Mozart Worked His Butt Off

The latest book to join our lending library, The Genius in All of Us: Why everything you've been told about genetics, talent, and IQ is wrong, makes the case that élite performance is the result of hard work, perseverance, and purposeful practice - as opposed to inborn gifts. While it may be tempting - even comforting - to think that the reason you aren't a great opera singer or golfer is because of the way you are wired, it turns out that almost anyone can achieve greatness if he or she is prepared to make the necessary sacrifices. The problem is not inadequate genetic assets, but rather the inability or unwillingness to tap into what we already have. The book presents cutting-edge research from a wide variety of disciplines - cognitive science, genetics, biology, and child development - to bolster this argument. 

The excerpt (pp. 16-17) discusses scientists' new understanding of the role of genes.

"This new vanguard is a loose-knit group of geneticists, neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and others, some of whom call themselves developmental systems theorists. I call them interactionists because of their emphasis on the dynamic interaction between genes and the environment. Not all of the interactionists' views have yet been fully accepted, and they freely acknowledge their ongoing struggle to articulate the full implications of their findings. But it already seems very clear that these implications are far-reaching and paradigm-shifting.

"To understand interactionism, you must first try to forget everything you think you know about heredity. 'The popular conception of the gene as a simple causal agent is not valid,' declare geneticists Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. 'The gene cannot be seen as an autonomous unit - as a particular stretch of DNA which always produces the same effect. whether or not a length of DNA produces anything, what it produces, and where and when it produces it may depend on other DNA sequences and on the environment.'

"Though Mendel couldn't detect it with his perfectly calibrated pea-plant hybrids, genes are not like robot actors who always say the same lines in the exact same way. It turns out that they interact with their surroundings and can say different things depending on whom they are talking to.

"This obliterates the long-standing metaphor of genes as blueprints with elaborate predesigned instructions for eye color, thumb size, mathematical quickness, musical sensitivity, etc. Now we can come up with a more accurate metaphor. rather than finished blueprints, genes - all twenty-two thousands of them - are more like volume knobs and switches. Think of a giant control board inside every cell of your body.

"Many of those knobs and switches can be turned up/down/on/off at any time - by another gene or by any minuscule environmental input. This flipping and turning takes place constantly. It begins the moment a child is conceived and doesn't stop until she takes her last breath. rather than giving us hardwired instructions on how a trait must be expressed, this process of gene-environment interaction drives a unique developmental path for every unique individual."

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