Roland S Persson Opens in new window., "The idea of human giftedness: Reclaiming sense and reason from ideology and self-serving bias": 

The lack of consensus of how to define both giftedness and talent has haunted both practice and research for a long time. Increasing understanding, usually being the hallmark of science is largely missing. This book explores likely reasons for stagnation. This is by no means unique to the field, but the problems are more troubling for giftedness and talent scholars than for researchers and practitioners in other areas of scholarly pursuit. The reason is a worldwide demand for gifted and talented behavior as a direct result of the New World Order. The global knowledge economy has demanding objectives and frequently fail to understand how to implement them by any other means than by legislation and policy, which as unfortunate consequences for society. To understand why the research field has largely turned inert one must understand and acknowledge the dynamics of social evolution which, for the sake of group cohesion, will always prompt dogmatism, bias, and unaware preferences and choices in response to the demands of environment. Importantly, rising to scholarly fame and recognition unavoidably has a corrupting influence because of physiological changes occurring unaware to the one being subject to such change. The resulting challenge to scholars and practitioners is therefore a formidable one. Not only does the research field need to change its epistemological basis and rethink much of currently accepted knowledge, gifted education will also need to reinvent itself or risk fading into oblivion due to the increasing possibilities of widely available artificially induced performance enhancement creating new standards of achievement in education and on the labor market.