"In principle, all the arguments offered apply to musical talent or
mathematical aptitude as well as IQ, but I doubt any reasonable person will
dispute a significant genetic contribution to these."
In fact, an article published in the August 1994 issue of American
Psychologist did dispute whether there was evidence of a significant genetic
contribution to these "talents", and the author (can't recall his name at
the moment) made what seemed to me a very compelling and reasonable case
that environment (namely, intensive practice and good mentors) was what
really mattered in producing high levels of skill at any given activity.
Okay, now I've found the article; the authors are Anders Ericcson and Neil
Charness, and the title is "Expert Performance". To quote the abstract,
"Counter to the common belief that expert performance reflects innate abilities
and capacities, recent research in different domains of expertise has shown
that expert performance is predominantly mediated by acquired complex skills
and physiological adaptations. For elite performers, supervised practice
starts at very young ages and is maintained at high daily levels for more
than a decade ... Performers can acquire skills that circumvent basic limits
on working memory capacity and sequential processing..."
The authors do not explicitly say that talent doesn't matter at all, but they
do say "the role of early instruction and maximal parental support appears
to be much more important than innate talent [in producing exceptional
skill]". Evidence suggests that this generalization applies to a wide
variety of domains, including music, chess, math, athletics, etc.
Jeff Melton
