Born This Way? Nature, nurture, narratives, and the making of our political personalities

Jonathan Haidt.

As a nation, we’ve made great strides overcoming our differences. North vs. South, Catholic vs. Protestant, black vs. white. These divisions once brought forth extraordinary animosity. Even male vs. female had its day in the sun, for those of us old enough to remember the absurd 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King. Those differences have not disappeared, but the urgency and rancor has faded.

There is one difference, however, that is widening into a chasm and threatening to split the nation into two dysfunctional halves: left vs. right. Voters themselves have spread out only a bit in the last 10 years: Gallup reports a decline in the number of people calling themselves centrists or moderates (from 40 percent in 2000 to 36 percent in 2011), a slight rise in the number of conservatives (from 38 percent to 41 percent), and a slight rise in the number of liberals (from 19 percent to 21 percent).

But the political class, the political parties, and the media have completely changed their game since the 1980s. Politics used to be hardball: very competitive, but at the end of the day, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill could meet for a drink and a private conversation. Congressmen and senators had the sense that they all belonged to a grand institution. They had enough in common, and enough friends across the aisle, that they could work together on solving the nation’s biggest challenges, from facing down the Soviets to dismantling Jim Crow.

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The language window. Matt Ridley

All of these cases, if they are genuine, reinforce the view that language must be learned within a critical window of time during youth, or it will be too late. Experiments with song birds reach the same conclusion: If deprived of the sound of adult song at a particular age, young finches are never able to learn to sing their species' song. (The research, incidentally, was called the Kaspar Hauser experiments.)

These findings are prime evidence of how nature and nurture work together rather than in opposition to each other. The brain is innately designed to be open to experience, but only during a certain period. I like to call it "nature via nurture."

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Sementales. Arcadi Espada

Lo interesante de esa historia no son los imaginarios apocalipsis, sino la sorprendente laxitud con que la sociedad contemporáneo ha encarado esta variante reproductora. La fertilización de una mujer con el semen de un desconocido no ha desencadenado debates proporcionalmente comparables a los que desencadenaron el divorcio o el aborto. La explicación probable es que la fertilización aleatoria no exige la destrucción de ningún mito poderoso como el del amor eterno o la inmaculada concepción. Todo lo contrario. La ausencia de debate y control sobre el semental aleatorio descansa sobre un mito muy generalizado. La convicción de que la crianza es lo que hace al hombre, que nada diferencia el semen de la sangre, que en esos bancos blancos se almacena líquido y no carácter.

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Goldilocks heritability. Matt Ridley

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Extract:

Intriguingly, the heritability of intelligence has probably been increasing in recent decades. The more we make sure everybody gets sufficient nutrition and education, the less these factors will determine differences in outcome, so the more differences in genes will determine the differences that remain. The fairer society becomes, the higher heritability will be.

The new results are just right for proving that education is not futile, but nor is it a life sentence. And that the genes that matter are so many and so slight in their impact that seeking them out for your children through genetic engineering will never be practical anyway. Now, isn't that a happy result?