An article in the December 2009 issue of The Atlantic poses a fascinating scientific question: do some children’s genes give them a greater risk of failure, but also a greater chance for success, if they’re raised under the right circumstances? Such children are dubbed “orchid children” David Dobbs’s piece The Science of Success. The comparison is to a Swedish folk saying about “dandelion children” who will thrive anywhere (although, yes, good parenting helps them too — just not as much). Dobbs details current research into biology and evolution which suggests that a percentage of the population (for humans and other species) are “orchids,” who require careful parental attention during early development — without this attention, they suffer and fail, but with careful nurturing, they succeed spectacularly, like orchids in a greenhouse.
Read the article for an excellent bit of science writing that’s directly applicable to parenting. I have quoted a few key quotes from the article below (emphasis added):
… [R]esearchers have identified a dozen-odd gene variants that can increase a person’s susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, heightened risk-taking, and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors, and other problems—if, and only if, the person carrying the variant suffers a traumatic or stressful childhood or faces particularly trying experiences later in life.
… This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.
… Together, the steady dandelions and the mercurial orchids offer an adaptive flexibility that neither can provide alone. Together, they open a path to otherwise unreachable individual and collective achievements.
(“White Moth” orchid photo courtesy of Flickr user phocks and used under Creative Commons license; dandelion photo by Chris Higgins.)
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I read this article. Didn’t like it. It seems like an awkward variation on the extrovert/introvert scale. A lot of people just don’t match up well with a dandelion/orchid scale.
So let me get this straight … emo teenagers and high school bullies would have been creative geniuses if only their parents had been a little better? Yeah, right. Fail/succeed and susceptible/resilient are two different continuums entirely.
posted by Rai Soleil on 1-5-2010 at 3:20 pm
Rai – so you disagree with the toddler study results, the monkey study results, or what? Or you just “don’t like” that genetics, behavior, and nurturing are linked in this way?
FWIW, according to the article, ALL PEOPLE match up with the dandelion/orchid scale. It’s based on a single allele which is measurable for any individual, and has been in these studies. So to say that people “just don’t match up well” is a misunderstanding of the facts here. You can certainly present other evidence or disagree with their conclusions (meaning that the study authors or article author misunderstood the science), but I don’t see how you can simply not “like” the evidence they’ve presented and therefore dismiss it. Well, I see how you CAN do that, but I believe you shouldn’t.
posted by Chris Higgins on 1-5-2010 at 3:27 pm
Interesting, but its an article reporting on studies, not a study itself. I only had time to skim it, but I didn’t see it state how good the correlation is between the gene sequence and the behavior. And with any social experiment, I always ask what precautions did they take to rule out the Hawthorne Effect? From the article, it doesn’t appear that they did.
posted by Rod Thompson on 1-5-2010 at 4:53 pm
Rod – the article covers studies on rhesus monkeys as well as humans. One would presume that the rhesus monkeys aren’t subject to the Hawthorne Effect, as they live in a colony that has been studied for its entire existence. The rhesus studies appear to confirm the human toddler/parent studies that were done independently.
posted by Chris Higgins on 1-5-2010 at 5:05 pm
Debate? With pleasure.
Toddler study: All I can say to this is, so what? That’s a short-term child development study, not a longitudinal behavioral evaluation. All we get out of that is that some toddlers are more plastic in their low-level behaviors (aggression, depression) than others, which means little for their later years.
In a previous Atlantic article, another author argued, with full longitudinal studies, that irrational and ill-behaved adolescents were in fact likely to be BETTER adjusted as adults than their counterparts who behaved “well” as adolescents and college students. Although not a direct counterargument to the article under discussion, it exemplifies how behavioral data can have counter intuitive relationships with the real world.
Monkey study: This proves … that orchids are prone to failure. And that orchids with “supermoms” earned the dizzyingly high praise that “these babies turned out very close to normal”. That’s not fail/success, that’s fail/fail-not-so-hard.
Monkey “Coup”: I still can’t figure out why this is in here, because it’s a terribly biased and long-winded example proving that, yes, rebels are probably aggressive. Soumi “speculates” that dense populations make monkeys (but especially orchid monkeys?) aggressive — with ABSOLUTELY ZERO genetic data. Useless.
And on that note, a comment about the writing of the article. Dobbs provides little to zero numeric support for those measurements that are actually important. All we get is stuff like “fewer symptoms” or “less risk of depression”, and the studies don’t seem to worry much about biases and cohort effects. When we do get some solid numbers, they’ve got no solid connection to the important conclusions. What the heck does “processed serotonin 10% more efficiently” actually MEAN? Does that mean the monkey is 1%, 10%, or 100% less likely to be depressive? I bet not even the author knows.
Frankly, this entire articles is nothing more than an attractive ethical proposition supported by a smattering of loose data and the shallowness of its hypothesis:
“Belsky suspects that as researchers start to design studies that test for gene sensitivity rather than just risk amplification, and as they increasingly train their sights on positive environments and traits, the evidence for the orchid hypothesis will only grow”
Wow, nice. So looking for certain data will help you find it? Cool.
And really, the minor “successes” the author is talking about (A is less likely to be depressed than B! Yeehaw!) are nil compared to the risks of the gene — mental illness, aggression, and possibly suicide. That’s still a vulnerability in my book.
And yes, you’re right, everyone has this gene that affects behavior. But there’s a big gap between a single allele and a real dandelion/orchid scale that describes this complex behavioral pattern — and I don’t think the author has bridged it.
I could go on.
posted by Rai Soleil on 1-5-2010 at 5:56 pm
Rai – thank you for the reasoned comment! I agree that the article is light on numerical evidence and that undermines it quite a bit. The monkey coup thing is a bit baffling, though it makes for good reading. Anyway, thanks for more than “I don’t like it.” :)
posted by Chris Higgins on 1-5-2010 at 6:00 pm
I think the dandelion/orchid theory is a little harder to grasp than the intro/extro scale because it is a new and not terribly well-defined theory.
It is certainly a nice way to look at behaviours such as ADHD or freeky-artsy types, or any oddball behaviour actually. It’s nice to know that there might just be an evolutionary benefit and a personal benefit in being a little weird.
posted by Nicole on 1-5-2010 at 6:34 pm
I agree with Nicole, the concepts presented in this article are more difficult to understand than the more familiar intro/extro classification.
Rai, with regard to your comment about Orchids with “supermoms,” I believe the paragraph you are referring to discusses pairing nervous infants with “supermoms.” The result being “very close to normal” babies. My interpretation of this part of the article is that the nervous infants are not the orchids, rather it is the bully infants who are the orchids. These bully infants tend to do very poorly, often being cast out of their groups by the age of 2 or 3.
The nervous infants are neither dandelions nor orchids, they are a third group. Thus I don’t think the article is saying everyone is either a dandelion or an orchid, rather it is simply saying these two types exist.
I suppose our differing interpretations of key concepts shows a deficiency in this article. However, I find the article presents an intriguing notion – genes that may promote antisocial behaviour or mood disorders may have beneficial characteristics as well.
Thanks Chris for this post!
posted by Anon on 1-5-2010 at 9:10 pm
These deficiencies if they do not overburden cause an itch which is a great motivator. Nervousness, increased general sensitivity. ADHD, a hunger for stimulation and action. Depression is tougher I suppose a need to fill the emotional gap. The main point is that they cause one to deviate from the norm. This makes them either a dissability or ability dependent on the direction this internal drive pursues.
posted by Steve on 1-6-2010 at 1:26 pm
A fascinating article. Sad that some of the comments above suggest the person posting merely skimmed it or at least has poor memory.
I’ve noted before that psychological/behavior/emotional abnormalities often have their constructive roles, such depression allowing a person to stop and focus on their problem (difficult in a society with secondary stress though). I was a kid that acted out when unhappy, but was recognized as very sharp. I had a ROUGH adolescence, but with that greenhouse level care, I am doing better than almost all of my peers in many ways (small town, word gets around about everybody). Sounds very much like an orchid.
This is not a scholarly article no, but is does cite many articles from peer reviewed journals from Science and I don’t feel that it is “bad science” or exaggerating it’s claims. It is very interesting and presents sound conclusions in a new and complex investigation that will take may more trials over decades with thousands or more participants. This is just the beginning, but it is far from a scoffable one.
posted by Kris on 1-7-2010 at 6:09 pm
Agree with Kris; well said!
I’m still thinking about this article even days after reading it. Thanks Chris H., for sharing this kind of stuff with us!
posted by tona b. on 1-9-2010 at 12:07 pm
Interesting. I think it agrees with the children’s psychology basis that there are mostly two extremes on the personality scale. There is one type of child “dandelion” that can survive and even thrive through any circumstances, even abuse. On the other side of that there is another type of child that needs a certain type of parent or they might turn out sociopathic, anti-social, and barely function as an adult. Of course, these are extremes and there are personality types that fall in between these. But, psychology does recognize we are born with some inherited personality traits that let us thrive in certain conditions.
as to Rai’s comment “emo teenagers and high school bullies would have been creative geniuses if only their parents had been a little better? Yeah, right. Fail/succeed and susceptible/resilient are two different continuums entirely.”
Actually fail/succeed and resilient/susceptible are not that different, they have a lot to do with each other. If you are going to succeed regardless of your parents you have to be resilient. There are kids that survive abuse with really no long term psychological damage, simply because they were resilient enough to survive. Where other kids will come out of abuse completely psychologically scarred, or unsuccessful because they were susceptible. And as for the bully/emo thing, they might have turned out better-adjusted (not geniuses, but certainly healthier) if they had better parents. For example, bullies typically have “bully” parents. This is where they would learn the behavior, however if you aren’t around that, you probably wouldn’t pick up on the behaviors to turn you into a bully. Bully’s are made not born, same with “emo’s”. They’re personality type, mixed with parenting probably turned a shy, introvert into someone that is depressed.
posted by tess on 1-13-2010 at 2:06 pm