Nature Vs. Nature Debate
Nature Vs. Nature Debate
It is true that your physical appearance can sometime be identical to the appearance of one or both of your parents. You can have hair color like your father and eye color like your mother. You can have your mother’s nose and your father’s height. If your father is bald you can also become bald on the other hand if your father still has all his hair in his eighties you can be looking pretty good in your eighties too. You can also have the identical look of one of your grandparents. But your personality, your characteristics, your temperament and even your outlook on life can come from someone that is not any blood relation to you. The environment that you were reared in can and will have a lasting effect on who you really are, the way you talk the way you respond to things or just the way you do certain things, the way you move your hands, the way you hold your head a lot of these things are picked up as you grow and learn and they are picked up by the people you spend the most time with. Therefore, I do believe that Nature and Nurture play very important roles in the person that we are today.
One of the subjects that really caught my attention in my "Introduction to Psychology” class was the (Sincero, 2012) “Genes vs. Environment” debate or as it is better known the Nature vs. Nurture debate. When I first heard the words I gave a totally wrong answer for the meaning of this Nature vs. Nurture debate. But the more I looked at it and researched it the more interested I became with it. I discovered that I wasn’t the only one interested in it. There was numerous websites and books dedicated to this debate. In my research I have figured out that each side has its valid arguments and in some cases it is really hard to decide that the person you are at this very moment is influenced by your Deoxyribonucleic Acid, better known as DNA or is it influenced by your life experiences and the environment in which you were reared. We do know that both nature and nurture play very important roles in our development as human beings but what we haven’t figured out is which one plays the most important role.
In this Nature vs. Nurture debate, I have to look at myself. I have a lot of the same features of my father as a matter of fact you can look at a picture of my father and myself at the same age and little kids can’t tell us a part from each other. So nature or DNA plays a very important role in forming what we look like or who we are. According to Sincero, (2012), The coding of genes in each cell in us humans determine the different traits that we have, more dominantly on the physical attributes like eye color, hair color, ear size, height, and other traits. But, there is still not an answer to whether the more abstract characteristics like behavior, intellect, sexual orientation, foods, what you don’t like, what you don’t like are directly attributed to your DNA or should I say, are they gene-coded too like our physical looks. Nature is often defined in this debate as genetic or hormone based behavior.
When you look at things such as mental illness, the question comes to mind is it heredity or environment. Frank Minirth, 1977 says that mental illness is not caused by one factor, so therefore we are here again is mental illness caused by Nature or Nurture? Saul McLeod (2007) said, Nature is what we think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Not only do we acquire looks, hair, complexion but we can also acquire diseases such as Huntington’s chorea, Heart disease, Alzheimer’s, Diabetes and obesity to name a few. A lot of this makes the debate even harder to take a side because it also makes you wonder whether psychological characteristics such as behavioral tendencies, personality attributes and mental abilities are wired in before we were born. It is believed by some of the extremist on the nature side that the earlier an ability appears, the more likely it is to come from genetics or shall we say Nature. Extremist also say that our bodies are wired in such a way that some things are always in us but don’t come out till a certain time. They say we are pre-programmed that way. They associate this to the things that happen to a person around puberty.
John B. Watson in the 1920s and 1930s established the school of purist behaviorism that would become dominant over the following decades. Watson was convinced of the complete dominance of cultural influence over anything heritability might contribute, to the point of claiming
"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." (Behaviorism, 1930, p. 82)