape are not talents.
Stepping away from that aspect of things, though, this distinction that you're drawing between learned skills and innate characteristics isn't a realistic one. A lot of these "learned skills" are going to be "learned," or not, when a kid is way too young to have any influence whatsoever over it. From the kid's perspective, it's just as innate as anything else.
I think the distinction is still absolutely sound. I'm not ascribing blame to it, just describing it.
I don't blame a kid who wasn't taught how to read. I'm saying that his inability to read is not because he's genetically incapable of it. His talent for reading is entirely a product of his life experiences, not his protein synthesis as dictated by his DNA.
Racists believe it's his DNA. They spent three centuries arguing that black people were designed by God to be strong but subservient, that they were too dumb to learn to read through no fault of their own and nothing could ever be done about it. They couldn't be taught anything except manual labor, because their heritage predetermined their abilities. Can we all now agree that's total bullshit? Even after centuries of unnatural selection through forced eugenics programs (aka breeding), black people can still learn to read! And do other smart people stuff! The human mind is remarkably responsive to developmental environment.
The difference is that a man raised in slavery may struggle to learn to read as an adult, but his children will be totally fine if they are raised correctly. The son's "talent" for reading is 100% environmentally determined, not genetically determined. The talent is earned by practice. You are not born with it or without it.
I'm shocked that anyone would seriously disagree with that assessment in 2018. 2017 (nazis!) made it a little more believable, unfortunately, but still upsetting.
The capacity and ability to learn is as innate as it gets, IQ is one measurement.
I don't think so. I think that early early childhood cognitive development is hugely influenced by things most people don't even think about, like how much parents speak with their baby, and how much time a baby spends crawling/climbing/running instead of sitting/laying, and exposure to properly balanced nutrients and environmental contaminants (don't eat paint chips, kids), and how much time is spent playing with other kids vs watching tv. I agree that there are differences in the ability to learn (not the same thing as what an IQ test measures, of course), I just think most parents are taking the easy and reassuringly pleasant cop-out by assuming their actions don't matter. Everything matters! Every time you tell your kid to go away so you can play on your phone you're cognitively impairing your child's development. Every time you serve McDonalds for dinner you're impacting the way their body grows.
Your DNA is given to you, so it is innate. But it's just the book of possible blueprints, not the finished product. How you live absolutely determines which page you're using to build your body and mind. The fact that you personally have little control over many of these early life decisions does not mean the page was irrevocably chosen at conception.
I agree that effort/practice will enhance learning. Tell me you have never been in a class where there was one person that had to study for hours or days on end and there was another that basically absorbed it with little effort?
I used to be that kid!
So of course I have. So has my 14 year old who got a D on his first honors chemistry test and then came home and told me he was dumb because his buddy John is just naturally smart and he got an A on the same test. Then he spent two months studying chemistry every night, and now my kid has an A and John has a B+, and suddenly the idea of "talent" makes a lot more sense to my son. Talent is earned with practice. It is not god-given. It is not destiny. It is the product of your life choices and experiences.
John got an A on his first chem test because John's parents used to drill him on science last year, so he had a good foundation of prerequisite skills. My son wasn't as far along that path yet, and now he is. He made up the difference with effort. He learned chemistry, and in the process learned that talent can be acquired.
He went through the exact same process when he first joined the swim team. Slowest kid in the pool, came home and told me he'll never be any good because there were kids two years younger than him who turned in faster times. A year later he's put in a thousand hours at the pool and his time are dropping with every single meet, and he's no longer the slowest kid in the pool. As it turns out, hard work pays off! His 14-year-old mind is blown.
He no longer blames his genetics for a bad lap time or a D on a chemistry test, and you shouldn't either. You are not a bad computer programmer because you are dumb, you are bad because you haven't yet learned how to be as good as someone else who HAS learned it. Don't passively accept your fate as if it cannot be changed, and don't blame your supposed bad luck for not being talented. Do the work. Get talented through practice. You (and here I mean the generic you) can learn.
To tie this back in to the topic at hand, don't believe anyone here who tells you can't earn $100k/yr if you're not naturally suited to it. You are naturally suited to any damn thing you decide to be suited to. You get to pick what kind of person you are, and what kind of jobs you like. Nobody in America is destined to be poor, and the idea that a person is incapable of success because of the their birthright seems pretty offensive to modern American ideals.