Freakonomics looked at this, coming up with some interesting conclusions. For one thing, reading to your children didn’t seem to have any effect on education scores, but owning books did (did the babies inherit book-reading genes?). Another example: adopted children tended to conform to the lifestyle predicted by their biological parents, not their adoptive parents, in regards to crime and income (which implies some uncomfortable ideas about poverty and class). I don’t remember the exact details of their analysis, but the general approach was to take commonly accepted statistical measurements and check for correlations. The most specious claim in the book (AFAIK) was that legalized abortion leads to lowered crime-rate twenty years down the road; while this is probably true, I don’t think the evidence demonstrates anything beyond correlation. His chapter on babies, though, was pretty good.
I’ve only met one pair of twins who were distinctively divergent (though both were in the military), but I believe they were fraternal.
adopted children tended to conform to the lifestyle predicted by their biological parents, not their adoptive parents, in regards to crime and income (which implies some uncomfortable ideas about poverty and class).
The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker touches on this a lot. Pinker basically throws out most studies that don’t control for genes (ie. You read to your kid and he develops good verbal skills.. But was that because you read to him/her, or because he inherited the genes that give good verbal skills), and instead he focuses on studies with adopted children.
Turns out that they are a lot more like their biological parents than their adoptive parents, and that twins that have been separated and adopted are still very similar to one another despite having grown in a different environment.
But Pinker mostly looked at psychological attributes, not at physical bodies.
The abortion claim was pretty well backed up by numbers; crime declines began earlier in states that legalized earlier, and crime fell by less in states where fewer providers existed. Moreover, the theory behind it makes perfect sense: higher capital investment (be it time or money) in children tends to lead to better life-outcomes; children who would otherwise have been aborted receive lower capital investment, either because their parents aren’t ready for them financially, or because their parents don’t like them as much.
I find their claim extremely dubious—abortion availability correlates with too many political and demographic variables for tests like that to work, and worldwide there seems to be no relation between abortion availability and crime at all.
I have a nit-pick with these studies, which I haven’t seen addressed: they show that a much larger part of the variance of results results from the birth parents than from the adopted parents.
However, the variance in birth parents’ IQ seems to be much larger than the variance in adopting parents IQ; has this been corrected for?
Freakonomics looked at this, coming up with some interesting conclusions. For one thing, reading to your children didn’t seem to have any effect on education scores, but owning books did (did the babies inherit book-reading genes?). Another example: adopted children tended to conform to the lifestyle predicted by their biological parents, not their adoptive parents, in regards to crime and income (which implies some uncomfortable ideas about poverty and class). I don’t remember the exact details of their analysis, but the general approach was to take commonly accepted statistical measurements and check for correlations. The most specious claim in the book (AFAIK) was that legalized abortion leads to lowered crime-rate twenty years down the road; while this is probably true, I don’t think the evidence demonstrates anything beyond correlation. His chapter on babies, though, was pretty good.
I’ve only met one pair of twins who were distinctively divergent (though both were in the military), but I believe they were fraternal.
The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker touches on this a lot. Pinker basically throws out most studies that don’t control for genes (ie. You read to your kid and he develops good verbal skills.. But was that because you read to him/her, or because he inherited the genes that give good verbal skills), and instead he focuses on studies with adopted children.
Turns out that they are a lot more like their biological parents than their adoptive parents, and that twins that have been separated and adopted are still very similar to one another despite having grown in a different environment.
But Pinker mostly looked at psychological attributes, not at physical bodies.
The abortion claim was pretty well backed up by numbers; crime declines began earlier in states that legalized earlier, and crime fell by less in states where fewer providers existed. Moreover, the theory behind it makes perfect sense: higher capital investment (be it time or money) in children tends to lead to better life-outcomes; children who would otherwise have been aborted receive lower capital investment, either because their parents aren’t ready for them financially, or because their parents don’t like them as much.
I find their claim extremely dubious—abortion availability correlates with too many political and demographic variables for tests like that to work, and worldwide there seems to be no relation between abortion availability and crime at all.
I have a nit-pick with these studies, which I haven’t seen addressed: they show that a much larger part of the variance of results results from the birth parents than from the adopted parents.
However, the variance in birth parents’ IQ seems to be much larger than the variance in adopting parents IQ; has this been corrected for?