What is more influential on our development - nature or nurture?

this is a life long question and one that has a lot of controversy around it. you can find supportive evidence on both arguments.. it’s abit like asking ‘are people born evil? or are they born good?’

personally, i think it’s a bit of a ‘faith’ question, similar to religion. there is no right or wrong answer, you just have to go with what you think?

this has been a bit of an ambiguous answer, because there is too much ‘out there’ for both..

personally however, i think nurture has a massive influence over our personalities, morals.. don’t forget in nurture, comes the influence from the tele we’re allowed to watch, the peers we socialise with? our basis for relationships and a lot of our attitudes..

however, the physical development is, i think, largely based on genetics, such as height, build etc, but also some characteristics..for example, my youngest, his father eats with his fork in his right hand and knife in the left… my ex husband and my son are the only two people i have ever known to eat that way! despite the fact that when the table gets laid, the fork is on the left and he hasn’t live full time with his father since he was three? bizarre

Twin studies shed a lot of light on this question. Identical twins adopted to different families and raised in different environments often turn out remarkably similar. They often gravitate to the same occupation, marry the same sort of spouse etc. This would indicate that there is more to heredity than most people think. Some traits are entirely affected by heredity like eye color. Others are influenced but not dictated by genetics. We now know political identification, religious preference, and sexual orientation are influenced by both heredity and environment. Individuals with a larger anterior cingulate cortex in their brain tend to be liberal while individuals with larger amygdalas tend to be conservative. A “liberal gene” has even been found that causes individuals to be more open to change while those without the gene are more resistant to change. Individuals with liberal brains raised in conservative environments can pick up conservative viewpoints. I grew up in a dyed-in-wool conservative family yet as everyone knows I’m a bleeding heart liberal. I probably have a conservative brain but acquired my liberalism. Some traits are almost entirely acquired; like what language we speak. The way I look at is our heredity is set but how it is realized has a lot to do with environment. It has been discovered that highly successful businesspeople and career criminals have similar personalities. A person with these traits in one environment might turn out to be the CEO of a corporation while in a different environment could end up a mob boss.

The nature versus nurture issue has been around for ages, and scholars have still not concluded which of the two has a greater effect on a person. Nature, referring to heredity, and the nurture, referring to the environment, are two very reasonable explanations to why we are the people we are today. This debate over whether nature or nurture has a bigger effect on us has been argued and supported very well for both sides. Each side stresses very important details and good explanations for why nature, or nurture, controls how we develop. Experimentation and research has been conducted on these two sides, and each is supported with good theories as to why nature or nurture is the important influence on us.

Nurture has a larger effect on us than does nature. Nurture is the characteristic builder that we gain as we grow up. It is what defines our nature and makes us who we are. Nurture cultivates our nature, and it is the main regulator of our being.

http://funadvice.com/r/15dmnodmqcj

1. Either/or questions are usually not the most illuminating way to frame things. I suggest that every time you have a question like this, you revise it to be about the relationship between the two, instead. In this case, for example, asking how nature and nurture interact in shaping different aspects of our development will point you toward much more informative, intriguing, and ultimately useful answers.

2. In the whole nature/nurture controversy, the advocates of either side have one key assumption in common: that the course of our development is shaped entirely by some deterministic force. I think that assumption is mistaken. Even looking at the interaction of nature and nurture still leaves out a crucial third factor: our own choices.

The nature versus nurture issue has been around for ages, and scholars have still not concluded which of the two has a greater effect on a person. Nature, referring to heredity, and the nurture, referring to the environment, are two very reasonable explanations to why we are the people we are today. This debate over whether nature or nurture has a bigger effect on us has been argued and supported very well for both sides. Each side stresses very important details and good explanations for why nature, or nurture, controls how we develop. Experimentation and research has been conducted on these two sides, and each is supported with good theories as to why nature or nurture is the important influence on us.

http://funadvice.com/r/15dmnodmqcj