Gene Do Not Define Who We Are

     I read David Shenk's book "The Genius in All of Us" and interestingly Shenk argues that genes do not make up who we are and this contradicts what I knew growing up. Shenk discards this fact by stating "talent is not a thing, but a process". I have usually thought as talent as a unique attribute that an individual has been born with such as a remarkable basketball player, amazing singer, talent to remember things and so on. However, Shenk describes the work of the psychologist Anders Ericsson, who wondered if he could train an ordinary person to perform extraordinary feats of memory. When Eric­sson began working with a young man identified as S.F., his subject could, like most of individuals, hold only seven numbers in his short-term memory. By the end of the study, S.F. could correctly recall an astonishing 80-plus digits. With the right kind of mental discipline, Ericsson and his co-­investigator concluded, “there is seemingly no limit to memory performance.” The work of Anders Ericssons reveals that talents can be taught and worked instead of being a unique and born gift. David Shenk also discards the sayings "he gets it from me", "he is just like me", and "I wonder where they get that from". Shenk believes that a person is molded by the environment that the individual is around. According to Shenk's novel, “It turns out that the genetic instructions themselves are influenced by other inputs,”. “Genes are constantly activated and deactivated by environmental stimuli, nutrition, hormones, nerve impulses and other genes.” That means there can be no guaranteed genetic windfalls, or fixed genetic limits, bestowed at the moment of conception. Instead there is a continually unfolding interaction between our heredity and our world, a process that may be in our control.

     What do you think? Do you think that people are born with unique talents or are talents, as Shenk puts it, a process and can be developed through training?