Nature Vs Nurture Debate

One of the oldest subjects to study is the nurture verse nature conflict. The nurture vs. nurture debate is the scientific, cultural, and philosophical debate about whether the human culture, behavior, and even their personality are caused primarily by nurture or nature. This debate is one of the oldest philosophical issues within psychology. The debate centers on contributions from genetic inheritance and from environmental factors leading to human development.

Nature refers to all the hereditary factors and genes that influence who we are, from our physical appearance to our personality characteristics. Nurture refers to all the environmental variables that impact who we are, including our early childhood experiences, how we were raised,

our social relationships, and our surrounding culture. A question to ask yourself; if a man abuses his family, it because he was raised and born with violent tendencies or is it because he learned them by overserving his own parents ways like their behavior.

I will help you figure out the answer to this question later on in this essay. A few examples of biologically determines characteristics or nature would be hair color, eye color, diseases, and skin color. Things like life span and height also have a big biological component, but they are influenced by environmental factors and lifestyles. Height is an example of a trait that is influenced by nurture and nature interaction. The child might come from a very tall family, and he might even inherit the genes of being tall. However, if he grows up in a bad household and doesn’t get the proper nourishment, the child might never attain the height he might have had if he was nourished properly. I have learned that today, the majority of experts believed that both nurture and nature influence behavior and even development. Each side of nature and nurture have good points and evidence to back it up,

but it really difficult to decide whether a person’s development is predisposed in his DNA, or a majority of its influence by its life experiences and its environment. I learned something very important about heredity and it is “the heritability of a trait can vary from 0.00 to 1.00 depending on the environments from which research participants are sampled.” Heritability does depend on the amount of variability in the environment factors that contribute to a trait.
Like I said before, nature refers to our innate potential that is influenced entirely by genetic and physiological factors. The biological approach towards nature would be focusing on genetics, hormonal, and neurochemical explanations of the behavior in something or someone. A list of things that have to do with nature is heredity, developmental disorders, congenital disorders, pre- natal development, genetics and genes, and biology (predispositions). Overall our behavior reflects a mixture or combination of both nurture and nature. The influences of nature consists of genes. My main point in this paragraph is to let the reader know that genetics is for nature and environmental conditioning is for nurture.
Nurture comes from the environment. It is the environment surrounding us and it impacts the way our personalities and preferences develop. I learned that “nurture “and environment refer back to our city, home, and how we were raised by our parents, teachers, and peers. The phrase nurture and nature relates to the relative importance of an individual’s innate qualities. “Nurture” in the sense of behaviorism in causing individual differences, especially in behavioral traits. Nurture can be both a noun and a verb. Some of the definitions are development, nourishment, to raise, the daily food of something, to care for, give attention to, and to educate. Some synonyms to help us understand nurture a little bit more clearly are care, nutriment, provisions, upbringing, training, provender, instruction, and diet. I was a little confused about the subject “nurture” so I decided to look up some antonyms for it and they are deprivation, neglect, starvation and ignorance. Some differences between nature verse nature is that nature deals with stuff like eyes, hair color, height, brain functionality and it always stays the same. Nurture deals with stuff like hobbies, social life, morals, behaviors, and it can change, I also learned about some things they have in common and that would be things like how life, who we are, and decease. The last thing I really want to discuss is things that fall in to the category of nurture. Some of those things would be caregivers, education, culture, religion, nutrition, attachment, post-natal factors, cognition, and environment. Most psychologists believe that nature is hereditary and nurture is like environmental experiences.
My conclusion for this paper is of course going to be like a debate and an understanding between two subjects, those subjects are nature and nurture.

As we already know, nature is the idea that traits or abilities are native or coded into human brains at birth. Nature is also referred to as nativism. Nurture on the other hand, is also known as empiricism or behaviorism. It is the idea that intelligence is obtained, not through birth, but experience. Scientists know that both nature and nurture affect a person’s future, but they don’t know how much each factor affects a person’s future. They have also figured out that when it comes to personality, environment is not a big factor. My biggest conclusion for this whole essay is that they both affect a person someway. The whole controversy between the two helps to determine who we are, whether it is nature, which is hereditary or if it is nurture, which is our environment. I didn’t really know this but personality is a result of evolutionary process. Human beings, inherit behaviors due to a complex interaction of genes. They also believe that they can sharpen their types of personality but can never fully change them. If you are on the nurture side then they believe that you are born with a blank slate at birth and your personality is nurtured. Radical psychologists such as Watson and Skinner claim that behavior can be described in terms of experience alone. After reading a lot about this subject I believe that genes and

environment both have a huge influence over how a child’s personality will end out being. It should no longer be argued over, it should be said that both nature and nurture work together to create a human being that is like no other. I am so glad that I took this course at Piedmont Technical college because I got the opportunity to research more about nature verse nurture, which was confusing at first but then it was like I wanted to keep going and learn as much as possible because we are human and we should be well educated about how our brain and body works. If you are still confused about the topic, just remember that things like your hair color, eye color, are topics dealt with in nature, while nurture is that your behavior is the result of learning and experience resulting from outside factors such as parents, media, peers, and religion. Nature is also called innate behavior and nurture is also called learned behavior.