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Scientists have no idea why 302 neuron nematodes go left or right, the idea that a social scientific study like this is coming to the conclusions they come to a
by VictorPath 4y ago
Scientists have no idea why 302 neuron nematodes go left or right, the idea that a social scientific study like this is coming to the conclusions they come to are absurd.
The original Pioneer Fund funded Minnesota studies very rarely studied twins separated at or near birth and raised in very different environments. For most of the twins, the separation happened much later, or happened early but was temporary and the family was reunited, or the parents died and two sisters each raised a twin, and the like. The notion is false that the Minnesota studies all this flowed from showed people mainly raised from birth in very different environments. It did not.
It's a religious belief - we are the Brahmin, we are the chosen people, dressed up in 21st century Calvinist/liberal clothes. We are born successful or not successful, due to nature, not nurture or environment. It's scientific Calvinism. Of course some people flock to defend it in a way they wouldn't for some aspect of quantum theory - as I said, it's a religion in pseudo-scientific form. It feeds people's egos, especially people born to some form of privilege who have not accomplished all that much, and some people race to swallow from that hose as fast as they can.
The history of the funding of all of this is the old Pioneer Fund which started out showing Nazi eugenic films. They funded the original Minnesota twin studies all this field flowed from.
I should note this appeared in The New Yorker three years into Tina Brown's editorship, this kind of low middlebrow garbage didn't show up in The New Yorker much before that, but it became commonplace after she came in.
- simonh 4y agoI have to say I dislike the tone of your comment, it's unnecessarily argumentative, but the point about the Pioneer Fund is correct. I'm also concerned that there may be some selection bias in reports of separated twins with amazing similarities. Nobody is going to make a documentary about a whole set of separated twins that are completely different from each other, and we will naturally focus on similarities and ignore differences. Personally on the nature Vs nurture debate I think it's probably both, at about 50/50. I don't see how either of them can't have a significant influence.