Derb – I’m not going to wade too deeply back into this. But here’s just something I’d like to throw out there. As you say the brain is an organ. It evolved to deal with hardships and the like. Fine, fine. I’m in basic agreement with you. But the brain did not evolve to live in the 21st century. It evolved to live on the plains of prehistoric Africa and the mountains and valleys of Eurasia. What constitutes an well-adjusted personality in suburbia is quite different than what constitutes a well-adjusted personality in cave man times. No one really cared if you had “issues” 10,000 B.C. Indeed, humans had no vocabulary to understand “issues.” The good life was a full belly, a safe cave and, for men, a mate who didn’t put up too much of a fight and, for women, a mate who treated you with some kindness. That is not civilization as we define it, and saying that our brains were designed to deal with those circumstances is not the same thing as saying that our brains are designed to deal with today’s world. Today, our brains need a lot more software upgrades so that our minds can be considered healthy.

We know that all sorts of animals — elephants, apes, dolphins etc — teach their offspring how to live in a specific culture. Is it really so outlandish to believe that parenting is the means by which children are taught not to live like cavemen and to have standards somewhat higher than that of cavemen?

Indeed, a dead mother or father 15,000 years ago created a very different set of problems than a dead mother or father creates today. And the damage that one receives from such an experience may be more of a handicap in a civilized world than it might have been in a nasty and brutish one where parents can teach you everything you need to know about life pretty quickly.

(We might also ponder the evolutionary role parental and filial love plays. Children who didn’t love their parents might have been weaned from the gene pool pretty early. Surely parents who didn’t love their children had fewer surving progeny than parents who did for all the obvious reasons.)

Regardless, it seems to me that the entire conservative project is founded on the observation that we are flawed, unfinished, creatures with base instincts and that it is the job of parents (and others) to improve the species from its lowly starting point. The work of genetics voluptuaries doesn’t really change that project much, by my lights. It confirms it.