Apparently, the Russian oligarch Mikail Khodorkovsky said before his fall from grace, "If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him. Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it." Every one had the same starting conditions? This guy must have been hallucinating when he said that. "Man is born free ...", said Rousseau. "All men are created equal" is found in the United States Declaration of Independence. All people are neither born free nor created equal. They are constrained by the interaction between the genes they inherited and the environment they were born into. Babies are already different by the time they are born.
Environment doesn't begin at birth, it begins at conception. The biggest source of these influences of the pre-natal environment is what’s in the maternal circulation, — levels of a huge array of different hormones, immune factors, inflammatory molecules, pathogens, nutrients, environmental toxins, illicit substances, all which regulate brain function in adulthood. If the mother is poor, nuroimaging studies on fetuses have shown that the fetal brain is more likely to be bathed in stress hormones from her circulation which delays aspects of brain maturation.
This means that there is increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety in your adulthood. Lots of androgens in your fetal circulation (coming from Mom; females secrete androgens, though to a lesser extent than do males) makes you more likely as an adult of either sex to show spontaneous and reactive aggression, poor emotion regulation, low empathy, alcoholism, criminality. A shortage of nutrients for the fetus, caused by maternal starvation, means there’s increased risk of schizophrenia in adulthood, along with a variety of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. Your mother's socioeconomic status is already beginning to influence what kind of brain you're going to have as an adult. Biological factors (e.g., hormones) don’t so much cause a behavior as modulate and sensitize, lowering thresholds for environmental stimuli to cause it.
That what kind of environment your womb was has all sorts of lifelong implications is shown by The Dutch Hunger Winter. This lasted from the start of November 1944 to the late spring of 1945. Europe was devastated by four years of brutal war. Western Netherlands was still under German control. A German blockade resulted in a big drop in the availability of food to the Dutch population. At one point the population was trying to survive on only about 30 per cent of the normal daily calorie intake. Over 20,000 people had died by the time food supplies were restored in May 1945.
The terrible shortages and suffering of this time also created a remarkable scientific study population. The Dutch survivors were a well-defined group of individuals all of whom suffered just one period of malnutrition, all of them at exactly the same time lasting about three months. Because of the excellent healthcare infrastructure and record-keeping in the Netherlands, epidemiologists have been able to follow the long-term effects of the famine. Their study had unexpected findings.
The effect of the famine on the birth weights of children who had been in the womb during that terrible period showed interesting variations. If a mother was well-fed around the time of conception and malnourished only for the last few months of the pregnancy, her baby was likely to be born small. If, on the other hand, the mother suffered malnutrition for the first three months of the pregnancy only (because the baby was conceived towards the beginning of this period), but then was well-fed, she was likely to have a baby with a normal body weight. The foetus seemed to have ‘caught up’ in body weight.
Foetuses do most of their growing in the last few months of pregnancy so this doesn’t seem surprising. But epidemiologists were able to study these groups of babies for decades and what they found was really surprising. The babies who were born small stayed small all their lives, with lower obesity rates than the general population. For forty or more years, these people had access to as much food as they wanted, and yet their bodies never got over the early period of malnutrition.
Even more unexpectedly, the children whose mothers had been malnourished only early in pregnancy, had higher obesity rates than normal. They also had a greater incidence of other health problems as well, including certain tests of mental activity. Even though these individuals had seemed perfectly healthy at birth, something had happened to their development in the womb that affected them for decades after. And it wasn’t just the fact that something had happened that mattered, it was when it happened. Events that take place in the first three months of development, a stage when the foetus is really very small, can affect an individual for the rest of their life.
Even more extraordinarily, some of these effects seem to be present in the children of this group, i.e. in the grandchildren of the women who were malnourished during the first three months of their pregnancy. So something that happened in one pregnant population affected their children’s children. Audrey Hepburn spent her childhood in the Netherlands during the famine and despite her later wealth she had lifelong medical problems like anemia, respiratory illnesses, and œdema as a result. Subsequent academic research on the children who were affected in the second trimester of their mother's pregnancy found an increased incidence of schizophrenia in these children.
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