A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway Essay Example for Free

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway Essay Hemingway and the Struggle of Masculinity in WarMen in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom The Bell TollsThe name of Ernest Hemingway has long been associated with the idea of a strong, stubborn man who is very socially inept. In both A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, we are introduced to an extremely cold, unfeeling character and we see how they evolve from one type of man into another. Frederic Henry and Robert Jordan are both Americans serving overseas in some conflict, Henry being in World War I and Jordan in the Spanish Civil War between the fascists and communists, and they originally see these conflicts as a way for them to prove their manhood. They soon realize that war is not meant for all people and that it should not be glorified. They either die for their new ideas or simply vanish from our world into a realm of nothingness. This transition needs to be analysed more closely in order for us to understand it better. In A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, we see how the main character is, in the beginning, a cold and sometimes insensitive person who loves the idea of war. In Arms, we see how Henry is a calm, calculating man who tries to live up to the Western impression of how a man should act. In American history, men have tried to reassociate themselves with a deeper meaning of manhood as a way to prove to themselves that they are acting like a man should: A broad spectrum of American men soon came to view war as the only way to cure a hopelessly flagging national masculinity(Donnell para 35). In the beginning, Henry the confidence of a man who is able to survive anything by himself and not show any emotion about it. War itself is a glorious game to him that is a test of manhood, a way for him to prove himself to the world and still be able to walk away from it: Well, I knew I would not be killed. Not in this war. It did not have anything to do with me. It seemed no more dangerous to me than war in the movies (Arms Detzler 237). Henry is a man who thinks that he is unable to be harmed and tries to live a life that is morally correct while struggling through a chaotic world. The Austrian mountains around Henry are full of temptation(ie bawdy houses) and yet he never visits them. Also, he is surrounded by constant barrages of shellfire and wounded, since he is an ambulance driver, and never shows any emotion towards these men. To him, they are simply chess pieces and he is the ambulance that comes to take away the wounded from this  great game. In Tolls, the main character is an American teacher, Robert Jordan, who is fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He is only in the mountains because he sees war as a glorified game for men only. When he is confronted with a task, such as blowing up a bridge to slow down enemy troop movements, he does not think about it and only focusses on what he needs to do: He would not think about that. That was not his business. That was Golzs business. He had only one thing to do and that was what he should think about and he must think clearly and take everything as it came along, and not worry. To worry was as bad as to be afraid. It simply made things more difficult(Tolls 8). He distances himself from the men he may have to kill and dehumanises his actions, allowing him to succeed at his job without showing any emotion or weakness. Jordan sees war as a mans job and that women have no place in it. When he first meets Maria, he tries to hide his feelings for her. He says that she should not be in the mountains with the guerillas and tries to hide how he feels an attraction to her when he looks at her. Jordan sees his emotions as a weakness and buries them deep down inside of himself, only to have them rise up later on in the novel. In conclusion, both Henry and Jordan begin as calm, cool, calculating men struggling to prove to the world who they are. These men live by a strict code of honour, chivalry, honesty, and courage, allowing their soul to survive many tough times. They originally see a war as a way to prove themselves but this soon changes. Detzler 3Towards the middle of both Arms and Tolls, we see how both Jordan and Henry become confused and disoriented by the events around them. They are faced with tough choices and are forced to reevaluate their beliefs. In Arms, Henry is wounded during the Italian retreat and is sent back to a hospital for recovery. There, he sees his helplessness as a sign of his weakness and feels that he should not have been hurt. After recovery, he returns to the front but becomes trapped with few other men from his battle group. After the men refused to help him in their struggle to make it back, Henry shoots them at point blank range in an effort to encourage the men to work harder. After this, Henry himself is almost executed after being  mistaken for an Austrian. His near-death experience during his escape caused him to reassess his beliefs because he is beginning to see that men are not meant to try and slaughter each other. He flees the army and gives in to his desires to see Catherine, a sign that he is going back on his belief that a man should never show any emotion. Henry travels to Switzerland with Catherine and tries to live out a normal life there, but now he is a confused man struggling with internal demons about his actions: The war seemed as far away as the football games of some one elses college. But I knew from the papers that they were still fighting in the mountains. . . . (Arms 277). Henry still remembers the men that he left behind at the lines and still wishes to be with them, fighting against a common enemy and united through courage, bravery, and the desire to stay alive. In Tolls, Jordan struggles with his ideas of courage and bravery as he is faced with various situations leading up to the destruction of the bridge. At different times, he is tested by other men, such as when he is forced to kill an enemy soldier who is actually just a boy. This action causes Jordan to rethink how war should be fought: should it be a cruel, merciless battle between soldiers and civilians, or should the young and innocent be spared, even if it is a sign of weakness. Also, when El Sordo and his men are trapped by the Fascist Army, they are left alone Detzler 4to fend for themselves, as to not expose the revolutionaries true numbers. Jordan wishes to go and help them because they are his comrades, but if he is to that, then he would be killed because of what some would call courage and what others would call stupidity. He is faced with either death or living a life of shame. El Sordo himself thinks the same as Jordan, wanting to die a glorious death since he knows that he should want to run away from the Fascists: Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. . . . Living was a hawk in the sky. Livng was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. (Tolls 313). El Sordo does not fear death because he accepts that it is an inevitable part of life. Both Henry and Jordan begin to have second thoughts of their long held beliefs that men should be cold, merciless soldiers and start to wonder if their new ideas about wanting to be afraid are the ones they should listen to guide their lives. At the end of the novels, both Henry and Jordan face death, either directly or indirectly caused by war, and try to cope with it. In Arms, Henry is faced with the death of his wife and child in Switzerland. During child birth, Catherine develops complications and needs to be heavily medicated to numb the pain. Their child is still-born and Catherine soon after dies from massive blood loss. The loss of Henrys wife forces him to think about how he has lived his life. He begins to wonder if it was worth it shooting those men for refusing to help him. He questions if he should have even joined the army in the first place. Henry even begins to think that perhaps the war is not some game and that even the innocent can be affected by it. He simply retreats back into his own thoughts because he cannot face the world anymore. Henry displays such self control that it cannot be healthy. He is trying to not show any weakness, an idea that he has always held to be true, even though he does not want to glorify war anymore: Such illustrious-control is a visible expression of the self-discipline, knowledge, skill, and poise a man must Detzler 5achieve-as well as the honesty, courage, persistence, and stoic endurance he must possess in order to confront the vicissitudes of his life and the inevitability of . . . death on his own terms and with honour (Miles para 9). Henry develops a strong resolution towards death and does not feel anymore that war, a vast death machine, should be promoted since it can hurt even the most innocent people in the world, such as unborn children. He then proceed to vanish from this world and become like a walking zombie, unable to move on with his life but unafraid of anything anymore that might threaten him since he has already lost what is most precious to him. In Arms, Jordan is faced with death at the end of the novel in many different ways. His friend Anselmo is killed during the bridge demolition while trying to protect Jordan. Anselmo himself did not like death but was willing to face God if it meant the completion of Jordans task. Jordan himself is gravely injured while trying to flee from the Fascists and resolves to take out as many as he can before he dies. Jordan does not show any weakness towards his friends, even though he is terrified and wants to run. Jordan changes from seeing death as something far away as something that affects  everyone. It is a chance for Jordan to redeem his past life and try to come to grips with how he sees death and war. He realizes that he has lived his life wrong and that the war that he is fighting in is not the one he thought he would be fighting for. Jordan originally thought that he was fighting to save the Spanish people from the Fascists but he eventually realized he was not fighting to save the people but rather to replace one corrupt leader for another. He then comes to accept that he will die soon and waits for his time on Earth to end, hoping to take an enemy with him when he goes:Dying is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much that it humilates you. . . . [T]here is something you can do yet. As long as you know what it is you have to do it. As long as you remember what it is you have to wait for that. Come on. Let them come. Let them come. Detzler 6Let them come! . . . And if if you wait and hold them up even a little while or just get the officer that may make all the difference (Tolls 468-470). To Jordan, death is an inevitable part of life and now he is dedicated to taking someone down with him. His part in war is over forever but he does not want to just fade away. He understands that war is glorious but if the next man is an enemy, that man is marked for death. Therefore, both Henry and Jordan come to understand death better and to know that war is not a glorious event. War is simply a big political game with the small people taking most of the fall. In conclusion, we see how both Henry and Jordan have changes brought about to their perceptions of war. They originally join their cause simply because it is something that all men were doing at that point in life. War was someplace that boys could go and become men. War was some far off land where men would run towards each other twice, shake hands and become friends again. Henry and Jordan soon see that war is nothing like this, with innocent people being killed simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Both men evolve from their original selves and change their ideas about life and death. Henry and Jordan lose a part of themselves during their battles, becoming better men in the end. They may be alone in the world but they are better men than they originally were: [T]he individual is on his own, like a Pilgrim walking into the unknown with  neither shelter or guidance, thrown upon his own resources, his strength, and his judgement. Hemingways style is the style of understatement since his hero is a hero of action, which is the human conditon (Hallengren para 17) These men, even though sometimes shallow, exhibit many qualities that both genders should live up to: honesty, courage bravery, morality, intelligence, affection, pride and sometimes sentimentality. These are the qualities that allow the two main characters to see through the fog of war and come to the basic conclusion: war is not meant for all people to be involved in and it should not Detzler 7be put up on a pedestal but rather looked upon with a logical mind. Even though peace is a lofty goal, it is very unlikely for humanity to succeed in achieving world peace. Until that day, war will be an everyday aspect to our lives and we need to step back and take another look at it. We need to stop viewing war as a big game and see it as a big political game, one that is not meant to help the little people, just like Henry and Jordan learned. Works Cited Donnel, Sean M.. Hemingways Short Fiction and the Crisis of Middle Class Masculinity. [Online] Available http://www.elcamino.edu/Faculty/sdonnell/hemingways_ masculinity.htm , May 12, 2006. Hallengren, Anders. A Case of Identity: Ernest Hemingway. [Online] Available http://nobelprize.org/literature/articles/hallengren/index.html , April 21, 2006. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Charles Scribners Sons Publishing Company, 1957. . For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Charles Scribners Sons Publishing Company, 1968. Miles, Melvin C.. An Introductory Overview to Hemingway. [Online] Available http://www.elcamino.edu/Faculty/sdonnell/hemingway.htm , May 10, 2006.

Law Enforcement Intelligence Processes :: essays research papers

LAW ENFORCEMENT INTELLIGENCE PROCESSES   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The fundamental key for any successful intelligence mission is the ability to access information from the different intelligence disciplines: Imagery Intelligence (IMINT), Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), Measures and Signals Intelligence (MASINT), Human Intelligence (HUMINT), and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). These five disciplines are in essence the only way for the analyst to gather information, short of actually traveling the world to investigate hands on.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The development of intelligence within the law enforcement field began in the early 20th century as a collection method during the investigation of organized crime organizations. The Sicilian crime families across the United States were the focal point from the 1940s to the 1980s, which were known as the La Cosa Nostra or the Mafia. During the 1980s, law enforcement realized that other organizations were sprouting up into a new era in organized crime. Today’s analysts are responsible for investigating and analyzing information on other non-traditional crime organizations like drug cartels, outlaw motorcycle gangs, street gangs, and various other non-Sicilian Mafia organizations.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The common denominators in all organized criminal activities are violence, corruption, and organization. The problem of dealing with the new non-traditional organizations is that there is not an extensive amount of information on each organization spanning over the last couple of decades. New information must be acquired, recorded, and filed. Modern technology has been crucial in the latter for creating databases.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  One of the most imperative pieces to completing any organized crime scenario are the day in and day out facts of how the organization was ran, what people were contacted, and the different types of activities that were illegally preformed. The analyst must be able to obtain information in order to make an analysis of what or who may or may not be at the root of a crime(s). This type of information can be found in law enforcement files, which are now moving towards electronically storing information. The analyst must be especially computer literate in order to research criminal activity and association. One device that the analyst has available is the Internet. Although this is not the only open source information-collecting device, it is one of the most commonly used open source methods. The problem of the â€Å"wheat versus chaff† can be realized very easily at any search engine. The Internet can be a very valuable tool for the analyst, but can also be a very time-consuming and an overwhelming obstacle if the analyst does not know how to overcome the problems of over-information.

Nature Nurture

The psychological debate of nature vs. nurture is one that has been deliberated and refuted for many years. This debate is so controversial because although it is fact that genetic makeup does play a major role in developing a person, the nurture and environment in which a person is brought up in is also an important factor. The nature vs. nurture issue dates back to Ancient Greeks, through the times of Aristotle and John Locke, with each philosopher projecting their own individual thoughts on the matter.Although nature depicts the development of a person in terms of their appearance and certain personality traits, nature and the setting and situations in which a person grows up is more important in explaining the development of a person because ultimately a person is an overall reflection of the environment of which they were brought up in. Psychologists are quick to support the nature debate because it deals with the genetic make-up of a person and biological psychology, which is f act. First of all, a person’s physical traits, such as eye color and blood type are genetically determined, even though there are certain ways to alter your look.Personality is proven to be heritable to an extent. Studies have proven that biological siblings are more similar in personality that adoptive siblings. In addition, a person’s genes can determine whether a person is predisposed to a disease or illness, such as diabetes and Alzheimer’s (Davies). A person who is affected with those types of diseases shows how nature can directly effect the development of an individual. A new technique called developmental genetic analysis is a procedure that examines the effects of genes throughout a person’s life.The technique concluded that a person’s intelligence is due about 50% to the genes they are born with (Huang). Furthermore, the nature debate is credible because of the genetic factors that support how people’s personalities and appearance develops, yet the nurture of a person ultimately overshadows the nature debate because environmental factors better influence the development of a person Each person comes from different backgrounds, religions, and environments, which are all external factors that play a large role in the development of an individual.Diet, stress, prenatal nutrition, peer pressure, and television are just some of the more specific environmental factors that can affect a person. Clearly, there are many more aspects of the nurture debate that contribute to the argument that a person’s upbringing is what will influence their development. For example, NBC reported that in a study where teenagers played violent video games and non violent video games, the violent video games were proven to enhance emotion in the amygdale, or the center for fear and aggression (Kalning).In this case the emotional effect from the video games supports the nurture debate because normal teenagers with non violent behav iors and tendencies were affected by an outside force that has the potential of affecting the teenager’s personalities. Nurture is more important in developing a person because despite a person’s genetic coding, the parents and the adults that a child is subjected to will play a greater role in the child’s development. Research shows that parents who talk to their children and spend time helping them interact ultimately raise more socially developed and intellectually stimulated children (Dewar).Even if a child born had genius parents, the environment and the early stages of development are crucial for the later stages of life. People are also highly influenced by their peers, and in the case of preschoolers who typically dislike a certain food will eat that particular food if children around them are eating it, showing that because it is the way of the human to want to fit and be liked, nurture has the greater impact and influence over a person (Harris).Further more, nurture is more important in shaping a human being because there are multiple factors that can influence a person differently, even if they have the same genetic background. Even though the nature vs. nurture debate is likely to always be challenged and discussed, it is possible that there may never be a right answer. The reason for this is that many situations and conditions factor in both the nature and nurture debate and there is reasoning in both cases to support either one as a reliable source.Overall, the biological traits and genes of a person enable individuals to learn and adapt to their surroundings, thus showing the debate is so closely related that it is difficult to determine which one more effectively contributes to the development of a person. However, the nurture issue states that a person is affected of the environment that they are brought up in, which is a more reliable source of the development of a person because there are more factors that influence envir onment than the biological aspects of the nature debate.Nature versus nurture. This has been a topic of debate for centuries. Years have passe still not been found regarding this issue. This is an argumentation of the utmost significance, not only because of its anthropological meaning, that will help us understand where we come from and how our personality is formed, but also because of the moral, political, ethical, educational, social, and statistical issues that it discusses. The nature side of the polemic says that humans behave as they do according to heredity, or even animal instincts.The nurture side believes that people think and behave certain ways because they are taught to do so. Neither of the above is the correct answer to the question, â€Å"Why do we behave like that? â€Å" The accurate answer is that heredity, meaning nature, is a true fact, but it has a role of â€Å"basis†, in the building of our mind and personality. The biggest impact in our developmen t is the environment in which we live and grow up: the nurture side. Therefore, nature is mostly influenced by nurture. Many scientists and authors have been arguing for the correct side, between nature and nurture.For example, William Golding, the English writer who wrote the book, Lord Of The Flies, states generally that every man has a capacity to be â€Å"evil† from the beginning of his life. This statement shows that from the point of view of Golding, every person has an inherited characteristic, which would basically mean he is on the nature side of the debate. Another notable person that agreed with the nature side of the polemic was the scientist, Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, the famous naturalist.Galton was the man who first started the debate between hereditarians, a group of people who believe that heredity determinates our human nature, and environmentalists, people who believe that our environment has the biggest impact on our development. In 1865, h e began to study heredity, basically the idea of nature. This was partly influenced by reading Darwin's publication, Origin of Species. This â€Å"thirst† for knowledge led him to do very significant and important studies, the twin studies, hoping to find the different contributions of nature and nurture.His huge contribution to the debate, especially to the nature side, proves that he agreed with the theory of heredity. As mentioned earlier, Galton had a cousin named Charles Darwin. He was a British naturalist and big defender of the nature side of the debate. According to the Indian University Archives, without Darwin there would be no nature vs. nurture debate. Darwin wrote various pages on his autobiography about his family’s contributions to his intelligence. However, he attributed his intellectual success on nature, not nurture. Proof is provided by, this sentence that he wrote about his brother: †¦I do not think that I owe much to him intellectually-nor to my four sisters†¦I am inclined to agree with Francis Galton in believing that education and environment produce only a small effect on the mind of any one, and that most of our qualities are innate â€Å"(Darwin, 43). Darwin believed that intelligent behavior came from the instincts of our previous, nonhuman ancestors. This proves that Charles Darwin, one of the brightest minds of the 19th century believed in the nature part of the argumentation. The point clearly stated through these three examples is that, the genetic predisposition (heredity) is real.Genetic predisposition may be a fact, but it isn’t the reason why we behave the way we do. Heredity is only the basis. The formation of ourselves is due to the environment in which we grow up. An example of this theory is shown, Lord of the Flies. In the book, a group of kids find themselves all alone on an island. In this group we find different characters with diverse personalities and manners. Also, as previously ment ioned, Golding, the author of the book, believed that everybody has the capacity of being evil. The kids in the story start developing that initial evil due to the new environment in which they live.A hostile, unknown, scary and dangerous environment; leads to the development of an aggressive and violent comportment. In the book, we see that in the first chapters, Jack is a born leader with self-control. Generally he appears as a normal kid. But, as the story progresses, and the kids find new problems on the island, he starts developing â€Å"his evil†. At the end, he becomes a belligerent and confrontational leader of a violent mob. The new environment in which he lives causes this enormous change in his personality. Another example situated in the book is the case of Ralph.He is also a born leader, a boy who listens to reason and logic, and someone who always finds solutions to his problems. But, in this new environment, as the kids around him start being â€Å"evil† , he starts losing his self-control, and develops a new character, where he is not the boy that he was before. This change occurs when Ralph joins Jack’s mob and starts dancing with them: â€Å"Piggy and Ralph under the threat of the sky, found themselves eager to take a place in this demented but partly secured society â€Å"(Golding, 152) . The last example is the case of Piggy. He is a tormented kid, a victim of bullying, but deep down he is a smart boy.In the book he finds himself being insulted by Jack all the time. For instance when Jack says: â€Å"Better call you Piggy than Fatty â€Å" (Golding, 26 ) . The results of this bullying are that he can’t say his opinion or ideas when he is around of Jack, opinions that could be very helpful sometimes. But later in the story, when Jack leaves the group, and the environment of their small society becomes more friendly and calm, he feels more free and happy and he finally express his opinion and shows his intellige nt ideas to everybody, so basically the change of environment change him too.The point I want to make with my examples, is that, we may all have, a â€Å"groundwork† , our initial nature that we inherited from our parents, but the biggest impact in the development of our personality is the environment in which we grow up, which can completely change us, like the characters in Lord Of The Flies†¦ Supporting my theory, Judith Rich Harris, the author of the book : The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do . She generally says in her book that she challenges the idea that the personality of adults is determined chiefly by the way they were raised by their parents.She also says that the role of genetics in personality has long been accepted in psychological research, however, even identical twins, which share the same genes, are not exactly alike, so inheritance is not all. Another example that proves the theory that nurture has the most impact in our pers onality is the case of Genie. Genie was a girl who spent nearly all her childhood inside a bedroom. She was a victim of one of the most severe cases of social isolation in American history (ABCnews). The police discovered her in 1970 after spending all her life tide to a chair.The result of this loneliness, was that she was unable to speak, walk, socialize, and generally being normal after being rescued. We can see, that due to the fact that she was in an isolated and lonely environment her attitude and personality weren’t usual, so this proves that the environment in which somebody lives has a direct connection with his/hers development, even if she inherited a bright and regular attitude from her family. To finish ill say that heredity is a well known, scientifically proved, theory. A fact.But without the help of nurture, it isn’t accurate. We become who we are, and we act the way we do because we are taught to do so. That’s how we learned . It doesn’t matter how our genes are, and what we inherited from our parents. The environment in which we live in will define us. â€Å"Genetic predisposition is not destiny â€Å" David Kranzler WHEN THE BRITISH EDUCATOR Richard Mulcaster wrote in 1582 that †Nature makes the boy toward, nurture sees him forward,† he gave the world a euphonious name for an opposition that has been debated ever since.People's beliefs about the roles of heredity and environment affect their opinions on an astonishing range of topics. Do adolescents engage in violence and substance abuse because of the way their parents treated them as toddlers? Are people inherently selfish and aggressive, which would justify a market economy and a strong police, or could they become peaceable and cooperative, allowing the state to wither and a spontaneous socialism to blossom? Is there a universal aesthetic that allows great art to transcend time and place, or are people's tastes determined by their era and culture ?With so much at stake, it is no surprise that debates over nature and nurture evoke such strong feelings. Much of the heat comes from framing the issues as all-or-none dichotomies, and some of it can be transformed into light with a little nuance. Humans, of course, are not exclusively selfish or generous (or nasty or noble); they are driven by competing motives elicited in different circumstances. Although no aspect of the mind is unaffected by learning, the brain has to come equipped with complex neural circuitry to make that learning possible.And if genes affect behavior, it is not by pulling the strings of the muscles directly, but via their intricate effects on a growing brain. By now most thinking people have come to distrust any radical who would seem to say that the mind is a blank slate that is filled entirely by its environment, or that genes control our behavior like a player piano. Many scientists, particularly those who don't study humans, have gone further and express ed the hope that the nature-nurture debate will simply go away.Surely, they say, all behavior emerges from an inextricable interaction between heredity and environment during development. Trying to distinguish them can only stifle productive research and lead to sterile polemics. But moderation, like all things, can be taken to extremes. The belief that it's simplistic to distinguish nature and nurture is itself simplistic. The contributions of this opposition to our understanding of mind and society are far from obvious, and many supposedly reasonable compromises turn out, under closer scrutiny, to be anything but.Let's consider some of the †reasonable† beliefs of the radical moderates. ‘Reasonable† Belief No. 1: No one believes in the extreme †nurture† position that the mind is a blank slate. Certainly few people today endorse the blank slate in so many words, and I suspect that even fewer believe it in their heart of hearts. But many people sti ll tacitly assume that nurture is everything when they write opinion pieces, conduct research, and translate the research into policy. Most parenting advice, for example, is inspired by studies that find a correlation between parents and children.Loving parents have confident children, authoritative parents (neither too permissive nor too punitive) have well-behaved children, parents who talk to their children have children with better language skills, and so on. Everyone concludes that to rear the best children, parents must be loving, authoritative, and talkative, and if children don't turn out well, it must be the parents' fault. But there is a basic problem with this reasoning, and it comes from the tacit assumption that children are blank slates. Parents, remember, provide their children with genes, not just a home environment.The correlations between parents and children may be telling us only that the same genes that make adults loving, authoritative, and talkative make their children self-confident, well behaved, and articulate. Until the studies are redone with adopted children (who get only their environment, not their genes, from their parents), the data are compatible with the possibility that genes make all the difference, the possibility that parenting makes all the difference, or anything in between. Yet in almost every instance, the most extreme position – that parents are everything – is the only one researchers entertain.Another example: To a biologist the first question to ask in understanding conflict between organisms of the same species is †How are they related? † In all social species, relatives are more likely to help each other, and nonrelatives are more likely to hurt each other. (That is because relatives share genes, so any gene that biases an organism to help a close relative will also, some of the time, be helping a copy of itself, and will thereby increase its own chances of prevailing over evolutionary time. But when the psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson checked the literature on child abuse to see whether stepparents were more likely to abuse their children than biological parents, they discovered not only that no one had ever tested the possibility, but that most statistics on child abuse did not even record the information – stepparents and biological parents were lumped together, as if the difference couldn't possibly matter. When Daly and Wilson did track down the relevant statistics, their hunch was confirmed: Having a stepparent is the largest risk factor for child abuse ever examined.The finding was by no means banal: Many parenting experts insist that the hostile stepparent is a myth originating in Cinderella stories, and that parenting is a †role† that anyone can take on. For agencies that monitor and seek to prevent child abuse the finding of a greater risk with stepparents could be critical information. But because of the refusal to entertai n the idea that human emotions are products of evolution, no one had ever thought to check. †Reasonable† Belief No. 2: For every question about nature and nurture, the correct answer is †Some of each. † Not so.Take the question, †Why do people in England speak English, and people in Japan Japanese? † The †reasonable compromise† would be that the Japanese have genes that make it easier for them to learn Japanese (and vice versa for the English), but both groups must be exposed to the language to acquire it fully. This compromise, of course, is not reasonable at all; it's false. Immigrant children acquire the language of their adopted home perfectly, showing that people are not predisposed to learn the language of their ancestors (though they may be predisposed to learn language in general).The explanation for why people in different countries speak different languages is 100 percent environmental. And sometimes the answer goes the other way. Autism, for example, used to be blamed on †refrigerator mothers† who did not emotionally engage with their children. Schizophrenia was thought to be caused by mothers who put their children in †double binds† (such as the Jewish mother who gave her son two shirts for his birthday, and when he turned up wearing one of them, said, †The other one you didn't like? †).Today we know that autism and schizophrenia are highly heritable, and though they are not completely determined by genes, the other likely contributors (toxins, pathogens, chance events in brain development) have nothing to do with parenting. Mothers don't deserve †some† of the blame if their children have these disorders, as a nature-nurture compromise would imply; they deserve none of it. †Reasonable† Belief No. 3: Disentangling nature and nurture is a hopeless task, so we shouldn't even try. On the contrary, perhaps the most unexpected and provocative disco very in 0th-century psychology came from an effort to distinguish nature and nurture in human development. For a long time, psychologists have studied individual differences in intellect and personality. They have assessed cognitive abilities using IQ tests, statistics on performance in school and on the job, and measurements of brain activity. They have assessed people's personalities using questionnaires, ratings by other people who know them well, and tallies of actual behavior such as divorces and brushes with the law. The measures suggest that our personalities differ in five major ways.We are to varying degrees introverted or extroverted, neurotic or stable, incurious or open to experience, agreeable or antagonistic, and conscientious or undirected. Where do these differences come from? Recall those flawed studies that test for the effects of parenting but forget to control for genetic relatedness. Behavioral geneticists have done studies that remedy those flaws and have disco vered that intelligence, personality, overall happiness, and many other traits are partly (though never completely) heritable.That is, some of the variation in the traits among people in a given culture can be attributed to differences in their genes. The conclusion comes from three different kinds of research, each teasing apart genes and environment in a different way. First, identical twins reared apart (who share their genes but not their family environment) are far more similar to each other than randomly selected pairs of people. Second, identical twins reared together (who share their environment and all their genes) are more similar than fraternal twins reared together (who share their environment but only half their genes).Third, biological siblings reared together (who share their environment and half their genes) are more similar than adoptive siblings (who share their environment but none of their genes). In each comparison, the more genes a pair of people share (holding environment more or less constant), the more similar they are. These studies have been replicated in large samples from many countries, and have ruled out the alternative explanations that have been proposed. Of course, concrete traits that patently depend on content provided by the home or culture are not heritable at all, such as the language you speak, the eligion you worship in, and the political party you belong to. But the underlying talents and temperaments are heritable: how proficient with language you are, how receptive to religion, how hidebound or open to change. So genes play a role in making us different from our neighbors, and our environments play an equally important role. At this point most people leap to the following conclusion: We are shaped both by our genes and by our family upbringing: how our parents treated us and what kind of home we grew up in.Not so fast. †The environment† and †our parents and home† are not the same thing. Behavi oral genetics allows us to distinguish two very different ways in which our environments might affect us. The shared environment is what impinges on us and our siblings alike: our parents, our home life, and our neighborhood (as compared with other parents and neighborhoods). The unique environment is everything else: anything that happens to us over the course of our lives that does not necessarily happen to our siblings.Remarkably, study after study has failed to turn up appreciable effects of the shared environment – often to the shock and dismay of the researchers themselves, who started out convinced that the nongenetic variation in personality had to come from the family. First, they've found, adult siblings are equally similar whether they grew up together or apart. Second, adoptive siblings are no more similar than two people plucked off the street at random. And third, identical twins who grew up in the same home are no more similar than one would expect from the eff ects of their shared genes.Whatever experiences siblings share by growing up in the same home in a given culture makes little or no difference in the kind of people they turn out to be. The implications, drawn out most clearly by Judith Rich Harris in her 1998 book †The Nurture Assumption,† are mind-boggling. According to a popular saying, †as the twig is bent, so grows the branch. † Patients in traditional forms of psychotherapy while away their 50 minutes reliving childhood conflicts and learning to blame their unhappiness on how their parents treated them.Many biographies scavenge through the subject's childhood for the roots of the grown-up's tragedies and triumphs. †Parenting experts† make women feel like ogres if they slip out of the house to work or skip a reading of †Goodnight Moon. † All these deeply held beliefs will have to be rethought. It's not that parents don't matter at all. Extreme cases of abuse and neglect can leave permanent scars. Skills like reading and playing a musical instrument can be imparted by parents.And parents affect their children's happiness in the home, their memories of how they were treated, and the quality of the lifelong relationship between parent and child. But parents don't seem to mold their children's intellects, personalities, or overall happiness for the rest of their lives. The implications for science are profound as well. Here is a puzzle: Identical twins growing up together have the same genes, family environments, and peer groups, but the correlations in their traits are only around 50 percent.Ergo, neither genes nor families nor peer groups, nor the interactions among these factors, can explain what makes them different. Researchers have hunted for other possible causes, such as sibling rivalry or differential treatment by parents, but none has panned out. As with Bob Dylan's Mister Jones, something is happening here but we don't know what it is. My own hunch is that the differences come largely from chance events in development. One twin lies one way in the womb and stakes out her share of the placenta, the other has to squeeze around her.A cosmic ray mutates a stretch of DNA, a neurotransmitter zigs instead of zags, the growth cone of an axon goes left instead of right, and one person's brain might gel into a slightly different configuration from another's, regardless of their genes. If chance in development is to explain the less-than-perfect similarity of identical twins, it says something interesting about development in general. One can imagine a developmental process in which millions of small chance events cancel one another out, leaving no difference in the end product.One can imagine a different process in which a chance event could derail development entirely, or send it on a chaotic path resulting in a freak or a monster. Neither of these results occurs with a pair of identical twins. They are distinct enough that our instrumen ts can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being. The development of organisms must use complex feedback loops rather than prespecified blueprints.Random events can divert the trajectory of growth, but the trajectories are confined within an envelope of functioning designs for the species. These profound questions are not about nature vs. nurture. They are about nurture vs. nurture: about what, exactly, are the nongenetic causes of personality and intelligence. But the questions would never have come to light if researchers had not first taken measures to factor out the influence of nature, by showing that correlations between parents and children cannot glibly be attributed to parenting but might be attributable to shared genes.That was the first step that led them to measure the possible effects of parenting empirically, rather than simply assuming that those effects had to be all-po werful. The human brain has been called the most complex object in the known universe. No doubt many hypotheses that pit nature against nurture as a dichotomy, or that fail to distinguish the ways in which they might interact, will turn out to be simplistic or wrong.But that complexity does not mean we should fuzz up the issues by saying that it's all just too complicated to think about, or that some hypotheses should be treated a priori as necessarily true, necessarily false, or too dangerous to mention. As with other complex phenomena like inflation, cancer, and global warming, when it comes to the development of a human being we have no choice but to try to disentangle the causes. Steven Pinker is Peter de Florez Professor of Psychology at MIT and author of †The Language Instinct,† and †How the Mind Works. † This essay is adapted in part from his latest book, †The Blank Slate

High Competitive Business Environment Advertising And...

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