Alison Gopnik: belief

Transcript context

…If the Turkheimer hypothesis is correct and societies are growing wealthier and wealthier, over time, virtually everything will be genetically determined rather than environmentally because we’ll all be higher SES, we’ll all have better environments, less likely to be crippled by polio in our youth or whatever, and it will just be about genes. Let me give you another example, Tyler, of the Turkheimer phenomenon that I think is interesting. If you look at smoking, for example, it turns out that when smoking was very available, when you did a twin study, there was a relatively small genetic contribution to whether you smoked or not. As smoking became less and less likely, and as there were more and more restrictions to keep you from smoking, then you start seeing what looks like more of a genetic effect, and it’s because the only people who are smoking are people who have a very strong tendency to smoke in the first place. Exactly what happens, how the caregiving, how the nurture is going to affect and interact with the genetics is going to be really complicated and unpredictable. So, you could argue just the opposite. You could say, as we develop a more and more safe environment, that actually what’s going to happen is that the potential for variability is going to get to be greater and greater. The possibility of doing something new, doing something different from what you did before — those are the kinds of things that are going to become more important. I think the nature-nurture is one of those examples of something that intuitively seems like a good way of characterizing things, but is, again — like the example of life — just isn’t the right framework, that what we have to do is say, “Okay, here’s a particular trait, here’s a particular capacity. Let’s track all these complicated ways that the environment and genetics are going to interact to bring a particular kind of outcome.” If it’s something like height, where there is clearly an environmental component, especially if the child is not well-fed, but it seems perfectly fine to say above a certain dietary level, it’s mostly genetic, right? No one says that’s ambiguous, and more and more traits will become like that.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.