You Know What Doesn't Matter to Children? Parents.

A rather bold thesis! Let's look at the evidence.

In terms of compelling evidence, let’s start with a study published recently in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics.1 Tinca Polderman and colleagues just completed the Herculean task of reviewing nearly all twin studies published by behavior geneticists over the past 50 years....

Before progressing, I should note that behavioral geneticists make a finer grain distinction than most about the environment, subdividing it into shared and non-shared components.1,2,3,4 Not much is really complicated about this. The shared environment makes children raised together similar to each other.3 The term encompasses the typical parenting effects that we normally envision when we think about environmental variables. Non-shared influences capture the unique experiences of siblings raised in the same home; they make siblings different from one another. Another way of thinking about non-shared environments is that they represent the parts of your life story that are unique from the rest of your family. Importantly, this also includes all of the randomness and pure happenstance that life tends to hurl in our direction from time to time. Returning to the review of twin research, the shared environment just didn’t matter all that much (that’s on average, of course, for some traits it mattered more than others). The non-shared environment mattered consistently.

The pattern of findings mentioned above is nothing new.1,2,3,4,5 The importance of genetics and the non-shared environment (and the relatively minor importance of the shared environment) was already so entrenched in behavior genetics that years before the Polderman study was published it had been enshrined as a set of “laws.”2 The BG laws, though, are based largely (but certainly not completely) on twin studies, the meta-analysis by Polderman et al. was comprised of twin studies, and if you pay attention to this sort of thing you’ve probably heard some nasty things about twin studies lately.3 You’ve read that twin studies contain an insidious flaw that causes them to underestimate shared environmental effects (making it seem like parents matter less than they do). The assumptions of twin research, however, have been meticulously studied. The methods of twin researchers have been around for decades and have been challenged, critiqued, refined, adjusted, and (perhaps most importantly) cross validated with other techniques that rely on different assumptions entirely.3,4 They work, and they work with impressive precision.

Based on the results of classical twin studies, it just doesn’t appear that parenting—whether mom and dad are permissive or not, read to their kid or not, or whatever else—impacts development as much as we might like to think. Regarding the cross-validation that I mentioned, studies examining identical twins separated at birth and reared apart have repeatedly revealed (in shocking ways) the same thing: these individuals are remarkably similar when in fact they should be utterly different (they have completely different environments, but the same genes).3

So, good news for those of you who are parents: Junior is a rat because of your rotten genetics, not because of your moral failings.

Well, and his peer group: it turns out that the 'socialization' that really matters is the kind of kids he runs with. "As Harris notes, parents are not to blame for their children’s neuroses (beyond the genes they contribute to the manufacturing of that child), nor can they take much credit for their successful psychological adjustment."

Psychoanalysts hardest hit.

Holiday Lesson Proves Nothing

These guys are good singers, though.

Oh, It's Even Worse Than That

Michael Ledeen writes on the Iran deal:

I dare say very few people realize there is no formal deal. Countless journalists refer to something that was “signed” or “inked” in Vienna, even though no such thing took place. A handful of careful writers, notably Yigal Carmon and Amir Taheri have gotten it right, and last week the State Department admitted that nobody has signed The Deal and it is not legally binding on anybody.

As I wrote in July, Iran has promised to be on good behavior, and we have promised to pay for it. We are indeed paying, as we have for more than two years ($700 million per month), and the Iranians, as is their wont, have done their worst to spread terror and jihadism all over the world, from the Middle East to Asia, Africa and South America.

Such a deal! Carmon thinks Obama will have to admit failure, and return to the negotiating table. As I predicted…

Oh, it's been signed by one person. Thus, it's legally binding on one country.

Guess which one?

I'm Big on Metaphors

Sounds like you're suggesting unions for grad students. Which, frankly, isn't that insane given the tremendous abuses they are suffering under currently: for below-poverty-line pay, you teach most of the courses the university offers. As Federal student loans vastly enrich university budgets, and as the teaching is the real value the university provides, that's the kind of imbalance that leads to people thinking that a union might not be a bad idea. Solidarity, baby! Popcorn!

Grim's Law of Wrench-Turning and Social Media

When looking for practical advice on how to repair mechanical problems with your ride, remember: YouTube is invaluable, Google is helpful, and Facebook is evil.

Don't forget to mix sugar into your gasoline to make sure it doesn't get too thin in the dry winter weather, and be sure to let all the summer air out of your tires and refill them with winter air so they don't burst in the cold.

In Fairness, the Baptists Banned Alcohol Sales Too

America's first majority Muslim city has elected its first majority Muslim city council, and they've passed their first laws.

While the members of the Hamtramck, Michigan city council have denied that they would put religion into politics, their actions show otherwise. They’ve already banned alcohol sales within 500 feet of local mosques, and allowed daily calls to prayer to reverberate through town as early as 6am.

I suppose churches would want to be excepted from public noise ordinances insofar as they had church bells. On the other hand, they wouldn't generally be ringing them at six in the morning.

The Feast of St. Andrew

Saint Andrew is a strange choice to be the national saint of Scotland. Scotland has plenty of its own saints, had they wished to choose a Scot. The Scots nevertheless chose him, but celebrate his feast day with a celebration of traditional Scottish culture. Just as ironically, Romania celebrates the Feast of St. Andrew -- who was a Jew from Galilee in spite of his Greek name -- with a festival descended from the Roman Saturnalia.

In any case, here's an appropriate video.

Yeoman "Farmers"

W. R. Mead is on ground I find very familiar today. He is making a pragmatic argument about why we should shift to a system that prefers small business development, but there's a political philosophical argument for the proposal as well. It's Jefferson's old argument about the increased practical liberty that comes from owning your own means of production. Political liberty is good, but if you are effectively under the thumb of another, you are not really at liberty to speak your mind. This is why James Jackson, that greatest of Georgian political heroes, fought to undo the Yazoo land fraud and ensure a Georgia in which you could own your own land.

When I say he fought for this I mean literally fought, not "fought for" in the figurative sense preferred by contemporary politicians. First he fought in the Revolutionary War for the principle of political liberty. Then he fought four duels in the course of trying to undo the Yazoo land fraud as his opponents tried to kill him to prevent his success. He was not dissuaded by these multiple attempts on his life, but saw the question through to victory.

So what was the principle for which he fought? It was that the American system of government should work to ensure that Americans had at least the real potential to own their own means of production. Instead of a society structured around a renter/land-lord relationship, it would be a society structured as much as possible to be about individual families owning the things they needed to produce a living. Then they could say what they wanted when it came time to reason politically rather than having to scrape to the opinions of the great or the rich. It would enshrine the political control of the community among the people because the people would be practically as well as formally free.

There is an Aristotelian idea behind this model as well. In the Politics, Aristotle writes that the least dangerous group to own power in any society is the propertied middle class. Because they have land or businesses of their own, they want strong protections for private property, and thus will not (as the poor tended to do in Aristotle's time) vote to 'take from the rich and give to the poor.' Because they are not so rich that they can afford to be long away from tending to their own business, they will not seek to rule any more than is absolutely necessary, ensuring that government remains limited to only those concerns that absolutely require it. Unlike government by the rich or by those who are paid to govern, popular government led by the middle class will not seek to overawe every aspect of life in order to further their own class interests.

Thus they will avoid both the problems associated with government by unregulated democracy, and government by an elite that is rich or that is paid to perform public office.

It remains a good ideal for future reform. Government could do much less, so much less that it was only done part time by those who would want as quickly as possible to get back to literally minding their own business. What is the solution to poverty on this model? Encouraging the poor in coming to develop a productive business of their own.

"Reason" a raison

Little French lingo for a Monday afternoon, since the President is badmouthing us in Paris at the climate change conference. On his other favorite topic, Reason magazine has the sense of it: "Obama Insists 'We Have to Do Something' About Mass Shootings but Can't Say What or Why It Would Work."

The Times describes Obama as increasingly exasperated by Congress's refusal to enact the gun controls he supports. Some of us are increasingly exasperated by Obama's failure to elucidate any logical connection between those measures and the crimes they supposedly would prevent.

It's a faith-based approach, which, actually, is another tie between his two favorite subjects.

UPDATE: It sounds as if the President's spokesman does have a specific plan:

The Obama administration is pressing for gun control, repeating a demand that Congress pass a ban on gun ownership for Americans on the no-fly list.

“If the U.S. Government has determined that it is too dangerous for you to board a plane then you shouldn’t be able to buy a gun,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said during a press conference in Paris today.... “Congress should pass this law before leaving for the Holidays,” Earnest said.

So, your proposal is that Congress should immediately give the executive branch unilateral authority to rescind any individual's Constitutional 2nd Amendment rights based on whatever criteria it likes, without any due process at all? That's a modest proposal.

Knocked That One Out Of The Park

Noah Rothman at Commentary magazine notices that "Problems change, but the remedy doesn't." The old problem was the Soviet critique of Western imperialism. The new problem is how to resolve an alleged crisis with climate change. Those sound like they are different enough problems that they should have nearly wholly different solution sets. But no, the solutions proposed are the very same solutions:

The notion that the American way of life is unsustainable and unfair toward the rest of the world’s population is an old argument, and its remedies are suspiciously familiar. It was once claimed that the prosperity of the first world must be curtailed if there was to be peace.... Replace the scourge of climate change with poverty and “climate-friendly technologies” with advanced military-industrial technologies, and you have a boilerplate Soviet speech aimed at an international audience.

It's not very surprising to find John F. Kerry at the forefront of advocating that America yield to the Communist agenda. He's been at that for a while now.

The Beauty of Nature, Perfected by Art

Isle of Lewis, Scotland. Someday, I think I may need to go and visit that place.

Of Course He Did

'At Paris Conference, Obama says US Partly to Blame for Climate Change.'

We're lucky he didn't assume the whole blame for us.

Fair Enough

The Colorado Fraternal Order of Police would like everyone to know that they don't appreciate the suggestion that they are racists.

"Carelessly Labeled"

A woman named Monica Bauer -- Master of Divinity, playwright, ordained as a minister in the United Church of Christ -- wants to accuse the entire Right to Life movement of being accomplices in murder. Exactly whose murder isn't clear, since no one belonging to Planned Parenthood's organization was hurt in the recent incident in Colorado, but let's leave that pesky factual question. I just want to get after the basic assertion.

[T]he religious extremist is most likely a right-wing Christian. And the shooter had help. He had help from an entire movement that has carelessly labeled abortion as "murder" and "baby-killing." Killing abortion providers flows logically from the moment you call abortion "murder" and this labeling has to stop. Now.

Am I a Christian? You bet. Have I read the Bible? Many times, and carefully. Graduated from Yale Divinity School with a Masters in Divinity. Ordained in the ministry in 1982, in the United Church of Christ. Still an active member of the church. Jesus never said a word about abortion, and the only way anti-choice activists twist the Bible to their side is to take a few lines from a Psalm or a few words about "spilling seed" out of context. There are entire books debunking the pro-life movement as resting on shaky theological grounds, so I won't waste time recapping all the arguments here.

There are actually a few more pesky factual matters here -- for example, there's no evidence in any of the recent interviews conducted with family and neighbors to indicate that this guy was a "religious extremist," or even "religious," let alone "right wing" or even a Christian. But we'll leave all that too.

Jesus never said anything about abortion. However, the objection to abortion does not stand on any obscure theology or any strange passages about 'spilling seed.' It's about the killing of a human being.

The appellation "baby-killing" is not some sort of weird locution: it involves killing a human being at a stage of development that, were the child wanted by his or her mother, we would have no problem identifying as a baby. We would say, and do say, "When is the baby due?" or "Have you decided what to name the baby?" It's only when mother has decided to kill her baby that we are told that we can only describe it using clinical language designed to mask the humanity of the creature being killed.

You may object to murder, since murder is defined in different ways by different people. The law doesn't consider this murder as murder is defined by the law -- a rather circular argument made worse given that the law often did treat it as a kind of murder until the Supreme Court overturned the laws of all fifty states. So we might well say that it is not murder in the technical sense of the word given to us on stone tablets from that famous bench in Washington, D.C.

Still, a commonplace definition of the word murder as it might be used by any ordinary person is this: "the intentional killing of an innocent human being." Let's run through the steps.

1) Is it intentional? Yes.

2) Is it a killing? Yes.

3) Is it a living being? Obviously it is, or it couldn't be killed.

4) Is the being to be killed innocent in the usual sense of the word "innocent"? Yes.

5) Is it human? It either is or it isn't. If it isn't, what kind of being would you say it was?

A more extended argument on that last point: to be a thing of a certain kind is to be structured in a certain way. A table is a thing that is structured in such a way as to be capable of holding objects off the floor. Artifacts like tables are structured by makers, who put them into a given order for a given purpose. Living things are different: they structure themselves out of other things they find in the world. They are their own purpose.

Now a given living thing -- say a fox or a dog or a hawk -- is not the stuff of which it is made. All of us have had dogs, I presume, and all of those dogs have grown from puppies, taking on more and more stuff from the world and putting it into the order that is themselves. The physical parts of themselves -- proteins, water -- are all exchanged over the course of their lives, but we recognize that it is still our dog. It's the activity of the ordering principle that is the life of the dog, and it is the order that is the dog. As long as it continues, we say that our dog is alive. When our dog dies, the ordering stops: though it may look like our dog for a while, it is no longer actively being put in order as a living thing.

The living, growing being is ordering the world as it encounters it into itself. Of course it is a human being: it is putting the world into a human order. It will remain a human being as long as this continues, even if she should live to be a hundred and one.

That's what you are killing.

I am no absolutist on this point. I understand that there are cases when the life of the mother will be lost, when there is a sense in which the child is not "innocent" and the killing is therefore not murder -- indeed, it might almost be morally obligatory. But these are a tiny minority of cases, as any honest observer will confess.

The language being used to describe these acts is not careless. It is dangerous because it is accurate. It is the right way to describe what we are allowing to happen all across our nation, using ordinary language as we would ordinarily use it.

There Are Two Americas...

...one urban, one rural.

The big problem is to figure out how to restrict the harms the urban areas cause to those areas. That's where nearly all the problems are coming from, and yet they have just slightly more votes. A proper Federalism using the 50 states might not do it, as the urban areas can overawe the decent parts of their states. But a federalism that treats urban areas as states in themselves -- maybe. It would mean increasing the number of states by a few dozen, in return for having rural states that could really live according to traditional mores without the chaos caused by these urban areas.

Gizmodo: Physicists Say Everyone Is Lying About That Russian Bomber

Interesting, although the Russian claims sound less like fabrications.

We're not done with this one. I think Russia may manage to peel France off of the NATO coalition with it, given America's terrible response to the whole thing. Even if they don't manage to bring France into a coalition with themselves -- and right now, the French President not only sounds like he's open to that, he sounds like he thinks it's his idea -- they could still split NATO by making France a free agent again. They were, for most of the Cold War.

C'mon. The Boy's Name is "Tomahawk."

A Sacramento, California, mom who let her 4-year-old son play outside at a playground 120 feet from her home was arrested. Her neighbors called 911 when they saw the kid outside. While many people might think four is too young for a boy to be outside on his own, the bigger question is: Is this a criminal offense? And doesn't the boy's mother have the right to make that choice?

The boy (whose name is Tomahawk) was in a gated apartment complex and on a playground. He's an outdoorsy kid who loves exploring and sounds like he can take care of himself fairly well.

When a boy's name is Tomahawk, he has probably been raised well enough to handle a playground in a gated community.

Certainty and Uncertainty

When I saw the news of an active shooter in a Planned Parenthood yesterday, I figured there was even money on it being a jealous husband or a domestic terrorist. After reports came in for a while, though, neither of these scenarios sounded very likely:

1) MSNBC -- hardly a conservative outlet -- reported that all the shooting had actually happened at a nearby Chase bank.

2) Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains division put out a statement that they didn't think this had been targeted at them.

3) Planned Parenthood put out a statement a few hours after the shootings that said that none of their staff and also none of their patients had been among the victims.

4) The history of the guy suggested he was barely connected to the world we live in, occupying a cabin with no electricity nor plumbing. He also had a legal history that suggested both domestic violence and cruelty to animals.

So, now it sounded like a bank robbery gone wrong, with the hostage taking at the PP location just by coincidence.

Then, today, we get these anonymous quotes sourced to law enforcement officials:

In one statement, made after the suspect was taken in for questioning, Dear said "no more baby parts" in reference to Planned Parenthood, according to two law enforcement sources with knowledge of the case.

But the sources stressed that Dear said many things to law enforcement and the extent to which the "baby parts" remark played into any decision to target the Planned Parenthood office was not yet clear. He also mentioned President Barack Obama in statements.

So now, who knows? Maybe somehow it was intended as a terrorist act aimed at Planned Parenthood after all, and he was just spectacularly bad at it. He may be too disordered to have had a certain purpose.

Those statements are proving politically very useful to those on the Left, for whom this is not an uncertain but a very certain opportunity. It's an opportunity to tell everyone on the Right to shut up once and for all about Planned Parenthood, and to make any rhetoric about abortion as the killing of babies off limits as hate speech that somehow causes irrational violent types to lash out.

Also, it's a chance to push for gun control, the President's new favorite topic. Funny how we didn't hear anything about Chicago in his speech, a city with the strictest gun control in the nation and also gun violence the likes of which most of the rest of the country never dreams. Or Paris, which has every kind of gun control a progressive heart could desire, and all the same far worse shootings occur.

The President is behind the ball on this one. Even INTERPOL has been suggesting, for a couple of years now, that an armed citizenry may be the only rational response to the threat of terrorism by active shooters. Harden the whole society, and such threats become much less dangerous in scope.

One solid thing can be said from my position: it sounds as if the police officer killed was a really decent guy. My sympathies go to his family and community.

UPDATE: Uncertainty abounds.

UPDATE: Someone thinks of citing the Catechism.

1756 It is therefore an error to judge the morality of human acts by considering only the intention that inspires them or the circumstances (environment, social pressure, duress or emergency, etc.) which supply their context. There are acts which, in and of themselves, independently of circumstances and intentions, are always gravely illicit by reason of their object; such as blasphemy and perjury, murder and adultery. One may not do evil so that good may result from it.

It's one of the areas in which I am most inclined to sin, I must confess.

"Oslo is Dead"

The constant international obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian question continues. The last seemed-like-it-might-work protocols are now clearly dead. So what's next, asks Geoffrey Aronson at Al Jazeera.

What has changed is that today there is a growing sense that Israel must set the agenda for the post-Oslo era. Israeli leaders now see an opportunity to make a dramatic Israeli move, to shuffle the cards in a way that responds to domestic political pressures to respond to continuing protests, advances Israel's settlement interests, and exploits Washington's retreat from diplomacy.

"If we do not initiate, someone else will take the initiative for moulding our future," warned a retired Israeli military general Shlomo Yanai.

Jerusalem is the crown jewel of Israel's national and territorial aspirations. And it is the place where the effort to square the circle of challenges posed by annexation is centred.

The contest over Al-Aqsa commands the most attention, but Israeli efforts since the second Intifada have focused on reducing the number and access of Palestinians in the city.

My sense of this conflict has always been that the Israelis should set the agenda and resolve it however they wished. Israel has repeatedly won its right to exist on the field of honor, even if you are not inclined to believe in its Biblical warrant. The decades of constant meddling in these internal affairs has done nothing to bring peace to the land.

More on Medieval Thanksgiving

While looking up something that I was thinking about with regard to Eric's comment on the Ancient Roman use of spices, I learned something that I did not know: the way that we use the term "entree" in North American English is not just different from the way the French use it, it's different from the way everyone else in the world uses it. But it is not different because it's an American innovation. It's different because we retain the Medieval meaning of the word.

The word entrée in French originally denoted the "entry" of the dishes from the kitchens into the dining hall. In the illustration from a French fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the Histoire d'Olivier de Castille et d'Artus d'Algarbe, a fanfare from trumpeters in the musicians' gallery announces the processional entrée of a series of dishes....

In traditional French haute cuisine, the entrée preceded a larger dish known as the relevé, which "replaces" or "relieves" it, an obsolete term in modern cooking, but still used as late as 1921 in Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire.

In France, the modern restaurant menu meaning of "entrée" is the course that precedes the main course in a three-course meal, i.e. the course which in British usage is often called the "starter" and in American usage the "appetizer."

For us as for 15th century diners the entree is the showily-presented main course, which in terms of Thanksgiving would be when the Turkey is brought to the table on a big platter and carved for everyone.