Be yourself
Be yourself
A sign on a footpath at West End, Brisbane, Queensland.
Scholarly and popular discussion about nature and nurture relates to the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities ("nature" in the sense of nativism or innatism) as compared to an individual's personal experiences ("nurture" in the sense of empiricism or behaviorism) in causing individual differences in physical and behavioral traits.
The phrase "nature and nurture" in its modern sense was coined by the English Victorian polymath Francis Galton in discussion of the influence of heredity and environment on social advancement, although the terms had been contrasted previously, for example by Shakespeare (in his play, The Tempest: 4.1). Galton was influenced[4] by the book On the Origin of Species written by his half-cousin, Charles Darwin. The concept embodied in the phrase has been criticized for its binary simplification of two tightly interwoven parameters, as for example an environment of wealth, education, and social privilege are often historically passed to genetic offspring, even though wealth, education, and social privilege are not part of the human biological system, and so cannot be directly attributed to genetics.
The view that humans acquire all or almost all their behavioral traits from "nurture" was termed tabula rasa ("blank slate") by philosopher John Locke. The blank slate view proposes that humans develop only from environmental influences. This question was once considered to be an appropriate division of developmental influences, but since both types of factors are known to play interacting roles in development, most modern psychologists and other scholars of human development consider the question naive—representing an outdated state of knowledge.
One may also refer to the concepts of innatism and empiricism as genetic determinism and environmentalism respectively. These two conflicting approaches have influenced research agendas for a century. While genetic determinism holds that the development is primarily influenced by the genetic code of a person, environmentalism emphasises the influence of experiences and social factors. In the twenty-first century, a consensus is developing that both genetic and environmental agents influence development interactively. In the social and political sciences, the nature versus nurture debate may be contrasted with the structure versus agency debate (that is, socialization versus individual autonomy). For a discussion of nature versus nurture in language and other human universals, see also psychological nativism.
In their 2014 survey of scientists, many respondents wrote that the familiar distinction between nature and nurture has outlived its usefulness, and should be retired. One reason is the explosion of work in the field of epigenetics. Scientists believe that there is a long and circuitous route, with many feedback loops, from a particular set of genes to a feature of the adult organism. Culture is a biological phenomenon: a set of abilities and practices that allow members of one generation to learn and change and to pass the results of that learning on to the next generation.
(Wikipedia)
A sign on a footpath at West End, Brisbane, Queensland.
Monkeys (Barbary Macaque)
Mother monkeys and their cute babies.
Nature versus nurture.
Is it nature or nurture ? This panel has it both ways.
Nurture seeds
Nurture the seed of your creativity and it will grow.