One Can Choose To Obsess Over Prescriptive

As Individual People, Embedded In Our Daily Lives, Of Course We're Interested In What Makes One Person Different From Another. We've Got To Hire One Person And Not Another, Marry One Person And Not Another.

The Fact That People Can Forget These Simple Truths When Intellectualizing About Children Shows How Far Modern Doctrines Have Taken Us. They Make It Easy To Think Of Children As Lumps Of Putty To Be Shaped Instead Of Partners In A Human Relationship.

Trivers, Pursuing His Theory Of The Emotions To Its Logical Conclusion, Notes That In A World Of Walking Lie Detectors The Best Strategy Is To Believe Your Own Lies. You Can’t Leak Your Hidden Intentions If You Don’t Think They Are Your Intentions. According To His Theory Of Self-deception, The Conscious Mind Sometimes Hides The Truth From Itself The Better To Hide It From Others. But The Truth Is Useful, So It Should Be Registered Somewhere In The Mind, Walled Off From The Parts That Interact With Other People.

So No, It's Not All In The Genes, But What Isn't In The Genes Isn't In The Family Environment Either. It Can't Be Explained In Terms Of The Overall Personalities Or The Child-rearing Practices Of Parents.

The Indispensability Of Reason Does Not Imply That Individual People Are Always Rational Or Are Unswayed By Passion And Illusion. It Only Means That People Are Capable Of Reason, And That A Community Of People Who Choose To Perfect This Faculty And To Exercise It Openly And Fairly Can Collectively Reason Their Way To Sounder Conclusions In The Long Run. As Lincoln Observed, You Can Fool All Of The People Some Of The Time, And You Can Fool Some Of The People All Of The Time, But You Can't Fool All Of The People All Of The Time.