|Are You a Genius?| |By Beth Schwartzapfel '01| In his new book,
The Genius In All Of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About
Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong, best-selling author David
Shenk takes issue with the traditional view of intelligence as
the sum of a person's genes and environment (G+E). Under this
paradigm, he writes, environmental influences act on genes that
are already set. In the new model Shenk describes in his book,
"genes express themselves strictly in accordance to their
environment. Everything that we are, from the first moment of
conception, is a result of this process." Genes only suggest a
direction rather than determine it. G+E should be revised to
GxE.BAM Do you believe we focus too much on whether we're shaped
by our biology or by our environment? DS We need to get past the
nature-nurture debate. I'm not making this crazy 1970s argument
that we're all blank slates, that we all have exactly the same
potential, that genetic differences don't matter. They do
matter. You've got genes