The key to understanding the nature/nurture controversy, IMHO, is the following remark by Henri Bergson:
"The beliefs to which we most strongly adhere are those of which we should find it most difficult to give an account, and the reasons by which we justify them are seldom those which have led us to adopt them. In a certain sense we have adopted them without any reason, for what makes them valuable in our eyes is that they match the colour of all our other ideas, and that from the very first we have seen in them something of ourselves." There is no controversy that genetics is responsible for a very large amount of what we are. After all, I am not an aardvark and Keith is not an aspidistra, which follows from the fact that both of both of our parents were human. The controversy concerns only a small but emotionally-charged component of human nature. I'll call it morality. When I taught social issues in education, the nature/nurture controversy was an occasion for a great deal of mirth. Students enrolled in social issues often were taking a parallel educational psychology course in which the nature/nurture controversy figured prominently. Understandably they would carry their conceptual baggage from one course into the other. >From the social issues perspective, the controversy was simply a matter of a poorly constructed question. From that perspective "intelligence" is socially constructed. What that means is that even though genetic inheritance may contribute largely to my score on an IQ test, the designation of that score as a measure of "intelligence" and the importance attached to intelligence so designated is an artifact of culture. Say what one will about "culturally neutral" IQ tests, the very idea of a "test" is a cultural artifact that is far from neutral. The expression "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" offers another, admittedly colloquial, way to measure intelligence. Few people would deny the culture-bound character of such a method and many people would object to such a raw standard. Historically, the nature/nurture controversy has been fueled by an inversion of that very question -- "if they're so poor, they must be stupid." My eight-year old son asked me the other day, "are poor people stupid?" It would be fairly easy to reconstruct the chain of direct observations and common sense assumptions that would lead to that question. What may not be immediately obvious to an eight-year old is that he is suspended outside of the terms of that equation by virtue of age. Similarly, what doesn't occur to most scientific researchers who take up this question later on in its more refined form is that they too are provisionally exempt from the more extreme implications of the question and its possible answers. Let's just say that the academy rewards convention and conformity, without passing judgement on whether that's good or bad. There's another thing the academy does that's relevant here. The academy selects for "teachability". It eventually dawned on me that the educational psych course highlighted the nature/nurture controversy because it appealed so well to the late adolescent temperment. The controversy engaged them in a way that many other issues wouldn't. Here was a stark debate between either and or and one which hinted at answering the eternal question "who am I?" The importance of that question becomes clear when we realize that its answer leads ultimately to the answer to the questions "how can I get laid?" and "how much money can I make?" Getting laid and getting paid are questions that continue to occupy scholars long after adolescence. Thus the conventionality of perennially featured academic questions and their teachability is not independent of their appeal to an age-selected subset of the population. Cyril Burt, believed so strongly in genetic transmission of intelligence that he fabricated data to support his position and even fabricated an imaginary assistant to be the "mother" of that data. But just because Burt committed fraud doesn't prove the opposite of what he was trying to prove fraudulently. It may be that Burt had a genetic disposition to commit fraud as well as a genetic disposition to believe in the overwhelming influence of genetic inheritance on intelligence. This is not to suggest that the two traits, if they are indeed traits, are necessarily linked. People frequently behave as though the revelation of scientific fraud, the identification of a fallacy or the failure of a model does prove the opposite. It doesn't. An example of this is the article of faith that the collapse of the USSR proved that capitalism, as interpreted in the U.S., was the best of all possible systems. The "as interpreted in the U.S." part is, of course, a non sequitur. But when the main clause is already a fallacy, the irrelevance of a subordinate clause is a trivial matter. Keith Hudson wrote, > Of course, I am not an expert on statistical studies of twins and siblings, > which involve controversies all too reminiscent of econometrics.
