Thursday, March 6, 2014

How much heritability in an artist’s genius?


How much heritability in an artist’s genius? 


A friend has sent this video of Pt Kumar Gandharva singing at the age of ten. I, with my very limited experience of listening to music, feel that we can sense the traits of the later Kumar Gandharva in this 1934 rendering. Whether these traits come to an artist through genes, or only though her/his childhood environment? Professor David T. Lykken, Psychologist with University of Minnesota, says in his article “The Genetics of a Genius” :
“It is meaningless to ask whether Isaac Newton's genius was due more to his genes or his environment, as meaningless as asking whether the area of a rectangle is due more to its length or its width. But if a certain group of rectangles vary in width between 1 and 10 inches but vary in length from 1 to 100 inches, then we can say, for the group, that the variation in their areas is more affected by the variation in their lengths than by the lesser variation in their widths. Similarly, for people in general, it is meaningful to ask whether their genetic differences are more or less important than their differences in experience in producing the variation we observe in the traits involved in genius. The proportion of the total variation in any trait that is associated with genetic variation is called the heritability of that trait”

Pt Kumar Gandharva: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJL_b0hxEdU



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