1. Musical talent is hereditary to a significant degree.
2. Musical talent is NOT a physical trait.
3. Therefore, being hereditary is not a proof of being a physical trait, despite the literal physical differences in DNA sequence.
Deal?
In light of your acceptance of intelligence having a significant genetic component, I wanted to re-evaluate the discussion from the top. You pushed back on my attempts to discuss genetics and made strong claims about training being important for intelligence, and now you’re making strong claims about genetics being important. I don’t know where that leaves us. My original point, recall, was that genetic variation doesn’t support the popular high-IQ narrative of so called super geniuses. Genetics cannot explain your claim of 100x difference in intelligence, and the only thing we’ve talked about that does explain it is training, which is not genetic, and, we both agree, boring.
The first reason I insist on the difference is because absolutely everything indirectly depends on physicality of the biological body. Spirituality aside, there isn't a single thing about humans that doesn't depend on the shape or size or chemistry or electrical charge of something somewhere. This makes "physical trait" an utterly useless category, one that clearly includes playing piano, and I really don't like that.
The second reason I insist on the difference is because the correlation doesn't have to be linear. There's no reaso why it can't be quadratic or logarithmic or exponential or hyperbolic or whatever. Being a literal physical feature imposes normal distribution with tight variance. Merely being correlated does not. If you still want to argue geniuses are not that much more intelligent than average people, you'd need more evidence than simple hereditability.
When you say "intelligence is a physical trait", I hear "there is a part of parts of the brain that have a certain total volume/mass/density/number of neurons/synapses/neural pathways/etc., and that number is the literal definition of intelligence". It's how it works for every other thing that we call a physical trait. If you didn't mean it like that, maybe you should have used a different terminology from the get go.
Now excuse me while I go looking for 10-15 more citations on the genetic component of musical ability that you're definitely not going to dismiss as irrelevant for one reason or another.
Your statement about correlation being an admission of not being a physical trait sounds naive to me; it’s ignoring the existence of polygenic traits.
Another source of terminology confusion here is the difference in what we mean by ‘intelligence’, and it’s probably way more important than what ‘physical attribute’ means. I really meant something different by ‘intelligence’ than you mean, and that’s my fault for not clarifying I was trying to focus on heritability and factor out learned skill.
I would love to see additional references about music and heredity, I’m looking forward to it.