One logical flaw in their argument, one I've seen frequently made by professors of psychology who focus on individual differences, is that they don't know whether or not the difference among participants in the Study of Exceptional Talent (a group of young people who score high on the SAT at a young age, a group that includes an immediate relative of mine) is from what they call "talent" or from practice. Nothing about the way the Study of Exceptional Talent gathers its rather limited data about study participants allow distinguishing one possibility from the other. There is no basis from the data-gathering done in that study to conclude that there is ANY difference between the "99.1 percentile" and the "99.9 percentile," especially given the error bands around SAT scores.

One of the really amazing things about the export performance literature by Ericsson, Charness, and others

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

is that it comes out of a tradition in psychology--individual differences psychology--that very readily defaults to genetic explanations and very readily ignores possible environmental explanations of the same individual differences. Ericsson's experimental results in training digit span (which is part of the item content of same IQ test batteries) were completely surprising when published in peer-reviewed journals--no one ever imagined that digit span

http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~kantor/t/MLIS/551/public_dump/m...

was such a malleable ability.

But digit span, which is malleable (trainable), is closely related to the "working memory capacity" that the authors are implicitly claiming is not malleable. That is not at all clear, and much experimental work suggests that working memory capacity is more malleable than the authors acknowledge in this opinion piece.

Also on-point here is pg's comment from his essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known"

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

"I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."