Aggregated News
To the Editor:
In “The Downside of Resilience” (Sunday Review, Nov. 30), Jay Belsky points to evidence that certain children are genetically predisposed to be helped by good teachers and supportive environments, and should therefore be identified as the best use of our scarce intervention dollars.
The idea that we should sort children into groups based on genetics and then treat those groups differently is unsettling to many people, as well it should be.
Mr. Belsky couches his proposal as an opportunity to help children with certain genes and not to take away from others, but distributing scarce resources is by definition a zero-sum game, and in advocating more for one group, you are by necessity suggesting that we give less to those who have different genes, a dangerous and misguided precedent.
People are not defined by their genes. That’s not wishful thinking; traits and behaviors are related to the genes we carry but in complicated and unpredictable ways. Patterns that emerge from looking at a population are interesting, but they rarely dictate how an individual will perform...