Word: birthrights
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...bright, stupid or anything in between. His starting position on the intelligence scale is predetermined-a biological sentence, like the one that orders tigers to give birth to tiger cubs and the human female to produce human babies. But nothing prevents a normal man from enriching his intellectual birthright, if it is allowed to mature in a hospitable environment. The obverse is equally true. Potential geniuses, deprived of suitable stimulation, will never fulfill their endowment...
Nonetheless, Psychologist Jerome S. Bruner believes that they must be there, that the full splendor of intelligence is part of the human birthright. Everything the infant needs-to master a tongue, to coax new music from strings, to find undiscovered stars-is already embedded in his nervous system. To test this premise, Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies has been conducting a series of unusual experiments on the human baby. The studies are based on Bruner's conviction that the infant is "a complicated programming system" and that a great deal of research on the child has presumed...
...Protestant background and his expansive American experience. "If you are a Wasp, you have the confidence that the Establishment is yours and that you are on the top," says Novelist Herbert Gold. "There is the feeling that the love of a horsy woman comes to you as a birthright," Hollywood may be filled mainly with non-Wasps, but they still usually take Wasp names and act out Wasp fantasies in films. In Jewish novels, the central character is often driven to live a Wasp-like life. Herzog finds his ultimate solace in a little bit of land he owns...
...same time, there will be a continuing campaign for "abortion on demand" on the ground that this is "every woman's birthright." This campaign, in the opinion of Dr. Alan F. Guttmacher, president of Planned Parenthood-World Population, will fail because "the public does not want abortion on demand and is not prepared to accept it." A more realistic approach to reducing the demand for illegal abortion, Guttmacher believes, is to make effective contraception far more widely available...
Baby Mine! The obligation to be clever in some way came as a birthright-rather reverently if hastily tracked through three generations by Family Biographer Ronald Clark. Above Aldous' cradle brooded the example of his grandfather, T. H. Huxley, a brilliant biologist and a public defender of Darwin when Origin of Species was shocking fundamentalists. Representing a kind of caretaker generation, Aldous' father Leonard devoted most of his life to a two-volume biography reciting the achievements of T.H. and looking forward with confidence to his own chil dren's outdoing him. No one is quite sure...