Born Free

Socialists have always maintained that we are not hard-wired by genetics, that a human beings' genetic nature leaves much scope for variation in behaviour.

People talk of a "gifted musician", the "natural athlete" and of "innate intelligence" and have long assumed that talent is a genetic thing some of us have and others don't. Those who think geniuses are born and not made may be wrong. New science suggests the source of abilities is much more interesting and improvisational. It turns out that everything we are is a developmental process and this includes what we get from our genes. At one time , geneticists saw genes as robot actors always uttering the same lines in exactly the same way, and much of the public is still stuck with this old idea. In recent years, though, scientists have seen a dramatic upgrade in their understanding of heredity. They now know that genes interact with their surroundings, getting turned on and off all the time. In effect, the same genes have different effects depending on who they are talking to.

"There are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the environment," says Michael Meaney, a professor at McGill University in Canada. "And there are no environmental factors that function independently of the genome. A trait emerges only from the interaction of gene and environment."

This means that everything about us - our personalities, our intelligence, our abilities - are actually determined by the lives we lead. The very notion of "innate" no longer holds together.

"In each case the individual animal starts its life with the capacity to develop in a number of distinctly different ways," says Patrick Bateson, a biologist at Cambridge University. "The individual animal starts its life with the capacity to develop in a number of distinctly different ways. Like a jukebox, the individual has the potential to play a number of different developmental tunes. The particular developmental tune it does play is selected by the environment in which the individual is growing up."

"High academic achievers are not necessarily born 'smarter' than others," Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Kevin Rathunde and Samuel Whalen write in their book Talented Teenagers. "But work harder and develop more self-discipline."

James Flynn of the University of Otago in New Zealand has documented how IQ scores themselves have steadily risen over the century - which, after careful analysis, he ascribes to increased cultural sophistication. In other words, we've all gotten smarter as our culture has sharpened us. Today's top runners, swimmers, bicyclists, chess players, violinists and on and on, are so much more skilful than in previous generations. All of these abilities are dependent on a slow, incremental process which various micro-cultures have figured out how to improve.

The nature of this improvement was merely intuitive and all but invisible to scientists and other observers. But a whole new field of "expertise studies", led by Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson, has emerged which is cleverly documenting the sources and methods of such tiny, incremental improvements. Bit by bit, they're gathering a better and better understanding of how different attitudes, teaching styles and precise types of practice and exercise push people along very different pathways.

It would be folly to suggest that anyone can literally do or become anything. But the new science tells us that it's equally foolish to think that mediocrity is built into most of us, or that any of us can know our true limits before we've applied enormous resources and invested vast amounts of time. Our abilities are not set in genetic stone. They are soft and sculptable, far into adulthood.

For more see our pamphlet Are we prisoners of our genes?