Nature vs Nurture

[Xakana]

Nature vs Nurture?

I'm watching Nova and they did an experiment on rats to test genes vs mothering. The rats raised by the low touch mother rat were more agressive, stress-prone, bit, screamed, etc. while the babies raised by the high-touch mother were calm, friendly and hand-tame. They switched out the babies of the rats that grew up there, giving babies from the high touch mom to the low touch and vice versa (they 'parented' the way they were) and again, the babies raised low touch were less healthy and more agressive, etc.The low touch baby rats also were more prone to disease.

Fascinating.

[momsbreak5654]

Sep. 28, 2009 at 6:07 AM

My son (use to be my step, but I adopted him), was a colic  baby.  His mother hated him, so he did not mother/son bonding and was held very little as a child.  He has ODD, PTSD, Anxiety, and launguage based learning disablities.  He also has poor social skils.  His sister was an easy baby.  Her mother spent a lot of time holding and carriering her.  She has no disorders.  The study seems accurate to me.

[Xakana]

Sep. 28, 2009 at 6:10 AM

They're now repeating it on humans and so far, it seems to be yielding the same results. It's fascinating because the parenting changes the GENES themselves. Which is how identical twins can be so very different--different experiences actually encodes a secondary genetic  code called epigenetic (sp) which are the switches that turn genes on and off. It can lead to cancer as well as other diseases.

And they were able to fix some of the damage in rats (they're trying to find a way to turn back on tumor suppressing genes),

(Original Poster)

[MSugarKane]

Sep. 28, 2009 at 8:09 AM

very interesting