26 PINNING DOWN POTENTIALsay that “most researchers now believe that young minds are better
thought of as developing muscles.... Th ey are made up of a lot of inter-
woven strands, and they get stronger with exercise. Like musculature,
minds have a ge ne tic ele ment to them. Diff er ent people are born with
diff er ent physical ‘potential’, diff er ent ranges and aptitudes.”^30
In chapter 4 and beyond, I pres ent a quite diff er ent notion of the envi-
ronment. I show how, compared with the attention given to genes, the
nature of the environment has been sadly neglected (and how that has led
to so many misunderstandings about the nature of genes). Th ere is a need
for an “enviromics” every bit as detailed and pored over as the genomics
the public have been blitzed with over the past de cade.
Th at will also mean understanding the environment at many diff er ent
levels, including the social context in which human cognition evolved
and operates. For example, it means realizing that theories of ge ne tic
determinism themselves become a deleterious part of the environment
in which people develop and come to think of their potential. Sugges-
tions that they are defi cient in genes and brains really do aff ect children’s
cognitive development and their per for mance as adults (see chapter 10).
THE BRAIN AND POTENTIALTh e potential said to be coded in diff er ent ranks in the genes is thought
to be refl ected in the varying quality of neural networks in the brain. As
mentioned above, James Flynn states that intelligence “begins with
ge ne tic potential for a better- engineered brain.” Just as psychologists
and educators have turned themselves into quasi- geneticists in recent
years, many others have sought to become brain scientists. Taken together,
these trends have produced a general conviction that this is the way to
understand individual diff erences in potential and in human be hav ior
generally.
In princi ple, there is nothing wrong with an awareness of how the
brain supports mental functions. But its usefulness depends on the model
of the brain that emerges and the nature of its relationship with those
functions. I simply challenge the conceptual foundations on which yet
more hype, and inappropriate models of the brain, are springing up. As
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