Are Geniuses a Product of Innate Abilities or of Environmental Factors

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Hello everyone, welcome to my post and I hope you are doing well. Today, I want to look at a topic, and understand what is really going on. I was talking to a group of friends, and there was a heated argument on if Geniuses were born Geniuses or they were made, whether is there anything like born talent, whether all talents are learned, and whether the difference between the so-called born talent is consistency and mastering. This said I will be sharing a possible holistic view of what I think is going on.

If I was to ask you to list 10 geniuses that ever lives, you would not miss the name, Albert Einstein, and if I ask you to go with names, you would mention names like Stephen Hawking, Marie Curie, Toni Morrison, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal and many more and I cannot mention them all. After looking at these names, the majority of these people are possibly innovators and inventors, and if we are going to call people geniuses because of their inventions or innovations then Satoshi Nakamoto should be a living genius but do you think that defines who a genius is?

If you are with two kids, with one being very well-adjusted and social, while the other keeps to himself. looks very uncomfortable around others, and often looks unhappy. If you were asked to pick who you think would have an IQ above 140, and be regarded as a genius at first glance, your pick might be the latter who is always keeping to himself, so I ask why? Following the harmony hypothesis, genius children often display superiority in almost all domains but with the disharmony hypothesis, geniuses have maladaptive social behavior and often display emotional problems.

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Following through disharmony hypothesis, they are not social beings, and this could be helpful in terms of investing their time into learning and the acquisition of crystallized intelligence which could later give birth to fluid intelligence. or do we say that gifted children are born with fluid intelligence? Remember that in so many cases, children who are termed geniuses are based on potential, while adults who are termed geniuses are judged based on achievements. If the brain develops to its full state before birth, then it is believed that we should all have the same natural abilities, or don't you think so? according to an article by Gagné, which was published in 2004, is the ability to turn natural abilities (which all of us possess), into outstanding skills, talent, and expertise in any field in which the natural abilities are channeled. He further said that this can be made possible if some catalysts are made available, and these catalysts include personal traits and self-management processes (in the case of the child who loves being to himself), environmental factors (looking at socio-demography, and psychological influences), and chance.

You know, intellectual ability has become the only metric to check giftedness, but does it really have to be the only metric? There are other dimensions that should be used as a measurement, in cases such as creativity, social ability, and psychomotor abilities but we have placed a metric of standardization on high intellectual ability, also can a person be gifted in all aspects of intellectual ability if they were judged by it. Can a mathematical genius be a genius in medicine? If this is not true, then we could say gifted humans just channel their natural abilities to develop their expertise and skills, which could mean they were not born geniuses, they were only precocious at their expertise which involves training the brain to that effect, or maybe I am wrong. We could also say that the difference between geniuses and non-gifted humans is quantitative rather than qualitative. Putting a focus on developing a particular expertise thereby causing an accelerated development, compared to an average person which could also be developed if the same factors can be in place.

Back to the IQ test of identifying geniuses. Since a genius is a person with a score higher than 140 on the intelligence test (as proposed by psychologist Lewis Terman). But there are so many people who fall under this category that have not been able to produce any exemplary accomplishment with examples like Marilyn Vos Savant, while so many people who do not fall under this category of the above 140 mark, are able to make exemplary achievements. Physics Nobel prize winner for coinventing the transistor William Shockley doesn't fall in the category of the 140 mark with IQ tests have been able to make exceptional marks and achievements. We could also nullify my first examples of having geniuses as innovators or inventors as people who fall under the genius group do not at all times invest and innovate.

Let me give it a stop here with this quote by Einstein which says, “If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't call it research.”. Could we say that geniuses are born or built quantitatively based on an extensive acquisition of crystallized intelligence which developed to become fluid intelligence? Can anyone get to become a genius provided they can channel their natural abilities into becoming outstanding skills if catalytic factors such as personal traits and self-management process, environmental factors, and chance to improve available?

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