{"id":3930,"date":"2013-07-31T10:03:14","date_gmt":"2013-07-31T09:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/?p=3930"},"modified":"2014-10-09T18:52:50","modified_gmt":"2014-10-09T17:52:50","slug":"the-nurture-assumption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/2013\/07\/the-nurture-assumption\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Nurture Assumption (Judith Harris)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This book turned out to be not what i had expected, but still interesting. Not sure why it got all the bad press. It&#8217;s behavior realistic but focuses on the environment which is what the author finds interesting. I think genetics is more interesting, but this is interesting too.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/The-Nurture-Assumption-Why-Children-Turn-Out-the-Way-They-Do-Revised-and-Updated-Judith-Rich-Harris.pdf\">The Nurture Assumption Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Revised and Updated Judith Rich Harris<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Donald of the Apes<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Donald was ten months old, and Gua seven and a half months, when she <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">came to live with the Kelloggs in 1931. Right from the start she was treated <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">like a human baby\u2014that is, the way human babies were treated in the 1930s. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">The Kelloggs put clothes on her, and the stiff shoes that babies wore in those <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">days. She wasn\u2019t caged or tied up, which meant that she had to be watched <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">every second except when she was asleep (but then, the same was true of <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Donald). She was potty trained. Her teeth were brushed. She was fed the same <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">foods as Donald and had the same naptimes and bathtimes. There is a photo\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">graph in the Kelloggs\u2019 book of Gua and Donald sitting side by side, dressed <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">identically in footed pajamas of the kind my mother used to call \u201cDr. Den- <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">tons.\u201d Donald is frowning; Gua\u2019s lips are curved upward in a modest smile. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">They are holding hands.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Aside from the difference in temperament recorded in that revealing photo, <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">the two were remarkably well matched. Chimpanzees develop more rapidly in <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">infancy than humans, but Donald was two and a half months older and that<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">helped to even things up. They played together like siblings, chasing each <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">other around the furniture, roughhousing and giggling. Donald had a walker, <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">a big heavy thing, and one of his favorite sports, according to his parents, was <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cto rush at the ape in this rumbling Juggernaut and laugh as she scurried to <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">keep from being run over, often without success.\u201d But Gua didn\u2019t hold grudges <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">and she enjoyed rough-and-tumble play. In fact, the two got along better <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">than most siblings. I f one o f them cried, the other would offer pats or hugs of <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">consolation. If Gua got up from her nap before Donald, she \u201ccould hardly be <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">kept from the door o f his room.\u201d 1<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Gua was more fun than a barrel full of Donalds. When the Kelloggs tickled <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">her or swung her around, she would laugh just like a human baby. If they tried <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">swinging Donald, he would cry. Gua was more affectionate (expressing her <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">affection with hugs and kisses) and more cooperative. While being dressed, the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">ape\u2014but not the boy\u2014would push her arms into open sleeves and bend her <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">head to allow her bib to be tied on. If she did something wrong and was <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">scolded for it, she would utter plaintive \u201c00-00\u201d cries and throw herself into <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">the scolder\u2019s arms, offering a \u201ckiss of reconciliation\u201d and uttering an audible <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">sigh of relief when she was permitted to bestow it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">In mastering the challenges of civilized life, Gua often caught on a little <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">faster than the stolid Donald. She was ahead in obeying spoken commands, <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">learning to feed herself with a spoon, and giving a warning signal when she <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">needed to use the potty (unfortunately, though, her potty training never <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">became completely reliable). The ape equaled or exceeded the child in most of <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">the tests that Dr. Kellogg devised: she was as adept as Donald at figuring out <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">how to use a hoe-shaped implement to pull a piece of apple toward her, and <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">learned more quickly to use a chair to reach a cookie suspended from the ceil\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">ing. When the chair was moved to a new starting point, so that it had to be <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">pushed in a different direction to reach the cookie, Donald continued to <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">push it in the same direction as before, whereas Gua kept her eye on the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">cookie and claimed the prize.2<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">There was one thing, however, in which the boy was clearly superior: Don\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">ald was the better imitator. Does that surprise you? According to Frans de <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Waal, a Dutch primatologist who spent several years observing the chim\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">panzees and their human visitors at a Netherlands zoo, \u201cContrary to general <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">belief, humans imitate apes more than the reverse.\u201d3<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">This was clearly the case with Donald and Gua. \u201cIt was Gua, in fact, who <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">was almost always the aggressor or leader in finding new toys to play with and <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">new methods o f play; while the human was inclined to take up the role of the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">imitator or follower.\u201d4 Thus, Donald picked up Gua\u2019s annoying habit of biting <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">the wall. He also picked up a fair amount of chimpanzee language\u2014the food<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">bark, for instance. How did Luella Kellogg feel, I wonder, when her fourteen- <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">month-old son ran to her with an orange in his hands, grunting \u201cuhuh, uhuh, <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">uhuh\u201d?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">The average American child can produce more than fifty words at nineteen <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">months5 and is starting to put them together to form phrases. At nineteen <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">months, Donald could speak only three English words.* At this point the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">experiment was terminated and Gua went back to the zoo.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">The Kelloggs had tried to train an ape to be a human. Instead, it seemed <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">that Gua was training their son to be an ape. Their experiment tells us more <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">about human nature than about the nature of the chimpanzee, but it also tells <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">us that there is remarkably little difference between them\u2014at least in the first <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">nineteen months. In this chapter I will look at some of the differences between <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">chimpanzee nature and human nature that appear after the age of nineteen <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">months, and at some o f the similarities that remain.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">One of the things that characterize these exceptional classrooms is the atti\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">tude the students adopt toward the slower learners among them. Instead of <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">making fun of them, they cheer them on. There was a boy with reading prob\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">lems in one of Rodriguez\u2019s classes and when he started making progress the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">whole class celebrated: \u201cEvery time he made a small step, the class would give <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">him a round of applause.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p>[04:20:33] Emil &#8211; Deleet: using this effect was something Khan suggested<\/p>\n<p>[04:20:37] Emil &#8211; Deleet: Khan from Khan Academy<\/p>\n<p>[04:20:47] Emil &#8211; Deleet: to get the smarter kids to help the less smart<\/p>\n<p>[04:20:57] Emil &#8211; Deleet: he suggested whole class achievements<\/p>\n<p>[04:21:12] Emil &#8211; Deleet: so that the entire group benefits when everybody masters something<\/p>\n<p>[04:21:20] Emil &#8211; Deleet: creating incentives for the smarter to help the others<\/p>\n<p>[04:21:50] Emil &#8211; Deleet: teaching something also helps the teacher master it better, so both parties benefit<\/p>\n<p>[04:21:51] Emil &#8211; Deleet: in theory<\/p>\n<p>i would very much like to see experiments with this.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">A well-dressed man often sports nothing more than a string around his waist to <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">which is tied the stretched-out foreskin of his penis. As a young boy matures, he <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">starts to act masculine by tying his penis to his waist string, and the Yanomamo <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">use this developmental phase to signify a boy\u2019s age: \u201cMy son is now tying up his <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">penis.\u201d A certain amount of teasing takes place at that age, since an inexperi\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">enced youth will have trouble controlling his penis. It takes a while for the fore\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">skin to stretch to the length required to keep it tied securely, and until then it is <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">likely to slip out of the string, much to the embarrassment of its owner and the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">mirth of older boys and men.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">In societies where education is compulsory, children rank \u201cbeing left back <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">in school\u201d as the third most scary thing they can think of, beaten out only by <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201closing a parent\u201d and \u201cgoing blind.\u201d \u201cWetting my pants in school\u201d comes in <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">fourth.4 A Yanomamo boy with his penis not tied up is like an American child <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">who has wet his pants in school: he is a boy who has been left back. It would <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">be humiliating to walk around with a dangling penis when other boys his age <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">or younger were already tying theirs up. When the Yanomamo boy ties his <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">foreskin to the string around his waist, he\u2019s not pretending to be his father: he\u2019s <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">concerned about maintaining his status among the other children in the vil\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">lage. It is the mirth of the older boys that provides the stick. It is the respect of <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">the younger ones that provides the carrot.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Then the mother, with the other women, accompanies her daughter into the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">woods to adorn her.. . . One woman begins to rub a little red urucu over all her <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">body, which becomes pink. They then design wavy black lines, brown on her <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">face and body; they make lovely designs. When she is completely painted, they <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">push through the large hole in her ear those strips of young assai <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">leaves. . . . Then they take coloured feathers and push them through the holes <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">which they have at the corners of their mouths and in the middle of the lower <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">lip. One woman also prepares a long, thin, white stick, very smooth, which she <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">puts in the hole that they have between their nostrils. The young girl is really <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">lovely, painted and decorated like this! The women say: \u201cNow let\u2019s go.\u201d The girl <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">walks ahead, and after her come the other women and the little girls.6<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">The parade wends slowly through the center of the village so that everyone <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">can admire the debutante. Though she is probably no more than fifteen years <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">old (menarche comes later to girls in tribal societies), she is now considered old <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">enough to marry. I f her father has already promised her to someone she will <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">take up residence with her new husband. She went into the cage a girl and <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">came out a woman, as though a magician had waved his magic wand: Poof, <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">you\u2019re a woman!<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Mandatory: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=JAHA4Jh5jkw\">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=JAHA4Jh5jkw<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">They are supposed to behave that way in some societies. Yanomamo men, <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">if they don\u2019t like the way their wife is behaving, hit her with a stick or shoot an <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">arrow into some part of her anatomy they can do without. Ask Helena, the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Brazilian girl who was kidnapped by the Yanomamo. When Helena came of <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">age she was claimed by a Yanomamo headman, Fusiwe, who already had four <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">wives. Fusiwe was a nice guy by Yanomamo standards\u2014reader, she loved <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">him!\u2014but he got angry at her once for something that wasn\u2019t her fault and he <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">broke her arm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">According to the editorial in the Journal o f the American Medical Association, <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Carl McElhinney was a child murderer. No, not a murderer of children, but a <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">seven-year-old boy who had committed a murder. The editorial was written in <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">1896; it was reprinted in JAMA a hundred years later as a historical curiosity.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">I cannot give you any details of Carl\u2019s crime because the focus of the edito\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">rial was not on the murderer himself but on his mother.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Before Carl\u2019s birth Mrs. McElhinney was an assiduous reader of novels. Morn\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">ing, noon and night her mind was preoccupied with imaginative crimes of the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">most bloody sort. Being a woman of fine and delicate perception, she appreci\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">ated to an extent almost equaling reality the extravagant miseries, motive, vil\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">lainies set down in novels, so that her mind was miserably contorted weeks <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">before the birth of her child Carl. The boy was an abnormal development of <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">criminality. He has a delight in the inhuman. It takes intense horror to please <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">this peculiar appetite. . . . I believe criminal record does not show a case so <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">remarkable as this. As the boy matures these mental conditions will mature. He <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">is dangerous to the community.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">The cause of Carl\u2019s abnormal development, according to the physician <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">who wrote the editorial, was the impression made on his mother\u2019s mind by the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">books she read while she was carrying him. Strong impressions on a woman\u2019s <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">mind \u201cmay pervert or stop the growth, or cause defect in the child with which <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">she is pregnant.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">The editorial concluded, as editorials are wont to do, with a moral:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">We as scientific physicians . . . should teach our patrons how to care for our <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">pregnant women, and the danger from maternal influences. The Spartans bred <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">warriors, and I believe this generation can breed a better people. One of the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">future advances to help the generations to come, will be to teach them the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">power of maternal influences, with better care of our pregnant women.1<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">The \u201cbetter care of our pregnant women\u201d would presumably include care\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">ful screening of the reading material permitted to them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p>Not so fast. It turns out that the ability of a criminal adoptive family to pro\u00ad<\/p>\n<p>duce a criminal child\u2014given suitable material to work with\u2014depends on<\/p>\n<p>where the family happens to live. The increase in criminality among Danish<\/p>\n<p>adoptees reared in criminal homes was found only for a minority of the sub\u00ad<\/p>\n<p>jects in this study: those who grew up in or around Copenhagen. In small<\/p>\n<p>towns and rural areas, an adoptee reared in a criminal home was no more<\/p>\n<p>likely to become a criminal than one reared by honest adoptive parents.14<\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u2019t the criminal adoptive parents who made the biological son of<\/p>\n<p>criminals into a criminal: it was the neighborhood in which they reared him.<\/p>\n<p>Neighborhoods differ in rates of criminal behavior, and I would guess that<\/p>\n<p>neighborhoods with high rates of criminal behavior are exceedingly hard to<\/p>\n<p>find in rural areas of Denmark.<\/p>\n<p>she is correct:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/jyllands-posten.dk\/indland\/ECE5427034\/danmarks-kriminalitet-er-kortlagt\/\">http:\/\/jyllands-posten.dk\/indland\/ECE5427034\/danmarks-kriminalitet-er-kortlagt\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>data here (danish): <a href=\"http:\/\/justitsministeriet.us5.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=c6bed21580590b2f170bce7e1&amp;id=f21904944d&amp;e=4786d354bb\">http:\/\/justitsministeriet.us5.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=c6bed21580590b2f170bce7e1&amp;id=f21904944d&amp;e=4786d354bb<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">The links between divorce, personality problems in the parents, and trou\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">blesome behavior in the children are complex: the effects go every which way. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">People with personality problems are difficult to live with so they\u2019re more <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">likely to get divorced; the same people are more likely, for genetic reasons, to <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">have difficult kids. There might even be a child-to-parent effect: a difficult kid <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">can put a real strain on a marriage. Earlier in the chapter I quoted the joke <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">about Johnny, the kid who could break any home, but it is not funny if you <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">have a kid like Johnny. Some children make every member of the family wish <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">they could get out. Judith Wallerstein talks about the heavy load o f guilt the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">children o f divorcing parents are burdened with\u2014the kids think their parents\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">divorce was their fault. What Wallerstein doesn\u2019t consider is that sometimes <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">there may be an element of truth in what the kids think. Divorce occurs less <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">often in families that contain a son than in those that only have daughters.38 <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">The presence of that boy either makes the parents happier or makes the father <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">more reluctant to walk out. But what if the boy is not a satisfying kid? What if <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">he is nothing but trouble?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>didnt know that. altho im not supersurprised, since a lot of people have told me that they prefer to have male children. \u201ceasier to handle\u201d they say.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">I see it in the news all the time; it always makes me angry. The Smith kid gets <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">into trouble and the judge threatens to throw his parents in jail. The Jones kid <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">burglarizes a house and his parents are fined for their failure to \u201cexercise rea\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">sonable control\u201d over his activities. The Williams kid gets pregnant and her <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">parents are criticized for not keeping track of where she was and what she was <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">doing. One set of parents, when they found it impossible to keep their teenage <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">daughter out of trouble, chained her to the radiator. They were arrested for <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">child abuse.61<\/span><\/p>\n<p>cant win&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Good things tend to go together. So do bad things. These are correlations. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Educational psychologist Howard Gardner would have us believe that there <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">are several different \u201cintelligences\u201d and that someone who was stinted on one <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">might have gotten a generous helping of another. But the fact is that people <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">who score low on tests o f one kind of intelligence are also likely to score low <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">on tests of other kinds.68 We are pleased when we hear about a child who is <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">mentally retarded in most respects but who is a whiz at drawing or calculating: <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">it appeals to our sense of fairness. But such cases are uncommon. Far more <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">commonly, nature is unfair to mentally retarded children by giving them no <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">talents and making them physically clumsy as well. That is why they compete <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">in the Special Olympics instead of the regular Olympics.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cEverything is related to everything else,\u201d said a psychologist whose spe\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">cialty was statistics. He told the story of a pair of researchers who collected <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">data on 57,000 high school students in Minnesota. The researchers asked the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">kids about their leisure activities and educational plans, whether they liked <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">school, and how many siblings they had. They asked about their fathers\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">occupation, their mothers\u2019 and fathers\u2019 education, and their families\u2019 atti\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">tudes toward college. There were fifteen items in all and 105 possible correla\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">tions between pairs of items.* All 105 yielded significant correlations, most at <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">levels of significance that would be expected by chance less than .000001 of <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">the time.69<\/span><\/p>\n<p>with the power of n=57k, sure, one can find even very small correlations!<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">On the other hand, I don\u2019t want to raise false hopes. So let me begin with a <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">true story, told by my late colleague David Lykken, about a pair of reared-apart <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">twins\u2014one of the pairs studied at the University of Minnesota by the research <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">team of which he was a member.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">They are identical twins separated in infancy; they grew up in different <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">adoptive homes. One became a concert pianist, talented enough to perform as <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">a soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra. The other cannot play a note.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Since these women have the same genes, the disparity must be due to a dif\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">ference in their environments. Sure enough, one of the adoptive mothers was <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">a music teacher who gave piano lessons in her home. The parents who adopted <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">the other twin were not musical at all.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Only it was the nonmusical parents who produced the concert pianist and <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">the piano teacher whose daughter cannot play a note.1<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Not that being rejected by one\u2019s peers is the end of the world. It hurts like <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">hell while it\u2019s happening and it does leave permanent scars, but it doesn\u2019t <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">keep a kid from being socialized (you can identify even with a group that <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">rejects you), and I\u2019ve noticed that many interesting people went through a <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">period of rejection during childhood. Or got moved around a lot, which has<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">similar effects. I was moved around a lot as a child and went through four <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">years of rejection, and there is no doubt that I would have been a different per\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">son if it hadn\u2019t happened. A more sociable person, but more superficial. Cer\u00ad<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">tainly not a writer o f books\u2014a job that has as its first requirement the <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">willingness to spend a good deal of time alone. The biologist and author E. O. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Wilson recalls his childhood this way:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">I was an only child whose family moved around quite a bit in southern Alabama <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">and northwestern Florida. I attended 14 different schools in 11 years. So it was, <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">perhaps, inevitable that I grew up as something of a solitary and found nature <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">my most reliable companion. In the beginning, nature provided adventure; <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">later, it was the source of much deeper emotional and aesthetic pleasure.17<\/span><\/p>\n<p>I attended 4 different ground schools, so i fit the pattern as well.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This book turned out to be not what i had expected, but still interesting. Not sure why it got all the bad press. It&#8217;s behavior realistic but focuses on the environment which is what the author finds interesting. I think genetics is more interesting, but this is interesting too. The Nurture Assumption Why Children Turn [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1653,1921],"tags":[2020,1067],"class_list":["post-3930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology","category-sociology","tag-heritability","tag-review","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3930"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4386,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930\/revisions\/4386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}