Originally Posted by Bostonian
Here are Charles Murray's comments on Amy Chua. He mentions that her kids have good genes: [...]

Guess what. Amy Chua has really smart kids. They would be really smart if she had put them up for adoption at birth with the squishiest postmodern parents. They would not have turned out exactly the same under their softer tutelage, but they would probably be getting into Harvard and Princeton as well. Similarly, if Amy Chua had adopted two children at birth who turned out to have measured childhood IQs at the 20th percentile, she would have struggled to get them through high school, no matter how fiercely she battled for them.

Accepting both truths�parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities�seems peculiarly hard for some parents and almost every policy maker to accept."

It's good rhetoric - but don't you see, it isn't an argument, just a set of assertions.

Who says Amy Chua's children would have got into Harvard/Princeton regardless of upbringing? Murray does, but he doesn't advance any argument for it. Who says a child with an IQ at the 20th percentile would have had a hard time finishing high school regardless of upbringing? Again, only Murray. These "facts" are obvious only if you are already committed to a talent-is-innate world view.

In fact, I'm sure every one of us knows of a child of very high achieving parents and grandparents who didn't go on to be similarly high-achieving, for whatever reason. And fwiw, if this Wikipedia page is correct (I don't think it's worthwhile to check, but feel free if you disagree) 85% of American adults have completed high school, so logically [quibbles deleted] at the very least, a quarter of those whose IQ is in the bottom 20 percent do complete high school!

Even if you decide that he didn't really mean to claim that these things *would have* happened but only that they probably would have, it's still not obvious, as he suggests, that genes give a hard limit to achievement whereas parenting doesn't matter at all provided the genes are good enough. The standard figure is that IQ accounts for about 25% of the variability in school success. Now, you might argue that Chua's children have good genes in ways not accounted for by IQ, but then, IQ isn't solely determined by genes either.

Strictly speaking, I dare say Murray's assertion "parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities" is true, but I don't think I'd back it to be more true than "genes do matter, but parenting constrains possibilities" after we turned both into precise statements.

Email: my username, followed by 2, at google's mail