Genetics & Environment

Lewontin believes that there must be a careful understanding of the whole organism as well as its environment (Richard, 2005). He says that a niche does not exist in isolation: it is acted on and defined by its occupier. Lewontin believes the genetic view is an oversimplification and he questions the heritability of human traits such as intelligence as measured by IQ tests and Bell curves in several articles and in his book, co-authored by Steven Rose and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes.

Studies have shown that the stimulation parents and caregivers provide to children in their first three years of life sets the stage for effective, productive communication skills (Baby, 1999). Researchers at the University

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ever, the offspring of the attentive mothers raised by neglectful mothers also had high scores, showing the effect was not totally due to nurturing. In earlier studies, these researchers had shown that offspring whose mothers licked and groomed them relatively often and nursed them in a certain arched-back position became less fearful than the offspring of reserved mothers (Nurture, 1999). These personality differences could have been due to either nature or nurture, so they put offspring of less attentive mothers with attentive foster mothers and found that they also coped better in stressful situations. Also, the pups own offspring were more attentive mothers themselves. The fearfulness of the pups was tested by timing how long they spent exploring or staying in one place within a controlled open-field area. The researchers concluded that the mother's behavior in the early days of the pups' lives influenced their personality. They add that in humans, the social, emotional and economic context in which a child is raised influences the quality of the relationship between the child and its parents, and this shows continuity across generations. In a review of 30 years of experiments with Rhesus monkeys, looking at early
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1974
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)