… they rapidly become less and less so.
What factors are understood to be the most significant in determining a child’s development? Ranking the following is kind of what I’m looking for:
Genetics of the parents (and are the traits of the father and mother equally influential?)
Health of the mother
Physical home environment
Mental stimulation in the home
Quality of elementary education
Quality of secondary education
Role models in the home
Other…
If you’re looking for formal scientific evidence there’s a great deal of conflicting evidence out there. You could find a study claiming that each thing on your list is quite important and another study claiming that each thing is unimportant.
“Development” is, of course, a broad category, so we’d first have to decide whether we’re talking about physical health, intelligence, morals, or something else.
Exercise and nutrition? I don’t know if it is specific enough, but obviously wealth matters too.
n/m
Wealth matters in the sense that most other factors are dependent on it. It has no direct effect on development, obviously - the kid whose family has an untouched $1,000,000 bank account develops no differently from the one whose family doesn’t.
No they don’t.
This misunderstand what equal means. It does not mean everyone is born the same but equal in terms of the intrinsic value of their lives.
For example, I have two kids, one was born 8lbs, 7 oz and one was born 7lbs,7oz. So they were nowhere near equal physically but both are equal in that they are both my children.
Exactly.
I’d have to say, yes, they do. Two infants are pretty much the same, anywhere on earth. But by the time a kid has grown to age four, his environment has kicked in, big time, and a Burmese kid will have a VERY different life than a Swedish kid.
Quality of life is pseudo-genetic: it derives, in great part, from the parents.
But that doesn’t make them unequal in the sense that the phrase is used. The kid from the slums has the same intrinsic rights as a human being as the rich kid from New York.
I understand what the OP is asking here, but I think he’s confusing the philosophical ideal “all men are created equal” with something else entirely.
In any case, without defining exactly what we’re looking for here, I’m not sure the question can be answered. The kid from New York might be richer, but the kid from the slums might spend his entire life helping those less fortunate than himself-- which one of those two is “better”?
My point is that “equal” in the sense of “all men are created equal” has a completely different meaning from how you are using it.
Jefferson, when he wrote that, was making an assertion in ethics, not science. It is not the kind of statement that can be true or false.
We are created equal in terms of our intrinsic value as human beings.
Nothing else is very equal.
We all belong to the family of man, and no individual has a claim to be of more value at birth than another. No individual has a claim that the world owes him more than another.
Genes, nurturing and the capriciousness of life’s circumstance contribute to how we actually turn out. No one chooses their parents or the starting circumstances of their life.
There some twin studies of separated monozygotic twins to help derive the relative contributions of nature and nurture. These are not perfect, but helpful.
Exactly.
True… I was specifically arguing in support of the notion that people grow “more unequal” as time goes on, which you said they didn’t. I think the world’s inequalities may, actually, overall, be decreasing, largely due to the titanic economic success of China. But as individuals go, inequality increases as we age. So, I guess I may be using the term in several different ways all by myself!
Come to think of it, I wonder if there aren’t at least a few people who are simply “born bad.” Maybe not many, but even in the finest abstract sense of human equality, it seems to me that there are a few bloody rotters who were rotters from day one of their rotten existence!
Even rotters are ends-in-themselves. That was the point of “all men are created equal.” It was a shocking idea in a civilization that had always tacitly assumed that some people are born to enjoy the good things and others merely to minister to them. (Shocking, but not entirely novel even then, it went back at least to the English Civil War with its Diggers and Levellers – or even back to Jesus, depending on how you read Scripture.)
And my comment was aimed at the OP and it’s misuse of the “all men are created equal” quote, that’s all.