The following is an excerpt.
In 2002 I read The Blank Slate. With all due respect to Steven Pinker one of the most fascinating aspects of this book was actually a review of the work of another psychologist,Judith Richard Harris. Harris’ own views are explicated crisply in The Nurture Assumption. In it she reviews and expands on a major insight from behavior genetics: over the long term parental influence seems to be a relatively marginal predictor in terms of many behavioral traits. To be explicit, one can imagine a personality trait which varies in the population. The variation of genes may explain 40% of the variation of the trait. The variation in parental child-rearing techniques, “shared home environment,” may explain 10% of the variation of the trait. The remaining 50% of the variation may be “non-shared environment.” That basically means we don’t have a definitive explanation of what the 50% remainder is, though Harris posits that this consists to a great extent of peer groups.*
However you quibble with the details of Harris’ line of reasoning, the key takeaway is that people often neglect that parents and offspring share genes when considering the influence parents have upon their children.
Read the full post here: Don’t forget parents share genes with their offspring
