> If acquiring disciplined habits and learning to defer gratification end up influencing genes—if, as he rather wildly speculates, "a twelve-year-old kid could improve the intellectual nimbleness of his or her future children by studying harder now"—that would seem to multiply the Matthew Effect, for ill as well as good.
i don't think "activating" genes means they become more heritable.
You may not think so, but this area is a hot topic of research. E.g. poor nutrition at the wrong times of life has a measurable genetic effect on children.
Viewing this as just a matter of what DNA gets inherited is too simple a model. There's a lot more that goes into the picture in terms of gene regulation, a topic that for eukaryotes is still fairly young and very complicated. E.g. a lot of "junk" DNA isn't, in that it has regulatory roles even if it doesn't code a specific protein.
Within the last few months there was an interesting HN item on this topic.
That's true, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Epigenetics is a pretty hot topic these couple of years. Straight from Wikipedia:
As reported in MIT's Technology Review in February 2009, "The effects of an animal's environment during adolescence can be passed down to future offspring ... The findings provide support for a 200-year-old theory of evolution that has been largely dismissed: Lamarckian evolution, which states that acquired characteristics can be passed on to offspring."
This was shown to happen in humans and does make intuitive sense - Mealy machines are more efficient than Moore machines!
> They also skirt the question of whether producing the requisite 10,000-hour grinds may prove to be as inegalitarian and hypercompetitive as the emergence of geniuses ever was.
It's a little scary that the author just assumes that being inegalitarian is a bad thing. Excellence is inegalitarian by definition.
Excellence most certainly is not inegalitarian by definition. Excellence is about living up to YOUR full potential, not about doing it better than any other person.
i don't think "activating" genes means they become more heritable.