The claim that innate talent is a myth emerged as early as 1690, when philosopher John Locke stated that we all come into the world as intellectually “blank slates” and acquire knowledge and intelligence that are written on these slates by our experiences. The political view underpinning Locke’s assertion was that if, indeed, we all enter the world as blank slates, and differ only in our experiences, then we’re all intellectual equals at birth and social classes are not justifiable on the basis of differences in ability.
Locke’s blank slate assertion was challenged by Sir Francis Galton in his 1869 publication Hereditary Genius, in which he asserted that physical characteristics and intelligence are mainly inherited. His assertion stimulated a controversy among psychologists that spanned succeeding centuries as the “nurture vs. nature debate.”
In 1993, psychologist Anders Ericsson 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.
There is no question that years of deliberate practice or intense study are required to perform at the highest levels in sport or academic enterprises. Michael Jordan’s prolonged and intense practice was certainly a key factor in his rise to elite performance. But others argue that he was gifted with superior physicality and athletic instinct.
In his bestselling book Outliers: The Story of Success, Macolm Gladwell popularized Ericssons’ research, asserting that talent is a myth and exceptional performance is merely the result of about 10 years of deliberate practice. However, if outstanding performance is achieved only through a minimum of 10 years of practice, then how do we account for child prodigies like Tiger Woods, who won the Junior World Golf Championship at age 8, or mathematician John von Neumann who could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head at age 6 and was proficient in calculus at age 8? More recently, Terrance Tao mastered arithmetic at age 2 and completed university level mathematics at age 9.
In her 2016 book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, psychologist Angela Duckworth, winner of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, argues that grit, a unique combination of passion and perseverance, is a vital component of success in any endeavour. However, her research has revealed that talent also plays a role. She states, “Are we all equally talented? No and no. The ability to quickly climb the learning curve of any skill is obviously a good thing, and, like it or not, some of us are better at it than others.”
Ellen Winner, psychologist at Boston College, challenges the exclusive attribution of exceptional performance in athletics or intellectual pursuits to prolonged deliberate practice. In her paper on giftedness, she calls attention to child prodigies whose talents emerge before practice is possible:
Although Ericsson and his colleagues consider the stories of early (pretraining) achievements of child prodigies to be unreliable, there are simply too many such reports that are too consistent with one another for them to be easily discounted. In addition, these reports come not only from potentially biased parents but also from careful case studies of young prodigies. If exceptional abilities emerge prior to intensive instruction and training, then these abilities are likely to reflect atypical, innate potential.
In other words, if exceptional performance is entirely attributable to practice that extends over a period of 10 or more years, how do we explain the existence of prodigies who show exceptional performance at an early age before any appreciable amount of instruction is available?
Drawing upon research from MRI scans, Winner states:
Indirect evidence indicates that gifted children and savants have atypical brain organization (whether as a result of genetics, the in utero environment, or after-birth trauma). First, giftedness in mathematics, visual arts, and music is associated with superior visual-spatial abilities, and children with mathematical gifts show enhanced brain activity in their right hemisphere when asked to recognize faces, a task known to involve the right hemisphere.
Eventually, research involving the genome will resolve the controversy. 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 twins. 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. This suggests that talent of various kinds also have a genetic component.
For more information, visit: https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/is-talent-a-myth/
