On the other hand, Francis, perhaps Montagu et al. got the habit from observing their respective parents (or uncles or cousins)? And perhaps it just isn't very unusual in the first place? Maybe you should think about things like that, before you go bothering Mr Darwin?
Hereditary is thing we don't understand as well as we'd like to think we do, and it is surprisingly often the case that adopted children or those switched at birth, when meeting their bio families as adults, find that they have weird* habits or physical postures or whatever that they share with their bio families and not their adopted ones, things that you'd assume are either random or learned, like "preferring to stand with the hands in the pockets rather than out" or, probably, "napping with an arm over the face".
Of course, to be fair, people always mention those traits and never the ones that they share with the adopted families and not the bio ones, which makes it even harder to work out how it all works.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-18 01:43 pm (UTC)Hereditary is thing we don't understand as well as we'd like to think we do, and it is surprisingly often the case that adopted children or those switched at birth, when meeting their bio families as adults, find that they have weird* habits or physical postures or whatever that they share with their bio families and not their adopted ones, things that you'd assume are either random or learned, like "preferring to stand with the hands in the pockets rather than out" or, probably, "napping with an arm over the face".
Of course, to be fair, people always mention those traits and never the ones that they share with the adopted families and not the bio ones, which makes it even harder to work out how it all works.
* for a given value of "weird", naturally.