JPod: Well, that’s as nasty a bit of ad hominem as I’ve seen in a while. From–who?–oh yeah, Malcolm Gladwell, that well-known authority on developmental psychology.

Fortunately that kind of thing counts for nothing in science. Is the science good? Is the only thing that matters. And that was exactly what drew me out on Rich’s comments in the first place. The science just smelled bad (and still does).

Look: If you tell me that adverse circumstances in childhood, like being short a parent, directly cause psycho-social handicaps in the adult organism, I smell a bad smell right away. It doesn’t make sense, based on what we know about biology. Our behavior, including our social behavior, is managed by the brain, which is an organ. Like any other organ, the brain evolved; and we have a pretty good idea of the circumstances it evolved under. Those circumstances included LOTS of childhood adversity, and LOTS of absent parents. The growth of the child’s brain into the adult’s brain is regulated by genes. Genes that led that development along a path from childhood adversity to adult dysfunction, would be about as advantageous as genes that gave you only one leg. Natural selection would take care of them in short order. To put it the other way round: If you define “toughness” as “the ability to arrive at adulthood without serious neurological impairment from such childhood adversities as a missing parent,” then toughness would be a thing strongly selected for. My own observations (I am a parent, and was once a schoolteacher in one of England’s worst slums) suggest that this is right. As I said, kids are tough, reslilient little devils.

OK, that’s a priori. A priori resoning is excellent grounds for suspicion, though. If you tell me that someone has published a paper showing that the Earth stopped dead in its orbit last Tuesday, and then commenced orbiting the Sun in the reverse direction, my first thought, even without reading the paper, is: “Why, that’s against the laws of physics,” and a proper suspicion follows. The notion that a missing father causes, in and of itself, psychic harm to the adult organism, similarly goes against the laws of biology, and suspicion again naturally follows.

As for Ms. Harris’s credentials, in her latest book, she tells the following cute story.

“[In 1998] The American Psychological Association gave me an award for [a paper published in Psychological Review]: the George A. Miller award, named in honor of an eminent cognitive psychologist and presented each year to the writer of an outstanding article in psychology. The award came with … an invitation to give a fifty-five minute address to a large audience of APA members at their annual convention … I began my address by reading aloud the letter I had received, thirty-eight years ealier, from the Harvard Department of Psychology. The letter explained that the department had decided not to let me stay on for the Ph.D. degree. They had decided that I wasn’t worthy of a Ph.D., the letter said, because they didn’t think I had the ‘originality and independence’ to live up to Harvard’s standards. The punch line came when I told my audience who signed that letter: the acting chairman of the Harvard Department of Psychology, George A. Miller.”

As I pointed out earlier, Ms. Harris’s lack of a doctorate has had little or no bearing on her ability as a psychologist. Career-path academic droners have their place in the great scheme of things, I don’t doubt; but so, sometimes, do eccentric outliers. As I said, ad hominem doesn’t cut it, and neither does credentialism: it’s the quality of the science that counts. Nothing else counts at all—no, not even the opinion of a staff writer for New Yorker magazine.