Fellow Scienceblogger Jonah Lehrer has this nice little vignette in Seed arguing that practice is more important than ability. Two examples that could be forwarded for the idea of innate genius are Mozart and Tiger Woods, two child prodigies that practiced a lot harder than most people give them credit for:
Mozart began playing at two, and if he averaged 35 hours of practice a week-- his father was known as a stern taskmaster--he would, by the age of eight, have accumulated Ericsson's golden number of 10,000 hours of practice. In addition, Mozart's early symphonies are not nearly as accomplished as his later works. John Hayes of Carnegie Mellon has shown that modern symphony orchestras almost never perform or record Mozart's childhood compositions, and argues that Mozart's early works would have long ago been forgotten, were it not for his mature masterpieces. In other words, Mozart's genius wasn't innate or instantaneous--he learned how to write immortal symphonies by writing lots of mediocre ones.
As for Woods, when we watch someone like him perform (Baryshnikov, Jordan and Yo-Yo Ma also come to mind), we assume that nature is entirely responsible: Tiger Woods was simply blessed with the PGA gene. But our intuition is off the mark. Woods is the best golfer in the world because he has devoted his entire life to golf. Thanks to an encouraging father who happened to be a golf fanatic, Tiger took his first golf swing before he took his first steps. When he was 18 months old, his dad started taking him to the driving range. By the age of three, Tiger was better than most weekend amateurs.
From personal experience, I would say is that molecular biology is definitely a practice discipline rather than an innate ability discipline.
I remember in high school being really jealous of those kids who were total geniuses at math and were getting degrees as like the age of 16. What I learned later is that there are some disciplines where you can do that, and some disciplines where you can't. Lab science, particularly molecular biology, is one of those where you can't.
Molecular biology is a discipline where the subtle little details of technique matter, and you don't learn those details until you have years and sometimes decades worth of practice. It takes wisdom to know what when wrong when the experiment fails for no apparent reason, and it takes patience to push forward through what -- trust me from considerable personal experience -- will be inevitable and regular failure. Wisdom and patience aren't things that most of us are born with.
The older I get the more I realize how much experience matters in something like science. We need to abandon this idea of the innate genius because in my experience for most fields that just isn't possible.
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The article is mostly wrong. It would've been worth the effort to read a few books or journal articles on the scientific study of creativity beforehand. As for creativity in science, Dean Simonton's _Creativity in Science_ is an excellent intro book and only clocks in at 185 pages, written very accessibly. His _Origins of Genius_ is also very readable, though it covers artists as well as scientists. Hans Eysenck wrote another good book, incorporating a fair deal of Simonton's work, called _Genius: A natural history of creativity_, which is under 300 pages and also accessibly written. All three have extensive bibliographies. Simonton's probably the leader in the field, and he has lots of free PDFs at his UC Davis website.
Rather than take up lots of space here explaining what's wrong, I'll just link to extensive posts I've already written on genius in general, and how it relates to the women in science debate:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/05/g-and-creativity.php
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/07/women-in-science-part-3595726061058.php
The short & skinny is that, yes, eminence (or excellence, genius, etc.) does require a slavish devotion to one's obsession, but this unyielding single-mindedness of purpose is not something everyone's born with. And anyone who thinks IQ doesn't matter is in for a surprise when they try to train someone with an 85 IQ to become a physicist or classical composer. Or if they were to attempt to train me to be an eminent basketball player when I'm 5'8 and wiry.
Other factors matter of course, especially personality traits: being more introverted, more antagonistic, less dependable/reliable, more open, and if you're an artist, more neurotic. The various factors interact multiplicatively rather than additively, such that failure to reach a threshold on even one of them will result in failure to reach genius-level eminence (= epistatis or "emergenesis"). And of course, the factors are all moderately or highly heritable (IQ, personality traits, work ethic, etc.).
the ability to learn and the returns from practice can be innate. i practice b-ball, but i kind of suck :)
It's probably most useful to think of "talents" or "abilities" as having a range. Innate factors determine how large the range will be or how highly it will be placed, and practice determines where you fall within that range. There's also the obvious component that we practice what we're good at: having an innate talent for something means that we do well at it, and because we enjoy doing well at things, we continue to practice that same skill to get more of the reward.
The article itself seems to be suffering from a bit of a straw man complex. Who actually looks at Tiger Woods and thinks "wow, he's obviously never practiced a day in his life, it must be all nature"? Mr. Lehrer might be confusing that with the more sane thought "Even if I had practiced as much as Tiger Woods all my life, I wouldn't be as good as him".
This is actually a fairly well known phenomenon in chess - there are many people who played the game from their near-infancy, who practiced long and hard, who had the best coaches. Yet they never reached the level of the greatest grandmasters or even came close. If you want to see this in action, look at Russia in the last half of the 20th century, and China now. Do they produce more top players? Definitely, because they put so much more effort into training them. (For some reason, communist parties have a love affair with the game that borders on a fetish). But does every player they produce make it to the top echelons? No way. Despite receiving similar training and encouragement, different people have different abilities.
Unfortunately, despite good intentions, the article is simply rehashing the tired old "nature vs. nurture" argument. Mr. Lehrer says:
"Woods is the best golfer in the world because he has devoted his entire life to golf. Thanks to an encouraging father who happened to be a golf fanatic, Tiger took his first golf swing before he took his first steps. When he was 18 months old, his dad started taking him to the driving range. By the age of three, Tiger was better than most weekend amateurs."
And for every father who trained up a Tiger Woods or Mozart, how many have driven children to do things that they are not good at and even hate, to the point of misery for both parent and child?