{"id":6988,"date":"2017-06-21T06:51:19","date_gmt":"2017-06-21T06:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6988"},"modified":"2017-06-21T06:58:42","modified_gmt":"2017-06-21T06:58:42","slug":"nature-nurture-and-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2017\/06\/21\/nature-nurture-and-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"Nature, Nurture and Environment"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read an article<\/a> on parenting the other day as it's never too late to learn. \u00a0It only really contains this piece of advice:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026\u00a0it should be enough for us to remember that our children are human beings, worthy of the same ethical treatment we give to our friends, other relatives, and even to strangers. \u00a0So protect your children, provide for them, be good to them, and\u00a0make memories\u00a0with them. \u00a0Apart from that,\u00a0don\u2019t expect to have very much say in how they turn out.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sound advice, it seems to me, even though the last sentence may well shock many people. \u00a0The article\u2019s focus is\u00a0the age-old issue of nature v nurture; \u00a0heredity v environment, and has a lot to say about twin studies \u2013 which I intend to ignore in what follows; just as I'm staying away from the vexed question of intelligence.<\/p>\n

Reading the article\u00a0took me back to 197something and a debate at the Cambridge Union where the US genetics & IQ guru, Arthur Jensen, was sub-heroically trying to argue that intelligence was X% inherited and Y% influenced by environment (ie parenting and other socialisation). \u00a0I forget the exact figures, although\u00a0X > Y, of course. \u00a0It was a one-sided affair as there were six people opposing Jensen. \u00a0One was Stephen Rose; another was a bloke from the USA called Jerry Something.<\/p>\n

I had already read enough to know that Jensen's certainties were certainly misleading, as was his spurious precision, but it was Jerry S who made the main point for me. \u00a0He said that it was obvious that\u00a0intelligence was 100% inherited and 100% influenced by environment. \u00a0In other words, genetics set a limit, and parenting decided\u00a0how close you got to it in your life. \u00a0 This appealed to me at a common sense level. \u00a0Looking back on it, however, the very notion of a limit\u00a0was far too deterministic and, well, limiting.<\/p>\n

I held to this 100 \u2013 100 view until a conference<\/a> that I've already written about where\u00a0Richard Lewontin's keynote\u00a0changed this view of human intelligence and inheritance. Lewontin qualified the idea of environment to include not just parental and societal influence, but also all the influences that apply before these can begin. \u00a0These are [i] the unpredictable and varying biochemical inundation\u00a0that a foetus experiences whilst in the womb; and [ii] the random, quantum-level decisions that are made, particularly in the developing brain, during development (both pre- and post-natal). \u00a0These are described in the article in this way:<\/p>\n

\"... the environment matters, but not just the environment that the child experiences in the home. \u00a0The environment in this sense is far more nebulous and hard to nail down \u2014 behavioural geneticists call it the \u2018non-shared\u2019 environment and it includes anything that causes two siblings to be different from each other. \u00a0And I really mean anything. \u00a0The psychologist Steven Pinker puts it this way: \u2018A cosmic ray mutates a stretch of DNA, a neurotransmitter zigs instead of zags, the growth cone of an axon goes left instead of right, and one identical twin\u2019s brain might gel into a slightly different configuration from the other\u2019s.\u2019 \u00a0In other words, we should not presume that random chance plays a vanishingly small role in making us the people that we are today.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For me, that randomness might explain a lot more than why twins can be different, and is why I like this idea a lot. \u00a0It also gives something of the lie to Philip Larkin's pessimism for one thing.<\/p>\n

Is this the end of the nature \/ environment debate? \u00a0I doubt it, but it's enough for me for the times being.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read an article on parenting the other day as it's never too late to learn. \u00a0It only really contains this piece of advice: \u201c\u2026\u00a0it should be enough for us to remember that our children are human beings, worthy of...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}