Talent is innate

Now I will to explain my case more fully, and address my opponent's case. Various studies have found the heritability of IQ to be between 70% and 80% in adults (. http://en.wikipedia.org...). Put another way, according to scientific experiments, such as identical twin studies, only 20-30% of your brain power is determined by your environment. The vast majority is determined by how smart your parents were. So having a smart set of parents - even if you were adopted away to a family of really dumb people immediately after birth - is enough to make you talented, because you are likely to have inherited a high IQ, which gives you the ability to acquire skills far more easily. We (mostly) get our bodies and mental ability from our parents. I doubt my opponent will really contest that point, and he hasn't done so thus far. How we use our bodies, or to what purpose we put our minds, is our individual decision alone. But what really determines our ability to excel in what we choose to put our minds to is our innate ability. Everyone can practice and become proficient at doing something. Only those with innate potential can excel and thereby become truly "talented". All of my opponent's examples only serve to prove this point. My opponent mentioned three people he considered talented - Mozart, Judit Polgar, and Usain Bolt. Mozart's father had obviously passed some of his musical ability on to his son, as well as encouraged him as he grew up. Lots of people were encouraged to be musical at a young age (myself included). What set Mozart apart, however, was that his brain had more creativity and musical aptitude than an average brain. That's because so much of his brain's make-up was determined by his parents at birth. Mozart wasn't born to be a great composer, but rather with the ability to become a great composer. Judit Polgar is an interesting case. Chess has traditionally been a very male-orientated game, largely because the female brain is in many ways unlike the male brain, and the structure of the game of chess generally favors the kinds of thinking in which men are superior. That's why despite working at least as hard as any top chess player, Polgar has never been ranked higher than 8th in the world, and is currently only about 30th. When it comes to the World Chess Championship, or any other competition, it doesn't matter that Polgar has put in just as many hours as all the men she is surrounded by. What matters is that she's a girl, and therefore she's at a disadvantage. That's why chess usually has women's leagues. The point is that Judit, being a girl, does not have an innate talent for chess, and that's why she (or any other given woman) does not have the same potential to be the world number one. But even if we were to accept the presumption that Judit Polgar qualifies as talented, the source of her chess-playing prowess would undoubtedly be her mind, most of which was inherited from her father, who was himself a famous Hungarian chess player. Again, being the daughter of a top chess player does not automatically make you good at chess, but it gives you the potential to do better than somebody without such ancestry. Being male does not automatically mean you will beat Judit Polgar, but it does give you a slight competitive edge. Usain Bolt, my opponent has already agreed, has certain genetic attributes that allow him to run fast. My opponent hypothesises that with training Usain's brother could sprint that fast as well, which only seems to agree with my point that this ability is inherited. Unlike many other people in the world, the Bolt brothers have the inborn ability to run fast. Others may practice running fast and gain average placings in municipal marathons, but it takes a Usain Bolt to go further. Lots of runners push themselves, but as history proves, fast running is tied to certain genetic characteristics, like being black. As for my opponent's study, just because many people don't use their full potential doesn't mean they are not talented. All that the study really showed was that some people have the genetic power to do well in marathons, and that these people aren't necessarily the ones doing the marathons. To borrow from my opponent's example, being able to blink 20 times a second is a talent, even if you never do it. So these people who have the genetic power to do well in athletics, and yet choose a life of academics instead, still qualify as talented. Basketball is not a sport where being tall is vital, however, being taller does give you an advantage in goal scoring. Lots of people try really hard to be top basketball players, but every single year, the top scorers in the NFL are also among the tallest. Again, that's not to say that being tall automatically makes you a good basketballer, but it gives you the ability to play basketball well (and if you have good hand-eye coordination or can slam dunk a ball easily, those are advantages too). All these things are mostly innate. The future top scorers of the NFL are therefore mostly decided with every new birth. What my opponent seems to be essentially arguing is that without a nurturing environment the many thousands of potential musical geniuses won't grow up to become musical geniuses. If you grow up without a chessboard, you are unlikely to become world chess champion. My argument is, however, that this advantage pales in significance compared to whether you actually have the mental capacity to play chess really well, or the creative ability to be a Mozart. Many people are trained, but only very few excel. What makes you truly talented, beyond the norm, is not the training (because otherwise all who train would excel) but natural ability. That's what matters, and that's what's innate. My opponent needs to explain why he believes that, with sufficient practice, anyone could be a top-class sprinter. That's like saying we're all the same. We're not. The resolution is affirmed.