I often tell my friends who are interested in adoption, that to be
an adoptive parent you have to have to be a believer in nurture. It's
also important for adoptive parents to realize that nurture isn't
everything to a person, and that children's genetic heritages will
always be a part their make up, but it's also important not to get
overly fearful of the genes of strangers.
But these days, "genes"
seem to have taken on mythic proportions in popular culture. People
seem to think everything about a person is coded somewhere in the DNA.
But that's not really how genetics work, as anyone with actual
knowledge of the subject will tell you. Some aspects of our identity
are more hard-wired than others. Some genes may indicate a tendency
towards an effect, but remain inactive until triggered by outside
factors.
Until recently, "intelligence" was thought to be largely a genetic matter.
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