Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Read Cowen's review of Murray again. If it's near impossible to prove that culture matters more, it's equally near impossible to prove that genetics matters more, but that doesn't stop an awful lot of people (like Murray) from working very hard to justify a prior that it's genetics.
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I do not understand genetics anywhere near as well as many of my clients or my children, but the whole idea of genetics as somehow being immutable - "its in his genes" is a fundamental problem as well. We may be born with some built-in genetic "coding", but that coding won't even guarantee we'll have the same hair color or eye color our whole life.
Likewise, intelligence seems to have a lot to do with how we use the brains we're given, and one thing we know is that the brain changes with use, and can be affected by things like learning a new language (learning a more symbolic language, for example, will light up different parts of the brain and result in different gene signalling). Genes may give you the possibility of having strong symbolic reasoning, but if you don't use them, because you are born into an English speaking family, for example, your genetic signalling shifts because genes apparently don't like to scream into a void (metaphorically).
I'm just saying, the whole "nature/nurture" debate is framed around a really simplistic and kind of weird concept of nature.
