Nature And Adoption Debate: Nature Vs. Nurture

This essay will discuss the Nature versus Nurture debate, and how twin and adoption studies have influenced on this debate. This is essay will go into support of how over time adoption and twin studies helped form this debate into understanding that both nature and nurture impact development. Adoption studies have played a vital part in the hereditary (Nature) aspect of this debate and twin studies will show support of how the environment (Nurture) still plays a large role within development. Further discussing how both Nature and Nurture jointly play a vital role in human development

The debate of Nature versus Nurture also denoted to as heredity versus environment or nativism versus empiricism is one of the most fundamental and age-old theoretical issues within psychology (Bee, 2000). Nature is understood to be the hereditary information established from parents at the time of conception – biological givens (Berk, 2010) and Nurture can be defined as “the complex forces of the physical and social world that influence our biological make-up and psychological experiences before and after birth (Berk, 2010 p.7). The main question essentially is whether a child’s development is directed by a pattern built in at birth or whether it is formed by experiences after birth. Historically this debate stood as Nature or Nurture, this was represented by Plato and René Descartes, both of whom alleged that thoughts and development are innate (Bee, 2000). Conflicting this argument was a philosopher John Locke, who insisted that at birth the mind is simply a clean slate – in Latin ‘a tabula rasa’ waiting to be written by experience, therefore Locke argued that given different experiences humans would have different characters (Hayes, 2011). S...

... middle of paper ...

...te in which these were once rivalling factors. This essay has provided evidence to support that now both nature and nurture are strong contributing factors to a person’s development. This notion was supported by the use of both adoption and twin studies. Through adoption studies it was seen that through the child’s IQ scores it could be determined that genetics played a large role in intelligence, and through twin studies it was seen that asthma although a genetic inheritance environment still plays a large role within the development of asthma. Both of these studies contributed heavily to the Nature versus Nurture debate as both demonstrate that both genetics and environment play a large role. This further enables researcher’s to shift focus on to how much is genetics and/or environment in involved in development as opposed to purely debating Nature or Nurture.