First thought: someone recently posted a suggestion to arrange a student debate on Harris's views (at least I thought it was posted--I can't find it anywhere). What I found interesting, assuming I didn't hallucinate the whole thing, was the comment that the students hated to take the pro-Harris position. It's been my impression as well that Harris's views are not welcomed by psychology students, who prefer to believe that the family (shared) influence is paramount. This may be because her take on development is too different from what they've always believed, and probably different as well from what they're still being taught in many psychology courses. Or perhaps it's because accepting her views means they can't "analyze" people any more, and if you can't do that, what's the point of being a psychology student? But a different comment I've heard, including on this list, is that Harris's views are a relief to many parents, who take it as a way of absolving themselves of responsibility for their children's shortcomings. Of course we're dealing with different populations here, and it's possible that reactions to the news differ in predictable ways. What we need is a study, not of Harris's views, but of the ways in which different people react to those views. Would that be a meta-Harris study? Second thought: in one of my recent posts (which I _was_ able to find), I said: > The finding that there is virtually no influence > of family environment on personality and social attitudes is > often extented to IQ, but I think this is incorrect. The data > do show that family environment contributes to IQ. Major revision to that view. I was unaware when I posted my comment that research has moved on to take into account the age at which the measurements were taken. Earlier twin studies apparently only measured IQ in children. Amazingly, it now turns out that while family (shared) environment is important for the child's IQ, this is not true for the adult, where it's essentially zero. A handy source is a figure published in last week's _Science _ (February 16) by McGuffin, Riley, and Plomin (p. 1232). Reading off the figure, it shows a shared value of about 0.3 for child IQ but a zero value for adult IQ. The data are taken from the new 4th edition of Plomin et al's book, _Behavioral Genetics_, which may not yet be out, but it's consistent with what they say in the 3rd ed, to wit: "Heritability of general cognitive ability increases during the life span. The effects of shared environment decrease during childhood to negligible levels after adolescence". That's pretty remarkable, isn't it? Stephen ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stephen Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470 Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661 Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Department web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy Check out TIPS listserv for teachers of psychology at: http://www.frostburg.edu/dept/psyc/southerly/tips/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
