Monday, July 30, 2007

DNA and our brain - James Watson

Dr. James Watson argues that gene is more dominant in our life. He believes that nature has more influence than nurture. Well, I disagree with his idea about nature more dominant than nurture. A research proof that a child was born with high IQ can not grow up and be an instant Einstein. Once a child is isolated in his or her childhood, no matter how high his or her IQ is, it is useless.

Researches proof the declining metacognition grown of those children. In learning process, a child needs peer and adults help, besides his or her self nature cognition. In order to push the learning level, children acquire social learning technique by mimicking and gaining the knowledge from peers or adults. Even though a child has a smart gene in it, without nurture it is meaningless and so is the apposite.

It is true that intelligent parents will most likely have intelligent children as well. The biologists show the genotype of those cases. Their children have high intelligent because they get 23 pair of chromosome from each parents. Each chromosome contents trait from the parents’ gene. Those genes with the smart DNA replicate themselves, thus their children have a high IQ.

Again, our brain is not like computer's CPU that has been programmed before Dell or Sony put it up in the market. Our brains receive the software installation during our learning stage (usually childhood). If a virus is installed in the processor, it does not work well, and so it our brain. If we learn the wrong thing, we turn out to be messed up.

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