Bob Draper wrote:

>Bill Pirkle wrote:
>
>>This might be a good question for this well-informed list (see post
>>subject).  Is there something about the wiring of the brain that
>>facilitates becoming a great composer or is it their exposure to
>>music and opportunity to explore it - nature or nurture?.
>
>Firstly the answer to the question is clearly NURTURE.

There's nothing at all clear about it to anyone who has thought about it
in a disinterested way.

>The search for an intelligence gene has been fraught with problems.
>Although one researcher claims to have found one ...

Does even the most fanatical hereditarian think that there is a single gene
for intelligence, however defined, or for musical talent, however defined,
or for any other complex human trait?

>In the 50s a British researcher at London university (name again forgotten)
>claimed to have proven a link between families and intelligence using
>separated twins.  But later it was found that he faked the data after
>suspicion arose because it was known that the number of twins was so
>small.

Cyril Burt (1883-1971).  Not long after he died, a man named Leon Kamin (at
Northeastern University in Boston, IIRC) claimed that Burt had fabricated
data.  However, I understand that he has been pretty well vindicated by
now.  See *The Burt Affair* by R.  B.  Joynson for a thorough account.

I also understand that later studies of separated twins have got results
quite close to Burt's supposedly fradulent ones.  This is getting off-
topic; I'll supply references privately if anyone is interested.

>Another researcher has shown that peer groups have a huge affect on
>childhood development.
>
>Yet another education researcher has shown that it is possible to raise
>the IQs of young deprived kids
>
>Let me remind you of another recent piece of research that showed that
>London taxi drivers' brains actually grew to suit the task of holding image
>maps in their heads.

Mr. Draper, you have referred vaguely to half a dozen "studies" or
"reseachers." May I suggest that this discussion would be improved if you
were more specific?

>>I will start the discussion with this bold statement "A healthy virgin
>>brain can be shaped to be anything including another Beethoven, Mozart, or
>>Chopin.  Its the knowledge - stupid" (not offensively meant).  Am I wrong?
>
>Bill you are spot on here.  But I suspect some people will not want to hear
>the truth.

Some other people would like very much to hear the truth, but aren't quite
as sure as you are what it is.  My own view is that extraordinary talents
are probably innate, i.e genetic in origin.  What becomes of talent is of
course influenced by environment- a Chopin raised in a world without pianos
would obviously not become a composer for that instrument.

Look, "healthy virgin brains" are born by tens of millions every year.
Many of them suffer strenuous attempts by parents and teachers to turn
them into "geniuses." Most such attempts fail.  If there were any clear
way to increase human abilities en masse and by large amounts, wouldn't
it have been discovered by now?

With the kind indulgence of our moderator (I hope), I'd like to digress
a bit and ask environmentalists what they think about someone like the
mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.  (Mathematics is somewhat less culture-
bound than music, and so may be a better place to investigate nature/
nurture questions.) Gauss, by his own account, could count before he could
speak.  He was the son of a bricklayer, and certainly spent his childhood
in no intellectual hot-house.  He grew up to be the greatest mathematician
of his era, and maybe of any era.  And what about someone like Srinivasa
Ramanujan? He was largely self-taught, and lived in colonial India in
nearly total isolation until he was twenty-five.  When he finally managed
to get to Cambridge, he was regarded by his sponsors, themselves among the
strongest intellects of the day, as a demigod.

Anyone who believes that talent is purely a matter of nurture must believe
that there was *something* in the childhoods of those two men that was

(i) So subtle that no one has the faintest idea what it may have been,

(ii) So powerful that it produced effects that made them seem almost
     superhuman.

Nature, or nurture? Apply Occam's razor!

Larry Blaine
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