Monday, June 07, 2004

THOSE NASTY GENETICS AGAIN

I linked to Chris Brand's report of this study in Child Development on 18th. last month. The media have now got hold of it. As it says here: "Love and genes can overcome even the most abject poverty, according to a study into the effects of environmental factors on child development. The study of 1,116 mothers and their five-year-old same-sex twins in poor households in England and Wales found that poverty did not have to be a life sentence and the right combination of parental care and genetics could triumph over adversity. "Children in our study experienced more than just poverty as measured by family income level, Julia Kim-Cohen of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College in London wrote in the May issue of the journal Child Development. "Living in the poorest neighbourhoods, their homes were rated as being overcrowded, damp or in disrepair," she added... It showed that genetic makeup does play a role in the ability of children to rise above their poverty and not suffer behavioural or cognitive setbacks, but it was not the whole answer". Leftists of course mostly seem to believe that poverty is SOLELY caused by environmental factors. That genes play a major role in whether you stay in poverty or rise out of it is abhorrent to them. It means that there are some big things that social engineering cannot change. It does also tend to show how right a certain wise man from the past was -- Matthew 26:11.

"Tiny genetic changes add up to huge differences when human DNA is compared to that of chimpanzees, researchers said on Wednesday in a report that explains how people and apes can be so close, yet so far apart. Genetically, chimpanzees are 98.5 percent identical to humans. But the differences between the species are clearly profound and geneticists have been laboring to find out how such subtle variations in DNA can be so important. "Clearly, the genomic differences between humans and chimps are much more complicated than conventional wisdom has portrayed," Asao Fujiyama of the RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center in Yokohama, Japan, and colleagues in Japan, Taiwan and China wrote in their report, published in this week's issue of the journal Nature". Leftists claim that the almost complete genetic similarity between blacks and whites means that there cannot be any inherited race differences. By the same logic there are no inborn differences between humans and chimps. In fact, a difference in JUST ONE gene can make a huge difference to how somebody turns out.

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