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http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-talented-1-in-10000.html

The talented 1 in 10,000
by Steve Hsu

David Lubinski sent me a copy of his latest paper from a longitudinal study of individuals who scored at the 1 in 10k level (normalized by age) on SAT-M or SAT-V before 13. This population is similar to the one whose DNA we are using in our intelligence GWAS.

How can a brief test administered to a 12 year old be so good at picking out individuals who are likely to be exceptionally successful at age 38? If I hadn't been repeatedly told otherwise by "experts" I might conclude it had some validity ;-)

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The authors note that about 2% of the US general population earn doctoral degrees (JD, MD, PhD), whereas about 22% of gifted students who test at the top 1% level do so, and 44% percent of this population (in the 1 in 10k population there were many times more PhDs than MDs and JDs).

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The paper being discussed is

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/03/25/0956797612457784
Who Rises to the Top?: Early Indicators
by Harrison J. Kell, David Lubinski, and Camilla P. Benbow
Psychological Science
March 2013, 24 (3)

Can we *please* stop associating intelligence with the J.D. degree?

Please?

I mean it doesn't require anything except having a pulse and a willingness to take on $200,000 in debt.

And the one 1 in whatever-he-is-off-the-reservation-probably-well-beyond-1-in-10,000 who I know is at that level is a Ph.D.

I regularly participate in a weekly journal club during the school year with a lot of behavior genetics researchers, and also am part of an online group for the Behavior Genetics Association. Most of the active researchers in this field DO NOT expect to find any powerful gene associations with membership in the Study of Exceptional Talent (SET),

http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html

which is the study population reported on here.

Are you trying to say there's no such thing as natural talent?

In a recent thread we discussed that brain scans taken by the National Institute of Mental Health show that areas of the brain develop on a different timeline for gifted or average children, similar to the way adhd childrens brains develop on a different schedule than average? Wouldn't brain growth rate be governed by a gene?





But I'm not in a Behavior Geneticist Club so I'll just stick with making a more pedestrian point. Some kids at school are staying after school for tutoring because they can not keep up with the class. Other kids are sitting in the same classroom listening to the same lessons and waiting for the rest of the class to catch up. There is obviously such a thing as natural talent. If there is such a thing then it follows there must be degrees of natural talent.

I was interpreting kmbunday's point as being the SET population is a functionally tainted pool to draw conclusions from. I'd view it as skewed for quite a few reasons: first it is self-selected, second membership in the population gives extra support (e.g. letters of recommendation) to achieving the very ends they are measuring (e.g. PhDs), third prep services exist for the test being used.

In addition to Zen Scanner's point, I'd add that for most complex behavioral traits, there is no one gene that's responsible. Instead, many many genes contribute incrementally to the likelihood and/or strength of that trait. This further weakens (and drastically so) one's statistical power to find a correlation between a behavioral trait and any one candidate gene.

And I'd add that, on top of all the genetic variability, there's all that epigenetic stuff going on, where the presence of a gene sequence may not matter at all if some environmental factor hasn't triggered it "on."

Yea, epigenetics has been blowing my mind lately. I think it was in Science News recently about cross-generational epigenetics and miRNA. And also I was reading about the presence of in utero testosterone and the thickness of the corpus callosum and the relationship with math ability with a negative effect/correlation on the presence of testerone in math gifted boys (and if you line up the math club next to the wrestling team, did we not already instinctually guess that that effect existed?)

epigenetics is freaking me OUT.