As early as 700 BCE, the Greek poet Homer stated, “So it is that the gods do not give all men gifts of grace–neither good looks nor intelligence nor eloquence.” Every elementary school teacher can tell you that the children who enter their classroom at the beginning of each year soon display different personalities, learning abilities, and intellectual capacities. In recent decades, the egalitarian movement has denied the existence of differences in people. As recently as 2020, the California Department of Education, in their draft of the Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools, K-12 document, denied the existence of giftedness, asserting:
We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents…an important goal of this framework is to replace ideas of innate mathematics ‘talent’ and ‘giftedness’ with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway…There is no cutoff determining when one child is ‘gifted’ and another is not.
The assertion that people like Mozart, Einstein and Elon Musk did not have special talents but merely worked harder than everyone else, was initially promoted in 1993 by psychologist Anders Ericsson who challenged the concept of innate talent, asserting:
Individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years. Analysis of expert performance provides unique evidence on the potential and limits of extreme environmental adaptation and learning.
In 2008, journalist Malcolm Gladwell, in his bestselling book Outliers: The Story of Success, popularized Ericssons’ research asserting that talent is a myth and exceptional performance is merely the result of about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice–a conversion of Ericsson’s 10-year criterion with the assertion “Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.”
Research in a variety of areas has revealed that we all have intelligence, but differ in our ability to learn, to think abstractly, to remember and to problem solve. Even intelligence within an individual rises to a peak and then diminishes through the decades. John Ravens, in his research in the 1940’s displayed the graph below showing changes in intelligence as we age.
In 2011, a large group of researchers published the results of a genome-wide analysis of 549,692 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) involving 3511 unrelated adults. (An SNP represents a difference in a single DNA building block, called a nucleotide.) They reported:
Our results unequivocally confirm that a substantial proportion of individual differences in human intelligence is due to genetic variation, and are consistent with many genes of small effects underlying the additive genetic influences on intelligence. … [Furthermore] purely genetic (SNP) information can be used to predict intelligence.
This research estimated the heritability of IQ to be about 0.5, confirming the results of the studies involving identical twins raised apart. Its conclusion that general intelligence is polygenic, i.e., it derives from a combination of many genes supports the concept of intelligence as a multi-faceted characteristic.
The bottom line is that we are all imbued with a set of amenities and proclivities, dictated by genes and enhanced by our environment. The good news is that these special attributes have a range, the upper limit of what is called our “potential.” By working hard and dedicating our efforts to things about which we are passionate, we can often surpass those of greater potential who have languished in the comfort of easy learning and achieved little. The bad news is that if we enter the contest against those who are gifted in an intellectual area and who are also passionate enough about their goals to invest the time and energy into their achievement, then there is no contest. Some people are, by nature, better athletes, better musicians or better physicists. It may not be what we want to hear, but that’s reality. My answers to the naysayers is, “Spend a year teaching elementary school,” and tell me if you still believe all humans are intellectual equals.” More information is available at: https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/is-talent-a-myth/
