Behavior geneticist Eric Turkheimer set out three laws of behavior genetics, Charles Murray reminds us (in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class):
First law: All human behavioral traits are heritable.
Second law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
Third law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
Murray adds some related findings:
Whether the topic was a Big Five characteristic such as extraversion or neuroticism or more specific characteristics such as tolerance, sense of well-being, or alienation, twin studies of heritability kept coming up with correlations for MZ twins that were more than twice the correlations for DZ twins, leaving no role for the shared environment.
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The literature on shared environment, nonshared environment, and heritability tells us that a family’s SES (income, parental education and occupation) is unimportant in explaining the cognitive abilities and personality traits that parents try hardest to promote.
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The bulk of the variance in success in life is unexplained by either nature or nurture. Researchers are lucky if they explain half of the variance in educational attainment with measures of abilities and socioeconomic background. They’re lucky if they can explain even a quarter of the variance in earned income with such measures. The takeaway for thinking about our futures as individuals is that we do not live in a deterministic world ruled by either genes or social background, let alone by race or gender.
I take it for granted that morphic fields are real and physically verifiable. (That fact usually gets me excluded from discussions of genetics.) If Rupert Sheldrake is right and morphic fields are real then they probably get observed by geneticists who don’t believe in them. Then they probably produce field – mediated effects that are mistaken for genetic inheritance effects. But since most geneticists take it for granted that every sentence c containing “Rupert Sheldrake” can be dismissed, I don’t expect geneticists to start considering my opinion any time soon.
Sheldrake’s morphic fields appear to be a rationalization (or perhaps a specific instantiation) of extradimensional patterns commonly expressed metaphorically as angels, demons, spirits, gods, Old Ones, and a great cosmic battle over the soul of man.
These metaphors occur in every tradition besides the scientific materialism, a radical metaphysical break, perhaps without equal in world history.
It would be funny if everyone else was right.
Riddle me how Stalin’s kid ends up a thot? Why the kids of dynasts are, more often than not, useless.
Are you going to flavour the Murray love-in with some negative reviews by any chance?
E.g: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RPDAI1GUKU00U
For someone with little to no knowledge on the subject, a mix of views rather than ex-cathedra pronouncements strikes me as the proper approach.
What was that woman’s name who wrote 25 years ago about the peer effect on children?
That struck me as, then and even now, a useful contribution to the debate.
I find it interesting that I am too young to remember any time when the genetic determinist approach dominated all- and when I look at the literature of the Victorian era, it seems to me that an environmentalist perspective was always there in contention, so I don’t think genetics ever controlled the conversation. OTOH, I remember that in recent decades environmentalism was almost totally dominant, such that some parts of our society had ceased to believe in heredity at all save for the crudest physical appearance factors.
With that in mind, I tend to think heredity’s truths, especially the more obvious ones, still need the effort behind them. THose 3 laws seem reasonable as a hybrid position.
Even so, there’s room for not only environmental factors, but opportunity. Who would think otherwise?
Consider Bonaparte, the 19th century’s favourite example. He seemed to inherit many ambitious and mercurial traits and a taste for intrigue and political/violent adventurism from his father, and sternness and implacability famously from his mother. His siblings got other traits for good and ill, though seemingly some share of those, and Nap got the lion’s share. I’m sure environment played a role. But opportunity was the largest factor. He found himself in a world in chaos. That same man a generation earlier or even later might have risen to colonel and been an aggressive battlefield leader. Still expression of his hereditary and learned traits, just without the wider field.
Stalin himself was probably no Bonaparte- his individual role in setting himself up at the top was less adventurous and personal and more about being a man of system and cunning in a new system he helped set up. Put Stalin and Lenin and Trotsky together, you would have something nearer Bonaparte.
But still, he had been an adventurer, gangster, gunman, revolutionary of even lower social origin, presented with the opportunity of his times. It’s quite true that his son amounted to little, but even then it’s probably not about heredity or even about the impact of his childhood. He could have been a second Stalin in all elements but one- the political circumstances of the 1920s- and he wouldn’t have replicated his father’s career. The system wasn’t organized for that kind of succession, and his father had sucked all the air out of the room anyway.
Sidebar- AS to Svetlana and the possible impact of childhood environment- have you all seen the photo of little Svetlana sitting on the lap of Lavrenti Beria? Jesus. Not many scarier photos. She looks almost as psycho as he does.
Judith Rich Harris wrote The Nurture Assumption — which I first mentioned here 14 years ago.
Yep, that’s the one. Thanks!