“Giftedness and Genetics: The Emergenic-Epigenetic Model and Its Implications”, 2005-05 (; similar):
The genetic endowment underlying giftedness may operate in a far more complex manner than often expressed in most theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. First, an endowment may be emergenic. That is, a gift may consist of multiple traits (multidimensional) that are inherited in a multiplicative (configurational), rather than an additive (simple) fashion. Second, the endowment may not appear all at once but, rather, will more likely unfold via an epigenetic process. These 2 complications have consequences regarding such aspects of giftedness as the likelihood of early signs, the appearance of early versus late bloomers, the distribution of giftedness in the general population, and the stability and continuity of gifts over the course of childhood and adolescence. These complexities lead to a 4-fold typology of giftedness that has important practical implications.
…To sum up, the consequences presented in Table 1 imply that the phenomenon of giftedness is far more complicated than often imagined. To the extent that the emergenic-epigenetic model describes the inheritance and development of giftedness, then a particular gift cannot be understood without first discovering if it is additive or multiplicative and if it is simple or complex. Naturally, the phenomenon of giftedness is even more intricate than even this model suggests. After all, I have only scrutinized the genetics of giftedness—on the developmental complexities of natural endowment. The analysis would become all the more complicated if I were to incorporate environmental factors explicitly into the developmental model. Nevertheless, it must be obvious that to the extent that a specific gift operates according to emergenic inheritance and epigenetic development, the complications are already far more prodigious than implied by most dictionary definitions.
[Note that the content of this paper almost completely overlaps with the almost-identically-titled 2005, “Genetics of Giftedness: The Implications of an Emergenic-Epigenetic Model”; you need not read the other. (Simonton is notorious for self-plagiarizing.)]