RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anyone with an ounce of common sense, two eyes, and a grasp of history understands instinctively that most genetic traits are inheritable. Height, body type, skin color, even eye color run in genetically related families, and those families, bound together in local, tribal, ethnic, and national communities, reflect that. There’s nothing inherently conspiratorial, “racist” or “supremacist” about any of this. And yet, for decades, ideologically driven scientists and cultural Marxist apologists have struggled with such a raw truth, and have endeavored to show that nurture, not nature, is the determining factor, especially when it comes to talents and intelligence. After all, what do human sperm and eggs have to do with the making of the New Soviet Man omelet?

So this book is sure to cause a fuss:

There are few areas of science more fiercely contested than the issue of what makes us who we are. Are we products of our environments or the embodiment of our genes? Is nature the governing force behind our behaviour or is it nurture? While almost everyone agrees that it’s a mixture of both, there has been no end of disagreement about which is the dominant influence.

And it’s a disagreement that has been made yet more fraught by the political concerns that often underlie it. Traditionally, those on the left have tended to see the environment as the critical factor because it ties in with notions of egalitarianism. Thus inequalities, viewed from this perspective, are explained not by inherent differences but by social conditions.

Similarly, those on the right have leaned towards a more Darwinian conception, in which different social outcomes are accounted for by differences of suitability to the environment. In turn, such an understanding has in the past led to the promotion of eugenics (both on the left and right) – through selective breeding, sterilisation and, in the case of the Nazis, wholesale murder.

And this is from the Guardian, Britain’s leftiest of left-of-center newspapers. In an even-handed review of Robert Plomin’s new book, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, Andrew Anthony writes:

In common with many other scientists, Plomin believes that Freud sent society looking in the wrong place for answers to the question of what makes us as we are. The key to personality traits does not lie in how you were treated by your parents, but rather in what you inherited biologically from them: namely, the genes in your DNA.

He finds that genetic heritability accounts for 50% of the psychological differences between us, from personality to mental abilities. But that leaves 50% that should be accounted for by the environment. However, Plomin argues, research shows that most of that 50% is not attributable to the type of environmental influences that can be planned for or readily affected – ie it’s made up of unpredictable events. And of the environmental influences that can be moderated, much of it, he argues, is really an expression of genetics. CONTINUE AT SITE