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The Neubauers, father and son, psychoanalyst and writer, take us on a trip to the ever-turbulent but vital realm of the nature-nurture interface. This, as they say, "is a book about accepting into one's life
both hereditary history (nature) and environmental history (nurture) as interactive parts of human individuality" (p. 9). The book reads as a guide for thinking about children, family, patients, ourselves—a guide that stresses the currently unrespectable contribution of genetic endowment to development and adaptation. Reminding us that unrelated strangers differ in only six million of the six billion base pairs of DNA in human chromosomes, full siblings in only two million and identical twins in none at all, the authors highlight the scope for variation and individuality conferred by the differences while focusing on the powerful significance of the genetic givens. This is the theme that, not surprisingly, dominates the book, as it does all cogent discourse on the matter. However, as the Neubauers point out, except in cases of extreme pathology, it does not inform much of current thinking about development and behavior.
How, they ask, has the popular conception of development come to focus so exclusively on learning and experience over heredity even as new information about the gene explodes around us? The reasons are many. There is a worthwhile historical review tracing the conflicting ideas of the importance of innate versus environmental factors in Rationalist as opposed to Enlightenment thinkers right through to late nineteenth, early twentieth century scientific thought, with an emphasis on the terrible misuses to which extremes of either philosophy have been put in recent times. The racism of Social Darwinism and the "justification" of genocide realized in the Holocaust, based on genetic stereotyping, have left an overwhelming and understandable cloud. At the same time, attempts to form "truly equal societies," in which environmental factors were