The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (2 page)

This didn’t stop after he got drafted into professional baseball. In Williams’s first season with the minor league San Diego Padres, coach
Frank Shellenback noticed that his new recruit
was always the first to show up for practice in the morning and the last to leave at night. And something more curious: after each game, Williams would ask the coach for the used game balls.

“What do you do with all these baseballs?” Shellenback finally asked Williams one day. “Sell them to kids in the neighborhood?”

“No sir,” replied Williams. “I use them for a little extra hitting practice after supper.”

Knowing the rigors of a full practice day, Shellenback found the answer hard to swallow. Out of a mix of suspicion and curiosity, he later recalled, “I piled into my car after supper [one night] and rode around to Williams’s neighborhood. There was a playground near his home, and sure enough, I saw The Kid himself driving those two battered baseballs all over the field. Ted was standing close to a rock which served as [home] plate. One kid was pitching to him. A half dozen others were shagging his drives. The stitching was already falling apart on the baseballs I had [just] given him.”

Even among the pros, Williams’s intensity stood so far outside the norm that it was often uncomfortable to witness up close.
“He discussed the science of hitting
ad nauseam with teammates and opposing players,” write biographers Jim Prime and Bill Nowlin. “He sought out the great hitters of the game—Hornsby, Cobb, and others—and grilled them about their techniques.”

He studied pitchers with the same rigor. “[After a while],
pitchers figure out [batters’] weaknesses,” said Cedric Durst
, who played on the Padres with Williams. “Williams wasn’t like that … Instead of them figuring Ted out, he figured them out. The first time Ted saw [Tony] Freitas pitch, we were sitting side by side on the bench and Ted said, ‘This guy won’t give me a fast ball I can hit. He’ll waste the fast ball and try to make me hit the curve. He’ll get behind on the count, then throw me the curve.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”

Process
. After a decade of relentless effort on North Park field, and four impressive years in the minors, Williams came into the major leagues in 1939 as an explosive hitter and just kept getting better and better and better. In 1941, his third season with the Boston Red Sox, he became the only major league player in his era—and the last in the twentieth century—to bat over .400 for a full season.

The next year, 1942, Ted Williams enlisted in the navy as an aviator. Tests revealed his vision to be excellent, but well within ordinary human range.

Something crazy happened to the world’s violinists in the twentieth century: they got better faster than their peers had in previous centuries.

We know this because we have lasting benchmarks, like the effervescent Paganini Violin Concerto no. 1 and the concluding movement of the Bach Violin Partita no. 2 in D Minor—fourteen minutes of virtually impossible violin work. Both pieces were considered nearly unplayable in the eighteenth century but are now played routinely and well by a large number of violin students.

How did this happen? And how have runners and swimmers gotten so much faster, and chess and tennis players gotten so much more skillful?
If humans were fruit flies, with a new generation appearing every eleven days, we might be tempted to chalk it up to genetics and rapid evolution
. But evolution and genes don’t work like that.

There is an explanation, a simple and a good one, but its implications are radical for family life and for society. It is this: some people are training harder—and smarter—than before. We’re better at stuff because we’ve figured out how to
become
better.

Talent is not a thing; it’s a
process
.

This is not at all how we’re used to thinking about talent. With phrases like “he must be gifted,” “good genes,” “innate ability,” and “natural-born [runner/shooter/talker/painter],” our culture regards talent as a scarce genetic resource, a
thing
that one either does or does not possess. IQ and other “ability” tests codify this view, and schools build curricula around it. Journalists and even many scientists consistently validate it. This gene-gift paradigm has become a central part of our understanding of human nature. It fits with what we have been taught about DNA and evolution:
Our genes are blueprints that make us who we are. Different genes make us into different people with different abilities
. How else could the world end up with such varied individuals as Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton, Ozzy Osbourne, and you?

But the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark—tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of misunderstandings and misleading metaphors. In recent years, a mountain of scientific evidence has emerged that overwhelmingly suggests a completely different paradigm: not talent scarcity, but latent talent abundance. In this conception, human talent and intelligence are not permanently in short supply like fossil fuel, but potentially plentiful like wind power. The problem isn’t our inadequate genetic assets, but our inability, so far, to tap into what we already have.

This is not to say that we don’t have important genetic differences among us, yielding advantages and disadvantages. Of course we do, and those differences have profound consequences. But the new science suggests that few of us know our true limits, that the vast majority of us have not even come close to tapping what scientists call our
“unactualized potential
.” It also suggests a profound optimism for the human race.
“We have no way of knowing how much unactualized genetic potential exists
,” writes Cornell University developmental psychologist Stephen Ceci. Therefore it becomes logically impossible to insist (as some have) on the existence of a genetic underclass. Most underachievers are very likely not prisoners of their own DNA, but rather have so far been unable to tap into their true potential.

This new paradigm does not herald a simple shift from “nature” to “nurture
.” Instead, it reveals how bankrupt the phrase “nature versus nurture” really is and demands a whole new consideration of how each of us becomes us. This book begins, therefore, with a surprising new explanation of how genes work, followed by a detailed look at the newly visible building blocks of talent and intelligence. Taken together, a new picture emerges of a fascinating developmental process that we can influence—though never fully control—as individuals, as families, and as a talent-promoting society. While essentially hopeful, the new paradigm also raises unsettling new moral questions with which we all will have to grapple.

It would be folly to suggest that anyone can literally do or be anything, and such is not this book’s intent. But the new science tells us that it’s equally foolish to think that mediocrity is built into most of us, or that any of us can know our true limits before we’ve applied enormous resources and invested vast amounts of time. Our abilities are not set in genetic stone. They are soft and sculptable, far into adulthood. With humility, with hope, and with extraordinary determination, greatness is something to which any kid—of any age—can aspire.

     PART ONE
THE MYTH OF GIFTS
                            

CHAPTER ONE
Genes 2.0
How Genes Really Work

Contrary to what we’ve been taught, genes do not determine physical and character traits on their own. Rather, they interact with the environment in a dynamic, ongoing process that produces and continually refines an individual.

T
he sun begins to rise over an old river town, and through a fifth-floor window of University Hospital, a newborn cries out her own birth announcement. Her new, already sleep-deprived parents hold her tightly and simply stare, partly in disbelief that this has actually happened, partly in awe of what lies ahead. As she develops, who will she look like? What will she be like? What will be her strengths, her weaknesses? Will she change the world or just scrape by? Will she run a quick mile, paint a new idea, charm her friends, sing for millions? Will she have any talent for anything?

Only the years will tell. For right now, the parents don’t really need to know the final outcome—they just need to know what sort of difference they can make. How much of their newborn daughter’s personality and abilities are already predetermined? What portion is still up for grabs? What ingredients can they add, and what tactics should they avoid?

The fuzzy mix of hope, expectation, and burden begins …

TONY SOPRANO:
And to think [I’m] the cause of it
.

DR. MELFI: How are you the cause of it?

TONY SOPRANO: It’s in his blood, this miserable fucking existence. My rotten fucking putrid genes have infected my kid’s soul. That’s my gift to my son.

Genes can be scary stuff if you don’t understand them. In 1994, psychologist Richard Herrnstein and policy analyst Charles Murray warned in their bestselling book
The Bell Curve
that we live in an increasingly stratified world where the “cognitive elite”—those with the best genes—are more and more isolated from the cognitive/genetic underclass. “Genetic partitioning,” they called it. There was no mistaking their message:

The irony is that as America equalizes the [environmental] circumstances
of people’s lives, the remaining differences in intelligence are increasingly determined by differences in genes … Putting it all together, success and failure in the American economy, and all that goes with it, are increasingly a matter of the genes that people inherit.

Stark and terrifying—and thankfully quite mistaken. The authors had fundamentally misinterpreted a number of studies, becoming convinced that roughly 60 percent of each person’s intelligence comes directly from his or her genes. But genes don’t work that way.
“There are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the environment
,” explains McGill University’s Michael Meaney, one of the world’s leading experts on genes and development. “And there are no environmental factors that function independently of the genome. [A trait] emerges only from the
interaction
of gene and environment.”

While Herrnstein and Murray adhered to a particular ideological agenda, they also seem to have been genuinely hobbled in their analysis by a common misunderstanding of how genes work.
We’ve all been taught that we inherit complex traits like intelligence straight from our parents’ DNA in the same way we inherit simple traits like eye color. This belief is continually reinforced by the popular media
. As an illustration,
USA Today
recently explained heredity in this way: