Nature vs. Nurture
I'll be completely unoriginal and tackle an age-old debate that really just goes around in circles. :) So what dictates our behaviour: our upbringing or our genes? There's a growing body of research which supports the idea that genes do dictate certain behaviours. For a good read, try "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker. And Pinker is very consistent with behaviour geneticists who have shown that about half of the variability in a trait like IQ is biological in origin.
Pinker’s debunking of the theories of the Blank Slate, the Nobel Savage and the Ghost in the Machine are quite fabulous. And I think one of the most important messages is that he is right to insist we can't hope to expand our circle of creative, life-affirming choices without truthfully identifying its factual, natural, and evolutionary constraints.
But I think there is problem with the reliance on the logic of evolutionary psychology. From a pragmatic point of view, even when there is evidence that fixed biological factors contribute to behaviour, all that the evidence can show is that an evolutionary explanation is plausible, not that it is either necessary or sufficient. And while we can be clear about the distinction between underlying evolutionary mechanisms (selfish genes) & proximate psychological mechanisms (overt motivations eg. envy, altruism, malice). Politics & education need to assess the degree of freedom evolution may leave to those mechanisms as we seek to influence them for the better. (http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate_reviews_file/)
Having said all that, therefore, our genetic background gives us more grounds for hope than despair. Our innate capacity for empathy, love and compassion, properly developed, usually can and does overcome our most disturbing selfish impulses. At the end of the day, I think we realise that we have to move beyond the simplistic dichotomy between heredity & environment and realised that all behaviour comes out of an interaction between the two. And also that “Nature is what we were put in this world to rise above.”
Pinker’s debunking of the theories of the Blank Slate, the Nobel Savage and the Ghost in the Machine are quite fabulous. And I think one of the most important messages is that he is right to insist we can't hope to expand our circle of creative, life-affirming choices without truthfully identifying its factual, natural, and evolutionary constraints.
But I think there is problem with the reliance on the logic of evolutionary psychology. From a pragmatic point of view, even when there is evidence that fixed biological factors contribute to behaviour, all that the evidence can show is that an evolutionary explanation is plausible, not that it is either necessary or sufficient. And while we can be clear about the distinction between underlying evolutionary mechanisms (selfish genes) & proximate psychological mechanisms (overt motivations eg. envy, altruism, malice). Politics & education need to assess the degree of freedom evolution may leave to those mechanisms as we seek to influence them for the better. (http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate_reviews_file/)
Having said all that, therefore, our genetic background gives us more grounds for hope than despair. Our innate capacity for empathy, love and compassion, properly developed, usually can and does overcome our most disturbing selfish impulses. At the end of the day, I think we realise that we have to move beyond the simplistic dichotomy between heredity & environment and realised that all behaviour comes out of an interaction between the two. And also that “Nature is what we were put in this world to rise above.”
posted by Food For Life at 4:21 PM
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