Stressing the importance of heredity is something associated with the right. Focusing on environmental factors with the left. Yet many on the right care greatly about the environment when it comes to schooling for their children. While those on the left want to describe racists as evil and not excuse their behaviour on the basis of how they were brought up.
To avoid this hypocrisy should we excise politics from the nature nurture debate? Should we focus on the new data coming from twin studies that identifies the impact of heredity on outcomes we have traditionally thought environmental? Or is this a dangerous theory with such damaging consequences for society that it should not be given air time at all?
Hugely influential geneticist Robert Plomin, libertarian journalist and author of The Evolution of Everything Matt Ridley, and award-winning journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown debate the relevance of politics in the nature/nurture debate.