QUESTIONING? MINDS? | 2006-05-22
There is a lot of disagreement about how much efffect heredity has versus environment.
The post-World War II period, when the Greatest Generation went to college to get indoctrinated on the GI Bill, was the halycon period of pure environment versus heredity.
I was there. Any mention of heredity was instantly branded Nazism. But that period wore itself out as more and more discoveries about genetics surfaced.
In the period 1945-1955, though, one could say without fear of contradiction on campus that there was no such thing as genetics when it came to human intelligence.
Nobody SAYS that today, but it is the unspoken assumption in every classroom, and no student ever challenges it.
The argument today is whether heredity makes 50 or 90% of the difference in determining who will commit crime or one's choice of toothpaste. Identical twins reunited separated at birth almost always use the same one and usually commit the same crimes at the same ages.
But you will sit in social science and science classes for a thousand hours and never hear one single word about hte effect of hereidty on human action.
But if the disagreement is about how much of human action is causd by heredity and how much by nurture, surly htose questioning young minds that are supposed to be so revolutionary would ask why this is never mentioned in ANY class.
In the 1960s, when Mommy Professor's Young Revolutionaries were out there demanding that the whole economy be made Marxist and everything be turned over to "the intellectuals," meaning Mommy Professor, those so-called "radicals" were the most obedient people imaginable.
No "young radical" EVER asked why heredity was never discussed. They attacked anybody physically who asked about it.
Those were the Questioning Young Minds Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather always praised to the skies.
But the iron lock on all discussion of what REALLY determines the human future is as solidly in place today as it was in 1955.
And no young "mind" questions it.