The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley

child-development world was as furious as you would expect when an academic discipline has its entire body of work put into question for failing to check its assumptions. A meeting arranged to discuss the book – over the strong objections of many in the field – by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development saw Harris being openly harangued by the doyens of the discipline, especially Eleanor Maccoby and Stephen Suomi. Articles in the press castigated her for ignoring good evidence against her findings. But when she pressed for chapter and verse, the objections melted away. Suomi’s strong claim that a cross-fostering experiment in calm versus anxious monkeys showed that parenting styles did influence the personalities of monkeys turned out to be untrue. He eventually admitted that the only data was from an unpublished trial with a very small number of monkeys, contradicted by other experiments that found no such effect. Jerome Kagan’s claim that he had seen the same effect as Suomi in human beings (but in the opposite direction) turned out to be based on one study by a student of a small number of fearful babies followed up for just twenty-one months – hardly a lifelong effect. In short, Harris’s case emerged triumphantly vindicated, rather than damaged, by everything the psychological establishment threw at her. The critics fell back on methodological criticisms of behaviour genetics, which proved largely baseless, and on much weaker claims about how paren...