> Isn't it possible however, that James and Sarah would have had a child who would have become another Mozart, or Einstein?
At least genetically this is unlikely. Several hundred genetic variants explain a good fraction of intelligence and a random mixing of Sarah and James’ variants will include ones that increase and decrease intelligence. Getting a really good random mix of several hundred variants is unlikely. That is, intelligence regresses towards the mean.
That is a lot of pseudoscientific bullshit, if you don’t have the stats to prove it.
How is it bullshit?
There is plenty of science to backup the claim that intelligence is heritable [0]. From there the rest of what I said is basic population genetics statistics.
And what do we do with the non-Shakespeares? I guess we just dump them and move to another part of the world... Just like little Sarah, the girlfriend of the speaker's son he mentions at 8'15.
> He [James, the speaker's son, who was 16 at the time] said 'I'll never find another girl like Sarah.' And we were rather pleased about that frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.
Audience laughs and laughs at this.
I don't care for that joke either.
Yet the interesting part here is that, in some cases, it's apparently ok to intervene in your children's life -- as opposed to letting them do their thing and pursue their creativity.
Isn't it possible however, that James and Sarah would have had a child who would have become another Mozart, or Einstein?
We'll never know.