Boy have my wife and I gone round and round on this one. [img]smile.gif[/img] I've always taken the Nurture position, partly because she is soo heavily Nature biased. She was adopted and spent her whole life feeling out of place in her upper middle income family... she later found out that her parents were from the, mmm.... "wrong side of the tracks" I guess you could say. Now her brother, also adopted, did very well in his new family... his parents were college students. For Jen this is all the proof she needs and she can get a bit irate when I point out that one example does not proof make [img]smile.gif[/img] (bit of a touchy subject for her).

She has gone through some VERY tough times to get where she is... even though she had every advantage as a child, she seemed bound and determined to make things hard on herself. Now to her she sees her brother and herself as having the same childhood, so what could explain the huge difference in the experiences of the two other than nature?

Personally I think there's too many things she doesn't know, like what were her first few months before she was adopted like... did she pick up an attachment disorder during that period from some sort of abuse (a VERY sensitive time in a childs life). Too many what-if's... but at the same time I can plainly see the influence of her parents stamped into her every action (mother especially). If she isn't doing something because it's the opposite of what her mother would want (rebelling), she is doing something EXACTLY the way her mother WOULD (usually when she's not thinking about it). The Nurture influence cannot be marginalized in the face of such overwhealming evidence (she doesn't want to hear that though... :D , "You're just like your mother" is a mortal insult)

this is a wonderful thread to read, most ppl are agreeing it's both, with varying differences. after veiwing my husbands family (from afar) i can say it's definately the individual that decides. my husband is #4 of 8, and the first to graduate highschool. the 5th dropped out and now the 6th has graduated. so two out of 6 have done what can be considered a social success. now the last two are still under 10 years old, what are their odds of acheiving a diploma? anyone good with odds please answer that.

I tend to think of it as physiology is all genetics. We can´t control our eye color no matter who our parents our for instance. Personality is all environment. Happiness isn´t genetics, it´s lots of hugs when you were young (yes there´s a study on that lol. If you received a lot of hugs as a child you will generally be happier and more positive :D ). Personality and physiology can of course interact. Who´s happy when they´re sick? Well besides from all you youngsters who miss school :D :D

The study on hugs relating to happiness certainly doesn't show personality is all about environment - the most it can say is that happiness isn't all about genetics. There's also research showing that things like depression are hereditary - again the most you can say is that there is a genetic influence.

Most people then are inclined to say well it's 50-50, or some combination anyway. This is a theory (not mine) I posted on pandemonium a while back on the same topic which I think is much more plausible than to argue for one or the other, and also more helpful if you're going to talk about nature/nurture wrt some practical or therapuetic sense.

So we are made up of our genes. However, unlike bacteria, human genes cannot be expressed automatically, ie they don't know when and how to express themselves. So they need a signal to tell them when to express themselves in order for development to proceed. In the womb, this is enabled by cell-cell contact, and the unterine environment, and most organs (except the brain and immune system) are fully developed at birth due to this interaction, with specific signals enabling gene expression at critical periods (ie if the genes are NOT stimulated during this period there won't be genetic expression and development in that area will be hindered or not happen at all).

Post-natally, the environment becomes the signal, and most of the development after this time is in the brain, which really determines who we are, and which is nowhere near fully developed at birth. Three factors have to be distinguished - functional potentiality, congenital predisposition, and behaviour, with the environment impacting on the first two to enable behaviour and development. Functional potentiality is a characteristic of the species - it determines whether or not an individual in the species will be able to do specific things, for example humans have the functional potential to speak, since we have brain areas and vocal apparatus that will enable speech, whereas other species do not. Congential predisposition is a characteristic of the individual, something you're born with that will determine whether you're good or bad at something, for example some people have a 'good ear'; they are born with the ability to hear small differences in pitch. But these two factors are useless unless the environment conditions enable them to result in behaviour. For example, a person may be born with functionally fine speech and language systems, and have no congential predispositions that will stop them from speaking, but if they're not exposed to speech from people around them, they will not learn to speak properly, and the longer they are lacking this stimulation, the worse their eventual speaking abilities will be.

Like i said: Equal portions of both. :D ;) ~hugs~

Nature is what we are, nurture is what we do with it. Both influence the final outcome.

Both.

children can be born with personality traits. my first was a happy baby to begin with. smiled almost immediately and was a satisfactoy audience for peek-a-boo. this one is now 6 weeks old and i've gotten one smile, yesterday. she scowls non-stop and only pays attention to me when i'm not paying it to her. i believe some personality traits a person is born with

Aelia Jusa:
Does your theory apply to *only* personality traits or to all genetic traits? I'd have to say I think some examples may fall outside your theory. On the physical side, some people exhibit conditions at a later date in life that, as far as we can tell, are not always environmentally induced: take adult diabetes for example (environmentally induced sometimes, but not others). On the psychological side I think schizophrenia would be an example - in some people it simply develops out of nowhere, genetically predisposed, IIRC.

I admit I'm not an expert on genetics and so on. And it's not 'my' theory ;) . However for the schizoprenia example, the theory covers that I think. When you say it's genetically predisposed, that's true (for some) but genes don't just express themselves - they can't. A lot of the stuff people think about genes is based on bacteria - gene expression is different for bacteria, the genes know how and when to express themselves without any signal. Human genes don't, they sit about in their double helix (lol :D ) and wait for a signal to tell them when to express themselves. So yes many disorders do have a genetic component, there's a lot of evidence of that from twin studies and so on (but again, not concrete 100% evidence, for example something like bipolar disorder has one of the highest genetic influence of psyhological disorders, but even that is only about 70%), but the genes have to express themselves from something. How do you *know* it develops out of nowhere? You can't possibly.