Sorry Derb, but for a guy who recently argued that it was wrong to reduce (some) important issues of human freedom and human relations to the “frigid and pitiles dogma” of reason, your take on the relative irrelevance of fathers leaves me more than a bit cold. I’m sure there is much merit to the data and studies you cite, but going by own experience and the experience of pretty much every person I know, it strikes me as ridiculously reductionist to say that fathers don’t matter. I admit to not having contrary studies to invoke at the ready, but when it comes to the issue of self-identification fathers — and mothers — strike me as monumentally important and undeniably so. Parents communicate values and priorities. Historically, the best indicator of political affiliation, for example, is the political affiliation of parents. Obviously, the same holds true for religion. These are not minor slices of the human experience. If we inherit our parents’ understandings of both transcendence and social organization, it seems hard for me to believe that genetics and peer groups explain most of the story of human development. I do not doubt that peers are important. But, as you suggest, parents seek adult peers of similar values as well. So the influence of parents may be hard to tease out in areas where parents are very much alike.

Also, how do you explain group differences within bourgeois communities? Maybe genetics explains some of the superior performance of Asians in some communities. But common sense says that the expectations set by parents explains a great deal of it too. Kids whose parents expect straight As are still far more likely to have kids who get straight As. The peer groups these kids fall into are a symptom of those expectations not the other way around. I would still bet more on the kid with good parents in a bad neighborhood than on the kid with bad parents in a good neighborhood.

It should also be noted that your perspective provides an important license to progressive arguments going back a century about the need make parents secondary to a nurturing social environment. Those aren’t your politics, but it seems like you share some of those assumptions.