Funny, and I think futile, argument. In the first sentence, try substituting the words "adopted by" with "born to". In the second, replace "adopts" with "produces", and "a child from a non-musical family" with "a non-musical child".
Mother Nature is funny this way, and these things happen far more often than you probably think. This particular excerpt hit me rather personally. I am a musician, and have worked over the decades playing in orchestras which have included many musician couples. Sometimes, a child of such unions follows in the parental footsteps, but more often not. Of two couples I can think of who had 5 and 6 children respectively, not one of the 11 had more than a dabbling interest in music, let alone pursuing it as a career. Of all the offspring I can think of from some 25-odd couples I've known where both parents were musicians, only about three that I'm aware of are still actively musicians today, and a small handful of others stuck with music lessons beyond high school and sometimes still play at an amateur level. A wide range of occupations and diverse talents are represented by the rest. Two other musician couples I knew, incidentally, gave birth to deaf children.
I would bet that with musicians of as reknowned stature as Joshua Bell, a similar, seemingly random pattern is evident.
Oh yes, my "altered" version of your first sentence, by the way, describes me to a tee. My parents saw no value in music lessons for me at age four, because I had no exposure to any musical instrument till age eight, at school. But when that happened, there was absolutely no turning back. I brought music home and "introduced" it to my tin-ear parents, who were left wondering whose kid could have got switched with theirs at the hospital. (I look too much like them for that to be a possibility, though!)
"If a child with natural musical gifts is adopted by a family that sees no value in spending money on violin lessons for a four-year-old, we could lose the next Joshua Bell. Likewise, if a family of violin virtuosos adopts a child from a non-musical family, forcing a musical education on a child without the natural gifts to benefit from it may prove both frustrating for the parents and psychologically damaging to the child, whose true gifts may reside elsewhere, undiscovered.
"Funny, and I think futile, argument. In the first sentence, try substituting the words 'adopted by' with 'born to.' In the second, replace 'adopts' with 'produces,' and 'a child from a non-musical family' with 'a non-musical child.'"
Genetic traits, or clusters of them, can be dominant or recessive. If you breed racehorses, it doesn't mean every foal is a sure Triple Crown champion. But without that selective breeding, you're extremely unlikely to get one.
Traits run in families. I suggest you look up in musical catalogs the compositions from the children of J.S. Bach. Or look up the Barrymore family, or the Fondas.
If Grandpa was a virtuoso violinist, you're much likelier to get those crucial violin lessons before age five, when the muscles and bones of the fingers are most malleable and the neural pathways are most easily canalized, than if through mischance you find yourself growing up in a family of electrical engineers with no institutional memory of your violinist grandfather.