Why there’s no such thing as an Etonian

Finally, just in the last few years I’d say, we’ve all begun to accept the role of nature in the great nature/nurture debate. Though we’ve squirmed and baulked, we mostly now do accept that genes inform (to a greater or lesser extent) not just our height and eye-colour, but our personalities: our intelligence, our disposition. We’re more like our parents than we are like strangers — and what, after all, was so very controversial about that?

So now we’re at peace with our genes, here’s another mental challenge, a curious discovery by geneticists that’s even more at odds with our intuition. This one concerns what we’ve come to think of as the friendlier of the two forces that form us: nurture, the environment, the part we imagine we can control so as to make a better world.

It comes to us, this finding, via Professor Robert Plomin, who has spent a lifetime figuring out what makes us who we are.