The Edge has long been one of my favorite websites. It consists mostly of interviews with and essays by some of our most articulate scientists. Every year the Edge invites a large number of the latter to answer some broad philosophical/scientific question. This year the question was:
WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?
Now I happen to think that the very idea of philosophy falls into that category. But each respondent has his or her own special candidate. I haven't had time yet to do more than dip into the results, but one stuck out. Judith Rich Harris, author of The Nurture Assumption, offers this dangerous idea:
Is it dangerous to claim that parents have no power at all (other than genetic) to shape their child's personality, intelligence, or the way he or she behaves outside the family home? More to the point, is this claim false? Was I wrong when I proposed that parents' power to do these things by environmental means is zero, nada, zilch?
Harris claims, against universal common sense, that the way that parents raise their children has virtually no effect on their children's character and behavior outside the home. This is indeed an astonishing and offensive proposition. After all, I read to my children nearly every day during a long, formative period in their lives. Both of them now love books, though one does more so than the other. And virtually all of us can think of examples where a child seems to have been spoiled rotten or otherwise permanently damaged by the wrong kind of parenting. But of course anecdotes tell us nothing. What we need is evidence of a strong correlation between the style of parenting and the character of children. We need to show that, all things being equal, children in general are more likely to love reading if their parents read to them. And so on with other desirable characteristics. Does such evidence exist? Well, no.
A confession: When I first made this proposal ten years ago, I didn't fully believe it myself. I took an extreme position, the null hypothesis of zero parental influence, for the sake of scientific clarity. Making myself an easy target, I invited the establishment — research psychologists in the academic world — to shoot me down. I didn't think it would be all that difficult for them to do so. It was clear by then that there weren't any big effects of parenting, but I thought there must be modest effects that I would ultimately have to acknowledge.
The establishment's failure to shoot me down has been nothing short of astonishing. One developmental psychologist even admitted, one year ago on this very website, that researchers hadn't yet found proof that "parents do shape their children," but she was still convinced that they will eventually find it, if they just keep searching long enough.
In short, psychologists and sociologists are very sure that parenting style must have a strong influence on the way children develop, but they have not been able to produce any evidence for this belief. From what I know about the controversy, it does matter who your parents were. But a large part of this is certainly genetic. It also matters what kind of community a child is raised in, and that has a lot to do with who the child's parents were.
This strikes me as a twenty-four karat dangerous idea. But it is one we may have to come to terms with. Science is all about dangerous ideas. This confirms my view that philosophy, the mother of every science, is the most dangerous idea of all. The Athenians may have been on to something when they dispatched Socrates by means of lethal ingestion. That doesn't mean I'm about to give philosophy up. It just means I, like all of us modern persons, have to get used to the idea of living dangerously.
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