Applying this information to parenting is the killer app for genetic profiles, much more compelling than employer screening. A sheet of paper that tells you what's unique about your kids and how to raise them? It would be very hard to say no.
The danger with this stuff is some people take it very literally, then a few years later we hear that it's not the whole story and unless you take something else into account then you've done it wrong.
I'm not trying to shoot down the research I think it's great to have more understanding of how out DNA affects personality, but that's just another tool to add to the whole set.
You can't reduce the complexity of parenting or education to an easy 10 step program; you actually have to pay attention to how each individual child learns.
"You can't reduce the complexity of parenting or education to an easy 10 step program; you actually have to pay attention to how each individual child learns."
When the child is very young it makes sense to follow the practice that yields the best results on average, absent of additional information. Some children might not benefit as much or at all from breastfeeding, but it would be irrational not to breastfeed your child unless you suspected that your child was an exception.
There isn't a best practice for facet of child development, but I think it would be a huge mistake to come away from this article believing that no best practices exist.
If a study that controls for maternal and paternal IQ and uses modern formula still finds a link then it would be more convincing. Having said that, breastfeeding seems to have a clear positive effect on the immune system of babies.
There is also a school of though that says the extra cuddles and being held in mothers space is good for them alone. This can be done with a bottle but does not have to be.
This kind of puzzles me. How can you even begin to cope with society if you don't learn from your mistakes?
Learning from your mistakes seems, to me, like having pain receptors. People without pain receptors exist, and they hurt themselves all the time in terrible ways, so that they need specialised, permanent care just to exist and not kill themselves all the time. The pain allows you to learn from your physical mistakes and not do them again.
If you can't learn from your other mistakes, how can you do anything but hurt yourself all the time? If 30% of children were truly like that, they would be extremely dysfunctional. I'm not saying that this is not the case - after all, if you think about it, there are a fair number of children at school who seem dysfunctional in some ways (though usually not the ones you'd think at first glance), like repeat-offender bullies - but if that is the case, shouldn't the solution be to discover a fix to this dysfunction rather than just telling parents "Oh well, your child doesn't learn from its mistakes, your parenting won't matter very much".
This article strikes me as completely worthless, especially the phrase "learn from your mistakes" as a general category. Let me give two simple examples that parents have almost no influence over that require a child to "learn from mistakes."
Walking: a child has to fall down a lot and understand how to lose balance slightly to be able to walk forward. They may observe others closely but they have to learn walking from their own mistakes.
Speech: many adults around a child may correct speech, but over time children have to auto-correct for the most part.
You would think you would find a correlation between delayed development in walking and speech and fewer dopamine receptors but I am not aware of any studies that would support that correlation and I have had good reason to look into causes for delayed development.
Here is the only link between studies and "learning from mistakes" that the article offers, and it's problematic:
"Numerous other studies have linked this gene variant to addiction, obesity and compulsive gambling, suggesting that the underlying problem is trouble learning the negative consequences of your actions."
Addiction, obesity, and gambling all have the property that they are associated with short term pleasure and long term problems. This is very different from being able to "learn from your mistakes." It's possible, for instance, that all three of these activities boost dopamine levels in the brain (as does smoking, another short term pleasure that's problematic in the long run) and counteract the effect of having fewer receptors. I think the real explanation will prove to be more complex (and will need to be evolutionary stable in the same way that dyslexia confers considerable survival advantages).
One of the most fascinating things about humanity is the fact that we went through one hell of a genetic bottle neck about 80 000 or so years ago.
That makes us as a whole very genetically similar and sadly the possibility of extinction by virus is real. Not so for chips, just one tribe of them can have more genetic diversity then all of humanity.
But as similar as we are in large groups, the differences between any two individuals can be HUGE. So huge that I can not even begin to imagine what it is like to not be able to learn from repeated mistakes.
