“The genius in all of us is our built-in ability to improve ourselves and our world.”

David Shenk thinks you misunderstand genetics. It’s not personal – he thinks pretty much everyone does. He argues in The Genius in All of Us that in trying to distinguish nature vs. nurture, we have missed the fact that who we are is determined by their interaction. Genes are turned on and off by the environment in which we live, and in the vast majority of activities for which we never reach our genetic limitations, it is practice and context that will determine just how talented we are. All of us have the potential to be a genius.

He points to Cooper and Zubek’s experiments with maze-bright and maze-dull rats, chosen as such because they descend from generations of rats who have been relatively good or poor at solving mazes. In normal conditions, the bright rats impressively outperform the dull ones. In enriched or restricted environments, however, both types of rats performed almost the same, whether as geniuses or dullards. Genetics do make a difference, but that difference can be overwhelmed by the influence of context and environment, despite what humans usually assume.

Shenk makes an important point, that we often neglect or underrate the importance of environment and its interaction with genes. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the shortness of the book (136 pages of argument, plus 200 of endnotes and citations), it can often feel like he hasn’t explored the ideas, but rather just rushed through them without examining their implications. He focuses, for example, on the idea that we can all be geniuses with a supportive environment: equally meaningful, however, is the implication that no one can be a genius without hard work and environment, and I am suspicious his choice of one perspective over the other is intended to sell books, not provide insight. He also sometimes seems to get carried away by his own arguments, so much so that he leaves his focus on interactions and seems to imply that environment is actually dominant over genetics, a suggestion he rightfully criticizes in the inverse.

The nature of heritability is always a controversial one, and the debate is often unfortunately ideologically, not factually, based. In that respect, Shenk has done a good job attempting to stick to the science, referring to many studies and explicitly citing his research. Nevertheless, a more thorough examination of the issues would likely be more compelling, and less likely to leave the reader feeling unsatisfied.

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