The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (17 page)

HAVE HEROES.

Heroes inspire, not just by their great work but also by their humble beginnings. Einstein worked as a patent clerk. Thomas Edison was expelled from the first grade because his teacher thought him retarded.
Charles Darwin had so little to show for himself as a teenager that his father said to him, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family
.” (Just a few years later, young Darwin set out on the HMS
Beagle
and eventually revolutionized humanity’s view of itself.)

To know the particulars of a favorite artist or athlete’s ordeal is to be continually reminded of uncharted paths and oddball ideas that only later become recognized as genius
. This experience is magnified by examining rough drafts of masterpiece books, paintings, and albums. To see the evolution of a particular work of art is to behold how
nothing
slowly and painfully becomes
something
. Or, as the legendary musician and artist Brian Eno put it:

What would be really interesting for people to see is
how beautiful things grow out of shit
… Nobody ever believes [that it happens that way]. Everybody thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head, that it somehow appeared there and formed in his head, and all he had to do was write them down … What would really be a lesson that everybody should learn is that … things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. The tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest, and then, the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing …

I think this would be important for people to understand because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that that’s how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted, that they have these wonderful things in their head, but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of … a “normal” person. [But with this insight], you could have another kind of life. You could say, “Well, I know that things come from nothing very much and start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning—I could start something.”

“Another kind of life.” Here, the artist Eno bumps into the biologist Bateson—who has written of our built-in capacity to “live alternative lives.” Perhaps there’s something to this developmental paradigm after all.

FIND A MENTOR.

Any person lucky enough to have had one great teacher who inspired, advised, critiqued, and had endless faith in her student’s ability will tell you what a difference that person has made in her life.
“Most students who become interested in an academic subject do so because they have met a teacher who was able to pique their interest
,” write Csikszentmihályi, Rathunde, and Whalen. It is yet another great irony of the giftedness myth: in the final analysis, the true road to success lies not in a person’s molecular structure, but in his developing the most productive attitudes and identifying magnificent external resources.

⁴
A much more thorough explanation of epigenetics can be found in
chapter 10
.

⁵
It might be fitting to take a moment here and write a few words about how difficult it is for me to get my own writing to the point where I am pleased with it. (Please note I’m making no claims here for what others may think of my work—I’m speaking only about my own opinion.)

Join other readers in online discussion of this chapter: go to
http://GeniusTalkCh7.davidshenk.com

CHAPTER EIGHT
How to Ruin
(or Inspire) a Kid

Parenting does matter. There is much parents can do to encourage their kids to become achievers, and there are some important mistakes to avoid.

Do we know how many geniuses are never recognized
because their talents are blighted before they have a chance to be expressed? The fact is, nobody does.

—TALENT RESEARCHERS MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI,
KEVIN RATHUNDE, AND SAMUEL WHALEN

T
o say that there is much we don’t control in our lives is a dramatic understatement, roughly on the order of saying that the universe is a somewhat large place. To begin with, there are many influences we can’t even detect.
In 1999, Oregon neuroscientist John C
. Crabbe led a study on how mice reacted to alcohol and cocaine. Crabbe was already an expert on the subject and had run many similar studies, but this one had a special twist: he conducted the exact same study at the same time in three different locations (Portland, Oregon; Albany, New York; and Edmonton, Alberta) in order to gauge the reliability of the results. The researchers went to “extraordinary lengths” to standardize equipment, methods, and lab environment: identical genetic mouse strains, identical food, identical bedding, identical cages, identical light schedule, etc. They did virtually everything they could think of to make the environments of the mice the same in all three labs.

Somehow, though, invisible influences intervened. With the scientists controlling for nearly everything they could control, mice with the exact same genes behaved differently depending on where they lived. And even more surprising: the differences were not consistent, but zigged and zagged across different genetic strains and different locations. In Portland, one strain was especially sensitive to cocaine and one especially insensitive, compared to the same strains in other cities. In Albany, one particular strain—just the one—was especially lazy. In Edmonton, the genetically altered mice tended to be just as active as the wild mice, whereas they were more active than the wild mice in Portland and less active than the wild mice in Albany. It was a major hodgepodge.

There were also predictable results. Crabbe did see many expected similarities across each genetic strain and consistent differences between the strains. These were, after all, perfect genetic copies being raised in painstakingly identical environments. But it was the unpredicted differences that caught everyone’s attention. “Despite our efforts to equate laboratory environments, significant and, in some cases, large effects of site were found for nearly all variables,” Crabbe concluded. “Furthermore, the pattern of strain differences varied substantially among the sites for several tests.”

Wow
.
This was unforeseen, and it turned heads
. Modern science is built on standardization; new experiments change one tiny variable from a previous study or a control group, and any changes in outcome point crisply to cause and effect. The notion of hidden, undetectable differences throws all of that into disarray. How many assumptions of environmental sameness have been built right into conclusions over the decades? What if there really is no such thing?

What if the environment turns out to be less like a snowball that one can examine all around and more like the tip of an iceberg with lurking unknowables? How does that alter the way we think about biological causes and effects?

Something else stood out in Crabbe’s three-city experiment: gene-environment interplay. It wasn’t just that hidden environmental differences had significantly affected the results. It was also clear that these hidden environments had affected different mouse strains in different ways—clear evidence of genes interacting dynamically with environmental forces.

But the biggest lesson of all was how much complexity emerged from such a simple model. These were genetically pure mice in standard lab cages. Only a handful of known variables existed between groups. Imagine the implications for vastly more complex animals—animals with highly developed reasoning capability, complex syntax, elaborate tools, living in vastly intricate and starkly distinct cultures and jumbled genetically into billions of unique identities. You’d have a degree of GxE volatility that would boggle any scientific mind—a world where, from the very first hours of life, young ones experienced so many hidden and unpredictable influences from genes, environment, and culture that there’d be simply no telling what they would turn out like.

Such is
our
world. Each human child is his/her own unique genetic entity conceived in his/her own distinctive environment, immediately spinning out his/her own unique interactions and behaviors. Who among these children born today will become great pianists, novelists, botanists, or marathoners? Who will live a life of utter mediocrity? Who will struggle to get by? We do not know.

What we do know is that our brains and bodies are primed for plasticity
; they were built for challenge and adaptation. This is true from life’s earliest moments. According to neuroscientists Mark H. Johnson and Annette Karmiloff-Smith,
“Recent reviews of pre- and postnatal brain
development have come to the conclusion that brain development is not merely a process of the unfolding of a genetic plan, or a passive response to the environmental input, but is an activity-dependent process at the molecular, cellular, and organismal levels involving probabilistic epigenesis (bidirectional relations between genes, brain and behavior).”

Put more simply:
“Human babies are special
,” says Andrew Meltzoff, codirector of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. “What makes them special is not that they are born so intelligent but that they are designed to change their minds when faced with the data.”

Intelligence is not fixed but waiting to be developed. Athletic prowess is not preordained but awaits training.
Musical ability lies dormant in all of us, calling for early and sustained incantation
. The potential for creativity is built into the architecture of our brains. All of these are a function of influence and process—far from fully controllable, but also quite the opposite of fixed and predetermined.

The parent’s job, then, is to respect and engage in that process—which has, of course, already started long before birth. Every parent experiences the odd sensation of getting to know his or her newborn child, recognizing in him or her a unique personality that seems to have been already formed. That’s because the process is already nine months old. The process has already begun.

On reflection, we parents are not so far off from John Crabbe and his mice. In his lab, Dr. Crabbe studies the interaction between environment and mouse genome. In our home nursery, we also watch how our child’s unique biology interacts with various facets of the outside world: we see what makes her laugh and cry, what grabs her attention and bores her silly, what tastes good and bad. We get to know not her preset design, but how she responds to different versions of the world we present to her.

Based on our reading of these interactions, we then tailor her environment accordingly
. We mesh our own aspirations with what we learn about the child.

This is the ultimate lesson of GxE: rather than first waiting for our natural gifts to sprout, we must immediately dive into the process, embracing the inseparability of nature and nurture. We know that genes are playing a key role and that their expression is being determined every moment by the quality of the life our child leads. We know that we are helping to choose our child’s own jukebox tune. Our job is to find the process that produces the best possible individual.

Of course, one does not have to aim for a gold medal to incorporate the lessons of talent and ability that come from this book. There are many quietly heroic ways to be a modest or terrific success: a wonderful teacher, a sharp and creative and ethical entrepreneur, even a loyal and hardworking assistant or clerical worker.

Ultimately, of course, the life goal will be up to the individual. But parents can sow certain seeds and water them.

Or can they? In 1998, writer Judith Rich Harris shook the world of academic psychology with her book
The Nurture Assumption
. “Do parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child’s personality?” she asked, then bluntly declaring, “The answer is no.” Relying heavily on the identical-twin heritability studies from the 1980s and ’90s (discussed in
chapter 4
), Harris concluded that parents are more genetic guardians of their children’s personalities than they are active shapers of them. The most important environmental influences on character, she proposed, are not parents but peers.

Challenging assumptions is always healthy, and in one sense Harris’s book was a welcome critique that forced university psychologists out of their comfort zone
. But a decade later, her argument is a victim of its own stale assumptions, beginning with her stance on genetics.
“Genes contain the instructions for producing a physical body and a physical brain
,” Harris wrote. “They determine the shape of the facial features and the structure and chemistry of the brain. These physical consequences of heredity are the straightforward consequences of carrying out the instructions in the genes; I call them
direct genetic effects
.”