A debate over nature versus nurture rages regarding expertise, just as it does in many other sciences. Are experts the product of genetics, training, or both? Can anyone become an expert, regardless of genetic composition? Are the prodigies and savants destined at birth to become top performers? Research on this topic varies.
Sir Francis Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin. He invented modern statistical regression and standard deviation. He also formulated many of the current philosophies about fingerprinting and intelligence testing. He was, by any reasonable measure, an intelligent person.
One of Galton’s published works was the book Hereditary Genius. In it, Galton indicated that eminent individuals in society are generally the descendants of a small group of people. Humans, he concluded, have an inherited potential that determines their prospects for exceptional accomplishments. If a person’s physical stature is influenced by genetics, then so too must be the size of one’s brain, mental capacity, and generic competence.
Galton’s work was the beginning of a philosophy that continued in scholarship for a century. Certain people, it was thought, are genetically endowed with superior traits. Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883 to promote the idea that the human species could be improved through reproductive manipulation. His work would eventually be used as support for selective mating, forced sterilization, and genocide. Galton’s thinking influenced Adolf Hitler and many others of similar ilk.
Decades later, many of Galton’s hypotheses were rejected and relegated to the intellectual trash heap. Some of his thinking about genetics, however, survives today. There is a notion, for example, fostered by Galton and perpetuated in Western thought that certain people are born with superior endowments. We speak of these people as “prodigies,” “unexplained geniuses,” “wonder children,” or “talent freaks of nature.” It turns out, however, that researchers have found no verifiable evidence supporting Galton’s idea of general superiority. No one, it turns out, is born to succeed or dominate.
Anders Ericsson, who we mentioned previously regarding the 10,000-hour rule, was one of the most accomplished researchers in the field of expertise and expert performance in modern times. He passed away in 2020,37 and it has been said of him that “no one [else] has had a greater impact on scientific and popular views of expertise.”38 Ericsson studied and wrote about the subject for decades. He believed that genetics have very little to do with expertise. Rather, he posited that training is what distinguishes top performers from the rest of the pack. In his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, he wrote, “The bottom line is that every time you look closely . . . you find that the extraordinary abilities are the product of much practice and training. Prodigies and savants don’t give us any reason to believe that some people are born with natural abilities in one field or another.”39 Ericsson, and many like him, discounted the influence of genetics.
In 2018, researchers Joseph Baker and Nick Wattie concluded that innate talent is “necessary but not sufficient to explain exceptional performance.”40 Also that year, researcher Robert Plomin put it this way: “There is no simple answer to the question of what it takes to become an expert. It’s not just training, and it’s not just talent. Training without talent will not take you to the top tiers of expertise, nor will talent without training. It’s not just nature, and it’s not just nurture; experts are born and made.”41 The trophy goes to the committed, the patient, the dogged, and the persistent. The smartest people are not necessarily and indeed rarely are the best experts.
