Jonah's interview of Judith Rich Harris is much recommended. Clearly related to my post on adoptive parents.
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Via Dienekes, Differential parental investment in families with both adopted and genetic children:
Stepchildren are abused, neglected and murdered at higher rates than those who live with two genetically related parents. Daly and Wilson used kin selection theory to explain this finding and labeled…
Over at The Corner at National Review Online John Derbyshire has been getting into a debate with his colleagues over Judith Rich Harris' work, and her two books The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike. I find it amusing when scientific controversy comes crashing into the punditocracy, though I…
Over at Mind Matters, I've got an interview with Judith Rich Harris, author of the influential and infamous The Nurture Assumption, which provocatively argued that parents aren't particularly important when it comes to determining the behavior of their children, at least outside of the home.…
A few weeks ago I reported some research that seemed to show a relationship between a gain in IQ due to breastfeeding and a particular genetic variant. Looks like I spoke too soon. p-ter has the goods:
The fact that they have a measure of maternal IQ but don't directly include it in the published…
I had an email exchange with JRH that was frustrating. Her endlessly reiterated point was, "you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear." Well, duh. But what about parents who try to make a sows ear out of a silk purse? THAT DOESN'T HAPPEN! you say, in middle-class horror.
Well, it does. Parents do all kinds of things to their children. They brutally put them down, suppress their kids, compete with them, and interfere with them. No names, but this happens.
JRH's observations about the importance of the peer group are pretty sharp. But her dismissal of parental importance vitiates her contributions. She's not a scientist. She's a yenta.
If there is a golden mean there are always exteremas. Of course, that kind of things happen, I happened before and will happen in the future. What is important - we are conscious about it, that meant we are albe to do something about it. Now it's up to us. And that's the point!