heritability

Apparently Australian women are only half as likely as their American counterparts to administer what they know to be a lethal jolt of electricity to a stranger when ordered to do so. Our sheilas have a spirit of independence, defiance and mistrust of authority. Thank god for Australian culture.

This factoid from an article in today’s big paper corroborates an argument as to why nurture, and in this case culture, is as or more important than nature, as decreed by our genetic make-up.

Nurture held sway in 1975 in the Nature versus Nurture debate. Studying a bit of pop psychology in my final year at teachers’ college, I want to believe that the children whose lives I am about to enter are blank slates ready for me to do a bit of colouring-in.

Nature wrestled its way on top when the human genome was decoded and we were absolved of our faults—heritability determined our likelihood of being a bogan, getting a divorce, voting Liberal or psychopathy. But Nurture lives to fight another day.

As I obsessively self-analyse (during this bout of ‘transition’), I wonder what sort of Muslim, or Eskimo, or Chinese I would be. What sort of person or man might I be had I not finished school and been a teacher, had I not played sport, or gone overseas at 17 instead of 55? They’re the imponderables I ponder from time to time.

Would I be an atheist in a Muslim country given my lack of the religiosity gene? Would I harpoon myself if I were an Eskimo rather than endure the sterile whiteness of my snowy surrounds another minute? (I missed the love-of-snow gene too.) Would I be perversely dissident in the herd of one point three billion corporate Chinamen?

My organic latter-day hippie but grounded and eminently sensible daughter is, of course, paying homage to nurture in busting a gut in a relaxed way to give my grand-daughter, young Miss Nerrington, a stimulating and nourishing environment in which to begin life, while I wait for those inherited characteristics I can now observe over four family generations to emerge.

My daughter is right, just as I was with her and her brother, to do whatever she can to raise an intelligent, independent and well-balanced child without obsessing about perfection, either from Nerri or from herself as a mother.

I can’t help but think that the Nature versus Nurture debate is a spurious one. Most of us are inexplicable messes of genes and upbringing and culture. Sometimes one rules over the other. Some genes are stronger than others, some environments all-pervading.

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” Is Philip Larkin talking genes or child-rearing? Surely he’s talking about both.

Rock on.