How it all started

• 1870: Galton argued that high intelligence and scientific talent depends mostly on the genetic endowment in his book “Hereditary genius”
• 1873: Candolle analyzed the history of 200 scientists and concluded that the environment was more important

Problems with definitons

• Nature
  • Is it potential or inborn ability?
• Experts
  • Are famous people experts?
    • Subjective evaluations are not valid, because of biases
    • Famous people are not always superior in skills

Nature arguments (Pronats)

Antinat’s make bad research

• They ignore prodigies
• They misrepresent other researchers work
  • In a study of exceptional memory, they only included the fact that all individuals improved a lot from practice while ignoring that there were individual differences in max performance.
• They argue against fixed/innate abilities, which isn’t what pronats are argumenting for.
• Studies from Ericsson and others show that hard work/deliberate practice is necessary, but not that it is sufficient
  • Those who are innately talented might be the ones who end up using 10.000 hours
    • Child prodigies often have to be forced to stop practicing
      • It’s hard to get most children to start practicing
    • Precocity and “rage to master” often co-occur

Disabilities

• Blindness, deafness, brain damage, and mobility disabilities set a limit on your potential in some domains.
• If biological retardation exists, then why shouldn’t biological acceleration exist?

Things that are genetically influenced

• Personality traits:
  • Achievement orientation, self-discipline, persistence, etc.
  • The big five personality traits is rooted in biology
    • Openness to experience has a high heritability coefficient and is a strong predictor of creativity and leadership.
• Physical abilities is highly heritable
  • Height and body size (Lenght of bones) are highly heritable and predicts success in sports.
  • Genes have been found that affect the distribution of muscle fibers
    • Type 1 = Endurance. Type 2 = Strength
    • But it can be changed through training.
  • Adapting to training stimulus
• Executive functioning is among the most heritable traits
  • Executive function = Inhibiting input, modifying working memory content, and switching attention
• There is evidence for natural variation in episodic memory, but not much research on procedural or semantic memory.
• The motivation for deliberate practice might be genetically influenced
  • Those with talent get positive feedback and reinforcement, which makes them more likely to practice even more and hit the 10.000 hours quicker than their peers.

Heritability estimates (How much of the variation is due to genetics)

• Height is 80% heritable
• For intelligence it’s 40-80%
• 10-20% in scientific creativity
• 20% in artistic creativity
• Hearing out-of-tune notes is estimated at 70-80% heritability
• Personality: 40% to 60%. Often 45%.
• Music 92%
• 17% in leadership
• Math 87%
• Sports 85%
• Writing 83%

Giftedness also determines talent

This is the DMGT Behavioral phenotypes model

• Below the DMGT (Behavioral phenotypes)
  • Exophenotypes: Brain size, height
  • Endophenotypes: Physiological & neurological processes. Many of them are known to influence natural abilities and intrapersonal factors.
  • Genotypic foundation: DNA, RNA, protein synthesis

Intelligence

• Intelligence = Mental speed + Working memory
  • Working memory may be the most important, It helps with reading, grades & IQ tests.
• Intelligence is highly heritable
  • the heritability estimates of intelligence range from 0.4 to 0.8
  • Brain volume is highly heritable ($h^2=0.90$) and is 40% correlated with intelligence.
  • Heritability of IQ vs. environmental influences
    • The correlation of the intelligence between identical twins (who has the exact same genes) that were raised together is 85%
      • The correlation is 74% if they were raised in different homes.
    • The correlation of the intelligence between normal siblings (who on average share 50% of their genes) is 46%
      • The correlation is only 24% if they were raised in different homes.
    • The correlation of the intelligence between genetically unrelated people was low, and often close to 0%.
    • The shared home environment of siblings doesn’t influence them as much as their peer group and birth order.
• Consequences of high/low IQ
  • IQ is the best predictor of job performance
  • 55% of the 5% with the lowest IQ never finished high school. This is only the case for 1% of the 25% brightest.
  • People with high IQ
    • Less likely to live on welfare
    • Less likely to be a high school dropout
    • Average IQ for scientists: 130

How genes cause greatness

• Often the environment can be thought of as the cause of greatness, while it’s also true that we to some extent design our environment according to our inherited abilities and interests.
• A slight advantage initially leads to a snowball effect.
• Genes drive people to experiences where they gain knowledge & skills
  • Genes control motivation, which leads to the growth experiences that in turn provide more motivation.
• The same genes might determine aptitudes for different skills
  • Genes don’t change much over the centuries, so the genes for great music skills existed long before music was invented, and will exist long after music disappears (if it does disappear).

Child prodigies

• Some children draw realistically from a very young age
• Child prodigies are passionately drawn to their talent domain
  • Lorin Hollander played professional piano concerts at the age of 7.
  • Wang Yani made professional paintings at the age of 3
  • Michael Kearney graduated college with a degree in anthropology at the of 10
  • Josh Waitzkin felt like he had played chess before when he played for the first time.

Savant syndrome

• Savant syndrome = People with developmental disabilities, but a narrow island of genius
  • Often savants seem to have expertise without any training.
• Calendar counting is one of the most common savant skills
  • Some can tell in which of the next 50 years easter will fall on the 27. march, but are unable to do simple math
  • Some get this skill after a head injury
    • He believes that such skills might lie dormant in many of us, like preinstalled software on a pc, but has to be activated.
• Stephen Wiltshire could draw almost everything he saw about London in a 15-minute helicopter flight.
• Kim peeks: Born without a corpus callosum. Diagnosed as mentally retarded. 65 in IQ. Could not dress himself as an adult. Didn’t understand metaphor or humor.
  • He could speed read and retain 98% of the information for years, but it was a direct copy of the material
  • Calendar counting
  • Encyclopedic knowledge of presidents, composers, zip codes, etc.
  • People said he reasoned like a 5-year old
  • He didn’t understand metaphor
  • Some other people also have a good literal recall, but with a bad understanding of the meaning

The environment doesn’t determine everything

• The mathematically gifted grew up in environments similar to their siblings and classmates, yet they were much better and more interested

How innate ability works

• Genes
• Genetic memory
  • Genetic memory = The idea that we inherit knowledge and abilities
  • Epigenetics could be the mechanism behind genetic memory
  • Dopamine is released when observing learned cues that predict reward.
    • So maybe this is passed on through epigenetics and result in the crystalizing experiences when child prodigies discover their domain of talent?
  • Some birds can sing complex songs without ever learning them

Nurture arguments (antinats)

Pronats’s make bad research

• Most knowledge about child prodigies is anecdotal and retrospective
• They sometimes use the effect of 1 to 40 hours of practice, while Ericsson uses studies where they trained for hundreds or 10.000 hours
• Many child prodigies were forced by their parents to practice, and they have an incentive for not sharing these details
  • We need to know how much they practice, and in which environment, if we want to use this as evidence for innate talent.

The external environment is important

• Not a single great scientist was produced in Europe in the dark ages.
• Excellence varies across cultures, so your culture is probably pretty relevant.
• Being with other people of high ability is helpful
• Many scientific discoveries are made independently by multiple scientists around the same time
• Children who were chosen as “Inherently talented” soccer players were often just the oldest in the class
• Bringing mathematically gifted students together makes them even better.
• They studied 160 musicians and found that having their needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness met, could turn people of low competence into people of high competence
  • While if the needs were not meet then people with high competence would not turn successful
• Commonalities among children showing high ability
  • Musical experiences (e.g. parents singing)
  • Supportive parents who encouraged practice
  • Early music teachers were warm, later music teachers were valued for competence

Deliberate practice is often nescessary

• Expert performance often takes 10 years.

• Since most skills require a composite of adaptions in terms of perception, musculature, coordination, and knowledge, it is quite unlikely that any given individual has innate abilities for all of them, but rather that they were developed in response to deliberate practice.
• There were 3 groups of musicians who used 50-60 hours on music-related activities
  • Those in the best group spend 25 hours on solitary deliberate practice (rather than 10 hours in the other groups)

We can gains skills through deliberate practice

• In several domains, the average performance has increased over the last few decades/centuries, even though the rules and equipment have remained the same, which can’t be explained by natural selection that takes thousands of years to produce changes. So it must be better practice.
  • E.g. music pieces that were once deemed hard, is now easy
• London cabbies with enlarged hippocampi, violinists, meditators etc.
• 24 young adults practiced 3-ball juggling for 3 months, and their gray-matter density in specific areas increased and decreased back to baseline once they stopped.
• Many people have through training been able to go from being able to recall 7 to 80 random digits
• Chess masters have phenomenal memory of the chess positions they often see, but not random positions, and their memory is average in other contexts.
• When given well-defined, feedback and there is motivation and opportunity to improve performance through repetition, improvements were uniform.
• Just because something is influenced by genetics doesn’t mean that biological determinism or immutability of traits are true.
  • E.g. weight can be changed through exercise and nutrition
• IQ mostly appears to be important for low-levels of skills but becomes less important after extended deliberate practice. Possible because generic abilities like IQ is used at low-levels, while later trained abilities specific to the domain are more important
  • There exist experts with low IQ’s in all domains
  • IQ predicts success in chess for people with low-level skills, but not for experts.
    • Some expert chess players have an IQ that is lower than 100
  • Working memory performance predicts sight reading skills of musicians at low levels, but not at high levels of skill.

Epigenetics: Genes are activated differently depending on the environment.

• All our cells have the entire genome, yet they have highly-specialized functions, which is determined by gene expression, which is influenced by light, noise, heat, food, hormones, nerve impulses, and other genes. (The internal & external environment of the gene)
  • This is why we can share 98-99% of genes with chimpanzees and 50% with bacteria and worms, and still be so different.
• Intelligence and ability is also dependent on environmental circumstances
  • Twins can be different even though they have the same genes

Don’t have a fixed mindset!

• Fixed mindset
  • Respond to failure: Thinking you are inadequate
  • Setting goals: To validate or demonstrate competence
  • Compare with others
  • Defensiveness
  • Self-enhancement (Maintaining positive self-view)
    • Blaming others
    • Distortion, favorable selection, and avoidance of diagnostic information
    • Self-handicapping
    • Comparing to people who are worse.
• Growth mindset
  • Respond to failure: Looking for ways to learn to improve
  • Setting goals: To learn and improve competencies.
  • Compare with the previous you
  • Growth
  • Self-improvement

Acquired mental representations are important

• Experts store their knowledge in a more optimal way
• Chess masters only have exceptional memory of chess positions they see in games, but not random ones.
• Expert racetrack drivers had superior knowledge in their domain but were not better at solving stock market problems than non-experts.
• Better representations of knowledge have led people with lower IQ to beat people with higher IQs in thinking and reasoning tasks.
  • It also made younger children beat older children.

The age at which you begin is important

• But since DNA doesn’t change, this isn’t proof of innate talent.
• Language and pronunciation is easier to learn as a young child
• While bones are being calcified (8-11 years old), the following can be modified
  • Ballet dancers ability to turn out their feet
  • Baseball pitchers arm stretching back
• Absolute pitch is easier to learn when you are 3-5 years old
• Expert musicians have increased gray matter in primary motor, somatosensory and auditory cortex
  • Even more, if they were younger when they started practicing
• Correct technique (ballet) is more easily acquired at younger ages when there are less interfering habits
  • Gymnasts who started out learning classical rather than rhythmic gymnastics had an advantage

Nature shaped by nurture

• Greatness is caused by the interplay of physical characteristics, personality traits, general intelligence, domain-specific abilities, and environmental factors
• Epigenetics: Environment turns genes on and off
• Neurogenesis: The brain can create new neurons
• Brain plasticity: The brain’s ability to adapt to a changing environment
• Many things are triggered by the right genetic predispositions in the right environment
  • Depression, schizophrenia, etc.
• We all have different skills based on our genes and upbringing

My conclusion

• The debate has been going on since 1870, and we are still left with some unanswered questions… (Some don’t even agree on the exact definitions of nature & nurture)
• Talent is nature shaped by nurture
  • We don’t know which one is most important in general
  • It varies across domains that require different traits, and for some, we have heritability estimates
    • Heritability estimates = How much of the variation is due to genetic factors as opposed to environmental factors

Talent is determined by

• You
  • Your genes & epigenetics
  • Personality, motivation, etc.
• Your environment
  • Institutions
  • Peers, teachers & mentors
  • Cultural, economical and political climate
• Deliberate practice
  • The age you begin practicing
  • The amount of practice
  • The quality of practice

The best nature arguments

• Disabilities
  • Blindness, deafness, brain damage, and mobility disabilities set a limit on your potential in some domains.
  • If biological retardation exists, then why shouldn’t biological acceleration exist?
• Heritability estimates: We have heritability estimates derived from twin studies, that show genes matter across multiple traits that are important for the acquisition of skills
  • Height and body size (Lenght of bones) are highly heritable and predicts success in sports.
  • The big five personality traits are rooted in biology
  • IQ is the best predictor of job performance and is highly heritable
    • Heritability of IQ vs. environmental influences
      • The correlation of the intelligence between identical twins (who has the exact same genes) that were raised together is 85%
        • The correlation is 74% if they were raised in different homes.
      • The correlation of the intelligence between normal siblings (who on average share 50% of their genes) is 46%
        • The correlation is only 24% if they were raised in different homes.
      • The correlation of the intelligence between genetically unrelated people was low, and often close to 0%.
      • The shared home environment of siblings doesn’t influence them as much as their peer group and birth order.
• Savants
  • Stephen Wiltshire: could draw almost everything he saw about London in a 15-minute helicopter flight.
  • Kim peek: He could speed read and retain 98% of the information for years, but it was a direct copy of the material
  • Some can tell in which of the next 50 years easter will fall on the 27. march, but are unable to do simple math
• Other
  • Child prodigies
  • Often the environment can be thought of as the cause of greatness, while it’s also true that we to some extent design our environment according to our inherited abilities and interests.
  • Some birds can sing complex songs without ever learning them

The best nurture arguments

• Arguments against pronats
  • Most knowledge about child prodigies is anecdotal and retrospective
    • And they were often forced to practice
  • They sometimes use the effect of 1 to 40 hours of practice, while Ericsson uses studies where they trained for hundreds or 10.000 hours
    • He argues that IQ is important when assessing low-level skills, but not for experts
• The external environment is important
  • Not a single great scientist was produced in Europe in the dark ages.
  • Excellence varies across cultures, so your culture is probably pretty relevant.
  • Many scientific discoveries are made independently by multiple scientists around the same time
  • All our cells have the entire genome, yet they have highly-specialized functions, which is determined by gene expression, which is influenced by light, noise, heat, food, hormones, nerve impulses, and other genes. (The internal & external environment of the gene)
  • Twins share 100% of their genes, yet they are different
• Deliberate practice is often necessary
  • Expert performance often takes 10 years or 10.000 hours
  • Since most skills require a composite of adaptions in terms of perception, musculature, coordination, and knowledge, it is quite unlikely that any given individual has innate abilities for all of them, but rather that they were developed in response to deliberate practice.
  • There were 3 groups of musicians who used 50-60 hours on music-related activities
    • Those in the best group spend 25 hours on solitary deliberate practice (rather than 10 hours in the other groups)
• We can gains skills through deliberate practice
  • In several domains, the average performance has increased over the last few decades/centuries, even though the rules and equipment have remained the same, which can’t be explained by natural selection that takes thousand of years to produce changes. So it must be because of better practice.
  • Just because something is influenced by genetics doesn’t mean that biological determinism or immutability of traits are true.
  • We know that deliberate practice makes a difference for London cabbies with enlarged hippocampi, violinists, meditators, ball-jugglers, remembering random digits, chess skills, etc.
    • Chess masters only have exceptional memory of chess positions they see in games, but not random ones.
• Growth mindset
  • Those with a growth mindset are more likely to improve than those with a fixed mindset
• The age at which you begin is important
  • Skills that are more easily learned as a child:
    • Language and pronunciation, ballet dancers’ ability to turn out their feet, baseball pitchers arm stretching back, absolute pitch, brain development of musicians, correct technique in ballet, etc.
  • But since DNA doesn’t change, this isn’t proof of innate talent.