> Twin studies show that nurture has little impact on personality or IQ, excepting things like serious abuse. I don't know anything about personality, but I do

> Twin studies show that nurture has little impact on personality or IQ, excepting things like serious abuse. I don't know anything about personality, but I do know that for IQ this is an awfully contentious topic, for a multitude of reasons. Whether that's ignoring maternal effects, the implicit assumption of independence between genetics and environment in twins reared apart, or just plain old questioning of how to interpret heritability as a statistic, it's REALLY unclear what to think. You will find serious academics in field with vastly different beliefs. I spent an inappropriately large amount of time researching this recently, and my conclusion is that it's a lot harder to measure than people think, and that the commonly cited numbers of 0.7-0.8 for heritability should be viewed with a significant deal of skepticism. It might be right, but it's a number that I have very low confidence in. I would also say that even if those numbers are correct, that does imply a very substantial effect due to environment. What I will say is that you have to more or less ignore the Wikipedia article on the subject. It's too political a topic for Wikipedia to perform well.