Pseudonymph

What do you think?

What was that? You are dying to know what I think? Well, ok...I will pander to your curiosity.

I think, that when it is extreme cases of behavior...meaning at one end of the spectrum, it is some of nature. For example,when a person is abused and hit his whole life and learns nothing but this, yet never strikes a person his whole life, then that, to me is nature. (vice versa as well, for this example)

A good example of this I think would be some friends I knew awhile back who were brothers. I knew both of them from the time we were all like, 7 years old. (keep in mind that obviously this isnt a "controlled observation")
They were raised strict catholic by the parents. They sent them to the same school. Made sure they had similar friends, didnt smoke no drugs etc. (They lived a few houses down from me)

I knew about what happened to them all the time because mine and her parents were good friends, plus I knew them.

Basically my point is, they lived almost identical lives, no cable tv. No violent games, no porn etc.(as far as the parents could tell anyway)

They started being totally different in the late teen years. One became real violence orientated and had a short temper. The other? total opposite. Just like his parents.

At First I suspected it was just a phase, as he was probably trying to seperate from his family and be an individual. But I have talked to him frequently and I have noticed that he is DIFFERENT. Especially from his family.

It would seem to me that this boy was different. He always fought it. Even from a young age. It just became more apparant
This is just one situation obviously, but I have heard of others like it before.

This leads me to believe that nature does indeed play a role, in some way or another...
what do you think?

Pomp

I think the broad consensus is that personality traits are partially heritable (IOW, genetic) and partially determined by environmental factors. <a href="http://psych-www.colorado.edu/hgss/hgssapplets/heritability/heritability.intro.html" target="_blank">Here's</a> a quick intro to the topic that I found with Google.

Edited because I am not smart.

[ March 20, 2002: Message edited by: Pompous Bastard ]</p>

tronvillain

Nature plays a role in everything, though it may or may not be significant in comparison to nurture. There is a constant interaction between the two.

DRFseven

One very good example of the interplay between nature/nurture is the stochastic development of neurons in the brain. What this means is that the neurons (nature) actually branch and develop in response to experience (nurture).

I think you are absolutely right, though, that some of the least common forms of behavior can be directly attributed to genetics. In almost all cases, a different environment could have effected a different outcome, but, often, no environmental change would not have been enough to have prevented, say, an institutionalized life or psychosis.

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle

Personally, I think the whole biological determinism line the gene mod people are feeding us is just so much crap. One's behavior is effected, not just by genes, but by environment, and by habit.

Secondly, human behavior is complex. It is influenced by an unknown number of variables. Chaos theory might be able to explain some instances of widely varying behavior amongst otherwise very similar people.

Amen-Moses

In an identical twins study shown on TV recently there were two women who were separated at birth, lived in completely different environments and were reunited in their fifties, they showed the first time that these women met each other on the programme.

They both wore the same colour and style of clothes, were both the same build (i.e rather portly) and had the same hair style and colour. They lived in similar houses with similar decoration, they married men who looked the same and were the same build and profession, they had similar views on politics, religion and even worked in the same profession for the exact same company.

Amen-Moses

DRFseven

Well, habit is genes and environment, not a third thing separate from those two.

jpbrooks

What puzzles me is why there is a "nature vs nurture" "controversy" at all. Why would a theorist think that behavior has only one type of cause (nature or nurture) rather than a combination of types of causes? It would be interesting to hear explanations from each side of this controversy as to why behavior cannot be the result of the factor promoted by the opposing side.

[ March 27, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

DRFseven

I think it has to do with how strict behaviorism held sway with researchers and professionals as well as the public for so many years . Behaviorism, though it recognized the mechanism of stimulus and response, discounted the mental part of the equation. To be fair, I'd say the behaviorists were reacting (no pun, etc.) to the sort of blank check written by the Freudians, who were able, for a while, to concoct the wildest and most far-fetched theories of behavioral causation because no one could prove them wrong; it couldn't be checked. Little boys wanting to screw their mothers, girls having penis envy - bah! No wonder they threw their hands up in horror and said NO to mental theories. But it's a misconception to think that behaviorists, such as Skinner, also discredited genetics; on the contrary, they certainly understood that genetics were inextricably linked to learning. It was the mental factor that did not figure in their theories.

emphryio

I think the "basic" traits of the person are totally from nature.

For example, you could abuse the heck out of a kid and he might have some serious hate stored up because of it, but if his genetics say, "Be happy go lucky." He will still basically be just that.

(But now if his genetics make him want to behave in a way that is just too different from the societal norm. He may have to assimilate to the point of being quite unhappy. But he may appear to have been effected by "nurture".)

If cloning was perfected, I would interested in experiments to explore the nature/nurture question further.

Also concerning twins, it is interesting that the ones separated at birth end up being much more alike than the ones that grow up together. It'd seem obvious that the ones that grow up together feel the need to "be different".