The Great Debate: Nature Or Nurture

Kobi Massaro
Ms. Wells
English X Honors
21 October 2013
The Great Debate: Nature or Nurture Humans have debated for the longest time whether nature or nurture has had the most effect in how humans turn out to be and how they act in certain situations. The argument is over whether the genetics of persons determines everything about them, nature, or whether the environment and other people dictate what the original person’s makes of their lives. To prove that nature is the dominate cause, scientist have conducted studies dealing with twins, homosexuals, and disease infected patients showing the strong link between how they were born and how they were during the study. Whereas scientist who believe nurture is the basis for a person’s personality
and attitude toward circumstances produced studies from the same test subjects but with different results saying nature made the sicknesses and differences between twins what they were made to be. However, the most common “side” picked in the arguments comes from the idea each of the two factors produces the same effect on human beings as the other does. One study done to find evidence to support nature’s side of the argument would be to split identical twins up at birth and reunite them many years later and judge how much alike they still were. A famous experiment of this study came from Ohio with brothers who were split up five weeks after being born.
“Reunited 39 years later, they would have strained the credulity of the editors of Ripley's Believe It or Not. Not only did both have dark hair, stand six feet tall and weigh 180 pounds, but they spoke with the same inflections, move with the same gait and made the same gestures. Both loved stock car racing and hated baseball… Both drove Chevrolets, drank Miller Lite, chain-smoked Salems and vacationed on the same half mile stretch of Florida beach. Both had elevated blood pressure, severe migraines and had undergone vasectomies…Their heart rates, brain waves and IQs were nearly identical” (Colt and Hollister “Were you born that way?”).
What can be said about these uncanny similarities is the brothers are most likely the way they are is the forces nature could only provide to them with their genes they were gifted with at birth. The big idea of this experiment is to show how, with almost four decades passing by, the brother still carried intricate details that made them who they were for 39 years without having the outside environment, nurture, affect them. The most convincing part of these results nature trumps nurture is they both spoke with the same inflictions and had many of the same gestures because many people would think that these traits would be largely affected by nurture oppose to nature. The mental aspect of humans can also be argued to take a large contribution from nature. Other studies have shown links between matters such as happiness, pessimism, or taste orientation with genetics given to a person at birth, “One study even concluded that happiness is 80 percent heritable—it depends little on wealth, achievement or marital status… A third study claimed a genetic influence for the consumption of coffee but not, it seems, of tea” (“Were you born that way?”). The fact that a persons over all happiness being a 80% direct result of nature and not as much a result of events through one’s life. Mental traits are commonly used to describe who a person is, meaning if a person is being described as a trait that is over 50% affected by nature rather than nature would in fact make a good claim for nature to be the dominate of the two forces. Skills that people learn, or even have a natural talent for, are also affiliated with who a person is because the actions that a person does signify them as being themselves. For example if a person has perfect pitch and can tell the difference between a f sharp and a f natural then they are known as a musician; significantly enough, perfect pitch has been seen as a hereditary skill as said by Kevin Posted in his article “Nature vs. Nurture Revisited”, “People with perfect pitch often have relatives with the same gift, and recent studies show that perfect pitch is a highly inherited trait, quite possibly the result of a single gene” (Posted “Nature vs. Nurture Revisited”). The argument stands its own ground here because a person is themself when they perform skills which they are good at labels them as a certain type of person, and if having perfect pitch is a trait that a person is good at than that trait that nature gave them sculpts them. The middle ground between the two ideas has many different arguments and aspects than nature or nurture. One argument used to support this idea is that the two forces affect different groups of people differently. A study in June 2006 showed the different reactions a male and female would have on a first smoke in contrast to nature and nurture, “Last month, researchers at the University of Southern California found that when it comes to taking that first smoke, women are more likely than men to be affected by environmental factors such as peer pressure. Genetic factors, however, play a larger role in influencing men to start smoking.” (Bryner “Nature vs. Nurture: Mysteries of Individuality Unraveled”). This basis for debate on whether nature or nurture affects everybody the same is not just between men and women, but rather between any two or more types of people. Teenagers for example are more likely to succumb to peer pressure to try an illegal substance than a 50 year old adult who is not as worried about social acceptance as teenagers are. On the other hand, Children of young age, which have not been exposed too much nurture yet, are less affected when seeing, for instance, the Red Sox go to the World Series than a 90 year old man who has only saw the Red Sox win pennant back in 1918. In years passing the idea that nature and nurture are dependent on each other, saying that without nature you could not have nurture and vice versa. Many philosophers have even preached the theories that nature and nurture are so close together in every sense that there are very few discrepancies to split the two forces. Colt and Hollister write how Greenspan, a Bethesda psychiatrist who is one of a growing number of therapists who have incorporated the findings of behavioral genetics into their practice, elaborates on the subject a little on their article, “Greenspan’s work illustrates an idea at the heart of the behavioral genetics today- that heredity and environment are entwined, always reacting to and building on each other. ‘It’s not a horse race between nurture and nature,’ he says, ‘It’s a dance’” (Colt and Hollister “Were you born that way?”). The “dance” is simply ebb and flow back and forth between which acts will take a more critical role in who a person is and what they will become. The impression that nature and nurture are so closely linked together brings about the argument that nature and nurture could even be considered one in the same. Nurturing, or the act of making any change on a person, holds all inflictions between being positively effective, e.x.
proper manners or fluent English, and negatively effective, e.x. bad hygiene or criminal thoughts. One of the negative effects came from a girl who was isolated from society living her whole life in a single room, tied to a chair which she couldn’t move from. “The police discovered her in 1970 after spending all her life tide to a chair. The result of this [loneliness] was that she was unable to speak, walk, socialize, and generally being normal after being rescued. We can see that due to the fact that she was in an isolated and lonely environment her attitude and personality weren’t usual” (Juan Schinas “Nature vs. Nurture”). With this story scientist argue whether or not a person will develop right if they do not receive the correct type of nurturing, which in this case she didn’t develop correctly. Since this girl didn’t connect with society and other human beings her mental health was where it was for the reason that she never experience positive nurturing from anybody or even anything. This isolation from nurturing shows the severity that a human can obtain if not tended to or interacted with through
life. One point commonly used in support of nurture being the domination of humans is the link between the environment that a human lives in and their physical health. Many people have argues whether some diseases are hereditary or come from the natural world. Venter, in Kevin Posted article, argues that the disease colon cancer is proof that disease come from more than just genetics;
“Indeed, Venter has wasted little time in playing down the importance of the genes he has catalogued.
He cites the example of colon cancer, which is often associated with a defective "colon cancer" gene. Even though some patients carry this mutated gene in every cell, the cancer only occurs in the colon because it is triggered by toxins secreted by bacteria in the gut. Cancer, argues Venter, is an environmental disease. Strong support for this viewpoint appeared last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers in Scandinavia studying 45,000 pairs of twins concluded that cancer is largely caused by environmental rather than inherited factors, a surprising conclusion after a decade of headlines touting the discovery of the ‘breast cancer gene,’ the ‘colon cancer gene,’ and many more” (Kevin Posted “Nature vs. Nurture
Revisited”).
Many diseases such as these have been said to be mainly caused by nurturing because of the effects that the environment burdens humans to deal with. This theory also contradicts many ideas said about nature being the dominate force of humans because of the discoveries found between twins saying that diseases like cancer have nothing to do with genetics when compared to the environment factors. This debate will never end with the new discoveries day to day about how humans are affected, but one idea will always hold true to the test of time: humans are both affected by the doings of nature and the acts of nurture. It may be true that one does in fact trump the other in the domination of human beings, but it is certain that both nature and nurture have an impact on which humans become. The life that everybody lives would not be the way they are without either nature or nurture because everything in life is sculpted around these two factors. Lastly, nature and nurture would not exist without the other because without a base to build off, nature, of what is life, and without an anything to change people in different lives why is there life?