behavior

A four-panel comic. Across the first three panels, a balding, bearded man in glasses pontificates while another man listens. He says: "Behavioral genetics isn't a real science. The human brain is too plastic! The true science of mind is empirical psychology. I reject the notion that a child's future self can be pre-determined by a string of nucleotides!" In the final panel he concludes, "Precisely. We must return to the correct paradigm of blaming mothers for all psychological disorders," while the second man throws up his hands and exclaims, "Why are they always too affectionate or too cold?!" The joke: rejecting genetic determinism only to embrace mother-blaming as the real science. Votey: a hand-drawn image of a mother cradling a baby, with the caption "Actually, my mom was some chickenwire wrapped in terrycloth" - a reference to Harlow's wire-mother monkey experiments.