Agreed on point of diminishing returns. So just briefly:

—[Your] First: Nobody says–certainly not me–that group socialization will make you turn out like your peers. You bring your genes to the process. Timidity, for example, has a genetic basis. What happens when you bring your timid phenotype, the expression of your timid genotype, into your peer group? All sorts of things, depending on your other personality characteristics, and theirs (esp. the personalities of high-status individuals), and the general culture. You might make yourself the group clown–funny & popular. You might become the group butt–funny & unpopular. You might be the group reject–nobody wants to play with you. Or they might just kill & eat you. Group socialization isn’t a production line, stamping out identical products. (Neither, by the way, is genetics. The book I mentioned a post or two ago, No Two Alike, starts with a pair of identical twins–same genes–who grew up joined at the head–TOTALLY same environment!–who none the less had different adult personalities. How on earth did THAT happen? asks the author, and the book then develops a theory. I have no idea if the theory is true, but it’s testable, and in any case, Harris is most definitely not selling any naive determinism. Neither am I.)

—Second: “But your use of the word [‘personality’] to ‘debunk’ Rich’s column about the importance of fathers and marriage suggests that you think it means everything from character and values to faith and ideology.” Yes, that’s how I use it. By “personality” I mean “what you are.” Don’t quite see your problem there.

What bothered me about Rich’s column, and what I took issue with, was its glib acceptance of some fallacious reasoning about human development, mostly of the correlation-equals-causation variety. To take an example *not* Rich’s: If you study more-than-normally aggressive adults, you find that they suffered more-than-normal violence & abuse from their parents. Rich would say (I mean, on the basis of his column, I suppose he would say) that THEREFORE parental abuse causes adult aggressiveness.

But that needs proving, and the mere correlation doesn’t prove it. Two alternative explanations come to mind at once. (1) We have an aggressive adult from an aggressive parent (he beat the kid, didn’t he?) Maybe aggression runs in this family. It doesn’t even have to be genetic. It could be dietary, or religious. (2) The kid was obnoxious and difficult from the start. (Some are. Believe me.) The parent, who was perfectly average in aggressiveness, was driven to distraction (read: abnormally aggressive reactions) by the kid’s intransigent naughtiness. So we’re not looking at a parent-to-child effect at all; we’re actually looking at a child-to-parent effect! Yet I am pretty sure I have never read a headline saying “Difficult Kids Provoke Parents to Abuse, Study Shows.” Why not? Because our popular culture, and even big swathes of our academic culture, are Freud-soaked: Mom and Dad make you what you are. Just from the history of our species, this is a highly dubious proposition; but in any case it needs to be proved rigorously. If it has been, I missed it.

The glib assertion that “Oh, the childhood home environment was A, the adult turned out B, therefore A causes B” is just, as I said in my comment on Rich’s column, “leaky.” It *might* be the case for some particular A and B. I’ll give you an A-causes-B for A=parents who drive recklessly, B=kids with nasty flesh scars; but in most such claims, all sorts of other things might be happening. That’s why we have careful scientific inquiry. When conducted, the science (as much as I’ve seen–and I say again, I’m not a child-development expert) says what I said it says: That genetics and group socialization are the biggies, home-family environment a littl-ie.

Third: “What bothers me about Derb’s use of science is that from time to time it seems to confirm morality he likes and stands irrelevant when it confirms morality he doesn’t like.” Very unfair, as I actually posted a counterexample a couple of posts ago. I am strongly repelled by male homosexuality, and for a long time resisted the idea that it was innate, as the homosexual activists insist. Now, as I said in that former link, I think they are right. I still don’t like the thing, but from what I’ve seen of the science, it is indeed innate. (Which, for the umpteenth time, is ***NOT*** a synonym for “genetic.”) So there I am using science to REFUTE morality I like.

Four: “If [marriage] has no serious effect on kids…” Where did I say that? I actually said, or pretty directly implied, the OPPOSITE thing when I said that the best thing you can do for your kids is to be successful enough in life to give ‘em a nice bourgeois neighborhood to grow up in. Marriage makes that MUCH easier–division of labor, two live cheaper than one, emotional stability, etc. etc. I am a HUGE fan of marriage–got my 20th anniversary coming up in August. Unfair again. Kids are tough, resilient little buggers, though, and will socialize and develop just fine starting from all kinds of home environemnts, other things being equal. Of course, other things never are, and that’s where the fun starts. But Rich’s glib A-causes-B syllogisms are still false, and have been proved so, to my satisfaction at any rate.