Talent: Willetts versus Smith

In that speech, David Willetts said:

The experiences children have had by the age of 11 are so different that it is a fantasy that you can somehow fairly distinguish between them at that age.

Most of the criticism he's got for saying this comes from those who believe we can fairly distinguish between children of different ability, and so should practice academic selection.
But might both be wrong? Could it be that children in fact have very similar ability and aptitudes?
Sounds like 1960s lefty liberal drivel? Maybe. But here's Adam Smith:

The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education. When they came into the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were perhaps, very much alike, and neither their parents nor playfellows could perceive any remarkable difference. (Wealth of Nations, I.2.4)

This raises three possibilities.
One is that Smith was just wrong.
Another - mentioned by Willetts - is that things have changed since then. Parents invest more, and differentially, in young children, and perhaps assortative mating is more common now than then, so 6-8 year-olds are no longer very much alike.
The third possibility is that Smith was in fact onto something. Perhaps the salience today of two rare fields in which natural talent is important - sport and professional music - have led us to believe that innate talent is important when in fact the work of Anders Ericsson suggests it might not be. Perhaps instead the difference between street porters and philosophers is due to socialization rather than natural ability.

Comments

[Uncle Smokes]

Practice makes perfect.

[Heraklites]

Surely all Ericsson has demonstrated is that practice can make a lot of difference to people who have high ability to begin with. Mozart wouldn't have been Mozart without all that early music study, Monica Seles wouldn't have won the French Open at 16 without all that early coaching. That seems a long way from showing that training is more important than innate ability.

[Maynard Handley]

Hmm. An actual FACTUAL question, not an issue of morality or opinion, and your best way to resolve the issue is to look at the opinion from someone 230 years, someone who, as far as I know, never engaged in even the most rudimentary techniques for gathering data from large populations?

What's next? Let's read Aristotle to gain insight into the best materials for building quantum cascade lasers?

If only there were some discipline, based on statistical and scientific techniques that had actually gathered data on this subject. We might call it, I don't know, maybe sociology, or maybe psychology.

Or, if that's too much effort, why not just rent a copy of 42-Up and come to your own conclusions? A handful of British kids is still more of a sample than zero.