Re: [Phys-l] Nurture vs Nature (Was:Student engagement)

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Ridicule is the last defense, a Semmelweis reaction.  At various times there
have been any number of families where the children were split up and raised
by different adoptors.  Psychology and medicine have to look at both the
normal and unusual conditions to figure things out.  A large number of
conclusions about brain functioning have been made based on freak head
injuries, sometimes with only a handful of examples.  But physicists do the
same with only a handful of observed particles.  This is how they figured
out that the hippocampus is the central orgin for long term memory.  Destroy
it, and you forever live in a world where you are only aware of the last few
minutes of time, and the memories stored before the destruction.

Indeed they have cases where one twin has significantly lower IQ than the
other one.  This is inline with the Feuerstein model of intelligence.  He
presumes that lower students have been in some sense deprived of the
necessary stimuli to develop intelligence, and he proves it by raising the
intelligence level of children up through the teenage years.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> >
> Psychologists must go out and pay huge money to parents of identical twins
> in order to get them separated.  Can't believe there are that many pairs
> naturally up for adoption.  ;-)