Posted on 11/07/2005 1:35:57 PM PST by shrinkermd
NATURE not nurture is the main determinant of how well children perform at school and university, according to a study to be published this week
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
At school they call me the "Left Side of the Bell Curve."
It takes a village to raise a child, so are we suppose to consider all parents useless for the sake of the great collective? Is that what this propaganda is all about? "Just say no" to stay home parenting, because it has no affect on the children at all?
I'm not buying it.
"Eric Clapton"
Adopted by grandparents.
The trick is that the same people who give you your genes are the ones who raise you, generally speaking. Regardless of whether you get the best of their genes, being raised by smart parents doesn't hurt.
This is a good place to mention that how much persistance and drive one has may well be in inherited trait. Of course it can also be learned from parents efforts and from the hard work one gets in a "good" school. I know from experience that the better schools expect and get more effort from the students. So it is all related.
Of course having wonderful genes may not get you anywhere if you don't have the necessary ambition.
In a study of Vietnamese families (Scientific American) that came here after the war the research showed that the kids became excellent scholars for the most part, even when hampered initially by the language barrier. The parents who spoke almost no English, nevertheless expected the older members of the family to tutor the younger kids. In fact, the largest families did the best overall because there was more tutoring going on at home. Here we may see the results of good genetics, but we also see the drive and ambition fostered by the parents of these kids.
I wonder if the study could also check this aspect. Perhaps the kids adopted into families with "driven" adults who insisted on hard work in school could be compared to kids adopted into "average" families where the kids were not challenged so much?
"Looks like the "Bell Curve" revisited."
Read and believed it when it was published. Still do, for the most part.
How is it that physical differences occur so often, resulting in differing capabilities, yet many deny mental capability ranges?
But he started KFC when he was 65 years old! He was always too old to enjoy it.
This is statistics, and it deals with trends and outcome probabilities, not with individual predictions. As Murray and Herrnstein wrote, they could NOT predict any individual student's fate, but they could perfectly predict the trends and tendencies: in a class with 30 imbeciles about 10 will end up in the criminal justice system - this is predictable; which ones will end up there is not. A similar picture obtains with higher IQs: on the average, they tend to do well [still, not all of them do]. But which ones will fall through the cracks is not easily predictable. And on the same lines, IQ [statistically] tends to beat environment [again, not always, but in most known cases].
This is a wildly oversimplified discussion of a critically important issue. Yes, genes matter. But anyone who has been following research developments in epigenetics and fetal programming, knows that there's a big difference between what genes you have and what genes are turned on. In utero conditions have a huge effect on this, though no effect whatsoever on which specific genes the fetus possesses. And at least one study showed strong evidence that the effects can last more than one generation. Take donor embryos from smart financially stable people, implant them in your average welfare recipient, and you'll probably get kids who are somewhat smarter and healthier than if the average welfare recipient's own gametes had been used, but you won't get kids anywhere near as smart and healthy as if the same embryos had grown to term in the uterus of a smart financially stable woman (whether their own biological mother, or another). An approach to using this information to good ends would be to replace the current "give money to anyone who's poor" policy, with a "give money only to poor people who stick to healthy lifestyles" policy.
Just wait til future research teases out the effects of in utero conditions. Until then, we have no real clue as to the degree of genetic heritability of IQ or anything else.
Outrage and unhappiness over these findings is also typical.
I once gave a talk to an upper class group of people who were almost uniformly rich and liberal. The idea was to earn my free dinner. I talked about how important intelligence was in predicting future academic and monetary success. They were furious and almost shouted me out of the place--especially when I pointed out they routinely bred their dogs and horses according to good genetic principles.
Egalitarianism lives on and buttresses the whole liberal intelligentsia in their efforts to maintain power.
I think the link definitely exists, but the 'cause' is not the income ... it is the likelihood that income is generally related to intelligence. Nevertheless, I believe we should continue to throw more and more money at the public education system.(/sarc)
It has already been done: that's where the data on twins come handy - the in utero conditions are identical there, and cancel out. At least some scientists do earn their pay, at least occasionally.
"You are thinking of Dave Thomas of "Wendy's"
I think you're right. I've confused the two.
I would welcome an explanation for:
1) The antipathy here toward a finding that essentially just says that some people have natural abilities others don't--which is common sense, I figure.
2) The visceral rejection of that finding on grounds that are irrelevant to the survey ("Look, these adoptees did well, so this survey is wrong there!"). Anecdotal evidence does not derail scientific evidence, nor does this study make such a blanket statement that 'adoptees are losers!' It merely states that there is such a thing as natural ability. Tossing out the straw man that this survey claims adoptees do not succeed is spurious argument.
It's times like these my mood is darkest about the future of the country, when even a conservative board seems to think that everyone must be considered equal all the time, and logic is automatically replaced with vitriol when that dogma is even tangentially challenged.
Both men's life stories are quite interesting tales of success in later life. Thomas was also a high-school drop-out.
The twin studies have provided useful info, but are limited by the small sample size (it's a pretty rare event for twins to be reared separately from birth, and identical twins are an even smaller subset of that group), and the skewed sample (children whose birth parents couldn't or wouldn't raise them are not representative of the general population, and twins have some known and unknown differences from the singleton population). A REALLY weird pattern among twins was recently discovered, and nobody has a clue how to explain it: http://www.medpagetoday.com/OBGYN/2005ASRMMeeting/tb1/1957 If down the road anyone manages to do a study of identical twins gestated in different mothers and/or at different times in the same mother, THAT would be fascinating. And it's technically possible already, but I don't think we'll be seeing this anytime soon in humans -- somebody should try it with animals, though.
Thanks. This stuff is interesting, but I've pinged the list twice today, so I'll let this one pass.
Junior, archival ping?
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