Nature vs. Nurture
One of those weirder than truth stories from real life.
Two sets of twins get separated at birth only to meet later thru pure chance. One set grows up in a major city with relatively well-to-do parents, the other set grows up in a rural area whose parents barely have enough to live.
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(From left) Wilber the butcher, Carlos the accountant, William the butcher, and Jorge the engineer.
Jorge and Carlos grew up in a poor/lower middle-class family in the city, whereas William and Wilber grew up in a poor family in the country. It's incredible how their careers have been shaped by where they grew up.
More pix at:
http://imgur.com/a/bIo6A
Full story at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/magazine/the-mixed-up-brothers-of-bogota.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
This story resonated with me. It seems to be a portending of what is occurring in America today. The rich and privileged send their children off to school to become professionals while the rest struggle with the scraps left over. Read the other day (source evades me) that college costs over the last 20/30 years have risen by multiple factors while wages have stayed the same during that time period.
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A lot of what we are, more than many would like (esp. those left of center or "self made"
is pure genetics. The writer tries to play down the similarities; it's important that she be her own person, which is fine. However the flaw in that is it makes her a product of her environment--not so fine. That we're in any way determined is just anathema to many, even if the mix is still close to unique.
But she winds up looking not just at character and personality traits but too often at outcomes that are too dependent on circumstances and then suggests that casts doubt on the methodology; it doesn't, it just fails to understand the terms in use. If your twin is a long distance runner and you lost your legs in a car accident when you were 8, that's irrelevant to the claims at hand. Looking at enough data you get past such irrelevancies and realize that, yeah, a heck of a lot of stuff is all but predetermined. That 50% or so that's inherited is just there; environment can produce the other 50% or so of character and personality that is learned or acquired. But environment can also affect how strongly and how those traits are implemented. It's looking at abilities, drives, internals, and the question is how to measure them by looking at external, observable things.
The Soviets early on wanted to engineer a "new Soviet man," they strongly believed that if you shape the environment you control the outcome. Failures were from not shaping the environment properly, not having the correct "architects of the human soul" providing input. It was the ultimate anti-eugenics movement, and that thinking was also common in the rest of "progressive" Europe and the US at the time. It was, of course, doomed to fail--you can't be omniscient and design the perfect environment, and that was the excuse given, that and subversive elements corrupting our youth; yet much of what they wanted to change wasn't going to be changed, the best they could have done was remove any opportunities for the bad traits to surface. So they tried that. It failed.
One reason nobody likes the idea of something like intelligence--even just a difference of a few IQ points--being inherited is because we fear eugenics and how it may be used these days and we love the idea of egalitarianism. Yet nobody's overly concerned at the "inequality" of some women not being able to sing alto while others can't sing soprano, or the inequality that some men can grow full beards while others can't. We use our money to change things that are obviously genetic--eye color, hair color, prosthetic enhancements. We like to think that we're so much more than our biology; but there you have it. Many of those most insistent on evolution and on there being scant difference between humans and animals, no "human soul" or whatever, shout the loudest that they are emphatically not just mere biological creatures as shaped to some extent by our environment, whose growth within those parameters is also limited or facilitated by our environment.
Such is life. If the science changes, great. Otherwise, this is just more anti-intellectualism in American life.
