Three generations of Charlie Browns are enough

I can’t call it Fun with Photoshop because I’m using Microsoft Paint. But for the past several months I have been reconstituting my mother’s family photo album in digital form. That way all of her children and grandchildren will be just a mouseclick away from embarrassing baby, prom and wedding pictures spanning several generations.

Like old-fashioned family albums, my computerized version serves up some eerie family resemblances. The difference is that I can painlessly create collages to underscore just how strong some genes are. This one was designed to dramatize the facial resemblance between the toddler versions of my father, my brother Martin, my nephew Stephen and me. Note the recurrence of the Charlie Brown look — round face, topped (but not for long) by fine feathery hair.

Facial features run in families. Everyone knows that. But the last time I looked at the collage I noticed something else: The four of us shared not just the same features but the same solemn expression. So Mom was right!

My mother, who died six years ago, was what you might call a folk behavioral geneticist. She didn’t know from alleles or haplogroups, but raising six children fortified her in her belief that more than physical features ran in families.

Her own brood broke down into, as she put it, four McGoughs and two Murrays, her maiden name. Michael, Laurie, Matthew and Martin were McGoughs, cursed with what my father called hair-colored hair and eye-colored eyes. (None of us, however, had inherited his “Village of the Damned” blue eyes.) My two sisters Mary Catherine (Kiki) and Megan were Murray girls, raven-haired with dark brown eyes.

And tempestuous tempers. That was the controversial part of Mom’s genetic theory: that the Murray and McGough temperaments bred true in the same way facial features did. The “McGough McGoughs,” as my mother called us, had been placid babies; the “Murray McGoughs” had bawled like banshees. Mom’s (vocationally prophetic) nickname for her firstborn, me, was “mild-mannered reporter.” There was nothing mild-mannered about Kiki, who slammed more doors before she turned 10 than I have in my five-plus decades.

Mercifully, children No. 3, 4 and 5 were McGough McGoughs, providing Mom with a nine-year grace period between door-slamming daughters. But over the years our even tempers morphed into what Mom feared was introversion. Writing to me in England, where I was doing a senior year abroad, Mom described changes in my baby brother’s personality: “Time is flying. Martin will be 13 years old on the 12th. It does not seem possible that little MP [the family’s name for Marty when he was a baby] is gone. The strange little boy we have here seems to be 100 percent McGough, a nervous wreck — he worries if he doesn’t have something to worry about. He’s moody and hard to understand. That’s the Irish for you.”

Forget the unconvincing ethnic afterthought. (The emotional Murrays were Irish too.) Mom’s basic point was correct, as a grown-up Martin and I agreed when I excavated the “strange little boy” letter a few years ago. I can’t render it in DNA notation, but there is indubitably a “McGough” personality — or maybe it should be called a “Curran” personality, after my paternal grandmother. I know it when I see it, and so did my mother — unto the next generation.

Mom was a hell of a nurturer, but she gave nature its due. And while she was an amateur when it came to the science of heredity, professional experts have produced scholarly and peer-reviewed studies about the genetic component of personality. And why should that surprise anyone?

I don’t believe that “it’s all in the genes,” whether the “it” be temperament, intelligence or the ability (to quote a legal definition of sanity) to conform your conduct to the requirements of the law. Environment obviously plays a role. I am happy to report that all of the solemn-faced babies in my family collage eventually developed social skills — maybe too many in the case of my brother during his college fraternity period. But the camera that took those baby pictures didn’t lie, and neither did Mom.

So what’s the larger point? Genetic determinism is scary. I cringe a little when I re-read what the Harvard psychologist Richard “Bell Curve” Herrnstein told me in an interview years ago:

Including, he might have added, whether we smile for our baby pictures.

But if genes do rule, or at least exert a lot of influence over how we act, that’s an argument for humility and compassion, two virtues my mother stressed to all of her children — the McGough McGoughs and the Murray McGoughs. If high intelligence is inherited, Mensa members shouldn’t flaunt their astronomical IQs or claim to have advanced through “merit.” What’s so meritorious about having smart parents? And if gregariousness is in the genes, that’s a reason for the 6th-grade class president who already has his eye on the White House to befriend that “strange little boy.” As Mom liked to say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Or maybe the grace of genes.

Michael McGough is The Times’ senior editorial writer.

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