So if my kid is born with a pleasant personality and has intrinsic traits of agreeableness, I can beat the shit out of them and still rest at night knowing they will be okay? Arguments of genetic determinism will never be able to rule out variables. The most resilient of soldiers will come down with a case of shell shock in the trenches. A violent, abusive culture will propagate individuals who fail to achieve self actualization. all this argument for nature reminds me of blame the victim.

You start out pretty sober: "On the one hand, behavioural genetic studies show that many human psychological traits are strongly heritable and thus likely determined, at least in part, by innate biological differences. On the other, it is very clear that even the adult brain is highly plastic and changes itself in response to experience. " Then you hypothesize that: "The reason is that our innate tendencies shape the experiences we have, leading us to select ones that tend instead to reinforce or even amplify these tendencies. Our environment does not just shape us – we shape it." No exceptions, no nod to environmental effects. We just shape our environment. So abused people simply seek out abuse because they were born with genes that cause them to victimize themselves? Seems the insinuation. "A child who is naturally shy – due to innate differences in the brain circuits mediating social behaviour, general anxiety, risk-aversion and other parameters – will tend to have less varied and less intense social experience." Your hypothesis disregards parenting style? Autism and dyslexia are very specific. But you seem to imply that all behavior and emotion are simply genetically determined. Statistically an abused child is FAR more likely to abuse than a non abused child. Genetic brain differences? Blaming behavior on genes shirks personal responsibility and starts a slippery slope to eugenic minded policies.

I apologize, in my fervor i didn't even notice that 'just'. That does change the context of the sentence. i will always take issue with any scientist's attempt to predict behavioral patterns based on genes in any reliable manner. Environmental stimuli provide much more precise observational patterns than genes ever will in the foreseeable future. I reason that despite our ability to map the genome, and even make such bold statements as we have found the cancer gene or the gay gene or the violence gene, no single gene will ever prove responsible to 100% of any human behavior or psychology. You obviously lean more towards genetics, and seem to believe that genetics plays a more important role in human development. Personally I lean more towards environment. Even if the influence was a perfect 50/50 balance between the two, environment will always provide data that makes itself much more easily observable and quantifiable. I am personally on the autistic spectrum, and I have (adopted) cousins who are as well. My family has never been stable and both my cousins and i grew up in chaotic households. If genes play a significant role in our predisposition for autism, then the environments we lived in catalyzed that predisposition. Autistics hate disorder and chaos in their lives. They like stability. The parents failed to procide that stability. Yet I see plenty of healthy, self actualized individuals who grew up in stable, loving home environments. So to me it seems obvious, my environment created me.

Addendum: Another example: low value mates, physically unnatrtactive people, can suffer from depression or be very confident. I have observed this. Many European women I meet who are not particularly attractive still have confidence. They grew up in good homes with nice parents who instilled confidence in them. Contrast that with many American women I meet who have unspectacular physical features. They starve themselves, the get tons of plastic surgery. If Autism is genetic and an autistic simply brings out the autism in themselves by reinforcing their own behaviors in the school yard, who's to say a depressive does not follow the same pattern? Again we have a scenario where we blame the individual, which always is so much easier than looking at environment. This is the slippery slope I speak of. If you blame genes for autism, why not A.D.D.? Then all of a sudden shoddy schooling is not a problem so much. Kids are the problem. We don;t feel as compelled to alter our behavior to create a better environment for young children, but instead begin to look for ways to alter the children to accomodate the environment that we create, thus reinforcing power structures that favor adult agendas. In hunter gatherer societies, none of these problems really existed. Psychopathologies and developmental disorders were not a pressing issue. But the adults did not force the children to adhere to schedules, do monotonous work, live outside of a close nit tribal atmosphere (kids are so very isolated these days.)

Any two twins separated at birth will show as many dissimilarities in personality as similarities. This might vary depending on what criteria you look for, be it autism or anger management or intelligence. But for every bit of evidence you claim supports nature over nurture, I could find contradictory evidence. Environment provides a much more readily predictable set of data than genes do. When dealing with genetics the variables increase. Which is why I feel when it comes to looking at individuals and helping them, much more productivity could come from observing how their environment effects them. For instance, I believe that a human will never reach self actualization (total self responsibility, independence, rationality) when they are subjected to hierarchical power structures that impede individuation. You speak of 'intervening' in the cycle, but that also implies that a child must be subjected to interference in their development. This reminds me of the dangers of genetics in general, that we will begin to 'intervene' to try and cure people of maladies we find genetic. But the 'intervention' simply reinforces power dynamics, the implications that adults know what is best for children and no matter how much they protest there are objective goals we need to achieve through manipulation. Before we do anything, I believe, it would benefit humankind to stop intervening in individual's lives, children included. Instead of expecting kids to alter themselves to fit our needs ('why won't my child listen to me?!') why not look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we can admit that we are no less fallible. Maybe then we can provide safe environments for our kids to explore, but not tell them how to explore it.

Human nature be damned, I see a dillema of economics, more than any other kind. How will we pay for government? It always operates at a deficit, which necessitates expansion and perpetual growth. Money printing. All steps of the process taken into consideration, it costs MUCH more than a dollar to print a dollar. Government debt disproportionately effects those with less disposable income, as the dollar devalues, basics cost more. Government in itself then functions as class warfare. The rich do get richer, the poor poorer. That said, free markets I believe have the potential to help us reach beyond competition for resources. But human nature loves competition. with abundant food and basic necessities, we will find another way to compete. The most competitive of us will explore space, and compete with the vast darkness of the uknown. Back on earth I reckon people will compete as artists, like peacocks and their tails more than brutal lions. Personally I wouldn't want to live in a world of non-competition, but I believe competition is cooperation is competition is...ad infinitum. Nothing brings humans together better than unity against a common foe. If we don't have open market competition, we will have more violent (war) competition. The former seems much less stressful to me. I'd rather compete in business than on the battlefield.

wow, there's almost a ten year shift in the mode over ten years. i would describe this as, beginning in 1990, a birth cohort (or rather, cohort distribution) is monopolizing NIH grants

joshua,  
thanks for referring back to the other thread 
 
bob sykes, 
your comment presupposes that gladwell was actually inspired by dawkins rather than simply coming to similar ideas in parallel. anyway, the interesting thing about your comment is it reminds me of a fight between kathy edin and elijah anderson. edin's work was similar to anderson's earlier work and she indeed cited him, but he thought that the similarities were such that a simple cite was insufficient and she should have dedicated the book to him or something. anyway, it's an interesting case in that it parallels the fuzziness of what can be interpreted as "plagiarism."

razib, 
 
i'm a sociologist at a top 10 department who specializes in issues similar to The Tipping Point and while I don't agree with everything Gladwell says, I can vouch that this critique is utter nonsense. as a matter of fact, there are plenty of "legitimate journals" and "academic settings" where nobody cares about Dawkins because the meme idea just isn't as novel or as powerful as a lot of non-specialists think. i'm actually unusual among specialists in the field in that i sometimes do cite Selfish Gene, but even I only cite him parenthetically because, frankly, his ideas are not central to the field. certainly i was never assigned to read him in grad school. 
 
lots of highly respected academics in this area (I'm thinking of Mark Granovetter, Paul DiMaggio, Eric Abrahamson, Duncan Watts, Everett Rogers, Sarah Soule, and David Strang) never cite Dawkins but nobody would call them plagiarists or say their hands are in the cookie jar. these sociology / orgs /comm scholars are who Gladwell was popularizing in Tipping Point and he candidly acknowledges it. 
 
If you think Dawkins is great, fine, but it's not like it's a failure bordering on plagiarism if someone else prefers an older and more sophisticated literature.

Yang, Fenggang and Helen Rose Ebaugh. 2001. "Transformations in New Immigrant Religions and Their Global Implications." American Sociological Review 66:269-288. 
Immigrant religious communities in the United States are undergoing profound transformations. Three processes of change occurring in new immigrant religions are described and analyzed: (1) adopting the congregational form in organizational structure and ritual, (2) returning to theological foundations, and (3) reaching beyond traditional ethnic and religious boundaries to include other peoples. These changes support the "new paradigm" in the sociology of religion that refutes secularization theories: Internal and external religious pluralism, instead of leading to the decline of religion, encourages institutional and theological transformations that energize and revitalize religions. Moreover, these changes are not merely attributable to Americanization. Rather, these changes have transnational implications for global religious systems-implications that are facilitated by the material and organizational resources that new U.S. immigrants possess.

Because "premarsx," real income, and education all show a pronounced secular trend you really ought to be doing the analysis within a single year or controlling for period effects.

I have a simulation of publication bias that may be of interest 
http://codeandculture.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/publication-bias/

So what's so "good" about it, then? -- Creepy sound more like it.