There are, I think, two areas of real interest here. One is what it is that causes these apparently inherent, inborn abilities. What is it that makes the difference between a child who breezes through calculus at 12 and one who struggles with it at 20, when they started with largely the same background and opportunities? The other is how we can help children -- all children -- reach their full inborn potential. Looking at your DNA can only really address one of those questions -- but it can address that one, at least potentially, and being eligible for TIP marks you (along with most (all?) Mudders) as being in a very small subset of the population, rather far from the mean, that would be difficult to get a statistically significant sample size of without the aid of identification programs like TIP, CTY, etc.
Of course, getting information from you and your parents that went far beyond your DNA could get at other angles on these questions -- are there possibly things going on here that are deterministic but not directly genetic? Gifted kids seem to be more likely in families with gifted parents, but sometimes they happen in families with seemingly no history of intellectual giftedness; why? How? What are the things our parents and/or schooling experiences gave us that enabled us to come to their attention and subsequently excel on the SAT? Are there better things that our parents and/or schools could have done? Etc. Right now, a lot of the research on these things is at the anecdotal stage; moving beyond that would be pretty amazingly helpful to a lot of parents and future generations of gifted kids.
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There are, I think, two areas of real interest here. One is what it is that causes these apparently inherent, inborn abilities. What is it that makes the difference between a child who breezes through calculus at 12 and one who struggles with it at 20, when they started with largely the same background and opportunities? The other is how we can help children -- all children -- reach their full inborn potential. Looking at your DNA can only really address one of those questions -- but it can address that one, at least potentially, and being eligible for TIP marks you (along with most (all?) Mudders) as being in a very small subset of the population, rather far from the mean, that would be difficult to get a statistically significant sample size of without the aid of identification programs like TIP, CTY, etc.
Of course, getting information from you and your parents that went far beyond your DNA could get at other angles on these questions -- are there possibly things going on here that are deterministic but not directly genetic? Gifted kids seem to be more likely in families with gifted parents, but sometimes they happen in families with seemingly no history of intellectual giftedness; why? How? What are the things our parents and/or schooling experiences gave us that enabled us to come to their attention and subsequently excel on the SAT? Are there better things that our parents and/or schools could have done? Etc. Right now, a lot of the research on these things is at the anecdotal stage; moving beyond that would be pretty amazingly helpful to a lot of parents and future generations of gifted kids.
Newt