Lykken & Tellegen (1996, pp. 188-189)
… [T]he stable component of well-being (i.e., trait happiness) is largely determined
genetically… The reported well-being of one’s identical twin, either now or 10 years earlier, is a
far better predictor of one’s self-rated happiness than is one’s own educational achievement,
income, or status…It may be that trying to be happier is as futile as trying to be taller and is
therefore counterproductive.
Scarr & Grajek (1982, p. 361)
Upper-middle-class brothers who attend the same school and whose parents taken them
to the same plays, sporting events, music lessons, and therapists, and use similar child-rearing
practices on them are little more similar in personality measures than they are to working class or
farm boys, whose lives are totally different.
Rowe (1993, p. 188)
In America today, excluding the extremes of inherited wealth and isolated pockets of
poverty in inner city and rural areas, about 40-50% of the variation in earnings is due to genetic
variation.
Bonner (1965)
The time has come for direct attack upon the centrals problem of biology, the problem of
how it is that a single cell… gives rise to an adult creature… This process, which we know as
development, has been described and thought about by biologists for as long as there has been a
science of biology. Its nature has remained a mystery because we have not heretofore understood
enough about the nature of life itself. Today we do. We know that all cells contain the directions
for all cell life, written in the DNA of their chromosomes.
Jacob in Keller (2000, p. 81)
the [organism is] the realization of a program prescribed by its heredity… when heredity
is described as a coded programme in a sequence of chemical radicals, the paradox [of
development] disappears.
Keller (2000, pp. 100-101)
Today, if we were to ask, “Of what does the [genetic] program consist and where does it
live?” we would hear a growing number of researchers in the field telling us that the program
consists of, and lives in, the interactive complex made up of genomic structures and the vast
network of cellular machinery in which those structures are embedded. It may even be that this
program is irreducible—in the sense, that is, that nothing less than the organism itself is able to
do the job.
Kuo (1967, p. 11)
We shall define behavioral epigenesis as a continuous developmental process from
fertilization through birth to death, involving proliferation, diversification, and modification of
behavior patterns both in space and in time, as a result of the continuous dynamic exchange of
energy between the developing organism and its environment, endogenous and exogenous.
Kuo (1967, pp. 109-110, 112)
…[P]ecking is such a complex process of prehatching and posthatching development,
involving so many morphological, physiological, and environmental factors, that it would be
quite naïve to argue whether it is “innate” or “learned” or whether or not this behavior had
already been acquired in the shell… both concepts, of instinct and of learning [are] obsolete…
[All viewpoints] on the concept of innate behavior amount to one thing: predeterminism or
finalism, verging on vitalism.