In yesterday’s interview with Michael Posner, he says:

- “There is a growing number of studies that show the importance of interaction between our genes and each of our environments. Epigenetics is going to help us understand that question better, but let me share a very interesting piece of research from my lab where we found an unusual interaction between genetics and parenting.”

- “Good parenting, as measured by different research-based scales, has been shown to build good effortful control which, as we saw earlier, is so important. Now, what we found is that some specific genes reduced, even eliminated, the influence of the quality of parenting. In other words, some children’s development really depends on how their parents bring them up, whereas others do not – or do to a much smaller extent.”

Now check out this fascinating article in the Economist:Domestication and intelligence in dogs and wolves | Not so dumb animals

- “Monique Udell of the University of Florida … wondered whether learning rather than evolution explained his observations. Her team therefore worked with a mixture of pet dogs, dogs from animal shelters that had had minimal interaction with people, and wolves raised by humans.”

- “As they report in Animal Behaviour, the wolves outperformed both shelter dogs and pets. Indeed, Read the rest of this entry »