But why an army of *nerd* clones?

[steuard]

I just got a letter from Duke University. Apparently, they want my DNA.

Years ago, Duke arranged for me (and many other 7th graders) to take the SAT. I did pretty well (very well, for a 7th grader). Now, some researchers there(?) are doing a study looking for "genetic markers of intellectual functioning" and they tell me that "There is probably no group of individuals in this country who possess higher measured cognitive abilities than the Duke TIP group to which you belong." (That's just one example of the flattery they've used.)

I'm not sure whether to participate. Being used as a genetic exemplar of brilliance sounds great and all, but I find the premise of the study to be pretty cheesy. They apparently believe that my ability to take standardized tests way back in 7th grade is supposed to correlate significantly with intelligence. That was probably a factor, but especially at that early age I'd think that my parents' habit of reading to me (and encouraging me to read grown-up books) contributed at least as much, to say nothing of the Lincoln public school system's fantastic gifted program (I had already had personal math mentors for several years at that point). It's hard for me to believe that "good 7th grade SAT score" will correlate clearly with anything but "white upper-middle class background".

So, what do you think: should I give them my genes or not?

[Edit: Just to be clear (since patrissimo seems to have missed my point a bit), I recognize that intelligence is a part of why I did well on the test. The genetic markers they identify may well correspond roughly to "smart white upper-middle class" kids. But I have serious doubts about their ability to disentangle those factors.]

Comments

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

In my sophomore year of high school, a classmate learned what my 7th grade SAT score had been, without knowing it was a 7th grade score, and on the strength of that alone, asked if I would be willing to accept money to take his SAT for him. I looked at him like he was crazy, and the conversation went no further. But I took it as an indicator then of how weird I was, even given my demographic background.

There are, I'm sure, a host of environmental factors that knock some kids out of the running for Awesome 7th Grade SAT Performance who might otherwise have a chance at it. My SIL talks about the differences in parenting styles she sees in parents of toddlers -- white middle-class parents tend to understand that toddlers need to explore, and encourage exploration within appropriate boundaries (i.e., not electrical outlets or Grandma's china), while poor black parents tend to label their children's attempts at exploration as "bad" and respond with punishment rather than redirection. (Note: I'm not against the occasional punishment to enforce boundaries; you don't want your kid getting electrocuted or cut on broken glass because they did things you could have taught them not to do. But when exploration consistently gets a large negative response, you're going beyond enforcing boundaries to teaching a kid not to explore, to stay only with what's safe and known. It's that killing of a child's natural scientific curiosity that my SIL sees, and that she thinks (and I suspect she's right) matters more than a lot of other factors that have been studied more.) How much "math talk" a child is around has a lot to do with how early and readily they start picking up on math. I know someone who spent a few years teaching at a high-quality Montessori preschool that served both paying middle-class clients and charity (or government-funded?) clients drawn from a poor black neighborhood, most of whom heard very little language at all at home; the poor kids often entered the program barely talking, and thanks to the preschool, would almost catch up with their middle-class age-mates by the end of the year. Environment does play a role.

And yet: I remember standing in line the morning of the SAT, hearing one high school senior remark to his buddy, "There's all these smart little kids running around, and it's making me feel stupid." (I immediately felt much less apprehensive about the test.) I remember encountering geometry problems for the first time while taking the SAT that morning -- I learned all the necessary geometry in my accelerated math class the following month -- and the feeling of exhilaration I got from actually being challenged on a test for the first time in my life and having to figure out things that no one had tried to laboriously teach me. I remember going to TIP and finally discovering that there was a place where it was OK to be smart, and still not really opening up enough to make friends until my third summer there because being open with anyone had been so beaten out of me by my public school classmates.

And now I'm watching three (soon to be four) kids grow up, and realizing how much of their abilities and personalities was there from the very beginning. There are things I can do to help them shore up their weaknesses, and things I can do to help the world get out of their way so they can run with their strengths and sometimes soar. But I cannot fundamentally change the fact that D struggles with perfectionism but automatically picks up on occasions when her brothers could use a little help accepting what Mommy has asked them to do, or the fact that T moves through a world of self-created chaos and somehow constructs fantastical stories and astute mathematical observations and exhales them as if he's just been breathing the whole time, not doing anything unusual here, nope, not him, or the fact that J feels the need to impose order wherever he goes (and does so with unusually precise manual dexterity).

(to be continued)

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

(continued)

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