During the past two centuries, this question has become the focus of an ongoing emotionally-charged discussion between the political Left and Right. The Left denies the existence of natural talent, while the Right asserts that it resides in our DNA. By denying the existence of talent, those on the Left argue that the distribution of wealth is unfair because the wealthy have no special gifts and have merely benefited from the good fortune of financial inheritance or better opportunity. The egalitarian ideology that defined the former USSR asserted that intelligence cannot be inherited and that any observed or measured differences in intelligence were entirely attributable to environmental influences; they consequently banned the study of genetics. Similarly many psychologists and educators in the United States, deny innate differences in individual intelligence and the concept of “giftedness.” Subscribing to the belief that special programs for the mathematically gifted are elitist and/or racist, the California Department of Education, vetted in 2021 its draft of the Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools, K-12. The first chapter of that document asserted:
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.
An outcry from those who believe in giftedness and the need for special programs for the gifted led to a softening of the statement above and an allowance for special programs.
In his book Genius Explained, psychologist Michael Howe asserted that Mozart had no special talent and that his “genius” was really little more than hard work over a prolonged period, stating:
By the standards of mature composers, Mozart’s early works are not outstanding. The earliest pieces were probably written down by his father, and perhaps improved in the process. Many of Wolfgang’s childhood compositions, such as the first seven of his concertos for piano and orchestra, are largely arrangements of works by other composers. Of those concertos that only contain music original to Mozart, the earliest that is now regarded as a masterwork (No. 9, K. 271) was not composed until he was twenty-one: by that time Mozart had already been composing concertos for ten years.
In 2008, journalist Malcolm Gladwell In his bestselling book Outliers: The Story of Success, popularized research by psychologist Anders Ericsson asserting that talent is a myth and exceptional performance is merely the result of about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.
Those on the political Right, beginning with Francis Galton, who suggested that high intelligence tends to run in families, argued that there is a genetic component to intelligence. If true, this would justify the existence of a non-uniform distribution of wealth based on different levels of inherited intelligence, and therefore different levels of competence. The development of animals with special capabilities through selective breeding, suggested that the same principles of talent distribution through heredity and mate selection applied to humans. One of the concerns that arose from accepting the concept of inherited intelligence was the prospect of eugenics, whereby those perceived to be “intellectually defective” would be removed from society or sterilized, as in Nazi Germany.
The debate between the Left and Right raged on for decades until in 1990, Thomas J. Bouchard et al. published a seminal article titled, Sources of Human Psychological Differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart in which they assembled 100 sets of identical twins who were separated early in life and raised apart. All participants in the study completed about 50 hours of medical and psychological assessment. Since identical twins come from a single fertilized egg, they share virtually 100% of their alleles and can be considered to be genetically identical. Furthermore, since they were raised apart, the difference in their IQs, when tested at the end of their separation, could be entirely attributable to environmental factors. Hence, Bouchard et al. were able to estimate the difference in IQ attributable to genetics, using the correlation in the IQ scores of the twins. The researchers reported “about 70% of the variance in IQ was found to be associated with genetic variation.” The authors cautioned that this finding did not imply that IQ cannot be enhanced by rich experiences, and cited the Flynn Effect as evidence that IQ scores can be increased by environmental influences. More details about this controversy and its most recent manifestations in sports and chess can be accessed at: https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/is-talent-a-myth/.
As you read other answers to this question, you will see that they are often expressed with great certainty–usually reflecting a political opinion rather than careful deliberate research. Though we do know that intellectual potential and IQ are defined to a large extent by genetics, we do not know the extent to which IQ and intelligence can be increased by intense work. Certainly attaining genius status in highly abstract fields requires a high intelligence, but we don’t know whether the bridge from talent to genius can be constructed through effort and focus. Perhaps the best distinction between talent and genius is captured in Arthur Schopenhauer’s observation, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
