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Name: Hilal abo sway Date : 3 August 2021
Instructor : Melike küçük
Nature vs Nurture
Since the dawn of recorded history, the question of nature and nurture has been debated and discussed for many centuries, where the roots of this question goes back to the early days of Plato and Aristotle, and in the last century the scientists were divided over this issue where each group favoured one of the factors over the other, however the new discoveries of genes and its functions and the latest social and psychological studies have shown that both factors play big roles and they are so integrated and connected with each other which makes it nearly impossible to separate them as we will discuss in details in the upcoming paragraphs.
The nature vs nurture debate is a philosophical, cultural and scientific debate about the nature and behaviour of humans, whether it is mainly due to nature or nurture influence.There are many theories to explain this phenomena which differs greatly from one period to another. For example, the theorey of behaviourism was adopted by psychologists in 1960s where human perspnality is the result of experiment and environmental upbringing. However, in recent years, the influence of nature or in other words genes has gained more attention so that a whole branch of psychology called : Evolutionary psychology was founed to study the evolutionary roots of human behaviour. To demonstrate the impact of nature or genetics on the development of our personality characteristics, many studies were conducted on twins who were shortly separated after birth to study the influence of genes on their behaviour. Dr. Peter Neubaeur a child psychologist in the documentary ‘’ Three identical strangers’’ conducted an experiement with multiple sets of jewish twins and triplets,the experiment focused on three twins : Bobby, Eddy and David, who were separated after birth and they eventually were able to meet each other by conceidence , such true story raises the following question : Do genes or the environment have greater effect on a person? . When the three twins first met they realized that they have a lot of shared similarities, where the three of them enjoyed smoking the same ciggraettes, and they all had the same orientation towards women. Also, their families have a history of mental diseases which the three of them proved to carry due to their genetic linkeage. Scientists try to study the heritability of intelligence, disease and sexual orientation by using identical and fraternal twins. A new study conducted by the Nature Genetics examined the influence of nature versus nurture of 560 diseases and conditions in more than 56,000 pairs of twins insured by the same insurance company. These diseases were the results of both genetic and environmental causes. However, scientists were able to deduce that the genes were the cause of 31 percent of the cases such as : sickle-cell anemia, while 9 percent of conditions are driven by environmental factors. So, the question that comes to our mind : What about the remaining 60 percent? As we go into more deeper studies of behaviour, we see that crimes which a social phenonmenon , is determined mostly by environment where the way we get raised and the financial support, and the education we get influence a lot of our lifestyles. In 2009, there was an egyptian movie called : ‘’ The replacement’ the story involves two orphaned twins , who were separated at the age of three, one was raised by a police commander while the other was raised by a belly dancer, this lead the first boy to become an officier while the other became a drug addict and trader, this shows that the environment role is so important in determingning our life choices and what kind of standards and lines we use to judge right from wrong.
On the light of what preceded, we can deduce that both nature and nurture are merged together which makes it nearly impossible to exclude one of them to study human’s nature and personality, where the gene confer the potiental but this potiential will be eventually expressed by the environmnet., which maks them two sides of the same coin.
(Ettore Majorana International Science Series) Davide Csermely, Danilo Mainardi (Auth.), Alberto Oliverio, Michele Zappella (Eds.) - The Behavior of Human Infants-Springer US (1983)
(Cambridge Studies in Society and The Life Sciences) Celia Roberts-Messengers of Sex - Hormones, Biomedicine and Feminism-Cambridge University Press (2007)
