
Genetic Glitch May Prevent Kids from Learning from Their Mistakes  - makimaki
http://www.newsweek.com/id/151758
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seregine
Applying this information to parenting is the killer app for genetic profiles,
much more compelling than employer screening. A sheet of paper that tells you
what's unique about your kids and how to raise them? It would be very hard to
say no.

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KiwiNige
The danger with this stuff is some people take it very literally, then a few
years later we hear that it's not the whole story and unless you take
something else into account then you've done it wrong. I'm not trying to shoot
down the research I think it's great to have more understanding of how out DNA
affects personality, but that's just another tool to add to the whole set. You
can't reduce the complexity of parenting or education to an easy 10 step
program; you actually have to pay attention to how each individual child
learns.

~~~
Alex3917
"You can't reduce the complexity of parenting or education to an easy 10 step
program; you actually have to pay attention to how each individual child
learns."

When the child is very young it makes sense to follow the practice that yields
the best results on average, absent of additional information. Some children
might not benefit as much or at all from breastfeeding, but it would be
irrational not to breastfeed your child unless you suspected that your child
was an exception.

There isn't a best practice for facet of child development, but I think it
would be a huge mistake to come away from this article believing that no best
practices exist.

~~~
greendestiny
Personally I still find the breastfeeding-IQ link dubious. This blog is an
interesting look at the study mentioned:
<http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/11/breastfeeding-d.html>

If a study that controls for maternal and paternal IQ and uses modern formula
still finds a link then it would be more convincing. Having said that,
breastfeeding seems to have a clear positive effect on the immune system of
babies.

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Alex3917
I think the immune system effects alone make breastfeeding the clear best
practice, even if no IQ boost exists.

~~~
KiwiNige
There is also a school of though that says the extra cuddles and being held in
mothers space is good for them alone. This can be done with a bottle but does
not have to be.

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swombat
This kind of puzzles me. How can you even begin to cope with society if you
don't learn from your mistakes?

Learning from your mistakes seems, to me, like having pain receptors. People
without pain receptors exist, and they hurt themselves all the time in
terrible ways, so that they need specialised, permanent care just to exist and
not kill themselves all the time. The pain allows you to learn from your
physical mistakes and not do them again.

If you can't learn from your other mistakes, how can you do anything but hurt
yourself all the time? If 30% of children were truly like that, they would be
extremely dysfunctional. I'm not saying that this is not the case - after all,
if you think about it, there are a fair number of children at school who seem
dysfunctional in some ways (though usually not the ones you'd think at first
glance), like repeat-offender bullies - but if that is the case, shouldn't the
solution be to discover a fix to this dysfunction rather than just telling
parents "Oh well, your child doesn't learn from its mistakes, your parenting
won't matter very much".

~~~
ars
You're assuming that because they can't learn from mistakes they can't learn
at all.

The article is not specific enough.

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skmurphy
This article strikes me as completely worthless, especially the phrase "learn
from your mistakes" as a general category. Let me give two simple examples
that parents have almost no influence over that require a child to "learn from
mistakes."

Walking: a child has to fall down a lot and understand how to lose balance
slightly to be able to walk forward. They may observe others closely but they
have to learn walking from their own mistakes.

Speech: many adults around a child may correct speech, but over time children
have to auto-correct for the most part.

You would think you would find a correlation between delayed development in
walking and speech and fewer dopamine receptors but I am not aware of any
studies that would support that correlation and I have had good reason to look
into causes for delayed development.

Here is the only link between studies and "learning from mistakes" that the
article offers, and it's problematic:

"Numerous other studies have linked this gene variant to addiction, obesity
and compulsive gambling, suggesting that the underlying problem is trouble
learning the negative consequences of your actions."

Addiction, obesity, and gambling all have the property that they are
associated with short term pleasure and long term problems. This is very
different from being able to "learn from your mistakes." It's possible, for
instance, that all three of these activities boost dopamine levels in the
brain (as does smoking, another short term pleasure that's problematic in the
long run) and counteract the effect of having fewer receptors. I think the
real explanation will prove to be more complex (and will need to be
evolutionary stable in the same way that dyslexia confers considerable
survival advantages).

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biohacker42
One of the most fascinating things about humanity is the fact that we went
through one hell of a genetic bottle neck about 80 000 or so years ago.

That makes us as a whole very genetically similar and sadly the possibility of
extinction by virus is real. Not so for chips, just one tribe of them can have
more genetic diversity then all of humanity.

But as similar as we are in large groups, the differences between any two
individuals can be HUGE. So huge that I can not even begin to imagine what it
is like to not be able to learn from repeated mistakes.

Humanity sure is a fun puzzle.

