Are you born with talent or do you adapt it over time? (Split from TOGS' thread)

[Atmosfear]

Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Being bigger than the other kids isn't a genetic predisposition as much as it is a product of birthday. Since childhood groups are stratified by grade cutoff ages, those who are closest to the cutoff dates can have as much as a full year advantage of growth over another. If the cutoff is January 1, and you are born on January 2, you are almost a year older than all the kids born in December. By the time this is distilled through continual selection processes, the only kids left are the ones near the cutoff, not because they had any better talent but because they signed up with a good birthday.

By the way this has all sorts of implications for the education system and has been a fairly prominent critique of the Ivy selection process. Gifted programs, for example, are naturally biased towards older children.

[coqauvin]

By the way this has all sorts of implications for the education system and has been a fairly prominent critique of the Ivy selection process. Gifted programs, for example, are naturally biased towards older children.

I never really noticed this - I was in a gifted program here, and the birthdays were split pretty evenly across the classroom. There were slightly fewer birthdays later in the year, but close enough to even (probably no more than 3 or 4 kids in a class of 25~) that there wasn't an exceptional difference.

Also, in all the classes I took there, there was no real notable difference in intelligence/capability levels of the olderish kids to the younger ones. I was one of the later ones, being born in late september, but my average was consistently in the top 5 every year.