Hurray! We can breed!

"Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are tabula rasa….  An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess.  An instinct is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge.  A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living.  And even man's desire to live is not automatic… Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it."  Ayn Rand

Human beings are social creatures by nature - without someone to feed and protect an infant, that infant will die.  Most of us develop with the innate capability to learn (DeCasper & Fifer with their nonnutritive nipples), and the few instincts we do have upon birth (Meltzhoff and facial mimicry) are meant to solidify our place in the social hierarchy.  Infants require years of supervision and guidance (i.e. language, fear, empathy, memory) before we trust them to fend for themselves as young adults.

There is merit in the notion that "good enough" parents are just that - thousands of years of evolution back up the claim that children will turn out just fine as long as you don't beat them, starve them, or emotionally/psychologically torture them.  Placing blame solely on parents for the minor aggravations or misdirection in your life is like blaming Maytag for burning your chili.  Were you stirring it often so it didn't settle?  Did you have the burner on the simmer setting instead of rolling boil?  Even if your parents never taught you to cook, either friends and YouTube have given you pointers by now or you've learned from smoky, rancid experience.

There are several stages of life we travel through (Erickson, Piaget), countless facets of influence, and at the end of the day research into genetics is relatively unexplored compared to the centuries of philosophy we have behind dissecting the human being.  While nature very well may determine intelligence (MZT vs DZT), nurture more often than not determines moral and social standing (Bowlby).  Personally, I've debated this topic with myself for years.  Based on personal experience with my own mother, I've come to a very important conclusion - even if I am working to overcome the lack of nurture in my childhood, my nature is to seek a life outside of the confines of that definition.  I am driven to become more than what I was raised to be - but had I been born to an affluent & affectionate family, would that drive still exist? 

I don't know where we should focus our attention on developing humans.  It shouldn't be a question of crunching enough numbers to create near-perfect specimens, and over the course of this semester I've had a hard time equating the human condition with math.  Studying developmental formulas makes it seem like the normative majority is just a bunch of coincidence converging into a lump of reproductive success.  Trying to decode the mystery of humanity through trending statistics is the same as blaming parents for their children turning sour (or commending parents for raising productive citizens) - sure, there's science behind it, but I don't believe that's all there is to it.