Reincarnation, Bible, and Day-care Centers (idea)

Something about whizzkid's node irked me. His arguments are good, but I believe his premises are incorrect. The first thing that jumped out at me was that Freud and beyond said that the first three years were "formative"... I played a hunch and googled 'Freud "did not study children"' Huh. As I thought. I greatly respect Freud and the founding fathers of psychiatry for being founding fathers, but they are the basis of psychology, not its apex. Freud did not study children directly ¹,² and some³ disagree with his conclusions about them. Here's the double take: "It makes no sense to assume that personality evolves from nothing to a full personality within the first three years of life." I had a rather complicated humorous analogy to insert here, on how maybe he couldn't understand it, but on reflection it's copyrighted to Johnny Hart. This type of mistake is known as The philosopher's error, ⁴ that is "mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity" or "since I can't see how x can be y, x is not y.." Thanks strawberryfrog! The incorrect premise in the above statement is that personality does not evolve from nothing. There is a strong genetic component. Twin Studies with identical twins raised in different homes have shown the strong genetic component of personality. Identical twins are a very powerful research tool for determining the genetic component of almost any trait. ⁵,⁶,⁷ There is an International Society for Twin Studies ⁸and it even has it's own scientific journal with bimonthly publications. The Nature vs. nurture writeup has a very balanced view, but 5 minutes with google will show that behavioural scientists tend towards a strong genetic influence on personality. ⁹, ¹⁰,¹¹,¹² Fractals are an example of complexity arising from simple rules. So are snowflakes. I have no problem with personality developing from the large amounts of genetic data that relate to personality in a mere three years.

This is only my 2nd writeup, feel free to msg me with suggestions... Sources: 1. http://bama.ua.edu/~jcollier/Intro_to_developmental_psychology.html (Freud and children) 2 http://cla.calpoly.edu/~dlvalenc/PSY459/Freud_G.html (Freud and children) 3 http://www.freudfile.org/freudians.html (Freud and contempories) 4 Daniel Dennett: Consciousness Explained Google (Research projects involving twins) 6 http://psych.fullerton.edu/nsegal/twins.html (opaque info) 7 http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3084541 (popsci article) 8 http://www.ists.qimr.edu.au/ (International Society for Twin Studies) 9 http://www.personalityresearch.org/bg.html (Nature > Nurture) 10 http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar04/awry.html (Nature > Nurture) 11 http://whyfiles.org/053multi_birth/3.html (Nature < Nurture) 12 http://www.amren.com/938issue/938issue.html (Nature > Nurture, though I don't agree with all their racist conclusions)