The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong
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- ISBN13: 9780385523653
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
With irresistibly persuasive vigor, David Shenk debunks the long-standing notion of genetic “giftedness,” and presents dazzling new scientific research showing how greatness is in the reach of every individual.
DNA does not make us who we are. “Forget everything you reflect you know about genes, talent, and intelligence,” he writes. “In recent years, a mountain of scientific evidence has emerged suggesting a completely new paradigm: not talent scarcity, but latent talent plenty.”
Integrating cutting-edge research from a wide swath of disciplines—cognitive science, genetics, biology, child development—Shenk offers a highly optimistic new view of human potential. The problem isn’t our inadequate genetic assets, but our inability, so far, to tap into what we already have. IQ hard and widespread acceptance of “innate” abilities have made an unnecessarily pessimistic view of humanity—and fostered much misdirected public policy, especially in education.
The truth is much more exciting. Genes are not a “blueprint” that bless some with greatness and doom most of us to mediocrity or worse. Rather our individual destinies are a product of the complex interplay between genes and outside stimuli-a dynamic that we, as people and as parents, can influence.
This is a revolutionary and optimistic message. We are not prisoners of our DNA. We all have the potential for greatness.Amazon.com Review
Louann Brizendine Reviews The Genius In All of Us
Louann Brizendine, M.D.,leader of The Female Brain and The Male Brain, is a diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the National Board of Medical Examiners, and is clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF. She is founder and director of the Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic and the Teen Girl Mood and Hormone Clinic. After getting her medical degree from Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, she concluded an internship in medicine and neurology at Harvard Medical School’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a position in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center of Harvard Medical School. She sits on the boards of many prestigious peer reviewed journals and is the recipient of copious honors and awards. Read Brizendine’s guest review of The Genius In All of Us:
In The Genius in All of Us Shenk perfectly clarifies why the scenery-nurture debate is dead. It is not just the genes we are born with, but how we are raised and what opportunities are open to us that determine how smart we will become. Nurture and experience reshape our genes, and thus our brain. Shenk argues that the thought we are either born with genius or talent, or we aren’t, is simply untrue. The notion that relentless, deliberate practice changes the brain and thus our abilities has been undervalued over the past 30 years in favor of the concept of “innate giftedness.” Practice, practice, practice (some say 10,000 hours or more) is what it takes. Shenk argues that it is just some fantasy that effortless, gifted genius is born and not made. He marshals evidence to show that genetic factors do not trump environmental factors but rather work in concert with them. Shenk notes that by the sweat of our brow we can train ourselves to be successful–even if we are born with only average genetic talent. Scientists know that how we are raised and how we are trained affects the expression of our genes. If you reflect you’ve reached your talent limit, reflect again, Shenk says. It’s not just in your genes, he says, but in the intensity of your motivation. Ambition, persistence, and self-discipline are not just products of genes, but can be shaped by nurture and environment. Certainly it is vital to have excellent genes, but that determines at most only 50 percent of your talent. He underscores the point that intelligence is made up of the skills that a person has developed–with an emphasis on “developed”–through hard work. Encouraging ourselves and our children to work hard requires being surrounded by others also wanting to achieve striving for excellence. Moreover, Shenk gives the hopeful message not just for kids, but also for adults. Happily for us, the human brain remains plastic, changeable and trainable well into ancient age. So no matter how ancient you are, if you’d like to be smarter–get to work! –Louann Brizendine
A Q&A with David Shenk
Question: Your book is called The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ is Incorrect. That’s a huge aver. Everything and how so?
David Shenk: It is a bold statement, and it reflects how poorly the public has been served when it comes to understanding the relationship between biology and ability. The clichés we’ve been taught about genetic blueprints, IQ, and “giftedness” all come out of crude, early-20th century guesswork. The reality is so much more appealing and complex. Genes do have a powerful influence on everything we do, but they respond to their environments in all sorts of appealing ways. We’ve now learned a lot more about the developmental mechanisms that enable people to get really excellent at stuff. Intelligence and talent turn out to be about process, not about whether you were born with certain “gifts.”
Question: In The Genius in All of Us you state that the concept of scenery versus nurture is over. Scientists, cognitive psychologists, and geneticists are moving towards an thought of ‘interactionism.’ What does this mean? If the battle of genes versus environment is over, who has won? Which is more vital?
David Shenk: They both won, because they’re both vitally vital. But the new science shows us that they do not act separately. Declaring that a person gets X-percent of his/her intelligence from genes and Y-percent from the environment is like adage that X-percent of Shakespeare’s greatness can be establish in his verbs, and Y-percent in his adjectives. There is no scenery vs. nurture, or scenery plus nurture; as a replacement for, it’s scenery interacting with nurture, which is regularly expressed by scientists as “GxE” (genes times intelligence). This is what “interactionism” refers to. A vanguard of geneticists, neuroscientists, and psychologists have stepped forwards in recent years to articulate the importance of the dynamic interaction between genes and the environment.
Question: You clarify genes and environment as a sound board. How so?
David Shenk: In the past, we’ve been taught that each distinct gene contains a certain dossier of information, which in turn determines a certain trait; if you have the blue-eyed gene, you get blue eyes. Period.
It turns out, though, that the information contained inside genes is only part of the tale; another critical part is how regularly genes get “expressed,” or turned on, by additional genes and by outside forces. It’s therefore helpful to reflect of your genome as a giant mixing board with thousands of knobs and switches. Genes are permanently getting turned on/off/up/down by hormones, nutrients, etc. People really affect their own genome’s behavior with their actions.
Question: How do these new findings affect the concept of the “The Bell Curve”–that we live in an increasingly stratified world where the “cognitive elite,” persons with the best genes, are more and more isolated from the cognitive/genetic underclass? Is that thought now completely obsolete?
David Shenk: Yes, it is obsolete. The thought that there is a genetic super-class that has a confront on high-IQ genes is nonsense. This comes out of a profound misunderstanding of how genes work and how intelligence works, and also from a misreading of so-called “heritability” studies. I am not adage that genes don’t affect intelligence. Genes affect everything. But by and large I reflect the evidence shows that people with low intelligence are missing out on key developmental advantages.
Question: Lewis Terman invented the IQ test at Stanford University in 1916. He confirmed it the ideal tool to determine a person’s native intelligence. Are IQ tests accurate? What are the benefits and fallout of the IQ test?
David Shenk: IQ tests accurately rank literary achievement. That’s reasonably different from identifying innate intelligence, which doesn’t really exist. Tufts intelligence practiced Robert Sternberg clarifies that “intelligence represents a set of competencies in development.” In additional words, intelligence isn’t fixed. Intelligence isn’t all-purpose. Intelligence is not a thing. As a replacement for, intelligence is a dynamic, diffuse, and ongoing process.
The IQ test has valid uses. It can help teachers and principals know how well students are doing and what they’re missing. But the widespread belief that it defines what each of us are capable of (and limited to) is disabling for individuals and society. People simply cannot reach their full potential if they honestly judge that they are so severely restricted.
Question: How do we go about finding the genius in all of us? What steps we can take to unlock latent talent?
David Shenk: Find the thing you like to do, and work and work and work at it. Don’t be discouraged by failure; realize that high achievers thrive on failure as a motivating mechanism and as instruction guide on how to get better.
(Photo © Alexandra Beers)
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This book is so clearly written and expertly organized that you will be tickled with the sheer amount of information you have imbibed by the end of it. That said, it’s brief and to the point. It makes a clear argument: all that noise about how talent and intelligence is innate and fixed is bunk. Real scientists have known for decades that genes do not simply “determine” complex traits, and that the real tale of of our development is how genes get turned on and off (“expressed”) due to environmental cues.
After this book gets the attention it deserves, every future “scenery vs. nurture” tale you read will seem like a comedic Mark Twain novel, which, really, it is. If you want that sort of simplicity, delight in The Prince and the Pauper or Puddin’head Wilson. Persons are fantastic tales.
But if you want to know the truth and learn the science, read David Shenk’s The Genius in All of Us. You will not regret it.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
During the 60s everything was learned. During the 80’s to now, during the conservative period, everything was inherited. Now we are going left again and here comes the nurture over scenery. Rich people like to judge that they were born better because that belief relieves the guilt of having too much when some go lacking. Being a republican won’t make you rich, but being rich will darn sure make you a republican.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
If you have studied contemporary cognitive psychology, even on a layperson’s level, the title of this book should clue you in that there’s something fishy here. Books like “Descartes’ Error,” “Theory of Multiple Intelligences” and additional books by Howard Gardner, the broad work and research of Jerome Bruner, ‘The Mismeasurement of Man’ by Stephen Jay Gould, and even my dentist’s observations about intelligence should already demonstrate this book is derivative of the work done in the past 25 years or so. The title is also a bit presumptious. Even the concept of genius is a cultural manufactured article, and by using it as the leader does, suggests he is buying into the whole notion. The title is particularly silly because if, for example, I’ve already read or studied that what I thought was right about genetics, talent and IQ is incorrect, then this book suggests that what I have learned is incorrect is really right, and therefore the ancient notions are valid!
But humor aside, besides simply summarizing much of what is already known and not known on the topic, or at least what has been challenged with some power, the book, in its breezy journalistic style, does not take up what can be done to make people find their ability due to so many factors such as environment, cognitive style, values, circumstance, luck, and so on. This is right of most well loved renditions of complex subjects, and luckily for their authors, persons who really know the theme matter are not likely to read such popularizations. We know all of the primitive theories from the 19th & 20th century have been challenged, and are regularly used more for convenience than for their reliability or validity, or another way of putting it is that if you are seeking a certain result for a concept like ‘intelligence,’ aptitude, or all-purpose knowledge, say for example, the GRE tests in literature or psychology, you can assemble a series of questions that will measure what you reflect is vital to know since it’s a lot more hard to do self-analysis and determine why you’ve chosen to structure measurement the way you have. I know an education professor, for example, who made a ‘literature’ test wherein all the questions and choices were based on comic book characters from the 1950’s. I got about 3% of the answers right. Who is to say this is not a significant measure? Of course, significance is done by the consensus of a few people or one person who happens to judge you’re ‘measuring’ something. The vital question is why politics, society, economics, and culture interfere with giving everyone a honest chance, and why standardized hard is even structured the way it is. How and why, for example, has the thought that multiple choice hard is valid additional than the fact that it’s simple for its creators to score, and earns them lots of money?
In fleeting this book answers the incorrect question. The vital question is how and why cultural, social, and economic factors and values determine so much of the results in hard. But that question places the onus on the ‘winners,’ meaning persons who choose such things, and it’s much simpler to place questions of genetics, aptitude, and IQ on the ‘losers’ — persons who are labeled –because they have small power in the scheme of things to protest. BTW, take it from a name who used to work on developing such tests: they ARE biased. But use some so-called meta-analytic research tools like statistics and you can easily ‘prove’ they aren’t. As has been said, statistics are like prisoners. Torture them and you’ll get them to say anything.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
From the delightful and myth-busting opening pages about Ted Williams (spoiler alert: He wasn’t talented. He worked harder than anyone else!), the only baseball player in history to bat .400, through the completely fascinating (and yes, accessible) explanation of how researchers and scientists now know the relationship between genes and talent (intellectual and powerful, among additional types), Shenk tells a very much optimistic tale. The bottom line is that all people can do better by effective harder, which is a message that is both morally and politically and socially appealing. It’s also — and this is Shenk’s main point — scientifically demonstrable.
It’s similar to but better than Malcolm Gladwell, I reflect, because it is a topic that speaks to factually everyone, but in this book there is a richer and more sustained engagement with the science, and it is likely to be more influential — for parents and kids and policy makers and teachers and philanthropists, for instance. It is a really vital message that has the potential to change how we reflect about what it means to be human and to strive. He’s a fantastic tale teller and in a way this is the self-help book to end all self-help books. If you do your homework, practice practice practice, you really do get to Carnegie Hall. Most of us just…don’t work that hard.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This book dispels myths about genius. Its simple to read, nearly chatty, with many references to real people, living and dead. His message is clear: if you work hard, you can attain mastery of your skills. There’s no fleeting cut. Geniuses practice long hours. They just don’t sit and watch TV.
One caveat: if you’re bone idle and want everything handed to you, don’t expect miracles. But then, you wouldn’t be reading this book.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5