On Nov 13, 7:57 am, enigma wrote:
"Welches" wrote :

That might be a difficult one to show as I suspect that
generally if one child is breastfed there's a good chance
that siblings are breastfed to a greater or lesser extent.

that's not a good assumption to make. my older brother was
breastfed until 5 months or so, when he bit mom. neither i nor
my younger brother ever got a chance to breastfeed after
that...

You've also got the argument of nurture as well, as if a
parent did well at school, they probably have more
resources to call on to help their children/want to help
their children. I think there was some research done to
show that ability maths is a recessive gene, which means
that my children don't have any chance of not being
mathematical without mutation, but my dad's mathematical
ability came out of nowhere.

now that's interesting. i had some difficulties with math, but
mostly with how it was being taught, not the actual math (once
explained *properly*, the light dawned & i was good at it). my
father's father, father & brothers are very good at math. my
SO is good at math. did i just miss the recessive math gene?
am i a 'carrier', so my son will get the gene (since his dad
has the math gene)? hmmm.

Lastly, of course, we haven't seen any definition of
'success' yet.

heh. i have an IQ of 137. i'm a farmer.
i dated a guy at MIT who was pretty close to my IQ. he had a
dual major in math & philosophy. my dad asked him at dinner
once what he planned to do with that dual major. BFs reply was
a thoughtful "Well, there's really only two things i *could*
do with a dual in math & philosophy. I can either teach, or
become a farmer..."
i wonder which he did...
lee

Interesting. A guy in my high school's G&T program ended up getting a
PhD in Philosophy from Princeton, and he found the best fit to be
landscaping maintenance at a cemetery, which gives him time to think
in a relatively quiet setting.

I'm too easily inclined to anthropomorphizing, and am too much of a
carnivore, hence farming would be a bad fit for me.

Once I turned 20 (a few decades ago) I realized that the whole
advantage gained by 'achieving' in school is because said achievements
offer one more choices in life. That's my story as a 'SAHM volunteer,'
and I'm sticking with it. [The only thing I really missed for a while
was leading large teams of people, and then -- hey! -- realized that I
could do that as a volunteer, only now I have to pay for the markers
and flipcharts.]

Caledonia