Tuesday, 9 May 2017

evolution - Are people genetically predisposed to being interested in specific fields/ideas? How does specialization occur?


I'm not sure if I formulated my question well, but I'm curious about a couple statements made by Steven Pinker and and James Heckman.


In this interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ9Ad6s8g7I&t=7m51s Steven Pinker says



"there'd be a wide variety of families I could have grown up with and had the same kinds of interests"



and in this interview with James Heckman, he says:




But anyway, Smith says people are basically born the same and at age 8 one can't really see much difference among them. But then starting at age 8, 9, 10, they pursue different fields, they specialize and they diverge. In his mind, the butcher and the lawyer and the journalist and the professor and the mechanic, all are basically the same person at age 8. This is wrong. IQ is basically formed by age 8, and there are huge differences in IQ among people. Smith was right that people specialize after 8, but they started specializing before 8.



Can anyone explain Heckman's statement that people "start specializing before 8"?


What do we know about genetic influence on interests? (Is this the right stackexchange to ask this on?)




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