Interesting. I haven't read the book. But what you say of it does dovetail with a lot of the very challenging thinking I have been doing about life, my kids, myself since leaping down the gifted rabbit hole last year.
I never gave it much thought but looking back I guess I grew up with the assumption that there were the Einsteins of the world, and those who were clearly mentally impaired, and that everyone else in the middle was basically the same and what they did with it was choice and circumstance. I was really annoyed by how all the other kids in my school were always pretending to be stupid, or just couldn't be bothered understanding (this was my genuinely held belief, which I now realise was probably misplaced).
As an adult I had kids and concluded that I did not believe in nature OR nurture being exclusively responsible for how my kids BEHAVED and that the truth was in the middle. Leaning towards nature being key and nuture bringing out their best (or worst). I still didn't really think about how this nature/nurture thing might apply to their intellectual potential.
Then I started reading, learning and thinking about gifted. I now find myself believing that IQ is significantly heritable (though I do believe it is also changable and that the brain is plastic), believing that my kids other Es are also significantly heritable, knowing for a fact that I have inherited nasty auto-immune disease related genes from my Dad, and being pretty sure I can predict which of my kids have those genes. It's been quite confronting to my long standing beliefs that we are all fairly equal in potential (if not opportunity).
I don't know whether to be hopeful or utterly depressed.
Hmmm. I don't think that added anything useful. Time for dinner.
