Born Supremacy?
Science & Spirit

This year, millions of us will take IQ tests in order to learn where we fall on the scale of intelligence. Most scientists would try to convince us that our score, like our potential, was decided at birth—that smarts and skill are a matter of genetics. But a small band of dissenters is out to prove we can, quite literally, make up our own minds.


For Rüdiger Gamm, the stakes were high. When the starting signal sounded, the second timed trial would begin, and he would have a final chance to better his score. For one minute, his only focus would be the fifty randomly chosen dates between the years 1600 and 2100 that appeared on the piece of paper in front of him. To figure out which day of the week each date fell on, he would have to work fast, but not too fast: If he got more than one answer wrong, he would be disqualified, no matter how many right answers came afterward. But if he could better Matthias Kesselschläger, Gamm would have what he had come to Annaberg-Buchholz seeking: the title of first-ever “Mental Calculation World Cup Winner for the category Calendar from Memory.”

But that was not to be. The two Germans would finish first and second in the 2004 calendar calculations competition, but Kesselschläger would best Gamm’s twenty-two correct results with thirty-three of his own—a new world record. Still, Gamm, now thirty-four, is considered one of the best human calculators in the world, able to multiply eight-digit numbers in his head. He also can calculate ninth powers and fifth roots, and divide one integer by another to sixty decimal places. What may be even more remarkable is that up until the age of twenty, he had no interest—and no talent—in math.

Then he came across an algorithm for calendrical calculation, and everything changed. Math, a subject he hated in school, became exciting, and Gamm began to practice the algorithm for fun, sometimes more than four hours a day. In 2000, psychologist Mauro Pesenti and his colleagues at the Cognitive Science Research Unit at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium decided to use positron emission tomography to examine Gamm’s brain, comparing its activity to that of normal subjects. They found that when performing mental arithmetic, Gamm used more of his brain than the others did; while all subjects showed activity in twelve parts of the brain, Gamm showed activity in five additional areas. Yet his brain didn’t appear unusual in any other way, nor did he show great aptitude when tested in areas other than math.

Since Gamm developed his remarkable computing skills so late in life, he is not considered a prodigy. According to the standard definition, a “prodigy” is someone like Michael Hebelka—a child who displays mastery of a field usually undertaken by only adults. When he was nine, Hebelka taught himself a programming language known as MOO, which software developers have long used to create complex adventure games. Soon, he was spending several hours a day at the screen, adding to his repertoire JavaScript, Perl, and Python—languages aspiring engineers generally don’t tackle until college or later. He would stay focused for so long, says his mom, Susan, “I used to do silly things like yell ‘FIRE!’ or ‘HELP!’ or give blood-curdling screams when he was into his programming, just to see if he was aware of anything around him. Of course, he wouldn’t react at all.”

Few studies have looked at the neurological activity of prodigies, so it’s hard to know what’s going on in Hebelka’s brain. The best guess comes from Michael O’Boyle, a psychologist and director of the University of Melbourne’s Morgan Centre in Australia. O’Boyle used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the brains of mathematical prodigies with those of average kids. When performing a mathematical task, he found, children with an aptitude for numbers show six to seven times the normal blood flow to parts of the brain responsible for operations related to math, including parts of the right hemisphere and frontal lobes. While their brains aren’t physically different, it would appear they are being used differently. But how—and, better yet, why? And where does someone like Gamm fit in?

Some cognitive theorists like Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, authors of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve, argue that prodigies like Hebelka achieve computing mastery at an early age primarily as a result of their biological makeup. Certain genetic characteristics, they say, allow such youngsters to tackle high-level reasoning tasks with a facility that eludes other children. Even though these specific characteristics have yet to be identified, most scientists today share this general view.

There is an outspoken minority, however, that falls on the other end of the nature-versus-nurture spectrum, a group that attributes the accomplishments of children like Hebelka less to heritable factors than to what Boston College psychology professor Ellen Winner calls an insatiable “rage to master,” which can be awakened by parents and teachers who foster efficient learning as well as enthusiasm for a task. Famed violinist and educator Shinichi Suzuki espoused this theory, believing high achievers surpass their peers chiefly because they put many hours of constructive work into mastering the field that interests them. But “people tend to gravitate toward disciplines that they’re good at and that they can learn easily,” warns Winner, author of Gifted Children: Myths and Realities. “If a kid has a high level of natural ability in math, but not in music, there’s absolutely no expectation that he would develop a rage to master in music.”

Asking whether very high achievers are born or made incites heated debate among researchers because the answer has profound implications for the rest of us. Does the fortunate—or unfortunate—accident of our genetics relegate us to a limited range of career possibilities? Do we all have the potential to become the next Albert Einstein, Bobby Fischer, or Rüdiger Gamm? More to the point, can any of us achieve any mentally demanding goal we choose if only we put our minds to it? And if sheer determination can reliably help attain mastery in a given field, then do biology and traditional notions of intelligence matter as much as we’ve always thought?

It wasn’t until the early 1900s that Americans began to embrace the concept of IQ tests—the metric most people consult to assess genius potential. In 1916, Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman revised and improved the Binet- Simon intelligence scale, which would be renamed the “Stanford-Binet.” He then gathered 1,500 of the most intelligent children in California’s school system—selected by teachers and testing—and followed them for years through a longitudinal research project he called “Genetic Studies of Genius.” Many of these kids, Terman found, went on to superior scholastic achievement and high occupational success; by age thirty-five, they had published ninety books, and by age forty-five, they were responsible for 2,000 scientific papers, 230 patents, and thirty-three novels.

Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist at King’s College London, believes that a variety of longitudinal studies like Terman’s support his belief that intelligence powerfully influences one’s capacity to attain expert levels of functioning. Not only is IQ the greatest determinant of a person’s eventual success in a chosen field, he claims, but the factors contributing to this intelligence are more heritable than environmental. The evidence, he says, shows IQ is largely in the genes: “There’s no trait anywhere in psychology or molecular biology that shows stronger evidence for genetic influence.”

Indeed, over the last few decades, familial studies have shown that identical twins raised in separate environments almost always have very similar intellectual abilities; on a scale of zero to one, their IQs show a correlation factor of 0.76. The IQs of siblings, not twins, raised apart are less similar, with a correlation factor of 0.47, and IQs of cousins, again, brought up in separate environments, diverge even more, with only 0.15 correlation. Since the genes that code for human intelligence have not yet been isolated and identified, however, concluding that intelligence has a strong genetic component is like assuming the plumber has stopped by because your faucet has been fixed. All the evidence bears out your assumption, but unless you actually saw him inside the house, you wouldn’t be able to prove he’d been there.

In an attempt to pin down the particular genes that help determine intelligence, Plomin compared the genomes of children with average intelligence to those of children with high IQs using sensitive DNA microarray testing, which can simultaneously measure the expression levels of large numbers of genes. Yet isolating “smart genes” proved more difficult than anticipated. Unlike traits such as colorblindness or cystic fibrosis, which are linked to only one or two genes, intelligence appears to be a vastly complex quality, dependent on a wide variety of polymorphisms, or unique DNA sequences, that are scattered throughout the genome. “It’s not just one or two or ten,” says Plomin, “but maybe hundreds of genes,” each of which contributes to the effect. Together, these genetic influences on performance are significant, he claims, although “that doesn’t mean environmental intervention wouldn’t have an effect.”


In the 1980s, when Susan, Judit, and Sofia Polgar were growing up in Hungary, the sisters followed a strict chess-training regimen that involved practicing five hours each day, solving thousands of chess puzzles, and playing matches blindfolded. Innate talent was irrelevant, believed their father Laszlo, a psychologist who was convinced he could turn any developmentally normal child into a prodigy, a theory expounded in his book Bring Up Genius! To the world’s amazement, he produced a trio of world-class chess champions, with Susan, the oldest, becoming the first female grandmaster. Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson, however, is hardly shocked: Given sufficient time and training, he says, anyone can become highly skilled at any mental endeavor—even those activities, like music and chess, generally thought to be off-limits to all but “natural geniuses.”

In a study of orchestral musicians, Ericsson found that what distinguished the top performers from the rest was not higher IQ, but a more significant time commitment to their pursuit. By the age of twenty, the best musicians, as determined by their professors at the Music Academy of West Berlin in Germany, had spent about 10,000 hours in goal-directed practice, followed by an average of 8,000 for the next-best musicians, and 5,000 for the least accomplished. Likewise, the most accomplished chess champions aren’t the ones at the very top of IQ distributions, but those who invest the most time in perfecting their game. “Our work has shown the incredible ways that the capabilities of any individual can change as a result of hard work,” Ericsson says. “Genes can’t explain that.”

One of Ericsson’s first subjects, known as “SF,” consistently scored in the average IQ range, but with many hours of guided practice was able to improve his short-term memory to the point where he could recite more than eighty random digits in a row after hearing them dictated only once. (Enhanced memory is believed to be the key to Gamm’s computing ability.) While the average, untrained person can recall about seven digits in a sequence, other subjects have shown dramatic improvement similar to SF’s. Mastery, according to Ericsson, is achieved through significant amounts of “deliberate practice”—activity designed, often by a teacher, to improve specific aspects of performance. Intelligence, defined as that largely heritable factor measured by IQ tests, might slightly boost a person’s odds of success in a chosen field at the beginning, he says, “but our studies show that as you ascend to higher levels of performance, it won’t help as much.”

Many educators and scientists, Ericsson says, are giving too much credence to the idea that mental abilities are predetermined and, as a result, are inadvertently discouraging children from achieving their full potential. “If you believe ability can’t be changed, that has a cooling effect on motivation,” he explains. And motivation, says Ericsson, is crucial. “If I were to take custody of you for the next ten years and make you spend four to five hours a day studying chess, you could become a chess champion,” he says. “But would you agree to do it? You’d probably say, ‘I don’t think so!’”

From the other side of the Atlantic, Plomin scoffs at the assertion that certain teaching methods and long hours of practice trump innate capacities in shaping mastery. “I do believe it’s true that if you gave a child 10,000 hours of training in music or chess, you could make that child very good,” Plomin says. “But if they’re not naturally very good, they’ll see other kids who are doing better than them, with much less practice, and they’ll get discouraged. If they persist, they’ll still be pretty good, but there will still be other people that are tremendously better.”


In 1969, Joseph Bates was so motivated—and reasoned so well mathematically—that he entered Johns Hopkins University as a regular student at the age of thirteen, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in four years. Bates, and soon many other gifted students like him, often went to see Julian C. Stanley, a quantitative psychologist at Johns Hopkins who quickly realized that high-ability students could be identified systematically through standardized tests like the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Throughout the 1970s, Stanley held regular talent searches and experimented with a variety of accelerated programs, eventually establishing the Center for Talented Youth, or CTY, in 1979.

CTY was designed to cultivate the extraordinary natural ability already displayed by students, potentially improving the likelihood that the child with a sky-high math IQ will one day undertake Nobel Prize-winning research. The courses, which today are offered in subjects such as bay ecology and fiction writing, meet for several hours a day, are dominated by intense class discussions, and include copious amounts of homework. “If smart kids aren’t challenged, they can get intellectually lazy, lose motivation, and fail to reach their potential,” director of research Carol Mills says, adding that the advanced material helps kids get excited about attaining the highest possible levels of achievement.

Students qualify for the center’s summer academic programs by scoring in the top percentiles for their age group on standardized tests. (Scores on such tests correlate with IQ to such an extent that several researchers have developed SAT-IQ conversion formulas.) Mills believes most kids selected for CTY probably have some level of innate advantage over their peers, and that those who have the most natural aptitude in a given subject area will be among those who are hungriest to reach high levels of achievement. “Is there a global intelligence that some kids naturally have? Absolutely,” she says.

Guiding CTY are the two factors—innate talent and hard work—that have divided cognitive researchers and seem to separate kids like Bates and Hebelka from men like Gamm. Even if genes play a large part in establishing our aptitude for a certain task, mastery does not come without training and practice. And if genes don’t mean everything, and conscientious devotion to a chosen activity is, at least in part, the way to peak performance, then isn’t it possible that with a little enthusiasm and a lot of sustained effort, we all can achieve much more than we dreamed we were capable of, regardless of what number an intelligence test assigns us?

“There’s a constant, seamless interaction and interflow between genes and environment,” says California intelligence researcher, psychologist, and educator Thomas Armstrong, who has written extensively about learning and human development. “In the end, you should let yourself be driven by your passion. That’s the key to success, and that’s what trumps all genetic influences and environmental interventions.”