I think that people are completely misinterpreting the article and the retraction in this thread, whether willingly or not. I don't think anyone is seriously q

I think that people are completely misinterpreting the article and the retraction in this thread, whether willingly or not. I don't think anyone is seriously questioning the fact that some people have more aptitude or intelligence than others. That's pretty commonly accepted fact. However, the general belief is that intelligence follows a roughly Gaussian (bell curve) distribution, and that it's roughly continuous. Mechanistically, one can imagine that intelligence is a convolution of genetic and other factors that are so thoroughly mixed that there are no discrete steps. The theory behind a two-humped camel model of aptitude or intelligence would then be that some magic x-factor is so significant that it splits the underlying distribution in two, into the "cans" and the "can nots". While the existence of such an x-factor would be a really interesting finding, it wouldn't change the underlying fact that some people have more innate ability to program than others, just like some people have more innate ability to be doctors or lawyers or concert pianists than others. It would just tend to make that difference much starker. What it also wouldn't change is the fact that innate ability doesn't always correlate to success in a given career, or in life. Many other factors other than innate ability, such as drive and ability to collaborate with others, affect whether someone is going to be successful at their job. Also, people can learn. Even someone who doesn't have innate talent can become very skilled, if they work really hard at it. So, even if the study were valid, which it's not, the finding itself is more of an academic interest than an excuse to start treating coding job interviews as a "sword in the stone" test of whether you've got "it" or not.