[mrrrgn]

While I think on the whole our society is very biased toward a Boasian view of nature versus nurture: "give me a child and I can raise it to have any personality and aptitudes via deliberate rearing techniques." I'm skeptical of some of the conclusions being drawn from this study.

Environment has not been entirely separated out here it seems. And while a comparison of fraternal and identical twins detangles things somewhat it doesn't completely.

My intuition is that a person's personality and aptitudes (around 50% heritable according to many studies) can help them to take advantage of their environment in certain ways. So it's not that environment doesn't matter at all. It's just that people with varying attributes will leverage their environment in different ways, leading to different outcomes.

It would be even more interesting to me to see the personality profiles of the children compared against their future earnings. My guess is there would be a strong correlation since personality -> interests -> career choices.

Then it would just so happen that identical twins have similar personalities. Leading to the results we see here.

Admittedly I'm hopeful that if we could figure out the correlation between personality and environment maybe we could shift our focus away from the unhealthy extremes of 100% nurture (leads to children being pushed by their parents to fit into a mold that may not suit them) and 100% nature (genetic fatalism leads to apathy and hopelessness). Instead what if we took a child's natural gifts and personality profile into account and tailored their environment to maximize their potential within those constraints? Seems like a more hopeful and useful path.

[barry-cotter]

> While I think on the whole our society is very biased toward a Boasian view of nature versus nurture: "give me a child and I can raise it to have any personality and aptitudes via deliberate rearing techniques." I'm skeptical of some of the conclusions being drawn from this study.

Boas was wrong.

> Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits

> There is now a large body of evidence that supports the conclusion that individual differences in most, if not all, reliably measured psychological traits, normal and abnormal, are substantively influenced by genetic factors. This fact has important implications for research and theory building in psychology, as evidence of genetic influence unleashes a cascade of questions regarding the sources of variance in such traits. A brief list of those questions is provided, and representative findings regarding genetic and environmental influences are presented for the domains of personality, intelligence, psychological interests, psychiatric illnesses, and social attitudes. These findings are consistent with those reported for the traits of other species and for many human physical traits, suggesting that they may represent a general biological phenomenon.

http://humancond.org/_media/papers/bouchard04_genetic_influe...

[mrrrgn]

I absolutely don't disagree with you. Personality traits and aptitudes are strongly inherited, along with some genetic randomness and some environmental conditioning. What I don't like is full on genetic determinism. Human beings transmit both genes AND memes for a reason. As sentient beings we inhabit two universes. The one made of atoms and the one made of thought and ideas.

Compare, say, humans and ants.

Ants seem to have a ROM of sorts: software embedded in genes and immutable within a single organism's lifetime. They only inhabit the world of atoms.

Humans have a ROM to cover basic functions but also writable memory. We can change our behaviors within a single lifetime and then if that wasn't cool enough we can also TRANSMIT those behaviors without genes via the world of thought and ideas (language).

We ought to never forget that. Fatalism binds us too strongly to the physical world. It's a bad path that leads to nihilism (struggle against nature is futile), cruelty (everyone deserves their lot in life since if they were capable of more they would have achieved it), and despair (self-actualization is impossible, I am an automaton).