If one orders 100 tulip bulbs from the Netherlands they might arrive with a note, which reads, "Do not worry about caring for your tulips. These bulbs have their own fertilizer. You don't even have to water them. You don't have to put them into the ground. You can leave them on the shelf in a cabinet. Whatever you do, they will still bloom into beautiful blossoms for your enjoyment." Most of us are raised according to The Tulip Theory, at least those of us whose parents believe genes significantly determine the long-term outcome of a child. Parents are not what they used to be, and neither are children. Parents are lost while their children flounder. These days, good parenting requires instruction, as times have changed.
There are at least 10 recurring techniques used by genetic researchers, consciously and unconsciously, to reassure parents that their children will be what they will be, while serving their funding sources from the pharmaceutical industry. For example, real research includes significant "rule outs" in their repertoire, for which there are valid alternative explanations that would yield the same or similar results. (See The Predictor Score Sheet and Scale.)
The most common vision that researchers fulfill is the expectation that children who behave like their parents must have inherited their genetic instructions for behavior or personality. These assumptions underlie the original Pedigree Studies of the 19th Century. The rule out to be found on the other side of psychology in the War of the Researchers is the discovery of mirror neurons, which should have won the Nobel Prize. Mirror neurons instruct us to identify with the other party whether treating us well or mistreating us. We save those mirror experiences, especially with our parent(s), to re-enact from the other side when we get a minute or when we get older. What goes in must come out. What doesn't go in can't come out.
Genetic behavioral researchers and social behavioral researchers, who rubberstamp the Tulip Theory, have failed across the board to rule out attachment issues in twin, adoption, or other family studies. Attachment issues from birth to three or even five are profound, but invisible to more than half of the researching world. As a matter of fact, most trauma researchers don't even know about attachment research and have no idea that failed attachments create the fragile base of personality commonly thought to be a fragile inborn core of the self. I say most, because trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk has said that the worst of all traumas is attachment trauma, and the insecurely attached child suffers other trauma much more deeply than the securely attached child. Thus, an insecurely attached woman who is raped will suffer the same rape ritual by the same rapist more severely than a securely attached woman.
In the field of psychology, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, as they are generally not mutually informed. Most psychologists keep up with their own lane but don't know much about research supporting other orientations. Thus, geneticists formulate ethereal hypotheses to explain the results they seek and reach. Behavioral researchers work with micro-studies, which are easy enough to measure and replicate, but leave thousands of island micro-studies to fill a textbook. Thus, to date, there is no comprehensive theory of developmental psychology, except for the Causal Theory.
The Causal Theory has taken the most highly replicated, dramatic, and critical studies of childhood experiences and organized them onto a single score sheet. These critical events taken together in specific couplings can prevent and predict. Considered in retrospect, they foster understanding and insight. The Predictor Score Sheet could create a sort of uniformity for forensic evaluators, who are presently using whatever measures they think are right. The score sheet could inform attorneys and judges such that they could recognize a hole in an argument explaining behavior. The Causal Theory could inform clinicians which issues need the most attention and tell school counselors which children are at greatest risk for violence later in life. It can inform arms dealers and FBI agents who present the most serious risk. It can readily assess bullying behavior. Mostly, the score sheet could inform parents how to raise miraculous children headed for greatness, because the same factors that create terrible violence in a human being also, when employed in the opposite direction, create the best of us.
It is the lack of these gestalts that make all of us blind and superstitious about genetic instructions. On nearly every news cast someone says, "We just don't know why a person would do something like this." A juror on the Menendez Brothers trial said, "I was molested, and I never wanted to kill my parents." For sure, we notice that not every molested child grows up to be a pedophile. However, who realizes that a securely attached child can never become a violent adult? Who in the field of psychology understands that to become a child molester, one must be insecurely attached and have already learned to repress their feelings for their parents' sake before they become molested? A child molester must first have suffered an insecure attachment, followed by a family repression ethic and then, finally, sexual abuse. Further, the severity, age and frequency of abuse will determine whether the perpetrator-in-the-making will become a common garden variety pedophile or one who ends up in the news. Thus, the Predictor Score Sheet scores experiences from the worst to the best, totals them, and places them on a bell curve, with the worst parenting and worst behavior at one end of the spectrum and the best parenting and best behavior at the other end.
Compared to the Tulip Theory, the Causal Theory can be taken into a therapist's office and applied to treatment. While some tulip theorists claim that there is evidence everywhere that proves genetic instruction, the Causal Theory proposes that no such research exists or provides evidence of genetic instruction, since it would have to be honestly calculated and replicated. For example, geneticists hypothesize that the "stress vulnerability model", "Diathesis-stress model" or the theory of epigenetics, suggests that some people are genetically predisposed to behaviors or personalities, and environment just flips the switch. Researchers have received bonuses from their benefactors for research results that "prove" genes create behavior. The author of this paper has spent more than two decades researching the research and has identified ten methods for misconstruing contrary results as evidence that behaviors are inborn. These techniques can be found wherever results are represented. They are usually identifiable in the last paragraph, which often states that the results of this study indicate a certain pharmaceutical treatment.
The Causal Theory holds that there are eight critical components to the formation of personality, which can be facilitated positively or failed negatively, recorded by Mirror Neurons. In power or adulthood, the grown child will reference these experiences in their repertoire of responses. This replication system in the brain is saved for adulthood. So, a mother who was put in daycare in infancy will likely suffer postpartum depression with the birth of her own child, when she finds she has no natural inclination to mother an infant. With such a span of time between the learning experience and the reenactment, cause and effect usually go unrecognized.