What is nature versus nurture

However, they've also discovered that possessing the gene alone is not enough to develop this ability. Instead, musical training during early childhood is necessary to allow this inherited ability to manifest itself. Height is another example of a trait that is influenced by nature and nurture interaction. A child might come from a family where everyone is tall, and he may have inherited these genes for height. However, if he grows up in a deprived environment where he does not receive proper nourishment, he might never attain the height he might have had he grown up in a healthier environment.

Throughout the history of psychology , however, this debate has continued to stir up controversy. Eugenics, for example, was a movement heavily influenced by the nativist approach. Psychologist Francis Galton, a cousin of the naturalist Charles Darwin, coined both the terms nature versus nurture and eugenics and believed that intelligence was the result of genetics. Galton believed that intelligent individuals should be encouraged to marry and have many children, while less intelligent individuals should be discouraged from reproducing.

Today, the majority of experts believe that both nature and nurture influence behavior and development. However, the issue still rages on in many areas such as in the debate on the origins of homosexuality and influences on intelligence. While few people take the extreme nativist or radical empiricist approach, researchers and experts still debate the degree to which biology and environment influence behavior.

Increasingly, people are beginning to realize that asking how much heredity or environment influence a particular trait is not the right approach.

The reality is that there is not a simple way to disentangle the multitude of forces that exist. These influences include genetic factors that interact with one another, environmental factors that interact such as social experiences and overall culture, as well as how both hereditary and environmental influences intermingle. Instead, many researchers today are interested in seeing how genes modulate environmental influences and vice versa.

Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Levitt M. Perceptions of nature, nurture and behaviour. Life Sci Soc Policy. Schoneberger T. Three myths from the language acquisition literature. Anal Verbal Behav. Moulton C. Perfect pitch reconsidered. Clin Med Lond. Bandura, A.

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Figure 6. How can we tell them apart? In both fields, it is understood that genes not only code for particular traits, but also contribute to certain patterns of cognition and behavior. Evolutionary psychology focuses on how universal patterns of behavior and cognitive processes have evolved over time. Therefore, variations in cognition and behavior would make individuals more or less successful in reproducing and passing those genes to their offspring.

Evolutionary psychologists study a variety of psychological phenomena that may have evolved as adaptations, including fear response, food preferences, mate selection, and cooperative behaviors Confer et al. Whereas evolutionary psychologists focus on universal patterns that evolved over millions of years, behavioral geneticists study how individual differences arise, in the present, through the interaction of genes and the environment.

When studying human behavior, behavioral geneticists often employ twin and adoption studies to research questions of interest. Twin studies compare the rates that a given behavioral trait is shared among identical and fraternal twins; adoption studies compare those rates among biologically related relatives and adopted relatives.

Both approaches provide some insight into the relative importance of genes and environment for the expression of a given trait.

Watch this video with renowned evolutionary psychologist Davis Buss for an explanation of how a psychologist approaches evolution and how this approach fits within the field of social science.

In humans, genetic variation begins with an egg, about million sperm, and fertilization. Fertile women ovulate roughly once per month, releasing an egg from follicles in the ovary. The egg travels, via the fallopian tube, from the ovary to the uterus, where it may be fertilized by a sperm.

The egg and the sperm each contain 23 chromosomes. Chromosomes are long strings of genetic material known as deoxyribonucleic acid DNA. DNA is a helix-shaped molecule made up of nucleotide base pairs. In each chromosome, sequences of DNA make up genes that control or partially control a number of visible characteristics, known as traits, such as eye color, hair color, and so on.

A single gene may have multiple possible variations, or alleles. An allele is a specific version of a gene. So, a given gene may code for the trait of hair color, and the different alleles of that gene affect which hair color an individual has.

When a sperm and egg fuse, their 23 chromosomes pair up and create a zygote with 23 pairs of chromosomes. Therefore, each parent contributes half the genetic information carried by the offspring; the resulting physical characteristics of the offspring called the phenotype are determined by the interaction of genetic material supplied by the parents called the genotype.

Figure 7. Most traits are controlled by multiple genes, but some traits are controlled by one gene. A characteristic like cleft chin , for example, is influenced by a single gene from each parent. When someone has two copies of the same allele, they are said to be homozygous for that allele.

When someone has a combination of alleles for a given gene, they are said to be heterozygous. For example, smooth chin is a recessive trait, which means that an individual will only display the smooth chin phenotype if they are homozygous for that recessive allele bb. Imagine that a woman with a cleft chin has a child with a man with a smooth chin. What type of chin will their child have?

The answer to that depends on which alleles each parent carries. If the woman is homozygous for cleft chin BB , her offspring will always have cleft chin. It gets a little more complicated, however, if the mother is heterozygous for this gene Bb. Figure 8. The capital B represents the dominant allele, and the lowercase b represents the recessive allele. In the example of the cleft chin, where B is cleft chin dominant allele , wherever a pair contains the dominant allele, B, you can expect a cleft chin phenotype.

You can expect a smooth chin phenotype only when there are two copies of the recessive allele, bb. Sickle-cell anemia is just one of many genetic disorders caused by the pairing of two recessive genes. For example, phenylketonuria PKU is a condition in which individuals lack an enzyme that normally converts harmful amino acids into harmless byproducts.

If someone with this condition goes untreated, he or she will experience significant deficits in cognitive function, seizures, and increased risk of various psychiatric disorders. Because PKU is a recessive trait, each parent must have at least one copy of the recessive allele in order to produce a child with the condition Figure 9. Figure 9. In this Punnett square, N represents the normal allele, and p represents the recessive allele that is associated with PKU. So far, we have discussed traits that involve just one gene, but few human characteristics are controlled by a single gene.

Most traits are polygenic : controlled by more than one gene. Height is one example of a polygenic trait, as are skin color and weight. Where do harmful genes that contribute to diseases like PKU come from? Gene mutations provide one source of harmful genes.

A mutation is a sudden, permanent change in a gene. While many mutations can be harmful or lethal, once in a while, a mutation benefits an individual by giving that person an advantage over those who do not have the mutation. Recall that the theory of evolution asserts that individuals best adapted to their particular environments are more likely to reproduce and pass on their genes to future generations.

In order for this process to occur, there must be competition—more technically, there must be variability in genes and resultant traits that allow for variation in adaptability to the environment. If a population consisted of identical individuals, then any dramatic changes in the environment would affect everyone in the same way, and there would be no variation in selection. In contrast, diversity in genes and associated traits allows some individuals to perform slightly better than others when faced with environmental change.

This creates a distinct advantage for individuals best suited for their environments in terms of successful reproduction and genetic transmission.

Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. So, poverty seems to have consequences that produce effects that can be detected in the body decades later. EN: In your book, you describe the pitfalls of genetic determinism and you caution against people creating an epigenetic determinism.

Can you describe the potential hazards of this type of thinking? That is, we tend to assume that if you have this experience in poverty, you are going to be permanently scarred by it. The data seem to suggest that it may work that way, but it also seems to be the case that the experiences we have later in life also have epigenetic effects.

EN: How does epigenetics make us rethink the idea of genetic inheritance? This has caused a bit of an uproar among some biologists. They are unsure about what to do with this new finding, because it calls to mind a pre-Darwinian biologist named Lamarck who argued that evolution occurs when the experiences we have change our bodies and we pass those bodily changes on to our offspring.

Asking which is more important, genes or environments, is kind of like asking which is more important in making an ordinary automobile run, spark plugs or gasoline. You need both. The presence now of some data that suggest that our experiences can produce biological effects that can then be transmitted to the next generation has alarmed biologists who were trained to believe that Lamarckian inheritance is impossible.

If that exposure has some sort of epigenetic effect on you, the prospect that your great-great grandchildren might be influenced by your experience is somewhat worrisome. This is all still poorly understood, but it makes it an exciting time to be doing research in this area. EN: Given the revolutionary nature of some of these findings, how has your thinking changed as a result of the rise of epigenetics? DM: I became interested in these kinds of questions long before epigenetics became popular.

Thinking seriously about development made it clear to me that nature and nurture can never be teased apart, because influential experiences are an important part of natural, normal development, starting immediately after conception. EN: How are other scientists reacting to epigenetic research?

Are people optimistic? Is there a rift? DM: I think everybody is optimistic and excited. I think everybody knows that there are a lot of really interesting and important things to be learned from doing this kind of work. Of course, there are also differences in perspective.

Whether you talk to biologists or psychologists, if you ask them outright, they will almost invariably tell you that genes and environments always interact to produce our characteristics. But my experience has been that if you press them a little bit, you will find that their interactionism is actually rather shallow. For instance, it can often be revealing to ask someone about a characteristic like Phenylketonuria—widely considered to be a genetic disease—or about a characteristic like eye color.

Given how genes and environments interact, each kind of factor is always just as important as the other in influencing the final form of a trait. Research on epigenetics has really driven this point home. So, I think as we learn more about epigenetics, there will need to be some change in theoretical perspective among some scientists.

EN: Is there anything else you would like to add?