> It's 90% genes , 10% other factors.
Do you have evidence to support these numbers, or the more general claim of genetic supremacy?
Do you have evidence to support these numbers, or the more general claim of genetic supremacy?
Math education comes up here regularly, and we have lots of smart math people here, but the story is often that some commentator was simply never shown anything interesting in their whole schooling. I'd never have given it much thought were it not for one particular math teacher who put a lot of effort into me and a few other interested kids. I still keep in touch with him.
I'll accept that nobody is, but his mom was a math teacher. Few of us get that kind of leg up, certainly not 600m+. When I was 5, "don't get shot" was already getting a significant share of my brain's power, and I had it better than most. Sure, he's got a brain like gasoline, but don't discount the spark and oxygen that allowed the genius to deflagrate. And don't just throw numbers around like that if you don't have proof. If you respect the mathematics, act like it.
But I have a feeling his success as a professional mathematician involves the interaction of such math talent with hard work and good mathematical taste.
One can read his PhD qualifying exams to observe he was actually not an outlier amongst his peers in his early career.
You are providing questions as a substitute for actual evidence. Your questions are worthy of being asked, but they are still questions.
Basically a variant of "I cannot explain ... therefore it must be Y! How could it not be Y?"
Just because people don't have adequate explanations for nurture doesn't make it an automatic "genetics". All it means is that they don't have adequate explanations. This does not make your stance any stronger or more likely to be correct.
(Disclaimer: I can easily believe genetics is the answer. I won't, however, be sure of it).
> Just because people don't have adequate explanations for nurture doesn't make it an automatic "genetics". All it means is that they don't have adequate explanations.
Your question is the equivalent of "Since you cannot provide evidence, I must be right." This is a fallacy. The other party's lack of evidence does not strengthen your position.
Maybe they don't know how to do it. Maybe TT got lucky.
This dynamic matches what we see in the case of Terrence Tao and his brothers, the Polgar sisters, and other cases of savants/virtuosos that come to mind. Usually one child has extraordinary ability while their siblings are much less remarkable. If the environmental model were accurate, we should see many cases where families produce more than one extreme talent of equal skill. But we don't see that in practice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygene#Trait_distribution
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean#His...
No formal training in math. Made insane contributions to mathematics including solving "unsolvable" problems.
> A child prodigy by age 11, he had exhausted the mathematical knowledge of two college students who were lodgers at his home. He was later lent a book written by S. L. Loney on advanced trigonometry.[18][19] He mastered this by the age of 13 while discovering sophisticated theorems on his own. By 14, he received merit certificates and academic awards that continued throughout his school career, and he assisted the school in the logistics of assigning its 1,200 students (each with differing needs) to its approximately 35 teachers.[14]: 27 He completed mathematical exams in half the allotted time, and showed a familiarity with geometry and infinite series. Ramanujan was shown how to solve cubic equations in 1902; he developed his own method to solve the quartic. In the following year, he tried to solve the quintic, not knowing that it could not be solved by radicals.
If there was a method of raising kids like this "scientifically" , I bet a good portion of the worlds GDP would be put into this field of research
Our genes encode the layout of physical race tracks on which marbles of matter and information travel. Some people's bodies have a bunch of muscle tracks, so as they grow, their body benefits from the activity on those. They grow up to find it easier to gain muscle than other people.
For geniuses, I imagine that the brain is a perfectly laid out super highway. Any information that comes in gets to where it needs to go because there's signs and signals and traffic cops patrolling. If some piece of information can't find where to go, well, damned if we don't have a construction worker and a navigator jumping in the passenger seat with you to help out.
Ultimately, I think the brain is so plastic that each of us can one day decide to elect a new mayor to our body town. The new mayor can decide to tear up roads and fix potholes etc. Yeah, it would have been great if we had founded the town with a plan and hadn't had that college riot but here we are. Time to pave some roads.
Because it kinda puncture this feel good marketing bull that "you can be anything you want". It could also shut endless flowing money into extra-coaching classes outside normal schools which promise to "help child to reach their fullest potential".
If you will be good at baseball if you have A and B, OK with neither, but terrible with only one, those genes will be identified in most studies as having nothing to do with baseball, maybe even identified as harmful.
I can offer a concrete example. Autism is more often found in high-IQ families, but itself is associated with decreased IQ. That suggests one case where either A and B alone are harmful, having neither makes you fine (and unlikely to bear children with A or B), and having both makes you smart.
I am not sure if we want people to figure out how to make connections involving specific genes, because a lot of us benefit from living in a world where we can game LeetCode by working longer and harder in a way that's unrelated to what Google is looking for.