LIKE PARENTS LIKE CHILDREN
Exploring a genetic mystery of the still unravelling process of becoming the unlikely heir of my father's ultimate genetic legacy at the experiential level.
Preface: I have always thought about myself in relation to the family I come from (Is there a more primal reference point for a human individual?). How so unlike everyone else I am and, yet, how so much like everyone else. There was a time I used to think I had nothing in common with any member of my nuclear family. Now I think I have something in common with every one of them. One source of this new and more accurate insight is, I think, the well-known statistical concepts of distribution and variance. It appears that I am the almost perfect statistically average child in terms of distribution of heritable genetic stuff, which makes me look like no one and, at the same time, like everyone. I am the average denominator, the approximation of the direct double gene pool from father and mother. There's a discernible trace of everyone else in me, yet you'd struggle to see me in anyone else. Hence, I've developed into a bundle of delicate but, fortunately, stable contradictions: the personality differences that are observable between my father and mother find a mostly stable dialectical expression in me - this is a vital piece of genetic luck as dialectics of traits are more likely to trigger gestalt instability than stability).
Consider the following contradictions as expressed in my personality: There is the mild-mannered agreeable nature of my father (less so than him) existing side-by-side with the confrontational, barely filtered opinionatedness of my mother (less so than her). There is the avid love of literature and knowledge just like my father (more so than him) combined with my mother's preference for that which is practical and radical (this trait/taste was mostly dormant for almost the first 3 decades of my development but now growing at an alarming pace). There is the irreverence of all things tradition from my mother (more so than her) being proportionately balanced by my father's unwavering tolerance for people he has little in common with (more so than him). There also comes from my father the uncanny ability to maintain peaceable relations with very difficult people (less so than him) which is oftentimes threatened by my mother's impatience and tendency to grate on people's nerves without at all intending to (less so than her). I could go on and on to highlight this pattern of dualistic personality traits that have come to make it difficult to have me neatly characterized or easily understood by those who have related with me to a good degree. I'm extremely introverted yet somewhat outwardly oriented in terms of range of activities (but I remain decidedly not much people-oriented). I'm strongly agnostic by nature (my first instinct since childhood has always been to question even those things I wholeheartedly believed in) yet filled with deep religious sensibilities. I'm extremely lethargic and mostly apathetic to life and its events yet filled with irrepressible curiosity as well as retaining a consistently diligent attitude in duty. This essay is my attempt to use these observations to make a larger point about disparate developmental destinies and life outcomes within families.
Disclaimer: I do not intend for this essay to be taken as anything other than anecdotal in its illustrative pictures and speculative in its arguments. It's a very narrow autobiographical sketch around a topic that has always engaged my interest. While I’m writing as a non-expert in the field of genetics, I expect readers to find some of my autobiographical observations and musings to be more or less discernible in their own family units.
Part I
Intro
This is an essay about family units at the nuclear level and how their genetic members often radically diverge and converge in highly unpredictable ways that are nonetheless intelligible to the perceptive eye. When individual characteristics and life outcomes (which, together, are referred to as phenotypes) converge among family members in a very obvious way, we usually take the normality of this for granted with no eyebrow raised. We naturally consider this convergence normal, expected, and desirable (provided the phenotypes in question aren't considered regressive, transgressive, or maladaptive). But this accepting attitude quickly changes the moment there's a significant degree of negative divergence1 in within-family traits and developmental outcomes, we begin to fret and worry, doubt and question, especially if this divergence tends more towards the negative side of the family norm and expectations. For instance, if the average functional IQ2 in a family is approximately 80, any child that falls within the range of 70-90 (the acceptable range) would likely be fine within this family system. However, any score significantly outside this range is likely to create serious relational friction and coordination issues between the deviant member and the rest of the unit. This same principle applies to every single heritable functional trait (that is, all traits useful in social adaptation) within the family context. Too wide and too many intra-family divergences in heritable traits are not good for functional and psychological cohesion within any family unit; it makes integration of subjective identity (through socialization) and coordination of independent action tendencies difficult.3 Such family unit ends up spending too many resources (time, effort, capital) on enforcement and alignment of norms as opposed to reinforcement and advancement of those norms.
Of Course We Aren’t Born Equal
As a general principle, divergence in measurable outcomes and observable traits among individuals or families begins with divergence in neurobiological endowments, the architecture of which is shaped by the genetic material that underwrites them. Here is something Cremiuex wrote: “In these studies, individuals who had better genes than their parents tended to be upwardly mobile…. The result even holds when comparing siblings: the one with better skills tends to move up, whereas the one with worse skills tends to move down.” I'd however replace skills with traits because what skills you choose to pursue and how effectively you learn those skills also depend on the disparate and intricate assemblage of structural and mental traits you already possessed from birth. Thus, outstanding achievements in the real world are often the manifest emergent outcomes of latent genetic and epigenetic baselines. This means that, provided the given environment isn't too different, and variation in heritable traits not too divergent, your success or failure in life relative to your peers will closely approximate those of your parents relative to their own peers. Stable abilities (e.g. intellectual powers, emotion regulation) and capacities (e.g. mental endurance, uncertainty tolerance) are not acquired as much as they're endowed. But they can often be differentially activated or toned down by developmental and experiential catalysts (the epigenetic axis of influence). The intricate multilayered mechanisms involved in this gene-environment interplay sometimes make it appear to the untrained eye as if the active formative principles and regulatory switches of our lives are primarily located outside rather than within the individual.
“The persistence of various ethnic groups at upper and lower levels of status in the United States has been taken as demonstrating the pervasive effects of racism in the United States, and the pervasive advantages of group cultures or connections. However, the book points out that we can observe exactly the same persistence among groups and families not perceived as ethnically distinct:”
In other words, differential outcomes aren't only routinely observable between races, cultures, and families, but also within them. I take this empirical finding further to mean that the active forces shaping how experiences are pursued and metabolized in lived outcomes reside primarily within the individual/group.
Of Parents And Offsprings
It's often difficult to perceive the sometimes very striking psychological and behavioral similarities between parents and their biological offsprings due to, among other reasons, two major factors: (1)the temporal difference in their respective developmental stages which means certain genes are yet to be activated in childhood while certain genes have been either already exhausted or turned off by mid and late adulthood, (2) the randomness of genetic inheritance and specific environmental catalysts that modulate their expression in each offspring.
Children rarely have knowledge of what their parents were like during their own childhood and parents often have no idea what their children will be like as fully mature adults. This temporal gap in mutual biographical data generate a skewed perception and a false narrative which often lead parents to think their children are worse than or nothing like their own childhood selves, while children also see their parents as being nothing like them or prematurely assert the unlikelihood of becoming anything like their parents. If only children could travel back in time to observe their parents as children and teenagers, and parents could time-travel into the future for a snapshot of what their children will be like as mature adults or parents. Empirically, we know that children become more like their parents as they get older while parents regress as they age further, slowly shedding the ego cloak and the burden of responsibility that comes with increasing social and economic expectations. In this opposing temporal growth trajectory - children upwards, parents downwards - I imagine that there's a critical point of intersection where both briefly meet and for the first time recognize the one in the other: “I guess I’m my mother's daughter after all!”4 For me, I'm just beginning to enter that developmental stage where I realize I'm not that different from my parents, especially my father, after all.
A Case Study: My Father And I
At first glance and by all outward indicators, I have very little in common with my dad. 95% of people who knew me and saw my parents confidently gave the verdict that I look like my mom facially (I've often not been able to agree with this overwhelming verdict even though I also know I have no shred of evidence or argument to counter it). People's overwhelming consensus may have come down to one conspicuous physical trait I share with my mom - a very prominent central diastema. I can’t think of any distinct physical traits I share with my dad, except perhaps slightly receding hairline and copious sideburns (which my brother also has). I'm taller and lankier than him and have a slightly faster general life pace than him (though this doesn't appear true anymore). On the contrary, my older brother is almost a spitting image of our father both in physical attributes, social mannerisms, and behavioral tendencies. As a young chap, it'd have been very easy for my father to deny paternity prima facie in my case if it ever became disputed. Not only did I share very little physical traits with him, but I was also once the very antithesis of him behaviorally - stubborn, truant, playful, and rebellious. In spite of this great divergence in paternal inheritance, there were a few silver lining that I was indeed my father's son. First, I was the primary inheritor of his love for wide-ranging literature (my brother also has a very strong appetite for books, but mostly of the motivation, religious, and academic genres). Second, in spite of my non-conformist spirit, I also got a non-negligible amount of his tendency to be agreeable and tolerant. I'm particularly grateful for these two psychological traits because I'd have been an otherwise insufferable snob without them (no thanks to my mom!)5. But because I also got a lot of strong psychological traits from my mother, I grew up acting in ways that were not distinctly like either of them.
In childhood, the almost equal share of paternal and maternal behavioral phenotypes mostly cancelled out producing nothing that was clearly traceable in both of them while generating some novel behavioral phenotypes. For instance, I'm the only one in my family who doesn't believe in God, who isn't keen about marriage or starting a family, who is morally liberal, and who has experimented with some lifestyle that, if any of my family members knew about, would have them vehemently denying on my behalf. By the cultural standards of Nigeria, I'm already an outlier in some regards (even while still managing to function firmly within the culture). So, within the narrower context of my family, I'm even more of an outlier. I easily became the undisputed black sheep (but more like a grey one since I still possess the uncanny ability to not stray too widely outside the bounds of what is morally and culturally permissible - I attribute this to my high conscientiousness, a trait both of my parents are extremely high on).
Fast forward to the present day and it's looking like I'm in fact the true heir of my father's genetic legacy6. In spite of my father's academic brilliance and modest intellectual vigor, he has somehow always maintained a pretty strong disposition towards religious faith with a detectable outline of crude spiritual sensibility. In choosing my mom as a life partner, he semi-consciously selected primarily for three things: intelligence, religiosity, and a confrontational disposition (I believe he was once in awe of my mom's righteous, fearless, militant spirit. Now he merely teases her about it while giving vent to occasional but tame exasperation). Sometimes, it's difficult to tell who is more religious between both of them. My mom was seriously going to remain celibate in the service of her Lord Jesus Christ until she met my dad7 (it's impossible not to love my dad if you were a young woman who had no reason to be too alarmed by his then abject material poverty). My dad, on his own part, would have his own spiritual apotheosis long after marriage. After a brief but extremely successful career as a chemistry teacher, he became disillusioned with his secular career. I believe he had a series of bad but random and normal life experiences at that point in time which his mounting existential emptiness inclined him to interpret as incontrovertible proof that he could no longer ignore God's calling. A very nasty Whitlow (that even I remember even though I was only about 6/7 years old at the time) and a near-fatal accident was ‘God's’ primary means of issuing my dad the ultimate memo. It worked beautifully! He resigned amidst great rancor from parents, students, and teachers, and devoted his life to God and the Church happily ever after. Till today, he believes that was the best decision he ever made. I believe him even though I didn't particularly like the decision back then. And even if I now understand it better as him following an existential imperative for a subjectively meaningful life, I still somewhat disapprove of it because the immediate impact on the family was, to put it mildly, not pleasant. For my father, I imagine that the emotional impact of that profoundly courageous decision (due to its immediate material implications) must have been akin to what I felt when I consciously renounced my faith in 2013 - a sigh of relief and a feeling of liberation that comes from finally being able to reconcile one's lived reality with one's felt identity.
So, surely, given enough progenies, there must be one whose existential trajectory reenacts this particular subtheme in my father's life script, right?8 Well, it's increasingly looking like I'm the unlikely candidate with that specific genetic mantle. First, I was just a boy from a Christian home like my other siblings and like any other kid. Then I became a born again in my mid-teens, making my parents very proud of my spiritual fervor while driving my siblings to the very edge of envy9. Then, just about 6 years after I became born again, I unborn myself again by renouncing my faith and becoming agnostic in my metaphysics. This was never a sudden event, it was many silent nights of questioning doubts in the making. And I have never looked back once with regret or nostalgia in the 12+ years since this happened. But before it happened, at the height of my moderately long and impressive career as a born again young zealot, I almost acted upon a strongly felt impulse to drop out of school (as a remedial university student) to pursue the rustic life of a Christian missionary. Together with another fellow zealot, I paid a visit to a tiny and very remote village of not more than 4 little rotund mud-and-thatched huts where we were going to commence our missionary calling. Luckily for me, reason intervened and prevailed as it somehow always did in those mostly very insensible years of religious fervour10.
So, if I'm now a deeply content and stable agnostic, how is it possible that I'm beginning to see myself as the real and ultimate inheritor of my father's cardinal genetic legacy, especially when I have a brother who has long supplanted me as the new super religious kid on the block? It's simply because I'm the only child who, like my father, is at best indifferent to worldly ambitions and at worst resentful of it. And the very impulse that once manifested in a desire to become a pastoral missionary has remained strong and active, but in its pure natural form, unpolluted by any man-invented belief system. Now, I just desire to abandon the city life to pursue a life of quiet labor and serenity in a remote rural setting. For me, I see it as a way to pursue and realize my spirituality expressed through activities such as manual but meaningful labor, farming and husbandry, mingling with and learning the folk ways, exploring and savoring nature, acquiring some craftsmanship skills, rediscovering my love of higher literature, levelling up my writing vocation, while maintaining a steady but limited professional service as a psychotherapist. It's a transition that when I finally make, will leave most people shocked just as many were shocked at my father's decision to quit a brilliant and promising career. Like my father, I can hear the calling daily, except that the voice is not of God but of Nature. And there are those who would say they are one and the same.
Part 2
Dawn, Dusk And Time
The phenotypic differences we sometimes observe between parental pairs and their offsprings is somewhat similar to the differences between dawn and dusk: one being the result of a just-rising sun and the other the result of a slowly setting sun. Yet the differences between these two phases of the day can often be more striking than their even more fundamental similarity. The dawn (at least in the Tropics where I reside) is usually cooler, wetter, darker, quieter, fresher, and often filled with an air of promise and new possibilities. The dusk, on the other hand, is often warmer, lighter, humming, and often characterized by a fading but golden glow and an unmistakable air of decline and disappearance. However, this would be a false dichotomy because dawn and dusk are just different sides of the same sun. The phases of the earth's rotation (on its axis) can thus look sharply different depending on which part of the world or which time of day you happen to find yourself. But no matter the place or the phase of day, one could always say something about the position of the sun which is stable relative to the planets that revolve around it. It's the immovable, unchanging core body relative to which every other body’s trajectory and property are defined. This is thus the fundamental similarity between dawn and dusk - they both say something true about the sun while exhibiting this truth in strikingly different ways. Parents can be seen as people who are nearing the dusk of life while their offspring are only just springing into the dawn. One is gradually setting and heading westward of life, the other is slowly rising from life’s easternmost axis. And genetic materials can be seen as the central life force (equivalent to the sun) around which generations of lineages orient their movements. So, necessarily, both parents and children would initially see life differently and would struggle to find commonalities in their respective perceptions given their sharply different temporal point of view until their respective movements collide at an approximate point in time - a period during which the confusions inherent in both dawn and dusk gives way to the definite clarity of night and day.
If I were to use this metaphor to describe my organismic development so far, I'd say that roughly the first three decades of my life was spent in the liminal period of dawn. And having only recently broken into daylight in the past few years, I can now see more clearly than ever the position I occupy relative to the family sun. And I know that a time will come when this clarity would again be lost to the hazy liminality of dusk relative to my own future offsprings.
Part 3
Hillbilly Elegy
Watching the movie adaptation of the book, Hillbilly Elegy, I remember suddenly having a very sharp realization that I may have been, all these years, a bit biased in my perception and understanding of the many delicate ways in which a deeply disturbed family can radically upset an individual's normal developmental trajectory. Don't get me wrong. I know that the immediate family environment as well as the larger cultural environment matter in who a person becomes, I just never could accept that these are invariably deterministic (except, of course, in cases of extreme dysfunction). Let’s keep in mind that a normal childhood, to begin with, does not necessarily mean one devoid of some minor degrees of stress and distress, and normal doesn't always translate to “positive and advantageous”, even in an ideal formative environment. Hence, a disadvantageous but “normal” phenotype (e.g. low IQ, femaleness11, sickle cell blood type, albinism, etc.), combined with a multidimensionally impoverished upbringing is a decidedly damaging combination. When genetic and phenotypic properties align with environmental forces, either positively or negatively, the central operative deterministic principles (whatever they actually are) become doubly energized. Even then, some specific but difficult-to-map-out configurations of traits, dispositions, and sensibilities, are ultimately resistant to the abyss and annihilation of a sick home/environment. A good example is this brief autobiographical account by a fellow Nigerian Substacker. Here's the grim picture of what his childhood environment was like:
“One could blame my father for living in what, by all definitions, was a ghetto. You know, badly built and poorly ventilated tenements with many different people living in them. The compound we (my father and I) lived in had communal bathrooms with algae-lined walls and earthworms squirming on the floor because the concrete had eroded; a caved-in pit latrine so that both adults and children had to do their business in potties (yes, there are adult-sized potties) and empty them into the latrine; and a communal, open-concept kitchen with soot-covered walls that smelled like smoke, rotting food, or rotting animals (usually big rats or lizards that had eaten rat poison), or all three smells combined. Some of our neighbors were questionable people: alcoholics, sex workers, promiscuous married men with dysfunctional families, Bible thumpers, unscrupulous “nurses” who dropped out of nursing school and performed illegal abortions, and corrupt low-level government officials. It was a strange crowd, and our family was by far the most conventional.”
The above formative experience is by no great means uncommon in many third world countries. Yet, the outcomes or long-term impacts of such corrosive environments are always widely variable. A few individuals would always end up being damaged by these types of environments, a few others would remain almost impervious to its negative impacts, while a significant majority would remain trapped between those two outcomes - allowing for subjective narratives to break this outcome neutrality. But here's the point I want to emphasize: a robust physical and psychological constitution always stands a better-than-average chance of beating the most deterministic environmental forces such as violence, poverty, and parental neglect (provided the specific environment isn't an accurate reflection of the individual's true genetic heritage. This is the primary reason why majority who experienced a traumatic childhood don't end up with PTSD. A strong genetic heritage would always rise above a suboptimal environment, and likewise, a weak genetic heritage would still struggle even in the best of environments). I also believe this is one of the reasons we never stop hearing or reading stories of individuals from poor and unstable countries who managed to rise to astounding heights of success in spite of a disfiguring and demoralizing environment, with many even citing this unkind early experiences as a primary impetus for their eventual success. Likewise, we don't fail to see examples of people who remain mired in underachievement and frustration despite the advantages of a rich and stable Commonwealth. These are phenomena that are mostly observed and easily observable at the extremes of a population distribution. But fundamental principles are also apprehended precisely by looking at these quite common exceptions to the general rule.
However, it goes without saying, that an undercooked constitution, with myriads of physical and psychological vulnerabilities, has a less-than-average chance of fully realizing its developmental potentials even in the most fully nourishing environment. I do not believe that what we usually broadly refer to as “the environment” is a causal force in the classic sense of the term; what the environment appears to do is to energize and magnify any given psychobiological property, showing it to be either defective (vulnerable) or robust (resilient). For example, an individual who inherited a trio of traits that include the cognitive property of forgetfulness, the personality tendency to trivialize, and a relatively low IQ is more likely to be highly resistant to traumatogenic environments and/or experiences. Again, this isn't arguing that the environment has no lasting impact, but that some individuals appear to be more responsive or reactive to environmental effects (whether negative or positive) than others, just as some individuals are more prone to adverse drugs reactions or allergies.
Part 4
In A Normal Stable Environment, Genes Always Have The Final Say
As to the origins of my prior underestimation of the influence of external proto-causal forces in the formation of the personality and life outcomes of the adult individual, I'm not so sure I can point to any specific source. But one likely candidate, two actually, but linked, is the family I myself grew up in. The other source is most likely books (but then my dad was also an avid reader which still reduces to my family of origin). Hence, I’ll focus mostly on the first source.
I was raised by mostly emotionally stable, educated, loving, devoted, sacrificial, hardworking, responsible, religious, and morally consistent parents in a moderately decent environment (not too dirty, crowded, dangerous, or chaotic) by an African small-town standard. (Please note this: I and my siblings also possess most of these traits except for one or two tweaks in this or that child). My parents almost never blame anyone for anything that happened and happens to them. This primarily self-oriented judging attitude is not necessarily always good, because it makes such people more likely to blame those who are equally not responsible for their misfortunes but, unlike my parents, have less constitutional and dispositional fortitude to bear the burden of responsibility for another person's bad choices. Yet, it's perhaps largely because of this internal attributive orientation that both of my parents were actually able to become what they are today. In this regard, they both conspicuously stood out from their respective full and half siblings with whom they shared the same family and cultural environment.
My dad is the only university-educated child among all his five full siblings. My mom is the only university-educated child among her numerous siblings from a polygamous family. My dad prioritized and pursued education in spite of serious poverty and a father disinclined to spend his meagre resources on education beyond secondary school. My dad, as a young chap, was academically brilliant and he knew it, and he decided to bet the better part of his earliest decades in pursuit of a university degree (his immediate younger brother chose to move to Lagos to become a cab driver while fathering six offsprings in the process). My dad first worked many odd jobs, including manual labour on village farms, and later as a domestic servant in the city. All these meant that he was well above 30 years old when he finally achieved his goal of bagging a university degree (in pure and applied chemistry) which made it possible for him to meet and stand a chance to marry a woman of my mum's quality. Again, in his family, he was the only sibling who married a university-educated spouse (one can easily see the additive effect of good genes in operation).
As for my mom, she also prioritized and pursued education even more militantly than my father having had the double misfortunes of being born a female in the early fifties Nigeria and into a polygamous family. It was a period when the culture, especially in towns and villages far removed from cities and big towns, was still very much hostile to the idea of wasting scarce resources on a girl child’s education when she is ultimately destined to become a man's domestic property. Fortunately for my mom, she had a father who was surprisingly progressive in attitude (despite being himself a stark illiterate) when it came to the question of spending on girls’ education and also had the wealth to back it up. (Fun fact: my mother would later become one of my father's two main sources of financial support while they were courting in university; the other support source being his own mother and to a lesser extent the brother that moved to Lagos)12. In addition, my mother was blessed with extended family members, scattered across more literate towns in and out of her own state of origin, who were well educated and were willing to see to her education as well. And of course, she too was brilliant, though less so than my father. But more than my father, she was possessed with a will and character that is highly driven and stubbornly uncompromising, serving as a complementary contrast to my father's more quiet determination. The two of them would never quite live up to their full career potential due to their stronger inclination towards modesty of ambition (a trait I have rather inherited in copious amounts) which was perhaps further influenced by their equally strong religiosity.
My Childhood Years
I and my siblings were raised with an evangelical zeal, a strong and egalitarian work ethic that included boys doing stuff in the kitchen and no enforcement of birth hierarchy, a no-nonsense parenting style that included many serious lashings especially for me (being the most stubborn and delinquent). But I can't remember I or any of my siblings feeling that our parents were mean, wicked, and unloving. We took all the restrictions, the disciplines, the prohibitions as a matter of course even though we hated and despised it, I above all. This matter-of-course attitude about the parenting style may also have been because it's the same in every other family we knew while growing up. We were not in the least atypical in this respect and we had no ideas or exposure to alternative ways of parenting at the time. The whole of our parenting philosophy back then can be summarized into this crude form: children are often stubborn and disobedient; parents discipline them.
Our parents only started to meet with outright rebellion from us, especially me, when they wanted to continue to dictate and mandate our choices, especially in the personal and moral domains, well into our university phase (we all rebelled against our upbringing in slightly different ways, just as our parents did when they were around our age). So I can say for sure that the most decisive force in shaping who I and my siblings have become is not how our parents raised us. Not even the disciplines – yes, those corporal punishments and restrictions put on leash some tendencies toward extreme waywardness and recklessness of choices and lifestyle early in life – but they were not in the least responsible for who we eventually turned out to be or the choices we later made, as you'd see.
The Great Adolescence Interlude
No parents can know for sure who their child is likely to become character-wise until the period immediately preceding and succeeding adolescence. It's the period where everything that has gone before, every latent genetic force in hibernation, and everything that's to come begin to coalesce for the first time, creating a turbulent mix of events that leaves everyone and everything not quite the same afterwards. Something fundamental and life-altering happens during this stage of development. And it more often than not completely disregards whatever may have come before. A study in Nature journal underscores this phenomenon to show that most of the physical, biological, and psychological differences that undergird sexual dimorphism between the sexes occurs during puberty:
“Many traits of the brain and body show marked sex differences, but the distributions of their values overlap substantially between the two sexes. To investigate variations associated with biological sex, beyond binary differences, we create continuous sex scores capturing the inter-individual variability in phenotypes. In an adolescent cohort (n = 1,029; 533 females), we have generated three sex scores based on brain–body traits: ‘overall’ (48 traits), ‘pubertal’ (26 traits) and ‘non-pubertal’ (22 traits). We then conducted sex-stratified multiple linear regressions (adjusting for age) using sex scores to test associations with sex hormones, personality traits and internalizing–externalizing behaviour. Higher sex scores (that is, greater ‘femaleness’) were associated with lower testosterone in males only, as well as lower extraversion, higher internalizing and lower externalizing in both sexes. The associations with testosterone, internalizing and externalizing were driven by pubertal sex scores, underscoring the importance of adolescence in shaping within-sex individual variability.”
One of my sisters was a congenital thumb-sucker and my mom did everything (I mean everything, sometimes very extreme measures, including making a small incision in her thumb and then lacing the cut with bitter leaf juice) to make her stop. She failed each time.13At about age 13/14 years, about the period my sister began senior secondary school, she voluntarily and abruptly stopped sucking her thumb. This was long after my mother had given up trying. And I remember the same remarkable change happened to me around the time I also started senior secondary school, that is, when I was just attaining puberty. My daredevilry suddenly began to slink away, together with my adventurous proclivities. I became more serious, more studious (up until then I often did exceptionally well without even trying hard), more timid, more introspective, more well-behaved, more socially introverted, and more concerned with social impressions and perceptions. Everything my parents had fruitlessly tried to preach and beat out of me suddenly kicked into place effortlessly and almost permanently. But they also got more than what they bargained for, because my rebellious nonconformist spirit, which had up until then often found expression in externalized behaviors, now became internalized and fully transfused into all endeavors of the mind. I became an intellectual rebel but still somewhat conservative in the realm of behavior. No idea was too big for me to consider, explore, and even skeptically embrace, including skepticism about the existence of God14.
My elder brother, the very definition of an ideal child while growing up, had his own apotheosis, his moment of adolescent transfiguration. Throughout his secondary school years, he was at best an academic mediocre. He wrote his WAEC and failed one subject, while the rest was a collection of credits with no distinctions15. For comparison, I sat for the same exam a year before I was due and I made all my papers except for a D (pass) in mathematics, and I went on to clear my WAEC and NECO the following year. But this was precisely the point our academic trajectories were dramatically reversed as though a switch was literally flipped on/off somewhere in our brains. My brother would go on to demand he be allowed to go back to the same school he failed his WAEC to retake it (this was an extremely bold and courageous request). He would go on to have one of the best results in the whole state, finished with a top three CGPA at his university, and recorded other incredible academic achievements, before ending up as an academic at a top 20 (top 3 in the UK) university in the world at the age of 3316.
As for me, once the former academic rock star of the family, my achievements have been, well... modest, and pales in comparison. In fact, my academic fortunes dwindled significantly to the point that I was the last to complete university education even though I started way ahead of my two younger sisters. I would end up spending 10 years in the university but that's a story for another day.
One of my sisters also underwent a milder version of this academic transformation after repeated failures. Her mind was less suited to science but she realized this too late and was unwilling to switch. After eventually gaining admission to study microbiology at one of the top state universities, she began to display, with zero pressure from anyone, an academic prowess and discipline she had never before shown.
At a certain period that coincided with the pubertal/early-to-mid adolescent years, something was activated or turned off in each of us that completely flipped, reversed, or intensified our previous behavioral tendencies, changing the narrative that had prevailed up until then. Trust me, our parents had nothing to do with it (at least not directly or intentionally). If they had their way, they would want my brother to be a tad less radical in his religiosity, and that I be a lot less radical in my irreligiosity and lifestyle preferences. Hence, in spite of all these largely positive spontaneous changes I mentioned, my parents still continued to have problems with so many aspects of our behaviors and choices, especially myself and my sisters. But this was probably a result of a conservative and religious parents raising children that were initially slightly less so. Not to worry at all, as we are eventually going to become as equally conservative as our parents as we grow in years and become parents ourselves. This, of course, is the metaphorical gradual movement of each life from the dawn phase to the dusk phase. My mom was once the rebel of her own family in terms of her determination to prioritize education over tradition and marriage, independence over family loyalty, and Christianity over Islam (a decision she wasn't even interested in shielding her family from). The same goes for my dad. He was both an intellectual force and rebel in the small hometown he grew up in. And he would establish a modest reputation as the best chemistry teacher ever in one of the then-best public secondary schools in the whole state before he finally yielded to the call of full-time ministry.
Yet, in spite of all these differences in lifestyle preferences, we still share a lot in common with our parents in many other ways. While my parents may not agree with my sisters for wearing trousers, artificial hair, or earrings, and while we often disagreed on whether it is decent and godly to grow my own hair and beards, or read certain books; my sisters are growing to become more and more like our mother, and I have always known I share my passion for reading, a gentle but principled stubbornness, as well as my love for the Afro hairstyle with my Dad (I once accidentally discovered a picture of his younger self sporting an Afro the size of which even I would not dare spot). But most of these outward similarities or differences in taste are mere cultural and developmental artifacts. The fundamental point to note is that, given the same cultural and environmental milieu, we would have behaved even more like our parents and they like us.
We are often locked in ignorance of how much we are like our parents because we know little to nothing about their own childhood and younger years. And they're often motivated either to not tell us or to be selective in what they reveal about their own childhood, partly because doing so may undermine their effort to cultivate the values they want to pass on to us. But any honest and perceptive parent would easily notice a trace of their old or current self even in their worst child (provided the child derives from their own reproductive materials, rather than through such nongenetic means like adoption or donor conception). It may take the child years to see or realize this, especially as they approach the same age that they first began to be witnesses to their parents' lives. For most children, that point of reference is never offered until they become parents themselves. They realize they are parenting just as their parents parented them.
A client of mine once sought therapy with the background complaint being the observation of certain unhelpful behaviors and tendencies she shares with her mother. And her theory was that her mother must have imparted those behaviors to her while raising them and that her mother herself must have acquired those tendencies as a consequence of losing her husband to death and having to adapt to becoming a single mother of 4 girls shortly after matrimony. However, because this client is a typical YAVIS (Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Smart), she followed up her theory with the most logical question: if her mother's excuse for exhibiting those offending behaviors was coping with grief and the stress of single motherhood, what's her own excuse? This question constituted a real conundrum in this client's mind and part of what she's looking for in therapy is helping to figure this out. Of course, I told her that the puzzle only existed because her premise was wrong. Like most people, she had automatically embraced the pure environmental influence framework which of course creates such conundrums as she had. With a different framework - GENE x environment - her puzzles were easily solved. And very much to her satisfaction, I must add. Everything suddenly became so clear to her that a therapy engagement she thought would take multiple sessions took only three.
A Final Statement
I said at the beginning that there may be two interlinked reasons why I have an underestimated opinion of the impact of formative environments. None of my siblings or I started out as the child our parents wanted us to be in spite of a regular assortment of thorough lashings and discipline (the kind that would no doubt be described in some societies as physical abuse). How is it then that we were so unruly in childhood (when parental discipline was at its peak) and then began to become less unruly starting from adolescence (when parental discipline was at its weakest? For some children, the order is reversed: obedient and conforming in childhood, and less so in later years. And yet, for another class of children, their childhood selves are not much different from their latter selves, that is, there is more continuity than discontinuity). The only logical explanation I can think of that consistently reconciles these paradoxical observations is that just as we inherit our physical traits (within a broad range) from our parents, so also the neuropsychological configurations that undergird our behavioral tendencies, developmental trajectories, and value preferences. It is why we tend to more or less behave like our parents, given the same set of environmental and cultural conditions, and after adjusting for relative age gaps. If there is any aspect of our normal behavior that cannot be traced out in any of a biological parental pair – while accounting for differences in cultural and material environments - then it is either because the behavior/trait in question is being concealed by one of the parties or it's just a matter of heritability variance or a result of some genetic accident. It is for this latter reason (negative epigenesis, protein coding error, mutation gone awry) that it's possible, once in a while, for a phenotypically perfectly healthy couple to give birth to a child with all sorts of defects - physical, neurological, and psychological.
For some reasons, some subtle psychological defects rarely become manifest until around late childhood/adolescence. Perhaps because it is a quality or function that only matters and only observable in the context of autonomous, unsupervised navigation of the complex, competitive, ruthless, and almost zero-sum world of the social space (the same way autism with no significant verbal or intellectual deficit only becomes well detectable as the subject attains higher developmental stage when independent functioning becomes more imperative). Until most children enter this higher order world, they would never be called upon to test themselves as individuals against other different individuals, initially living their life mostly in the shadows and as extensions of parental lifestyle. As they mature and grow beyond direct parental oversight, they are either going to drown or swim by virtue of their neurophysiological endowments: they are either going to fail or succeed more or less like their parents before them, depending, primarily, on the genetic cards they got dealt and, secondarily, on the kind of environment they have to navigate.
When divergences are in traits or directions that are considered undesirable and/or maladaptive. A mild example of this is me being born with a nervous system that’s right hemispheric dominant - meaning that I was mostly left-handed or left-sided in functioning. This is considered a bad omen, hence, a taboo in my culture and by my parents. My mother did not relent until she succeeded in severely (but not completely) altering my left-side bias.
I define this as the minimum level of intelligence an organism needs to adaptively navigate its immediate environment, starting with the familial environment.
I believe this same principle applies at successively larger levels of sociocultural organization. Genetic homogeneity confers greater functional similarity and minimizes the likelihood and frequency of internal clashes due to extreme phenotypic variations. However, this desirable functional similarity among members of a biological unit is not only determined via genetic selection but can also be achieved through phenotypic selection. The former (genetic selection) is the primary instrument of biological evolution through natural selection, and the latter (phenotypic selection) is the chief instrument of cultural evolution through trait selection.
I am strongly inclined to think that a child who never attains this realization with respect to either or both of their parental pair should seriously question the validity of their status as a direct biological offspring. In the absence of any knowledge of being adopted, then something is fishy and paternity (and in some cases, maternity) may be highly questionable.
Even though she's changed significantly, the stories from her siblings and other family members who knew her in her youth were unanimous in describing her as insufferable, strong headed, and snobbish.
I believe each individual’s ultimate genetic legacy, the final and highest life outcome driven and delivered in part by their genes, is revealed in their freely and happily chosen vocation - the one or set of endeavors that one would choose to devote one's life to if the confounding variable of financial pressure is eliminated. I believe this is strongly driven by genes and highly heritable.
Both of them were biological and experiential virgins prior to marriage and it'd take them more than 2 weeks before they could bring themselves so low as to indulge in something as morally depraved as sexual intercourse.
The same applies to one of the major scripts in my mother's developmental arc. And the one upon whom it appears to have fallen to reenact this script is the youngest child (a female) in the family. Unfortunately, hers comes with a greater tragic twist than mine. The price I'm destined to pay for being the chosen one to reenact my father's core life script is at worst a delayed realization of matrimonial and reproductive fulfilment. For my sister, the price it's increasingly looking like she's set to pay is matrimonial and reproductive failure. And I think the primary reason why neither of our parents paid this price (even though they came quite close) in their own respective lives is because the period they grew up in. If we transplanted their lived stories into the current cultural and technological milieu, I'm almost confident that my father would have married even later than he did (he married extremely late even for his time at 33 years) and my mother would have likely remained reproductively unpaired and celibate.
The only thing my parents prized as much as spiritual devotion was academic achievement in which I also happened to be the star child - at least long enough before the sleeping academic giant in my brother would eventually awaken with a roar.
Even as a young innocent passionate believer, I had always not been able to successfully abandon reason and logic. Among my evangelistic brethren, I was respected more for my common sense than for any apostolic ability. As a fanatic believer, I was still somehow the voice of reason. But I guess it was the totality of my commitment to the Faith that imbued my commonsensical insights with the aura of spiritual authority that my co-believers could then accept as though proceeding from the Holy Spirit itself.
I include this because of the well known cultural, political, and psychological disadvantages that come with being born a female or being feminine in psychology (if a biological male).
My father would later more than repay this debt by taking one of his brother's children to be raised with us and sponsored her education. This niece would eventually end up becoming pregnant while in school, truncating her education. This same tragic plot characterized almost all of my father's nieces and nephews allo of whom came to considerably look up to my father for financial support until his retirement. It was a brutal black tax that made myself and my siblings decide to have very little to do with our cousins because the expectations continued.
She succeeded in permanently altering my own left-handedness, but only in the domains of writing and eating. I remain stubbornly left-handed or ambidextrous in everything else.
Till today, even though they strongly suspect it, my parents still don't definitely know that I've renounced my faith. And I intend to keep it that way as it'll break their heart (my lack of religious faith is nothing personal so I'm willing to keep it to myself to protect my parents’ feelings). I love them so much and they love me, perhaps, the most of all.
Ironically it was Chemistry, the same subject our father taught brilliantly as a teacher and wrote two mini texts about and which happened to be my own favorite subject.
I have written in more details about my brother's developmental trajectory and how it wildly diverged from mine from adolescence onward.