> Perhaps biased, my wife’s pursuit of her undergrad and master’s degrees, coupled with her unbridled passion for learning what we need to do to give our daughter the best education and upbringing possible is surely close to that number. It shows; my daughter has an insatiable curiosity that, according to Gladwell, is a direct result of how we’re raising her.

Having recently devoured a bunch of the works of Steven Pinker, I question this. If their daughter is naturally curious, it could be inherited rather than learned. In "The Blank Slate" Steven Pinker has an entire chapter on children. There he says that all studies that try to figure out what styles of parenting lead to what results, none of them control for heritability. They simply assume that the child's behavior due to styles of parenting. But what if curious parents lead to curious children because of their genes, and not their style of parenting? Pinker goes on to argue that what the evidence shows is that the style of parenting has absolutely no long-term effect on a person's behavior. Instead, what matters is genes, culture (in particular the child's peers), and chance events.