![]() Although they never lived in the same household, their identical genes give them startlingly similar personalities and behavior. Some of the most powerful contradictory evidence came from studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and given up for adoption. The theory was that if ghetto children could be given middle-class homes, they would become middle-class successes. It was orthodoxy to believe that children resemble their parents in intelligence, income, and social status because of how they are reared. Plomin writes, “hirty years ago it was dangerous professionally to study the genetic origins of differences in people’s behavior and to write about it in scientific journals.” It was acceptable to point out that physical traits such as eye color and height were largely under genetic control, but to say that intelligence had a genetic component was to flirt with Nazism. Plomin calls this a “revolution” in psychology. “Our future is DNA,” he writes.įor most of the latter half of the 20th century, it was required to believe that variations in human behavior were caused almost exclusively by differences in environment, especially the home environment. ![]() What are known as genome-wide association studies (GWAS) make it possible to look directly at someone’s DNA - even in utero - and predict with increasing accuracy what sort of person he will be. Plomin writes at length about them - have found clear genetic patterns associated with everything from intelligence to physical height to schizophrenia. There has long been circumstantial evidence from twin and adoption studies of the vital role genes play in making us who we are. For the most part, we end up where we belong. Successful people were born with abilities, not unfair “privilege.” Failures were dealt a bad genetic hand. ![]() This means that further government intervention in the environment - the leftist panacea for all social ills - will have essentially no effect. What is more, although environments affect human abilities and propensities, they act mostly in random, short-term ways that cannot be controlled or predicted. ![]()
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