Dan said: > Most data suggests that it is mostly environmental. Indeed, my > wife knows of no studies that indicate a genetic link. She has not > worked in the field for about 10 years, so it is possible that > there has been a recent study we don't know about, but its still > likely she would have heard.
Is she aware of any studies that looked for a genetic link and failed to find one? I know next to nothing about social science, but the impression I get from Pinker's _The Blank Slate_ is that until recently almost all studies tried looked for correlations between the home environment and future behaviour, but this clearly isn't good enough to find the causes of the behaviour. For example, finding that there is a correlation between growing up in an abusive home and becoming abusive tells us absolutely nothing about whether being abused causes future abuse unless we separate out environmental and genetic effects by studying identical twins growing up together or apart (or whatever). Rich
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