This is an interesting question, and one that I’ve been exploring for the past three years. We do know from the research of Bouchard and others* on the studies of identical twins separated at birth that a significant part of our intelligence is determined by our genetics. We also know that intellectual stimulation and early exposure to learning is an important factor in bringing intellectual potential to fruition. However, we don’t know precisely how important early exposure to learning is in intellectual development. When a child displays precocious behavior, the parents often suspect that they have a gifted child and begin to provide extensive learning opportunities. This helps the child reach his or her intellectual potential. The key question is: what component of the child’s later achievements can be attributed to genes and what component to the nurturing?
About three years ago, I set out to gain some insight into this question. I selected about 400 of the world’s greatest achievers and recorded their family backgrounds, early formative education, post secondary education and ultimately, their achievements. This information was then compiled in a series of mini-biographical sketches that I have posted on https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com. Each day, I post the bio of one of the high achievers who was born on that day.
The complexity of the answer to this question is evident in the fact that many high achievers come from families of highly accomplished people, while others reach the pinnacle of achievement in spite of extreme family resistance. For example, many mathematicians in the 17th and 18th century who came from the upper classes were discouraged from studying mathematics or science, because it was not a profession that could generate as much money as medicine, law or business. In spite of this lack of encouragement, they went on to produce new mathematics or science of the highest quality.
Furthermore, people like Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was employed as clerk in Madras, India had very little academic encouragement, yet he scrounged textbooks, taught himself mathematics, and emerged at the top of his field, contributing original mathematics at the highest level. Ramanujan’s success brings to mind the adage, “Genius will be served.”
There are also cases in which a parent, bent on making his son a genius, drives the son toward a hatred for academic study. Such is the story of political scientist and philosopher John Stuart Mill who is considered by some to have had one of the highest IQ’s of any human being. Similar situations occur to some extent in the case of Sir Francis Galton and Sir William Rowan Hamilton.
To avoid the pitfall of survivorship bias, we observe that there are many potential geniuses whose potential talents are not brought to fruition, because they do not spend their formative years in an environment that provides them with an outlet for their talent. This was recognized by poet Thomas Gray in 1751 as he stood amongst the tombstones in the church cemetery of a modest rural village, reflecting on the unsung heroes, whose lives played out in obscure hamlets and passed, uncelebrated, in spite of their latent potential for historic achievement. In his 33-stanza poem he writes:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
My work on this question is still in progress, but all I can assert at this point, is that anyone who is gifted with high intelligence and lives in an environment that nurtures that innate potential has an unbeatable combination of attributes for high achievement.
•The Minnesota Twins Study: Bouchard, Thomas J., David T. Lykken, Matthew McGue, Nancy L. Segal, and Auke Tellegen. 1990. “Sources of Human Psychological Differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart.” Science, New Series, Vol. 250. No. 4978, pp. 223–228.
