Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don't think it really changes.

I have five kids, and people can say 'nature versus nurture,' but it is nature! Nurture has so little to do with it. I have five kids, and there are five totally different people in my house.

I'm a very melancholic kind of person. I don't know why; I think certain people are born a certain way.

Some people are genetically programmed to be difficult.

You just are born the way that you're born.

The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.

With my background and genetic makeup,buddy, you're lucky I'm as normal as I am. (Katra Agrotera)

Contrary to what some parents might believe or hope for, children are not born a blank slate. Rather, they come into the world with predetermined abilities, proclivities and temperaments that nurturing parents may be able to foster or modify, but can rarely reverse.

Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.

Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict.

I have two little kids, and they both came out completely different, with their own personalities.

Character, I am sure, lies in the genes.

You know, there's a tremendous amount of genetic propensity not necessarily for what TV shows you like but for literally how you view the world, how you react to things, how things touch you and how things move you.

You know there is a person inside every baby, right? And anybody who has ever met a baby knows there is already a person in there.

My daughter is full energy, like my wife and I, and strong-minded and has an opinion, like we do. And my boys, one's a bit more calm and chill, and the other is much more sensitive to things. You see this right away, when they're first born. One cried, one didn't, with the boys.

Personality traits form at an early age and are fixed by early adulthood. Many important things about you change over the course of your lifetime, but your personality isn't one of them.

It's the same as any role and I find that you can't lump characters together; because they all have different life experiences, different reasons for being the way they are.

It's interesting to see how we are all uniquely different.

But with each passing year and each new study, the evidence for the genetic contribution to individual and group differences becomes more firmly established than ever.

Identical twins are ideal lab specimens for studying the difference between learned and inherited traits since they come from the womb preloaded with matching genetic operating systems. Any meaningful differences in their behaviors or personalities are thus likely to have been acquired, not innate.

Every child is so different. Their experience growing up and their experience relating to the world has so much to do with their temperament, and their likes and their dislikes.

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.

We are all born with a unique genetic blueprint, which lays out the basic characteristics of our personality as well as our physical health and appearance... And yet, we all know that life experiences do change us.

If someone's liver doesn't work, we blame it on the genes; if someone's brain doesn't work properly, we blame the school. It's actually more humane to think of the condition as genetic. For instance, you don't want to say that someone is born unpleasant, but sometimes that might be true.

There is no escaping from the conclusion that nature prevails enormously over nurture.