By Steve Sailer
05/19/2021
Earlier: “Three Identical Strangers:" A Documentary About Separated-At-Birth TripletsFrom my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Twins Separated Across Space and Time
Steve SailerMay 19, 2021
What matters most: nature or nurture, genes or environment, ancestry or upbringing? The conventional wisdom argues for the malleable latter, even though twin and adoption studies typically find more substantial evidence for nature than for nurture. Yet, I would like to encourage hereditarians to not get overconfident just because they so soundly defeat the politically ascendant nurturists on the rare occasions when they can lure them into scientific debate. Today, I want to point out a limitation on twin studies that opens up the likelihood that Hegel’s notion of the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) also matters.
I am an extremist only in the sense of being an extreme moderate. For example, on the central intellectual question of the human sciences of nature versus nurture, my default assumption since the 1990s has been to begin by guessing that, for whatever trait is under consideration, genetics and the environment are about equal in influence. I shift away from that evenhanded standpoint only when there is strong evidence one way or another.
In contrast, the dogma of the day argues for the extremist position that all behavior must be determined by shadowy environmental forces, such as “systemic racism,” even though the rapidly improving genetic sciences find ever more evidence for the power of heredity.
Yet, the older I get, the more I feel compelled to warn realists to avoid genetic triumphalism because history has many cunning passages. In the very long run, time can deal us big surprises.
Read the whole thing there.
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