One of the depressing facts that you pick up from the book “Blank Slate” is that current research tells us that the influence of parental upbringing on a child’s nature is approximately zero. Your genes have some effect on your son or daughter. The overall environment that he has been brought up in matters. But your own influence is negligible. Another way of stating this is that if you have a biological child and an adopted child, the difference between the two will be almost as great as the difference between your biological child and your neighbour’s child.
Of course, there are many studies that have established this effect, but to me, the simplest verification came from the fact that I have inherited my social shyness from my father, even though he died when I was five. Another example seems to be Varun Gandhi. He must have been 2 years old was 3 months old when Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash, but he still seems to have managed to inherit his father’s psychopathic personality. The combined effect of his father’s genes and his current environment seems to have rendered irrelevant any effect of his mother’s upbringing.
The combined effect of his father’s genes and his current environment seems to have rendered irrelevant any effect of his mother’s upbringing.
Is this sarcasm? Preventing stray dogs from being put to sleep, and attempting to get us all to stop drinking cow’s milk….?
I don’t know, somehow I get the impression that the way genetics is employed in laymen’s debate it is no better than Voodoo science.
Well..Ofcourse Genes do Matter, but I am not satisfied with the research that upbringing matters 0 percent. I don’t think so.
Gaurav, yes, it is difficult to reduce complex scientific facts to simple sentences. I’ve tried to be careful while doing so.
@Gaurav
In this NYT Magazine story, Pinker himself hints at how the justifications for lack of definitive pointers based on information that can be currently gleaned from the human genome may be sound similar to the rationalisations provided by an astrologer for justifying vague/wrong prognostications.
Ofcourse, this is not to suggest that both those fields are comparable. But the article does make you realise that the field of genetics may still be in its infancy. and there are a lot of things we do not know and may never know definitively about ourselves based on genetic data.
@Ravikiran
One of the depressing facts that you pick up from the book “Blank Slate” is that current research tells us that the influence of parental upbringing on a child’s nature is approximately zero.
Yes, it is truly depressing and to some extent demoralising as well.
Chetan yeah that’s what I have realized. The picture of genes acting as on-off switches to control human behavior is so inaccurate as to be unhelpful in most of the cases. Of course the debate between nature vs. nurture is far from settled but I tend to side with nurture.