Another nail in the Cultural Marxist coffin. Review of Robert Pin in’s new book by Greg Cochran.
“In Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are Robert Plomin makes the case that genetic differences cause most variation in psychological traits – things like personality and cognitive abilities. The way your parents raise you, the schools you attend – they don’t have much effect on those traits. Children are similar to their parents, but that similarity is due to shared genetics, rather than shared family environment.
Obviously the thoughts in your head, the facts you know, are not the same as your great-great-grand-father’s – we learn those things. But how easily you learn those facts, how well you remember them, how optimistic or pessimistic you are – those are largely set by your genes. Almost every psychological trait has significant heritability, even political leanings. To a significant degree, you’re either born a little Liberal or else a little Conservative, to quote Gilbert and Sullivan.
And to the extent that your personality is not set by your genes, it’s apparently influenced by poorly-understood random factors, rather than your upbringing or social circumstances.
These questions were originally investigated using natural experiments, some ubiquitous, others fairly uncommon. Biological children are 50 percent related to their parents, full sibs are also (on average) 50 percent related. Identical twins share all the same genes (except for somatic mutations), while adopted children are unrelated to their adoptive parents. All these natural experiments show that nature is important, nurture not so much (in fact, very little). Siblings are more similar than pairs randomly drawn from the population, while identical twins have very similar personalities and abilities – even if raised separately. Adopted children are similar to their biological parents, not their adoptive parents. As Plomin puts it, parents are not carpenters who construct their children, and are hardly even gardeners.”
https://quillette.com/2018/09/25/forget-nature-versus-nurture-nature-has-won/