Evolutionary Psychology: Nature Vs. Nurture

Due to the evolutionary psychologists in the text „Nature Versus Nurture: The Battle Continues“ women and men have no choice how they act. Both are bound to different behavior patterns, which is the consequence of the evolutionary progress. All along the task of the men was to impregnate as most woman as possible to save the continuity of their race, while women always have been the ones that had to born and raise the children. Therefore the males concentrated on getting as most as possible partners, while women persued only few partners who stay with them and help raising up their children. Emotional skills, that could lead to a long-term relationship were not needed for the males. Instead they focused in improving their physical skills in order to be a ready for fight. The opposite goes for women.

An argumentation that makes sense referring to the history of manhood. Additionally men and women have a different distribution of hormones, which verifiably has an influence on the character of humans. Men have a higher testosterone level which for example is responsible for muscle development and sperm production. Two functions which are important for the tasks, that were mentioned by the evolutionary psychologists (EP's) – Improving of physical skills and the impregnation of women. Females instead have a higher estrogenic level, which, for
example, is responsible of the maturing of egg cells. This confirms the theory of the EP's since egg cells that get fertilized lead to pregnacy and the birth of a child that needs to get raised up.

But on the other side there are also men and women, who do not act like it gets expected, even though they have the same hormone levels like other same-genders.
Men that are not practical or technophile, do not like sports and are not interested in maturing. Also there are women that are not interested in giving birth to children or raising them up. This is a big contradiction against the theory of the EP's. There are even people, who do not want to be a men or a women anymore and transgender themselves. This means that it is not only our history nor our hormones who let us act like we act. There has to be other
factors.

A really important is the nurture of children. The way how people get raised up has a verifiably big influence on their characters and due to the fact that most of the children are raised up in a gender-specific way, it propably has an effect on the gender roles. While boys are given cars and bricks to play with, girls get dolls and toy kitchenware. Boys are taught to be strong, brave and proud while girls have to learn how to be gentle and please other people. These are only examples for a big amount of differences in the nurturing of children, which mostly lead to different moral values, habits and characters.

In the english class we made different experiments to see how different genders act in different situations. We looked how students from our class shower, go to bed, pull of their clothes etc. The experiment has shown us that males and females both tend to do things in a gender-specific way. For example most of the boys prefered to pull off their shirts firstly, while most of the girls started with their pants. These are things that do not seem like they are related to nurture, biology or something else. They are rather the entirety of a lot factors.

The same goes for gender roles, which do not only have one origin like a lot of people believe. It is neither the prehistoric tasks, the hormones nor the nurture, which are the reasons for gender roles on their own. Only joint they can be termed as the reason for the differences in the behaviour of males and females. In my eyes this is the biggest problem in the study of men and women.