His Father’s Son

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.

6 thoughts on “His Father’s Son

  1. 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….?

  2. 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.

  3. Well..Ofcourse Genes do Matter, but I am not satisfied with the research that upbringing matters 0 percent. I don’t think so.

  4. @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.

    Direct-to-consumer companies are sometimes accused of peddling “recreational genetics,” and there’s no denying the horoscopelike fascination of learning about genes that predict your traits. Who wouldn’t be flattered to learn that he has two genes associated with higher I.Q. and one linked to a taste for novelty? It is also strangely validating to learn that I have genes for traits that I already know I have, like light skin and blue eyes. Then there are the genes for traits that seem plausible enough but make the wrong prediction about how I live my life, like my genes for tasting the bitterness in broccoli, beer and brussels sprouts (I consume them all), for lactose-intolerance (I seem to tolerate ice cream just fine) and for fast-twitch muscle fibers (I prefer hiking and cycling to basketball and squash). I also have genes that are nothing to brag about (like average memory performance and lower efficiency at learning from errors), ones whose meanings are a bit baffling (like a gene that gives me “typical odds” for having red hair, which I don’t have), and ones whose predictions are flat-out wrong (like a high risk of baldness).

    For all the narcissistic pleasure that comes from poring over clues to my inner makeup, I soon realized that I was using my knowledge of myself to make sense of the genetic readout, not the other way around. My novelty-seeking gene, for example, has been associated with a cluster of traits that includes impulsivity. But I don’t think I’m particularly impulsive, so I interpret the gene as the cause of my openness to experience. But then it may be like that baldness gene, and say nothing about me at all.

    Individual genes are just not very informative. Call it Geno’s Paradox. We know from classic medical and behavioral genetics that many physical and psychological traits are substantially heritable. But when scientists use the latest methods to fish for the responsible genes, the catch is paltry.

    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.

  5. 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.

Comments are closed.