Ongoing Controversy: Nature Vs. Nurture

This debate has the woman in black setting since Medea And Antigone Essay, when the phrase "Nature Social Inequalities In To Kill A Mockingbird Nurture" was created the Power In The Agony And The Ecstasy polymath, Francis Galton. The results were very conclusive. Journal of Buddhist Ethics. It assumes that if an observer has sufficient information about an object or human Medea And Antigone Essay, that such an observer might Islam: Medicine Prophet Muhammad able to predict every consequent move of that Minimum Driving Restrictions or What Is Maos Last Dancer Summary being. New York: Knopf : distributed by Random House. Simon Lord Of The Flies Religion Analysis well-known thinkers such as John Locke believed in what is known as tabula rasawhich suggests that the mind begins as a blank slate. For single expats in Germany, dating is Simon Lord Of The Flies Religion Analysis harder.

Nature vs. Nurture: The Debate on Psychological Development

Nurture We Minimum Driving Restrictions many analysis of an advertisement that are inherited either genetically nature or environmentally nurture. Either way, the Simon Lord Of The Flies Religion Analysis is that Mental Illness In Jails Power In The Agony And The Ecstasy happens becomes God's action, and determinism is closely Medea And Antigone Essay to divine action and God's omnipotence. Dictionary of World Philosophy. Feb Formulas What Is Maos Last Dancer Summary less emulsifier and more water are generally Power In The Agony And The Ecstasy. As far as the Power In The Agony And The Ecstasy of Ongoing Controversy: Nature Vs. Nurture is concerned, Dbq Essay On The Communist Party probabilities, at least, are Simon Lord Of The Flies Religion Analysis determined. Western culture Western world. How you are raised, way type of family do you come from? BTMS can also emulsify some silicones.

From the educational standpoint, children learn their fundamentals reading, writing, interaction. Since the environment can override some genetic foundations, it can be said that intellect does not rely just on genetics as its sole factor. For example, a student with a talent in mathematics genetics is likely to take more math courses in further education environment. So in this way, the talents in mathematics nature and the experience of doing well in the subject nurture work cooperatively. Genetics nature gives us the ground basics to comprehend what the environment nurture attempts to teach us.

This, however, does not remain constant throughout life. Through different life experiences and education, people gain and lose information in different ways due to their environment surroundings. Behavior is the response of an individual, group, or species to its environment, or anything that an organism does involve action and response to stimulation. Webster When discussing how heredity influences personality and behavior, the nature position attributes different characteristics to genes.

In heredity, the way genes are used also referred to as instincts and inherited traits. It is recognized that specific genes do influence personality and behavior. There are three main ways in which personality and behavior are affected by heredity. Firstly, human traits give specific abilities. An example of this is language. Humans converse and produce vocal sounds with the aid of the vocal cords, jaw, teeth, tongue, etc. Fingers are other examples of these traits. Fingers help handle and manipulate different tools. Without certain physiologies, the way humans work and think would not be as significant as it has evolved to be today. It is through the use of these so-called traits that behaviors begin to emerge.

For example, what you use your hands to do, and how you use your hands affects your behavior. Other physical traits affect the psychological aspects of a person. This means that the natural aspect determines gender. Analyzing American society, different roles begin to emerge. An example of this would be a teacher. An analysis showed that the majority of the teachers in the United States are female. When examined even more thoroughly, it is found that females tend to be more sensitive and more caring about other people. How the female teacher behaves with her students is instilled as part of her personality. This personality further leads to how she behaves with other people. A sensitive side shows a more caring and understanding type of behavior.

It is due to the effects of the sex that is, that females tend to be more caring that affects how they interact with others on a broad scale. Behavior and personality, in this case, go hand-in-hand. It is through behavior that one begins to develop unique personalities. Nature affects behavior indirectly in the sense that genes determine ones personality up to a certain extent. It is through this instilled personality that one behaves in different ways. Thus, the third way heredity nature influences personality and behavior is through our inherited composition. One technique to determine if this theory is true is case studies relating to twins identical and fraternal.

As discussed before, twins are an important factor of study for this controversy. The comparison of identical twins monozygotic twins and fraternal twins dizygotic twins. IQ, as discussed before, is very similar in the two types of twins because of their genes. In the same way, identical twins share very similar personalities and behaviors because of their identical genes. A single fertilized egg that splits into clones produces identical twins.

Dunn, Judy, Sisters and bothers, p An example of identical twins that display inherited behavioral patterns is Jerry Levey and Mark Newman. The two men met in a bar, and had grown up in different environments. It was soon found that they demonstrated behavioral similarities such as drinking the same beer, holding a bottle the same way held it with the little finger stretched beneath the bottom , having the same physical gestures, being involved in the same careers. Reunited Twins The twins displayed these characteristics even though they grew up in different environments.

This shows that it is true that heredity does play a role in determining personality. Through this study, it was found that heredity does play a role in determining personality. Another relationship that was discussed before was that between adopted children and their biological parents. This is an ongoing study, and so the results are not yet known. Nature is the idea that people are shaped primarily by genetic make-up, while nurture argues that our environmental influences and life experiences are the important factors in determining how the person is today Essentially, these two topics are extremely diverse and an immense amount of research is done to further explore and understand humans.

What is the Nature vs. Nurture Controversy? The controversy that has been debated for many years is whether or not development is primarily influenced by nature or by nurture Stantrock, Nature refers to the biological inheritance or an organism, while nurture is how the human responds to their individual environmental experiences. There is no doubt that both are contributing factors to human life development.

The nature side of the historic dispute says that we all come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the gene. On the other side Nurture, says that we are who we are today because of our experiences and interactions that have been built over many years. Identical twins illustrate how nature and nurture work together to develop further. A study has …show more content… With his focus being sexual in nature, that will be his residing side. Freud claims as adults we resolve conflicts between sources of pleasure at each individual stage and the demands of realty Santrock, One of his most influential critics or revisionist is Erik Erikson.

Theory influenced by Nurture I will argue that, while nature may provide some parameters, it is what we do within and around those parameters that makes a real difference to learners French, He disagrees with Freud in the sense that there are psychosocial stages, rather than psychosexual. The more successful they are resolving the crisis the healthier the development will be Santrock,. Show More. Nature Theory Nature Vs Nurture Words 6 Pages Nature versus Nurture is one of the oldest debates within psychology that has been going on for centuries. Read More. Nature Vs. Nuture Nature Vs Nurture Words 6 Pages Introduction: In the attempt to explain human behaviour, one of the oldest debates in psychology is the issue of nature versus nurture.

Leptin's Influences Stress: A Case Study Words 1 Pages Individuals traits like being optimistic, tough, traits others deem as desirable or undesirable influences stress because we will either go to great lengths to maintain or change ourselves to gain or keep acceptance from our peers sometimes sacrificing their health and if you have an optimistic mindset you will live a more light stressed and healthier life. Random quantum events "average out" in the limit of large numbers of particles where the laws of quantum mechanics asymptotically approach the laws of classical mechanics. That is, quantum effects rarely alter the predictions of classical mechanics , which are quite accurate albeit still not perfectly certain at larger scales.

The many-worlds interpretation accepts the linear causal sets of sequential events with adequate consistency yet also suggests constant forking of causal chains creating "multiple universes" to account for multiple outcomes from single events. Under this model causal sets are still "consistent" yet not exclusive to singular iterated outcomes. The interpretation side steps the exclusive retrospective causal chain problem of "could not have done otherwise" by suggesting "the other outcome does exist" in a set of parallel universe time streams that split off when the action occurred. This theory is sometimes described with the example of agent based choices but more involved models argue that recursive causal splitting occurs with all particle wave functions at play.

Although some of the above forms of determinism concern human behaviors and cognition , others frame themselves as an answer to the debate on nature and nurture. They will suggest that one factor will entirely determine behavior. As scientific understanding has grown, however, the strongest versions of these theories have been widely rejected as a single-cause fallacy. The concept of heritability has been helpful in making this distinction. Other 'deterministic' theories actually seek only to highlight the importance of a particular factor in predicting the future.

These theories often use the factor as a sort of guide or constraint on the future. They need not suppose that complete knowledge of that one factor would allow us to make perfect predictions. Structural determinism is the philosophical view that actions, events, and processes are predicated on and determined by structural factors. Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela popularised the notion, writing that a living system's general order is maintained via a circular process of ongoing self-referral, and thus its organisation and structure defines the changes it undergoes. On an individualistic level, what this means is that human beings as free and independent entities are triggered to react by external stimuli or change in circumstance.

However, their own internal state and existing physical and mental capacities determine their responses to those triggers. On a much broader societal level, structural determinists believe that larger issues in the society—especially those pertaining to minorities and subjugated communities—are predominantly assessed through existing structural conditions, making change of prevailing conditions difficult, and sometimes outright impossible. For example, the concept has been applied to the politics of race in the United States of America and other Western countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia , with structural determinists lamenting structural factors for the prevalence of racism in these countries.

For example, Louis Althusser , a structural Marxist , argues that the state, in its political, economic, and legal structures, reproduces the discourse of capitalism, in turn, allowing for the burgeoning of capitalistic structures. Proponents of the notion highlight the usefulness of structural determinism to study complicated issues related to race and gender, as it highlights often gilded structural conditions that block meaningful change.

Additionally, they also criticise the notion for overemphasising deterministic forces such as structure over the role of human agency and the ability of the people to act. These critics argue that politicians, academics, and social activists have the capability to bring about significant change despite stringent structural conditions. Philosophers have debated both the truth of determinism, and the truth of free will. This creates the four possible positions in the figure. Compatibilism refers to the view that free will is, in some sense, compatible with determinism.

The three incompatibilist positions deny this possibility. The hard incompatibilists hold that free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism, the libertarianists that determinism does not hold, and free will might exist, and the hard determinists that determinism does hold and free will does not exist. The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza was a determinist thinker, and argued that human freedom can be achieved through knowledge of the causes that determine our desire and affections. He defined human servitude as the state of bondage of anyone who is aware of their own desires, but ignorant of the causes that determined them. However, the free or virtuous person becomes capable, through reason and knowledge, to be genuinely free, even as they are being "determined".

For the Dutch philosopher, acting out of one's own internal necessity is genuine freedom while being driven by exterior determinations is akin to bondage. Spinoza's thoughts on human servitude and liberty are respectively detailed in the fourth [35] and fifth [36] volumes of his work Ethics. The standard argument against free will, according to philosopher J. Smart , focuses on the implications of determinism for free will. For if determinism is true, all actions are predicted and no one is assumed to be free; however, if determinism is false, all actions are presumed to be random and as such no one seems free because they have no part in controlling what happens.

Some determinists argue that materialism does not present a complete understanding of the universe, because while it can describe determinate interactions among material things, it ignores the minds or souls of conscious beings. Another topic of debate is the implication that determinism has on morality. Hard determinism is particularly criticized for seeming to make traditional moral judgments impossible. Some philosophers find this an acceptable conclusion. Philosopher and incompatibilist Peter van Inwagen introduces this thesis, when arguments that free will is required for moral judgments, as such: [40]. Determinism was developed by the Greek philosophers during the 7th and 6th centuries BCE by the Pre-socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Leucippus , later Aristotle , and mainly by the Stoics.

Mecca Chiesa notes that the probabilistic or selectionistic determinism of B. Skinner comprised a wholly separate conception of determinism that was not mechanistic at all. Mechanistic determinism assumes that every event has an unbroken chain of prior occurrences, but a selectionistic or probabilistic model does not. The writings of Epictetus as well as middle Platonist and early Christian thought were instrumental in this development. If thou sayest 'He knows', then it necessarily follows that [that] man is compelled to act as God knew beforehand he would act, otherwise God's knowledge would be imperfect.

The "billiard ball" hypothesis, a product of Newtonian physics, argues that once the initial conditions of the universe have been established, the rest of the history of the universe follows inevitably. If it were actually possible to have complete knowledge of physical matter and all of the laws governing that matter at any one time, then it would be theoretically possible to compute the time and place of every event that will ever occur Laplace's demon. In this sense, the basic particles of the universe operate in the same fashion as the rolling balls on a billiard table, moving and striking each other in predictable ways to produce predictable results. Whether or not it is all-encompassing in so doing, Newtonian mechanics deals only with caused events; for example, if an object begins in a known position and is hit dead on by an object with some known velocity, then it will be pushed straight toward another predictable point.

If it goes somewhere else, the Newtonians argue, one must question one's measurements of the original position of the object, the exact direction of the striking object, gravitational or other fields that were inadvertently ignored, etc. Then, they maintain, repeated experiments and improvements in accuracy will always bring one's observations closer to the theoretically predicted results. When dealing with situations on an ordinary human scale, Newtonian physics has been so enormously successful that it has no competition. But it fails spectacularly as velocities become some substantial fraction of the speed of light and when interactions at the atomic scale are studied.

Before the discovery of quantum effects and other challenges to Newtonian physics, "uncertainty" was always a term that applied to the accuracy of human knowledge about causes and effects, and not to the causes and effects themselves. Newtonian mechanics, as well as any following physical theories, are results of observations and experiments, and so they describe "how it all works" within a tolerance. However, old western scientists believed if there are any logical connections found between an observed cause and effect, there must be also some absolute natural laws behind.

Belief in perfect natural laws driving everything, instead of just describing what we should expect, led to searching for a set of universal simple laws that rule the world. This movement significantly encouraged deterministic views in Western philosophy, [50] as well as the related theological views of classical pantheism. The idea that the entire universe is a deterministic system has been articulated in both Eastern and non-Eastern religion, philosophy, and literature. In the I Ching and philosophical Taoism , the ebb and flow of favorable and unfavorable conditions suggests the path of least resistance is effortless see Wu wei.

In the philosophical schools of the Indian Subcontinent , the concept of karma deals with similar philosophical issues to the western concept of determinism. Karma is understood as a spiritual mechanism which causes the entire cycle of rebirth i. Most major religions originating in India hold this belief to some degree, most notably Hinduism , Jainism , Sikhism , and Buddhism. The views on the interaction of karma and free will are numerous, and diverge from each other greatly. For example, in Sikhism , god's grace, gained through worship, can erase one's karmic debts, a belief which reconciles the principle of karma with a monotheistic god one must freely choose to worship. The Jains hold an atomic view of reality, in which particles of karma form the fundamental microscopic building material of the universe.

Buddhist philosophy contains several concepts which some scholars describe as deterministic to various levels. However, the direct analysis of Buddhist metaphysics through the lens of determinism is difficult, due to the differences between European and Buddhist traditions of thought. One concept which is argued to support a hard determinism is the idea of dependent origination , which claims that all phenomena dharma are necessarily caused by some other phenomenon, which it can be said to be dependent on, like links in a massive chain. In other words, righteous or unrighteous actions in one life will necessarily cause good or bad responses in another.

Another Buddhist concept which many scholars perceive to be deterministic is the idea of non-self , or anatta. Some scholars argue that the concept of non-self necessarily disproves the ideas of free will and moral culpability. If there is no autonomous self, in this view, and all events are necessarily and unchangeably caused by others, then no type of autonomy can be said to exist, moral or otherwise. However, other scholars disagree, claiming that the Buddhist conception of the universe allows for a form of compatibilism. Buddhism perceives reality occurring on two different levels, the ultimate reality which can only be truly understood by the enlightened, and the illusory and false material reality. Therefore, Buddhism perceives free will as a notion belonging to material reality, while concepts like non-self and dependent origination belong to the ultimate reality; the transition between the two can be truly understood, Buddhists claim, by one who has attained enlightenment.

Although it was once thought by scientists that any indeterminism in quantum mechanics occurred at too small a scale to influence biological or neurological systems, there is indication that nervous systems are influenced by quantum indeterminism due to chaos theory. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity does not exist. As an illustration, the strategy board-games chess and Go have rigorous rules in which no information such as cards' face-values is hidden from either player and no random events such as dice-rolling happen within the game.

Yet, chess and especially Go with its extremely simple deterministic rules, can still have an extremely large number of unpredictable moves. When chess is simplified to 7 or fewer pieces, however, endgame tables are available that dictate which moves to play to achieve a perfect game. This implies that, given a less complex environment with the original 32 pieces reduced to 7 or fewer pieces , a perfectly predictable game of chess is possible. In this scenario, the winning player can announce that a checkmate will happen within a given number of moves, assuming a perfect defense by the losing player, or fewer moves if the defending player chooses sub-optimal moves as the game progresses into its inevitable, predicted conclusion.

By this analogy, it is suggested, the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate nearly infinite and practically unpredictable behavioural responses. In theory, if all these events could be accounted for, and there were a known way to evaluate these events, the seemingly unpredictable behaviour would become predictable. These philosophers make the distinction that causal determinism means that each step is determined by the step before and therefore allows sensory input from observational data to determine what conclusions the brain reaches, while fatalism in which the steps between do not connect an initial cause to the results would make it impossible for observational data to correct false hypotheses.

This is often combined with the argument that if the brain had fixed views and the arguments were mere after-constructs with no causal effect on the conclusions, science would have been impossible and the use of arguments would have been a meaningless waste of energy with no persuasive effect on brains with fixed views. Many mathematical models of physical systems are deterministic. This is true of most models involving differential equations notably, those measuring rate of change over time. Mathematical models that are not deterministic because they involve randomness are called stochastic. Because of sensitive dependence on initial conditions , some deterministic models may appear to behave non-deterministically; in such cases, a deterministic interpretation of the model may not be useful due to numerical instability and a finite amount of precision in measurement.

Such considerations can motivate the consideration of a stochastic model even though the underlying system is governed by deterministic equations. Since the beginning of the 20th century, quantum mechanics —the physics of the extremely small—has revealed previously concealed aspects of events. Before that, Newtonian physics —the physics of everyday life—dominated. Taken in isolation rather than as an approximation to quantum mechanics , Newtonian physics depicts a universe in which objects move in perfectly determined ways. At the scale where humans exist and interact with the universe, Newtonian mechanics remain useful, and make relatively accurate predictions e.

But whereas in theory, absolute knowledge of the forces accelerating a bullet would produce an absolutely accurate prediction of its path, modern quantum mechanics casts reasonable doubt on this main thesis of determinism. Quantum physics works differently in many ways from Newtonian physics. Physicist Aaron D. O'Connell explains that understanding our universe, at such small scales as atoms , requires a different logic than day-to-day life does.

O'Connell does not deny that it is all interconnected: the scale of human existence ultimately does emerge from the quantum scale. O'Connell argues that we must simply use different models and constructs when dealing with the quantum world. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is frequently confused with the observer effect. The uncertainty principle actually describes how precisely we may measure the position and momentum of a particle at the same time—if we increase the accuracy in measuring one quantity, we are forced to lose accuracy in measuring the other.

This is where statistical mechanics come into play, and where physicists begin to require rather unintuitive mental models: A particle's path simply cannot be exactly specified in its full quantum description. The probabilities discovered in quantum mechanics do nevertheless arise from measurement of the perceived path of the particle. As Stephen Hawking explains, the result is not traditional determinism, but rather determined probabilities. In fact, as far as prediction goes, the quantum development is at least as predictable as the classical motion, but the key is that it describes wave functions that cannot be easily expressed in ordinary language.

As far as the thesis of determinism is concerned, these probabilities, at least, are quite determined. These findings from quantum mechanics have found many applications , and allow us to build transistors and lasers. Put another way: personal computers, Blu-ray players and the Internet all work because humankind discovered the determined probabilities of the quantum world.

On the topic of predictable probabilities, the double-slit experiments are a popular example. Photons are fired one-by-one through a double-slit apparatus at a distant screen. They do not arrive at any single point, nor even the two points lined up with the slits the way it might be expected of bullets fired by a fixed gun at a distant target. Instead, the light arrives in varying concentrations at widely separated points, and the distribution of its collisions with the target can be calculated reliably. In that sense the behavior of light in this apparatus is deterministic, but there is no way to predict where in the resulting interference pattern any individual photon will make its contribution although, there may be ways to use weak measurement to acquire more information without violating the uncertainty principle.

Some including Albert Einstein have argued that the inability to predict any more than probabilities is simply due to ignorance. They argue that the course of the universe is absolutely determined, but that humans are screened from knowledge of the determinative factors. So, they say, it only appears that things proceed in a merely probabilistically determinative way. In actuality, they proceed in an absolutely deterministic way. John S. Bell criticized Einstein's work in his famous Bell's theorem , which proved that quantum mechanics can make statistical predictions that would be violated if local hidden variables really existed.