Many people have said that the sample group is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions, and that's true but, really, isn't this study confirming what we all see every day of our lives? More to the point, isn't this study just giving lip service to a conclusion one could have reached by looking at the findings of a bunch of other studies on the factors influencing brain development?

There are bucket-loads of developmental studies that suggest/prove that nutrition and music and art and parental involvement all contribute measurably to brain development. At the same time there are even more sociological studies that show these factors are lacking, or completely absent in poor families.

The methodology of this study, to me, doesn't even necessitate a second glance, simply because the conclusion at which it arrives can be surmised by simple deductive logic, given that variables like the effect of nutrition and education on brain development are well understood.

If you look at the myriad other disparate studies relating to infant brain development and socioeconomic disparities, both nutritional and educational, you will come to the exact same conclusion as this study - poor kids are likely to have brains that are less well-developed than their wealthy counterparts. The sample group of this one study could be 26 million, the conclusion will be the same.

Of course I'm speaking about America here, if you studied the difference in a more agricultural setting, or a more primitive one, the differences would likely still be observable, but much less pronounced. That's my feeling anyway...

I read an interesting study the other day about paternity - turns out that poor fathers are between 10-30% more likely to unkowingly raise another man's child. The reason being (in my opinion) that women attached to poor men are more likely to surreptitiously seek the genetic material of another man whom they perceive as being better off.

Ever since the dawn of human civilization there has been a correlation between wealth/social status and health, intelligence and opportunity, right?

I appreciate the desire to give poor folks a fair shake, but going overboard with that produces the worst kind of (Politically Correct) willful ignorance. In order to avoid the appearance of bias we are forced to ignore facts?

All this "We are all equal and beautiful and wonderful" crap flies in the face of observable fact. It's well intentioned but it's making the problem harder to solve, because we can't own up to the differences fostered by our culture and our current environment. Should I even mention that most of the PC campus liberals spouting this stuff off are, themselves, generally better off economically? Unconscious bias indeed...

"Maybe if we ignore the problem long enough I'll make it to my death bed without ever having to acknowledge my role in it!"