In which Donners settles the nature v. nuture debate for all time. Finis!

The pond is always dazzled when dashing Donners arrives on the scene to sort something out in a definitive way.

Now doing a Greg Hunt on the nature versus nature debate here produces the odd southern walri and a few hints of uncertainty ...

The view that humans acquire all or almost all their behavioral traits from "nurture" was termed tabula rasa ("blank slate") by John Locke in 1690. A "blank slate view" in human developmental psychology assuming that human behavioral traits develop almost exclusively from environmental influences, was widely held during much of the 20th century (sometimes termed "blank-slatism"). The debate between "blank-slate" denial of the influence of heritability, and the view admitting both environmental and heritable traits, has often been cast in terms of nature versus nurture. These two conflicting approaches to human development were at the core of an ideological dispute over research agendas throughout the second half of the 20th century. As both "nature" and "nurture" factors were found to contribute substantially, often in an extricable manner, such views were seen as naive or outdated by most scholars of human development by the 2000s.
In their 2014 survey of scientists, many respondents wrote that the dichotomy of nature versus nurture had outlived its usefulness, and should be retired. The reason is that in many fields of research, close feedback loops have been found in which "nature" and "nurture" influence one another constantly, as seen in self-domestication. As in ecology and behavioral genetics, researchers think nurture has an essential influence on nature. Similarly in other fields, the dividing line between an inherited and an acquired trait becomes unclear, as in epigenetics or fetal development. (follow the link for footnotes)

But when dashing Donners plays a hand, he goes all in and bets the house ...

Now the pond is inordinately pleased that there is no connection between socio-economic status and educational achievement, and no doubt poor people around the world will be cheering with joy ... though it does make the pond wonder why rich people send their kids off to private schools and spend a lot of money on education.

Heck, some even pay money to get them into the toffier sections of the Catholic education system ... seemingly unaware that it's all a waste of money, that the clever kids will rise to the surface whatever the odds, and the dropkick losers will drown in the deep end of the pool ...

This is the sort of stunning insight the ACU offers ... it seems your natural learner and improver has no need whatsoever to resort to dashing Donners for enlightenment and understanding. Just give them a subscription to Scientific American and a dozen other magazines and soon they'll be top dog ...

Yes, some children are born smarter and some are born dumb, and the ones with lead in the head from living in cheap housing were always going to be losers and dropkicks anyway.

And now, with all that sorted, and with the pond under siege, and having to cover the night shift for the Daily with Randy Stone - so many members of the commentariat at the moment, so little time to cover them all - it's also late final extra for a glorious Devine, right on top of the Academy Awards and all they imply ...

The pond swears by all that's ancient and sacred, the silly chook is getting sillier by the day, the hour, the nanosecond ...

The pond's almost inclined to take out a lottery ticket, but instead it's probably better to send them a note that they advertise on a notorious hate speak site ...

... though it'd probably be fairer to say it's a mad chook site, caught in the noon-day sun like Englishman and Adelaideans ...

How anyone could leap from a simple misguided envelope to  paranoid diversity panic is one of the greater marvels of modern reptile commentariat scribbling ...

Not an actual whiff of a response to the actual movies. Just a bigoted splash of bile in the Devine way.

So much hate in the world, and yet, how did she end up with such an unfair share of it?

Of course it's just a chance to recycle a lot of publicity snaps from the films, a kind of visual padding to distract from the rant ...

Why doesn't she just don a KKK outfit? It would be seemly, and give her a kind of D. W. Griffiths credibility ...the pond is pitching it as Miranda Devine's The Birth of the Nation of Hate ...

So much intolerance, paranoia, fear and loathing in the world. How did she end up with such an abundant supply of it?

Now don't get the pond wrong. Hidden Figures did much better at the box office, but then Moonlight was always going to be an art house item.

The reality is, that the Devine's rant about diversity might just as easily be applied to that film as to Moonlight.

What bemuses the pond is the way that the Devine gets from there to here, or more particularly from a discussion of diversity in Hollywood movies to the Anglo-Australian Christian culture of war mongering ... and doesn't even mention Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge along the way...

Actually reading the Devine is going to kill the pond, and pretty quick too, if death by laughter turns out to be a lethal medical condition ...

Diversity is the weaponisation of political correctness?

What the whole world, in its rather remarkable diversity, has been weaponised by diversity? And not by nukes?

Well between banning diversity and banning the nukes, the pond would settle for a nuke ban tomorrow.

Such a stupid woman, and sillier by the day, or even by the nanosecond ...but congratulations diverse world.

Homogenise like two dollar supermarket milk or die ... or perhaps just accept you've been slimed by a whiff of Devine vitriole ...

And so to a couple of cartoons the pond rather enjoyed, both Fairfax, both cartoonists stabled here, even the recalcitrant and vaxxer weird Leunig, who seems to have caught exactly the right tone for the Devine madness ...