Derb, sorry for the delay in taking the bait you posted yesterday, I missed it until this morning. I have no desire to rehash the entire debate from a couple of summers ago (in part because it would require me linking to all of the posts, which is too laborious). But let me still be a voice of skepticism about all of this genetic-determinism stuff.

First, I’ll make my concessions. As you know, I’m no tabula rasa fetishist. I’m perfectly willing to accept the notion that 40, 50, 60, even 70 percent of our personality is largely baked into the genetic cake in one sense or another (though we might disagree on what that means). I’m also perfectly willing to concede that parents — or rather, parenting styles (having two parents matters, a lot) — do not matter as much as we once thought, or as much as I would like to believe. It comes as no surprise to me that the Dr. Spock users’ manual to children wasn’t all it was cracked up to be in the 1950s.

That said, I have to say I just don’t find a lot of this behavioral-genetics stuff nearly as persuasive as a lot of folks I respect do. For starters, it seems to me that a lot of this boils down to scientists measuring the stuff they’re really good at measuring. For instance, the self-reporting of “happiness” is taken as gospel. But the memories of these same people — indeed, their conception of their entire life story — is discounted. If I were to ask 1,000 successful or happy people to “name the people who had the biggest influence on your life,” my guess is that something like 900 of them would put their parents at or near the top of the list (and most, I would further guess, would say their parents had a positive influence on them). And yet that testimony is apparently inconsequential, while their answers to some kind of “morality and happiness” quiz is dispositive. Why?

Also, the determinists all concede that parents are hugely influential on the religious and political orientation of their kids. Why doesn’t this bother the determinists? Surely religion and politics are not trivial things. If they were, why do we try to avoid talking about them at the dinner table? Why do people define their worldviews along religious and political beliefs? Why do they kill each other over such things? Saying parenting has no effect, save for religion and politics, sounds a bit like saying college has no effect except for determining how much money you’ll make and how you’ll live the rest of your life.

As we discussed last time around, parents make all sorts of substantive decisions for their children that have enormous consequences. Most kids would not willingly subject themselves to the laborious practice and lessons that earn them proficiency at the piano or the violin. And yet, the parental imposition of those skills often have profound consequences. Steven Pinker might think that music is mere “auditory cheesecake,” but the people who dedicate their lives to music (often thanks to their parents’ introduction to it) don’t see it that way. The fact that scientists say music is trivial or unimportant seems more like a concession that they simply can’t measure its importance. One can make the same argument about sports, education, and work habits generally.

Also, I’m confused why you, John Derbyshire, find so much of this stuff so overwhelmingly compelling, given that it ends up being a kind of reductionist materialism more commonly found in other ideological precincts. Last January, you wrote during our Haiti discussion:

Culture is just customary collective behavior. If I ask: “Why do people in this place behave in this way?” and you reply, “Because of their culture,” you are asserting that they behave in this way because that’s how they behave. “Culture” is a sort of phlogiston or luminiferous æther that sounds as if it’s explaining something, but actually isn’t. I’d advance it as a good candidate for a word that should be banned from serious social and political discussions.

Is this really where genetic determinism is supposed to take us? Is culture really so irrelevant that it should be “banned from serious social and political discussion”? That strikes me as a staggering overstatement of the genetic determinists’ case so extreme that if I came up with it, I would be fairly accused of creating an unfair straw man.

But if culture doesn’t matter (which as a Hayekian and a Burkean I find preposterous), why bother lamenting that “pop culture is filth”? Why spend a nanosecond on talk of assimilation? Indeed, why do you care about gay marriage (I’m assuming you do, maybe I have that wrong)? Why care about tradition, proper grammar, literature, the rule of law, whatever, if at the end of the day these all boil down to gilding the genetic lily? What is the genetic determinist’s explanation for the profound improvements in productivity for a Mexican laborer in America versus a Mexican laborer in Mexico? Does their DNA change when they cross the border?

Or are you saying that culture is epiphenomenal to a specific race or ethnicity? British culture is British culture because British DNA is what it is? What about when Brits were barbarians? What if some Albanians or Iranians adopt a British baby — will that kid grow up to be culturally British because his genes tell him to?

Again, I’m will to accept that genes are important. But it often sounds like you’re saying they’re everything. And I’ve seen no evidence for that whatsoever.