# Nature vs nuture



## Princess Ivy (Oct 27, 2005)

and structure vs agency

so which is it. we all know the forms of the debate. are we as humans programed by our genetic code? or by the environment in which we are reared? are our decsisions automaticly programed into us by the structures around us? or are we agents with free choice?
there are so many arguments supporting all views, and even more wich support a middle of the road view that we're products of it all and therefore shouldn't try to separate it into component parts, which do you believe?


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## dwndrgn (Oct 27, 2005)

I think we owe a great deal to both.  I have a perfect example in my family.  My cousin looks like, acts like, and has many of the same medical problems of my mom.  However, being raised by my aunt who has a very different personality than my mom, she is very different than I and her tastes in things like clothes and jewelery are similar to my mom's while she and I rarely like the same things.  I don't look a lot like my mother (though people mistake us over the phone all the time) being 5'11" to her 5'1", with blonde hair to her brown (used to be brown, now she's a blonde too  ) but we have very similar personalities even though our upbringings were completely different (she grew up on a farm, with many siblings, a sickly mother and an alcoholic father, while I had a modern home with two distant siblings, and a mother and father that were always there - until after high school when they divorced).  So this is an example of genetics being pervasive but the power of environment is there as well.


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## lazygun (Oct 27, 2005)

Middle of the road gets my vote.No denying that genetic history has relevance/effect,but not to the extent that even fundamentals cannot be changed in the Individual.


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## Alia (Nov 11, 2005)

I share the same thoughts as well, Dwndrgn & Lazygun.  My daughter, who was only a few months old when my mother passed away, share a lot of her traits, her mannerisms.  I know a lot of it has to do with me and how I raise my children, which in turn was the way I was raised but I find that each of my three share something my mother use to do or the way she acted.  My little one, the baby is extremely ticklish on his feet.  I am not, but my mother was!  He acts like her when you get anywhere near his tiny little feet to put socks on him, kicking and jumping back (of course he giggles, mom didn't ) The daughter loves her horses, something I had gotten away from for many years.  I have often wondered if that is a trait which she inherited from my mother (which also makes me wonder if it's a trait at all).  It wasn't until recently that I found my love for the large beasts again (and through daughter's constant nagging to go horse back riding with her.).


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## Eldo (Nov 11, 2005)

I believe in Nature.  I'll start by asking a question.  If people inherit their appearance, their genetic code, personality and mannerisms, illnesses and diseases, is it not then possible that Nurture is merely a trigger for the Nature to occur?  I say this is exactly the relationship that Nature and Nurture have.  It is Nature that governs our existence.  Not only our physical side but also our mental side: we are born with a identity, which is made up of a miriad of concepts, including nationality, ethnicity and religion which are our most important and powerful parts of who we are and what we will become.  The concepts of fate and destiny are undoubtedly linked with Nature.  From the womb we are the person we will become and nothing can alter that.  Circumstances and situations do effect us but our reactions and our decisions are ingrained within our personality and character traits which are unchangeable.


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## littlemissattitude (Nov 11, 2005)

I have to say that I believe both have a role, but that environment has much more to do with personality, tastes, interests, and abilities than genetics does.  Part of that is due to personal observations, and part is due to my feeling that assuming that biology is destiny, as sociobiology does, is a dangerous leap to make for various social and political reasons.  For example, if you assume that abilities and intelligence are genetic in nature, it is all too easy to ascribe certain attributes (good or bad) to all members of one particular ethnicity or another, which can lead to positive prejudicial treatment for some groups and negative prejudicial treatment for other groups, and those different treatments being justified by citing "science".  This, I think, is dangerous in any number of ways.


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## Jeremy (Nov 26, 2005)

With a master's degree in biological anthropology (or human sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, or whatever you want to call it), I cannot resist but jump into the discussion.
To an evolutionary psychologist, the dicotomy between nature and nurture does not exist. Humans are 100% the product of the genes and 100% the product of the environment. Genes respond to the environment during a person's development to create what a person is, his eye and hair color, his height and weight, and his personality, intelligence, and knowledge. It is a completely deterministic process. If you alter a person's environment during his development, you would have created a different person, however slightly. Similarly, if you alter a person's genes, you would have created a different person. To an evlutionary psychologist, the question whether nature or nurture plays a more important role in molding a person makes no sense. They work together to create every manifestation of a person. Sociobiology is simply a scientific discipline that seeks to understand how genes interact with the environment to create social behavior. it has no political implications whatsoever, except to understand why human engage in politics. Furthermore, sociobiology is only concerned with human behavior, that is, behaviors that are engaged in by all humans, not the perceived differences between racial or ethnic groups.

Jeremy


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## littlemissattitude (Nov 26, 2005)

Jeremy said:
			
		

> Sociobiology is simply a scientific discipline that seeks to understand how genes interact with the environment to create social behavior. it has no political implications whatsoever, except to understand why human engage in politics. Furthermore, sociobiology is only concerned with human behavior, that is, behaviors that are engaged in by all humans, not the perceived differences between racial or ethnic groups.


 
That's all very nice in theory, Jeremy. Unfortunately, politicians are generally fairly scientifically illiterate. And also unfortunately, at least some sociobiologists give the impression in their writings that they do indeed see biology (or at least the genetic component of biology) as destiny. Admittedly, most of what I have read in sociobiology is fairly old, and perhaps the discipline has stepped away from the fairly extreme (at least in my view) positions held by Wilson in some of his work. I hope that is the case. Still, with the most common references describing sociobiology as seeing behavior as primarily a function of genetics and evolution, it can lead the layman to the assumption that biology is, in fact, destiny according to the findings of sociobiology. Such a reductionistic take is much too simplistic for me.

My education in cultural anthropology has taught me that human behavior is much too complex to be put down simply to evolutionary selfishness. But my political experience has taught me that people will latch onto any scientific idea that they think tends to support their own views. So, I stand by my contention that to take the common perception of the sociobiological view is politically dangerous because of the political use it can be put to by those who, for example, want to promote the idea that some ethnicities are more prone to violence than others. While sociobiology might not say that, it is all too easy to make it seem like it says that. It is the same with intelligence. It would be quite easy to use a sociobiolgoical argument, valid or not, to argue that some groups are inherently more intelligent than others and that in consequence those groups should be given extra advantages within the educational system. I've seen sociobiology used to argue that one, in fact. It doesn't matter, at bottom, whether sociobiology really says that. It only matters that some folks will believe that it says that and, more important, that other folks will use it to try to convince people to believe that.

You see, the thing is, sociobiology does have political implications. Because, as we used to say in the sixties, _everything_ is political. This is true in that anything can be used to political ends.


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## Jeremy (Dec 4, 2005)

Science has made tremendous progress since 1975, when Wilson published Sociobiology.  Back then, or even as recently as 10 years ago, some racists may use genetic determinism to justfiy their agenda of racial discrimination.  If human behavior and intelligence are genetically determined, they argued, then the perceived difference in behavior and intelligence among the different races must be due to a difference in their genes.  There is no reason to provide welfare or affirmative action in education to these inferior races because they are genetically programmed to be intellectually inferior, violent, etc.  Well, science has turned their arguments against them, because in the last 10 years we have sequenced the human genome, and we found that there is no significant difference in the genes among different races.  We are all genetically the same, basically.  Using genetic determinism as an argument for racial preference or discrimination is unscientific, and if some politicians are scientifically illiterate then they should be exposed as the ignorant fools that they are.  People need to be educated, and I think education is the ultimate solution to the social ills that have afflicted American society.


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## littlemissattitude (Dec 6, 2005)

I'm very glad to hear that your discipline has come so far, Jeremy.  Now, go out and write the great popular book explaining this.   Please.   Because if it has been done already, I haven't found it yet.  It needs to be done, if only to put paid to all that old baggage.  As you say, education is the key.  And the first step in education is disseminating the information.


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## Jeremy (Dec 6, 2005)

For those of you who care about the profound subject of the biological evolution of human behavior, psychology and culture (probably only me and littlemissattitude), there are 2 very good popular treatises published in the last 10 years or so:
The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright
How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker
And on the subject of genetics and race, I found an article by doing an internet search:
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/pdf/ng1454.pdf#search='Human%20Genome%20and%20Racial%20differences'
Among biologists who study humans it is widely accepted that "race" is not a scientifically defensible concept. Indeed, I personally do not acknowledge the existence of different races. That would be unscientific.


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## chrispenycate (Dec 6, 2005)

Jeremy said:
			
		

> Among biologists who study humans it is widely accepted that "race" is not a scientifically defensible concept. Indeed, I personally do not acknowledge the existence of different races. That would be unscientific.


So what would you call a group of humans that share a set of physical characteristics, which differs somewhat from the mass of mankind? A breed, like dogs? There is no reason the word "race" should be pejorative, even if it has been used so many times in the past. Admittedly, it's not a very precise definition, but if one rejects all terms without absolute referents in the english language one becomes as pedantic as me- and with a considerably smaller vocabulary. 
If the gene maps show there is no measurable difference between these groups, then the information is being held somewhere else- saying that because we don't know how to measure a difference, that that difference does not exist is not scientific, just blinkered.
On the other hand, there is no reason to believe that the differences are anything but physical adaptations to climatic differences.


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## littlemissattitude (Dec 7, 2005)

chrispenycate said:
			
		

> So what would you call a group of humans that share a set of physical characteristics, which differs somewhat from the mass of mankind?


 
Very quickly, because I've got to leave for rehearsal in a few minutes...

I've heard "sub-group" used to name a collection of individuals such as you describe.  I've also heard "population" used in that context.  I'm not sure either of these is considered anthropologically correct these days - these things change faster than a model in a runway show sometimes.  I'd have to go back and do some reading to refresh my memory as to other ways of naming such a group.

Well, I'm off to three and a half hours of Tchaikovsky and too many dancers in a crowded rehearsal studio.  Oh, well, the guest dancers arrive tonight (supposedly), so it should be interesting.  I think they're all from the San Francisco Opera Ballet this year.  I love "Nutcracker" week, but sometimes I love it more before and after the week.


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## Jeremy (Feb 24, 2006)

chrispenycate said:
			
		

> So what would you call a group of humans that share a set of physical characteristics, which differs somewhat from the mass of mankind? A breed, like dogs? If the gene maps show there is no measurable difference between these groups, then the information is being held somewhere else- saying that because we don't know how to measure a difference, that that difference does not exist is not scientific, just blinkered.
> On the other hand, there is no reason to believe that the differences are anything but physical adaptations to climatic differences.


 
No, no.  All the physical differences among different "races" are attributable to differences in certain genes that encode those physical features, such as tone of skin, color of eyes, and so on.  However, these genes only consititue a tiny fraction of the total number of genes in a human's entire DNA.  The vast majority of human genes do not have visible manifestations; they encode proteins in your blood, inside your cells, on cell surfaces, and so on.  And there is a tremendous variation in these genes among humans of the same population, far overshadowing the variation that exists between different populations.  You may surprised by how much genetic difference there is between you and your grandchild you are holding.  There were two different evolutionary forces at work in our distant past.  The first is to produce similarity in appearance among relatives.  The second is to produce variation among relatives at the biochemical and molecular biology level in order to thwart parasitic organisms such as viruses, bacteria and parasites that can be easily passed on from one relative to another.  (If all relatives share the same molecular biological make-up, then the parasites only need to adapt to one person and then they can feast on all his relatives without any further adaptation.  Different molecular biological make-ups make parasites' job that much harder.  This is why we have sexual reproduction in the first place, the shuffling of genes.)
Anyway, in the last century, some people think that different races are biologically different from each other, and they use that to justify racism.  Yes, different physical features are encoded by different genes, but these differences exist among a vastly greater genetic variation among humans within a single race.  Race is indefensible as a biological concept because such a definition would have to ignore all this variation within a race.
Oh, Chris, of course one can still use the word "race" as a social concept.


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## dwndrgn (Feb 24, 2006)

I must say I've enjoyed reading the two of you (LMA and Jeremy) discussing this issue. I have nothing intelligent to add (and this is new??), but I did want to thank you guys for the educational discourse.


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## HieroGlyph (Feb 24, 2006)

dwndrgn said:
			
		

> I must say I've enjoyed reading the two of you (LMA and Jeremy) ... I have nothing intelligent to add ...


 
Me too, both points...
But -

Yay! To Stephen Pinker  I dub him the 'Combinatorial Man'.

Take out that 'vs' (versus, not).


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## Quokka (Apr 19, 2006)

I definately agree with a lot of what's been said, especially that it's not an either or situation. Still, as I think has been mentioned already, there's the science and then there's the real world implications and although the case of David Reimer, his family and Dr Money is, for me at least, more about the ethical and personal costs of actions that are driven by research and not a focus on the people. It does raise questions on our understanding of personal development.

We have come along way since the 1970's no doubt but there is still a lot of debating and conflictual theories between the sciences, which makes me wonder what point of view we'll be looking back from in 30 years time.


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