is an excellent book by David Shenk, subtitled why everything you've been told about genetics, talent and intelligence is wrong (isbn 978-184831218-0).
As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
We're better at stuff because we've figured out how to become better.
Talent is not a thing; it's a process.
We do not inherit traits directly from our genes. Instead we
develop traits through the dynamic process of gene-environment
interaction.
In truth, the [word] 'intelligence' has become a mere vocal sound,
a word with so many meanings that finally it has none.
[Charles Spearman]
Stability does not imply unchangeability. [Michael Howe]
In 1932, psychologists Mandel Sherman and Cora B. Key discovered that IQ
scores correlated inversely with a community's degree of isolation.
Talent is not the cause but the result of something.
People make a great mistake who think that my art has come easily
to me. Nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I.
[Mozart]
Heritability is a population average, meaningless for any individual
person. When someone says that heritability of height is 90 per cent,
he does not and cannot mean that 90 percent of my inches come from
genes and 10 percent from my food. He means that variation in a
particular sample is attributable to 90 percent genes and 10 per cent
environment.
Genes don't directly cause traits; they only influence the system.
Genes are probabilistic rather than deterministic. [Michael Rutter]
We have far more control over our genes - and far less control over our environment - than we think.
What would be really interesting for people to see is how beautiful things grow out of shit. [Brian Eno]
The brain circuits than moderate a person's level of persistence
are plastic - they can be altered. They key is intermittent
reinforcement.
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