I once spent a day teaching some incarcerated men about the brain. Afterward, one guy asked me, “My brother and I grew up in the same house. He’s the vice president of a bank; how’d I wind up like this?” We talked, figured out a likely explanation for his brother—by whatever hiccup of chance, his motor cortex and visual cortex gave him great hand-eye coordination, and he happened to be spotted playing pickup basketball by the right person…who got him a scholarship to the fancy prep school on the other side of the tracks that groomed him into the ruling class.
