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Nature and nurture interact to create expert performers

Ericsson and colleagues have provided an exhaustive review of research on the role of training in the acquisition of expert performance and their framework continues to be invaluable for examining issues in this area. However, several researchers have noted limitations with the theoretical foundations of the deliberate practice approach (see Abernethy et al., 2003). Rather than reiterate these, I will focus on the authors’ dismissal of the possibility of innate factors explaining expert performance—an issue relevant to my own work. Several times in their review, the authors reject innate factors by noting that improvements in skill occur in small incremental steps rather than in ‘abrupt’ leaps, which we are to assume would reflect the profile of development if innate factors constrain skill acquisition. I believe this is a straw man. No recent evidence from the field of genetics indicates that expertise spontaneously appears and most researchers agree that a devoted apprenticeship to ‘deliberate practice’ is an absolute necessity for performance at an elite or expert level. In the language of logic, researchers generally agree that deliberate practice is necessary; disagreement exists regarding whether it is sufficient. In sports, for example, an athlete with a genotype allowing them to complete large amounts of high intensity training without suffering from injury would be at an advantage over an athlete with a less resilient makeup. However, upon examination it would appear that training was the distinguishing factor between the two athletes. Although I agree with the authors’ position that the identification of individual genes that explain expert performance has been largely unsuccessful, research is beginning to mount supporting the role of specific genes as possible contributors to elite performance (e.g., ACE gene; Baker & Davids, in press). Ericsson and colleagues contend that any ‘healthy’ individual has the potential for expertise. Healthy persons, in their perspective, do not include ‘individuals who have identified and medically recognized deficits due to birth defects, accidents, diseases, and known chromosomal and other well-understood genetic disorders’. This