Nature versus Nurture

Which is dominant? It probably depends on the exact scenario at hand, just what variables we're talking about.

Quoting Terrapin Station

Which is dominant? It probably depends on the exact scenario at hand, just what variables we're talking about.

I am thinking of life outcomes and personality outcomes and not including unavoidable genetic illness.

For example you could say someones choice to smoke cigarettes caused them to of die of lung cancer

Or you could say someones genes predisposed them to nicotine addiction.

Or you could say stresses from family and society drove them to smoke.

Or you could say it was a combination of all that.

You might say someone has a gene that increases their tendency to aggression but you might also say this gene is easily controlled by nurture and that a genes bad characteristic will only manifest in bad circumstances or can be redirected productively.

I am compelled by the seed example because it seems to me that genes definitely require an environment and nurture and these can be very variable.

If you view a plant as invasive and damaging you can alter its environment to kill it or if a plant is seems as valuable you can improve its environs.

I am not trivializing the role of genes but it seems to me they rely to heavily on environment to dominate environment unless you consider genes as part of the environment in some sense.

I think the genetic stance is far more deterministic personally even if nurture and societal influences can be hard to overcome.

How do you differentiate what is nurtured from the inside of what does the nurturing?

Nature nutures as much by the dominance of man as by the state of nature (whatever that is).

Man's dominance over nature is fundamentally subordinate to nature. But nature doesn't dominate anything, it selects for. Nature has selected for the adaption that dominates (makes a domain).

There is a sick brutality to nurturing (a form of dominance) which resembles the sick brutality of blind selection (shit happens in the absence of controlled selection).

Both man and nature select for one another rather than dominate one another.

This is a false dichotomy, read up on epigenetics.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I favor nurture over nature if I was being totally honest. This might illustrate the reason. if you have two genetically identical seeds and you plant one in good soil and water it it will flourish but if its twin is planted in bad soil and infrequently watered it will be poorly and struggle.

And give the same amount of water and soil to different seeds and the difference in genes will cause different outcomes in how they grow. It seems like an equal influence from both.

Note: Instinctive behaviors (genetic knowledge) are a product of nature. Learned behaviors (learned knowledge) are a product of nurture.

Quoting MindForged

This is a false dichotomy, read up on epigenetics.

It is a dichotomy that still exists in discussion and literature.

Quoting Harry Hindu

And give the same amount of water and soil to different seeds and the difference in genes will cause different outcomes in how they grow. It seems like an equal influence from both

The way you get to discover potential genetic causes is by trying to give two things an identical environment. However the environment equals nurture.

I am obviously not denying people don't have different genetic outcomes but these occur embedded in environment/nurture.

It seems the genes only act after they are in an environment and being nurtured.

One thing I do not believe like some thinkers argue is that genes determine a child's outcomes. Also one thing about human society is that it is deeply artificial. So our genes are not a created to negotiate modern society. Only in a truly primitive state can our genes beside to be fulfilling a truly biological niche in my opinion.

Quoting Nils Loc

Man's dominance over nature is fundamentally subordinate to nature. But nature doesn't dominate anything, it selects for. Nature has selected for the adaption that dominates (makes a domain).

I think the position that nature dominates is a deterministic perspective. Indeed many thinkers now claim not to believe in free will. So these people would attribute everything to either blind physical forces or mechanical forces.

However if you view nature as the same as nurture this is not a mechanical view of nature and there is no problem. However I think human dominance is problematic and could destroy nature by man made climate change, pollution or nuclear weapons.

It is ironic how much we dominate the rest of nature considering some people hold it controls us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDKDuvhXNME

Genes have the primary influence on intelligence.

Quoting MindForged

This is a false dichotomy, read up on epigenetics.

Yep. Anyone who thinks there is an agonistic relation between nature and nurture is uninformed about both.

Quoting Walter Pound

Genes have the primary influence on intelligence.

A heart exists because of genes however the environment a heart is in determines its health.

Intelligence is an abstract trait that manifests itself through actions. Being intelligent in it self does not guarantee life out comes which is the claim by some pro genetics theorists.

Quoting StreetlightX

Yep. Anyone who thinks there is an agonistic relation between nature and nurture is uninformed about both.

I have noticed that most people who work with children and families and in psychology or social work can see how important nurture is through experience without depending on abstraction.

I think the weight you put on nature and nurture is important for policy and values and interventions. If someone has a genetic disability then clearly this is going to be a purely medical issue but with dysfunctional families and social policy I think we really need to distinguish the main influence.

I think the idea that nature and nurture play an equal rule is vague and unhelpful really it is a common slogan but if you look further into the literature or polemics you start to see a clear bias.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I think the idea that nature and nurture play an equal rule is vague

I didn't say they play an equal role. I said the whole debate is largely meaningless.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

It is a dichotomy that still exists in discussion and literature.

The point is it's a meaningless idea now. Epigenetics is in many ways the culmination of this age old topic. Nature and nurture are far from these easily separable things that we can then say play the determinative role in the traits people have. I've seen a lot of this lately, especially in very telling areas (this isn't directed at you) where people go on about "People Don't Like it When You Discuss IQ Research" (Sam Harris even does this crap) and they are just twenty something years out of date. Like, here's a fairly common expression of more recent understandings of this topic (nature vs nurtur, not IQ stuff, lol):

Since the 16th century, when the terms “nature” and “nurture” first came into use, many people have spent ample time debating which is more important, but these discussions have more often led to ideological cul-de-sacs rather than pinnacles of insight.
[...]
As psychologist David S. Moore explains in his newest book, The Developing Genome, this burgeoning field reveals that what counts is not what genes you have so much as what your genes are doing. And what your genes are doing is influenced by the ever-changing environment they’re in. Factors like stress, nutrition, and exposure to toxins all play a role in how genes are expressed—essentially which genes are turned on or off. Unlike the static conception of nature or nurture, epigenetic research demonstrates how genes and environments continuously interact to produce characteristics throughout a lifetime.

http://thepsychreport.com/books/the-end-of-nature-versus-nurture/

One of my favourite images from Evelyn Fox Keller's The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture:

Reply to Andrew4Handel I think the nurture VS nature axis is very little useful, and false even; since nature and nurture aren´t really separate worlds but two aspects of the same phenomenon. For example, you can say that people in West Africa usually show phenotypes with very dark skin, strong bodies, high fertility in women...but these traits, with a strong genetic make-up, are in turn the consequence of cultural and experiential phenomena: These tribes are like that because historically chose to live in certain places and through certain means, and if their ancestors had decided to develop a civilization their bodies would change a lot. Notice in this respect, how Indian populations in South America are gaining stature in respect to their grandparents, because they are eating differently and living differently; also their fertility is affected. In Spain, men have gained 12.5 cms in 100 years, which is remarkable in my opinion, and it affects how genes for being tall are selected by women (less, as there are many more tall men). There is no "nature" traits that are not conditioned by cultural choices, and there are no "nurture" elements that are free from genetic influence. Plus 99% of DNA in our bodies was never in our mum´s egg or our dad´s spermatozoid, but it is in our bacteria and other creatures in us.

Quoting StreetlightX

I didn't say they play an equal role. I said the whole debate is largely meaningless.

I think it is far from irrelevant when it comes down to helping people flourish, family interventions psychology, mental health, criminality and so on.

If something is being caused by nurture it is important to discover this and change and improve the environment.

Every theory in academia about humans and society can be influential in policy and have a major impact on people and society. It is a battle ground for influence. So for example Robert Plomin and Bryan Caplan economist believe parenting has little impact on education and life achievement. And Plomin,a behavioral geneticists, thinks you can examine someones genes as soon as they are conceived and predict outcomes and give them a polygenic score.

The problem is analyzing and selecting which data is most important and how it is being interpreted. This process will be influenced by biases.

Nevertheless I think even if you believe someones intelligence is inflexible I think policies should encourage everyone to flourish and not be based on an interpretation of someones polygenic score.

Reply to Andrew4Handel Sure, there are reasons to find 'causes' for things and attempt to intervene; one wonders what good it does to place those causes into little pre-marked boxes labelled 'nature' and 'nurture'. If anything, such an artificial parsing of phenomena would prejudice an investigation, not facilitate it. The world doesn't care about whatever concocted categories we'd like to make for it.

Quoting MindForged

The point is it's a meaningless idea now.

I do not think it is meaningless to look at someones life or circumstance and work out how much is caused by their ingrained personality and how much developed through nurture and is being sustained by environment.

Here is an example of the dichotomy still alive:

https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/parenting-doesnt-matter-or-not-as-much-as-you-think/

In this debate the Two female panelists who think parenting matters work with families and in therapy and the two men who have the opposing view are theorists working in university.

Quoting StreetlightX

Sure, there are reasons to find 'causes' for things and attempt to intervene; one wonders what good it does to place those causes into little pre-marked boxes labelled 'nature' and 'nurture'. If anything, such an artificial parsing of phenomena would be little more than a hindrance to investigation, not a spur.

I have never heard of a non medical intervention into someones life or family where genes have been mentioned. You do not have to explicitly say nurture but it is clear that most interventions outside of genetic illnesses are nurture interventions and the intervention is not based on any knowledge of the peoples involved genetic traits.

I think social change needs to come about by changing environments and values and anything else is fatalistic.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I have never heard of a non medical intervention into someones life or family where genes have been mentioned. You do not have to explicitly say nurture but it is clear that most interventions outside of genetic illnesses are nurture interventions and the intervention is not based on any knowledge of the peoples involved genetic traits.

This is not an argument. This is barely an anecdote. Nothing doing.

Reply to StreetlightX

The point is that it is one thing to claim something is genetic or nature and another thing to have isolated and treated a cause. Maybe there are strong genetic causes to family dysfunction?

Possibly. In that case it would be hard to alter dynamics but we would alter our approach to the situation.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

The point is that it is one thing to claim something is genetic or nature and another thing to have isolated and treated a cause. Maybe there are strong genetic causes to family dysfunction?

Maybe they are. But gene expression is far more complex than you make it out to be - in fact, it's not at all the case that simply saying something is 'genetic' automatically situates it on the side of 'nature'. Both MindForged and DiegoT have already mentioned just how implicated the very idea of 'genes' are with the cultural and social environment in which they belong. It simply an obscene simplification to align genes with nature to begin with. It is no accident in fact that some authors have called into question the very idea of a gene as a causal agent unto itself, precisely given the complexity of their expression. Again, this attempt to put things into little boxes labelled 'nature' and 'nature' is nothing but oversimplification that would make for worse policy crafting, not better.

Reply to StreetlightX

I have highlighted the circumstances where ascertaining nurture problems is important which is when intervening in problem lives and dysfunction. You seem to be talking only from an abstract theoretical perspective.

It is not trivial or an obscene simplification to highlight when bad nurture is causing life problems for someone. I think examples such as skin color, height and diet are trivial compared to the outcomes of peoples lives in general. Not every genetic feature is relevant to someones quality of life.

So for example where skin color can be a problem is in a racist social context but in general it is not an inherent problem.

Just because there are numerous influences on someones life it does not mean you cannot isolate plausible specific causes.

Racism can cause mental health problems. One attempt to tackle racism is to criminalize and prosecute racist actions. This is an attempt to tackle racism as a social problem regardless of whether we might have a biological tendency to racism. This is what I was referring to earlier concerning the actual nature of interventions.

Even if you think the nature-nurture dichotomy is a fallacy it is still alive and well and influential and I personally have a preference for nurture interventions over deterministic naturalistic perspectives.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I have highlighted the circumstances where ascertaining nurture problems is important which is when intervening in problem lives and dysfunction. You seem to be talking only from an abstract theoretical perspective.

The only thing abstract here is the artificial attempt to lump causes into fake boxes labelled 'nature' and 'nurture'. Nothing I said implied that we cannot isolate causes. What I object to is the secondary, derivative, and unnecessary effort to qualify them by some under-considered metaphysical distinction that does nothing but impair investigation into such causes. Everyone knows what it is to find the cause of something; discerning weather that cause belongs to 'nature' or 'nurture' is just the kind of 'abstract theoreticism' that does more to obfuscate than illuminate.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

The way you get to discover potential genetic causes is by trying to give two things an identical environment. However the environment equals nurture.

No. The environment is Nature. Isn't another name for the environment, "Mother Nature" and "Natural"?

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I am obviously not denying people don't have different genetic outcomes but these occur embedded in environment/nurture.

Again, it's environment/nature.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

It seems the genes only act after they are in an environment and being nurtured.

It seems to me that the environment has nothing to act on if genes didn't make copies of themselves with the potential for "mistakes", or mutations (nature). It's called, NATURAL selection, not Nurturing selection.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

One thing I do not believe like some thinkers argue is that genes determine a child's outcomes. Also one thing about human society is that it is deeply artificial. So our genes are not a created to negotiate modern society. Only in a truly primitive state can our genes beside to be fulfilling a truly biological niche in my opinion.

Then raising a dog and a human together in the same environment would result in equal outcomes (nurture). That obviously isn't the case. One's nature is a powerful influence on how you can be nurtured and how you can behave or respond to the environment.

Also, human society is natural. If humans are natural outcomes of natural processes, then our skyscrapers are as natural as a beehive. "Artificial" is a term that people who still think that humans are separate from nature use.

Nature and Nurture. It's time to think of them on equal footing. They are one and the same.

Quoting Harry Hindu

Again, it's environment/nature.

In the nature nurture debate I believe they are referring to human nature not how nature effects humans.

It usually refers to innate personal nature/inheritance versus nurture/rearing. Behavioral genetics is about genetic correlations as opposed environment. Dawkins Selfish genes is about inherited traits with primitive motivations and Plomin whom I mentioned earlier is concerned with polygenetic scores and deterministic genetic outcomes.
Stephen Pinker's Blank Slate is concerned with proving we are born with a specific quite deterministic nature.

I think it is a chicken and egg thing with genes but the theory is that genes arose in a primeval soup not that genes preexisted their environment which to me does not favor genes.

Important social policy and psychological theory hinges on this. The issue is that people who favor genes or personality as most powerful advocate different policies, ideologies and therapies but people who advocate nurture and environment are more likely to advocate changing societal and family dynamics.

I do think genes are important but they are important in context of nurture. For example you raise your child based on what is best for his or her genes or simply preferences and dispositions. But people like Plomin and Caplan will argue that parental intervention has limited effect which is implausible. One notable statistic is that people most often share their parents religion.

The archaic "nature" literally meant birth ("it natures" which is like our use of it nutures). That which births, nurtures. Take this as a psychological truth if not fact. Some mothers destroy their babies which might be arguably a type of nurture belonging to an indifferent nature, that of Darwininan selection which is not deterministic. Those that survive survive, those that die die.

Look at the word, nascent: "just coming into existence and beginning to display signs of future potential."

Once you recognize the signs of future potential you put a child in an environment (group or mentor) that helps him/her to flourish. The recognition of a child's potential is the problematic part. Our monoculture can be somewhat preferential and brutual ( like a mother or father) selecting for some traits and being indifferent to others. For an adult it is like following their instincts and intuitions (which has become a nightmare of psychological tension for so many people). Signs of future potential can be hidden by maladaptive behavior but that in-itself is a sign that the organism needs a new type of nurturing environment.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

In the nature nurture debate I believe they are referring to human nature not how nature effects humans.

But humans are part of nature - the environment - your social environment.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

One thing I do not believe like some thinkers argue is that genes determine a child's outcomes. Also one thing about human society is that it is deeply artificial. So our genes are not a created to negotiate modern society. Only in a truly primitive state can our genes beside to be fulfilling a truly biological niche in my opinion.

I forgot to mention this last time. Modern society is just a new environment that a species has to adapt to. That is what species have been doing since life came about. Environments change. Species adapt or die out. Sometimes as species can wreck havoc on their own environment and threaten their own existence, but species are part of the environment just as an earthquake or a hurricane is. Predators are part of the environment (natural selection) that puts pressure on their prey to adapt. Humans aren't any different. The environment is chaotic. Sometimes there are times of stability, but that is a result of our subjective view of time.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I think it is a chicken and egg thing with genes but the theory is that genes arose in a primeval soup not that genes preexisted their environment which to me does not favor genes.

The chicken and egg thing isn't a paradox any more. We now know that the egg came before the chicken. Egg-laying is a method of procreating that was adopted by the chicken from their ancestors.

Genes just didn't just pop into existence. They evolved from complex organic molecular interactions (that soup that your talking about). Nature and nurture are the same. You are arguing a false dichotomy.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

Important social policy and psychological theory hinges on this. The issue is that people who favor genes or personality as most powerful advocate different policies, ideologies and therapies but people who advocate nurture and environment are more likely to advocate changing societal and family dynamics.

I do think genes are important but they are important in context of nurture. For example you raise your child based on what is best for his or her genes or simply preferences and dispositions. But people like Plomin and Caplan will argue that parental intervention has limited effect which is implausible. One notable statistic is that people most often share their parents religion.

If the idea is that we should have equal outcomes for all, you can't achieve that by just taking children from their parents and letting the State raise them as one. You'd have to genetically engineer humans AND let the State raise them as one.

Mutations are what has driven the long-term existence of life. If genes didn't have the potential to make changes when they copy themselves, then life couldn't evolve and would have died out long ago. Mutations are what allow us to adapt to those environmental changes.

Quoting Harry Hindu

Nature and nurture are the same. You are arguing a false dichotomy.

Maybe I should clarify myself here. By nurture I mean parenting and some social factors. The term nature is problematic in some sense because it does not refer to anything is specific but is like a concept someone times contrasted with the artificial or supernatural.

So in a trivial way everything is nature but in the context of these debates nature equals biology and genes and sometimes ecological environment (as opposed to artificial environs)

On the other hand nurturing is quite well defend as upbringing of offspring and it can refer to the environment you deliberately create or expose the offspring to.

Nature as in life in general on this planet is not really concerned with outcomes and many species go extinct and use a wide variety of strategies to achieve goals with mixed results and fluctuating systems. I am not arguing that we should make children in harmony with nature and their genes but that nurture can help the best traits of a person flourish.

i am not optimistic either way but I think nurture and parental responsibility is very important.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

Maybe I should clarify myself here. By nurture I mean parenting and some social factors. The term nature is problematic in some sense because it does not refer to anything is specific but is like a concept someone times contrasted with the artificial or supernatural.

I seems like you've lost interest in reading other people's post and are set on just restating your claim over and over.

I already said that the artificial/supernatural vs. natural is a false dichotomy. You're using antiquated terms based on an incorrect idea that humans are separate from nature.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

So in a trivial way everything is nature but in the context of these debates nature equals biology and genes and sometimes ecological environment (as opposed to artificial environs)

I'm not interested in discussing debates. I'm interested in discussing reality. Reality is nature. Nature is reality. If it makes you feel better to use the term "reality" then that's fine. "Reality" is what makes you "you". You're making it more difficult on yourself by dividing reality into "nature" and "nurture".

Quoting Andrew4Handel

On the other hand nurturing is quite well defend as upbringing of offspring and it can refer to the environment you deliberately create or expose the offspring to.

Nature as in life in general on this planet is not really concerned with outcomes and many species go extinct and use a wide variety of strategies to achieve goals with mixed results and fluctuating systems. I am not arguing that we should make children in harmony with nature and their genes but that nurture can help the best traits of a person flourish.

i am not optimistic either way but I think nurture and parental responsibility is very important.

I think it is important too. I often say that most of our problems are the result of bad, or a lack of, parenting. But nature is just as important. Mental disorders can be a daunting, sometimes impossible, hurdle for any good parent to overcome.

Quoting Harry Hindu

I'm not interested in discussing debates. I'm interested in discussing reality. Reality is nature. Nature is reality. If it makes you feel better to use the term "reality" then that's fine. "Reality" is what makes you "you". You're making it more difficult on yourself by dividing reality into "nature" and "nurture".

But I think in reality some things are genes and "nature" and somethings are nurture/environment in a real sense.

Take cancer for example. Angelina Jolie had both her breast removed because she had an increased risk of breast cancer in her family.

However some people have developed cancer through the workplace being exposed to toxic substances like asbestos or lead. So it wouldn't make sense for Jolie to have a double mastectomy if her relatives died in a work related incident.

The debates people have are based on evidence.

Homosexuality is an interesting example (and sexuality in general) because people want to know what causes it whether it is genetic, occurs in the womb, or develops.

If it was found to be genetic in some sense and this was proven beyond a doubt it would be interesting to see how religious anti gay people reacted.

I find the idea people could be reared to be gay via parenting and propaganda highly implausible and as a gay person who grew up in a strictly religious home I see no evidence of this happening to me.

I have read claims (by homophobes no doubt) that the reason some gay men had bad relationships is because the boys sexuality was alienating the father from the fatherly duties he had a preference for. Some people blame a child's personality for the parents rejection of it.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

One thing I do not believe like some thinkers argue is that genes determine a child's outcomes.

Why do you think that genes, which direct the formation and operation of a person, would not determine outcomes? Granted, genes are not the only operator in plant and animal life; there is also the environment which can be quite aversive--shortage of food, too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, death, etc.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

Also one thing about human society is that it is deeply artificial.

At first glance, human society is perversely artificial. Some aspects of society continue to be perverse even after considerable observation, but a lot of "society" is just the result of our particular animal natures. For instance, naked apes that we are, we require shelter from the environment. We lost the big teeth of our ancient forebears, so we do better with cooked food and manageable fruits and vegetables. Shelter and cooking alone -- never mind high fashion and television -- are "artificial" -- depending on artifice.

Quoting Bitter Crank

Why do you think that genes, which direct the formation and operation of a person, would not determine outcomes?

By outcomes here I am not referring to hair color or intelligence etc.

An outcome can be shaped or influenced by too many factors including chance.

I think there is a valid discussion to be had about weighing up the contributions of nature and nurture in various areas including education and child rearing.

Reply to Andrew4Handel I wasn't thinking of traits like hair color either. I was thinking in terms of "life outcomes". How adaptable we are, how volatile, how insightful, how diligent, how much risk we are comfortable with, how aggressive we are, and so on are all controlled by genes to some extent. Comfort with risk taking is something that genes probably control; whether we actually take risks, when, and where we take them, are probably conditioned by experience.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

But I think in reality some things are genes and "nature" and somethings are nurture/environment in a real sense.

Take cancer for example. Angelina Jolie had both her breast removed because she had an increased risk of breast cancer in her family.

However some people have developed cancer through the workplace being exposed to toxic substances like asbestos or lead. So it wouldn't make sense for Jolie to have a double mastectomy if her relatives died in a work related incident.

The debates people have are based on evidence.

But your parents are bags of genes and how they behave (raise you) is a result of their genes and their own upbringing (adopting the behavioral norms of ancestral bags of genes). It's a process so tightly woven that it's difficult to say that it's two separate things.

Your Angelina Jolie example and comparison is one that supports my argument, not yours. It's both nature and nurture.

"If the idea is that we should have equal outcomes for all, you can't achieve that by just taking children from their parents and letting the State raise them as one. You'd have to genetically engineer humans AND let the State raise them as one" Yes Harry Hindu, and we still need to add a third factor to make true equality possible: a never-ending repression to prevent differentiation and specialization to emerge naturally, as it is a mathematical quality of our universe that when elements interact they tend to form systems of differentiated parts.
So equality as totalitarian (socialist, fascist, feminist, islamist...) movements understand it, requires a strong and endless violence on the DNA, minds, and behaviour of people.

In a computer program to develop new designs via I.A. algorithms, what is nature and what is nurture? For example, if I need a new design for a car tyre that is the most efficient in rainy and hot conditions, is "nature" or "nurture" that did the job?

Quoting Harry Hindu

But your parents are bags of genes and how they behave (raise you) is a result of their genes and their own upbringing (adopting the behavioral norms of ancestral bags of genes). It's a process so tightly woven that it's difficult to say that it's two separate things.

Your Angelina Jolie example and comparison is one that supports my argument, not yours. It's both nature and nurture.

I don't see how My Joile example supports your point and I definitely do not think it is a tightly woven process. Some cancers are only caused because of an environmental factor and some are only caused because of a genetic disposition.

I think your reference to genes is vague and you can't actually specify any particular gene complex that you can claim caused a behavior or outcome.

Quoting DiegoT

If the idea is that we should have equal outcomes for all

I have not put forward this idea. My comment was that genes can fully manifest their attributes in ideal environments.
For example if you drop a Lion in the middle of the Atlantic then it's genes will prove useless but in the Savannah it can show its skills. In this sense genes can easily be undermined by environment and nurture.

So before you claim to have proved genes are responsible for intelligence or outcomes then you need to create an equal playing field to validate this claim.

My other argument is that we could help people to be the best them, whatever that is, otherwise we are going to be forcing very different people with different abilities into a damaging rigid paradigm. This could mean something like a completely different education system for different types of people.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I don't see how My Joile example supports your point and I definitely do not think it is a tightly woven process. Some cancers are only caused because of an environmental factor and some are only caused because of a genetic disposition.

I think your reference to genes is vague and you can't actually specify any particular gene complex that you can claim caused a behavior or outcome.

The Jolie example supports my argument because there are two reasons (nature and nurture) why someone would want to remove their breasts. You basically showed that both can be the case, but ignored one over the other for no reason. You basically made a circular argument. You gave no evidence why one is more important than the other. Remember, my argument isn't that nature is more powerful than nurture. My argument is that they are equal. I think you are arguing against a position that I haven't taken. You want to see it as black and white. I see it as one color - grey.

Reply to Harry Hindu

I was saying Angelina would only want to remove her breasts if she thought the cancer was genetic and not otherwise.

The overall point is that there are genetic conditions that cannot be avoided and lots of environmental factors that can be avoided. But I am failing to see where this blend of nature and nurture is arising in specific cases.

What I am seeking to show is that you can make a valid distinction between nature and nurture without it been an oversimplification. I am skeptical about genetic or nature explanations unless they are robust and specific not just hand waving.

I think you would have to be a determinist to believe nature could not be overcome. Also I believe people are biased even when they play lip service to the both are equal stance. For example with Stephen Pinker who really wants to prove that evolution and nature have some inescapable deterministic effects.

Remember what Richard Dawkins said?

"Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.

They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”"

Reply to Andrew4Handel it´s not possible that some cancers are entirely environmental. You need a human being to develop the cancer, and the human being is shaped by genes. Genes that are working differently to those of ratopín rasurado (sorry, I don´t know the name in English), that prevent any cancer from developing at all in these animals. Likewise, there are no entirely genetic cancers either; the cancer needs food, oxigen, water to grow and that comes from the environment. The distinction inherited/acquired is a practical one, to help doctors focus on possible remedies, but it´s not an accurate description of what really happens biologically.

Reply to Bitter Crank
It seems to me that humans have a vast repertoire of behaviour and potential. Whereas animals have a limited repertoire of behaviour and potential.

So there is a huge range of possible outcomes for humans and environments they live in.So I think it is much harder to predict outcomes or find general causal factors. Also people can be channeled in numerous directions to "flourish" in different ways. So I don't think tendencies like introversion, aggression etc can be that determinate.

Maybe being shy will prevent you becoming president or Prime Minister? Maybe not? Maybe aggression will get you a top job as a ruthless manager or maybe it will land you in prison? Maybe diligence will make you hard working and popular with your boss but unpopular with your more relaxed work mates.

Reply to Andrew4Handel Dawkins is not a good source for this discussion in particular. He probably thinks that milk conspires with coffee to enter our bodies every morning and create the kind of metabolisms that will want more milk to be produced.

Quoting DiegoT

it´s not possible that some cancers are entirely environmental.

I am not saying that I am saying they are primarily caused by something in the environment and can be avoided by not being exposed to that environment. It is trivially true that the the body and nature are involved in everything but not causally deterministic.

Another example is comparing physics and economics. It is trivially true that coins are considered to be made of atoms but atoms play no role in economic theory. You could class money as an emergent property which behaves differently then the basic behaviour considered in atomic theory.

Psychology could be described as an emergent property in this way.

Ugh, Dawkins set the public understanding of biology back by at least a decade or two, and as a result we get threads like these.

Reply to Andrew4Handel coins do not play any factor in economy either...I think you mean money, which is a thought, and thoughts are conditioned by biology and culture. "If it was found to be genetic in some sense and this was proven beyond a doubt it would be interesting to see how religious anti gay people reacted". Well, they would react similar to how they react when it is proved that violence or gluttony is in our biological nature. They´d say: but we also have a spiritual (or cultural) nature that must play a role, or we are just chimps.

No one should ever cite Dawkins in debates like this. The mere existence of epigenetics just nullifies his old selfish gene nonsense. If I were him I'd be be bitter about it and all the impressive stuff coming out of the field, so I definitely don't put much stock on his word on this topic.

Quoting DiegoT

Well, they would react similar to how they react when it is proved that violence or gluttony is in our biological nature. They´d say: but we also have a spiritual (or cultural) nature that must play a role, or we are just chimps.

I do not think they are willing to accept God would create homosexuality. If it was proven genetic

. I think some gay people including myself here would be reassured if it was purely genetic because of the slurs we have faced.

I do think religious people that opposes something that is genetic and biological and immutable will tie themselves up in knots be contradictory and look horrible (which is what happens)

If there was anyway it could be shown we could be nurtured to homosexual they would jump on that.

Nevertheless I don't think you can get an is fro an ought so whether a behaviors is nature, nurture or a combination how we respond to that or create values from it is subjective values.

Reply to MindForged Yes, people like Robert Plomin and Richard Haier should be cited instead since they specialize in the field of genetics and focus on intelligence.

Reply to MindForged

Robert Plomin has come out with a book arguing similar this year, 2018.

https://theconversation.com/blueprint-by-robert-plomin-latest-intelligence-genetics-book-could-be-a-gift-for-far-right-104499

"DNA is the major systemic force, the blueprint, that makes us who we are. The implications for our lives – for parenting, education and society – are enormous."

"On the science, Plomin has previously expressed his support for Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s racial premises in their notorious 1994 book The Bell Curve "

Reply to Andrew4Handel Yes, it is a great book.

Reply to Andrew4Handel I'm sorry, but no. Plomin's book makes it clear that there are no policy recommendations made on the basis of his work, which is very contrary to Murray's questionable nonsense which does make direct, racially directed policy suggestions. Further, this seems to entirely ignore epigenetics. Genetic expression is just flatly in contradiction to the idea of genetic determinism. Genes (which themselves aren't well understood) interact with the environment. Quoting David Moore from "The Developing Gnome":

So, although I will talk about genes repeatedly in this book, it is only because there is no other convenient way to communicate about contemporary ideas in molecular biology. And when I refer to gene, I will be talking about a segment or segments of DNA containing sequence information that is used to help construct a protein (or some other product that performs a biological function). But it is worth remembering that contemporary biologists do not mean any one thing when they talk about “genes”; the gene remains a fundamentally hypothetical concept to this day. The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds—things that are analogous to “blueprints” or “recipes”—is undoubedtly false. Instead, DNA segments often contain information that is ambiguous, and that must be edited or arranged in context-dependent ways before it can be used.

The idea that you'll reduce intelligence down to some set of genes in isolation is silly. Their akin to a template, a passive one.

Quoting MindForged

I'm sorry, but no. Plomin's book makes it clear that there are no policy recommendations made on the basis of his work, which is very contrary to Murray's questionable nonsense which does make direct, racially directed policy suggestions

Andrew never made the claim that Prof. Plomin was in favor of Prof. Murray's policy recommendations. Quoting MindForged

The idea that you'll reduce intelligence down to some set of genes in isolation is silly. Their akin to a template, a passive one.

Prof. Plomin doesn't disagree with you there either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lev8dGnxvdw&t=71s

Reply to Andrew4Handel Reply to StreetlightX homosexual behaviours are observed in many species; however, homosexuality as a personal identity is far from universal. Homosexual tendencies are shaped by culture; just like the pitch of our voice, the way we walk or how we deal with conflicts. So there are many different ways of being homosexual, just like there different ways of being hetero. XXI homosexual culture has many anti-social values: a great hostility to tradition; body cult; hyper-sexualization and hedonism; vanity; irresponsibility; intolerance.[/b] It is natural that religious people are disgusted by the gay culture, as their lives are guided by opposite values. LGTB and gay activists have been widening the gap between traditional families and homosexuals for decades, because they are informed by a socialist, confrontational view of the social world. The good place of gays in Western societies, relies on political power too much and on being acceptable by common people too little. Gays as a community need to be more open-minded, and change their values and then Christians and Jews will accept them a lot better. Stop using the word homophobia for a start. Don´tdemand respect, earn it by finding and promoting better role models for the young gays.

Reply to Andrew4Handel You’re not related to Greg Handel of Wisconsin, are you?

Reply to Andrew4Handel No one should think they can read the human genome and predict behavior. As far as I know, very few specific short passages of the genome have been linked to any particular behavior. The evidence, or suggestion if you will, that some personality features are linked to genes comes from longitudinal observations of others and self. The way in which genetics would be linked would be by comparing the genomes and personalities of many people. (This is the way genetic causation for certain cancers have been found.)

Another way is by animal models. I would cite the silver fox experiment in Russia. Silver fox are bred for their fur and are generally hostile towards their captors/caretakers. By selecting out animals that displayed ever so slightly less hostility and breeding them, they eventually produced a variety of silver fox that was much more dog-like; accepting physical contact (petting, for instance). The fox also lost their nice fur features and their ears became less erect. The key to these changes turned out to be cortisol levels: they were consistently much lower in the fox that had been bred for reduced hostility. This breeding program required many generations, and went on for something like 60 years.

I agree with you that the range and repertoire of behavior in humans makes drawing connections between genes and personality very difficult. The same goes for intelligence, memory, disease response to adverse environmental factors, and so forth.

Reply to Bitter Crank the fox study is interesting as it is part of a range of studies, leading to the conclusion that a limited and identified set of genes are important to create domesticated phenotypes across different species, including humans. Humans, foxes and dogs all share certain adjustments in their gene expression to tame them and make them more social and female-like. Humans, dogs, cats and other species are all part of a single process that lead to the domestication of these different species that gathered around hominid settlements for food and safety. Bonobos too are thought to be undergoing a process of self-domestication.

Quoting Walter Pound

Andrew never made the claim that Prof. Plomin was in favor of Prof. Murray's policy recommendations.

If that's the case then perhaps he shouldn't quote these two passages right after another because that's exactly what the following seemed to imply:

DNA is the major systemic force, the blueprint, that makes us who we are. The implications for our lives – for parenting, education and society – are enormous."

"On the science, Plomin has previously expressed his support for Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s racial premises in their notorious 1994 book The Bell Curve "

Quoting Walter Pound

Prof. Plomin doesn't disagree with you there either.

I didn't say I disagreed with Plomin - I've only skimmed his most recent book, but it's not anywhere near as certain as he seems to suggest - but with what Andrew seemed to be saying.

Quoting Noah Te Stroete

You’re not related to Greg Handel of Wisconsin, are you?

No I am a big fan of The Composer G F Handel.

It would seem as though there is a bit of a knowledge gap in this thread. I am happy to answer any questions about genes. Behaviour and genes are definitely linked in a very straightforward way. In addition, the nature vs nurture is no longer a debate, we now know some things about the genome and it will only continue to grow with time. One of the simplest ways it can control behaviour is through the regulation of hormone levels. So I think that the best way to think about the human is not to make the human all that different from its mammalian cousins. A more distant relative would be something like E. coli. Essentially the nuclei of our cells are tiny machines that print instructions which allow other tiny machines to make proteins and other complicated molecules. The DNA encodes all of this stuff. In addition to storing the recipes including the recipe to replicate itself, the genes can be turned off and on in the sense of this instruction printing feature as a result of outside stimulus or stress.

Reply to MarcRousseau
What issue is that supposed to resolve?

-

"The exponential fall in genome sequencing costs led to the use of GWAS studies which could simultaneously examine all candidate-genes in larger samples than the original finding, where the candidate-gene hits were found to almost always be false positives and only 2-6% replicate;[7][8][9][10][11][12] in the specific case of intelligence candidate-gene hits, only 1 candidate-gene hit replicated,[13] the top 25 schizophrenia candidate-genes were no more associated with schizophrenia than chance,[14][15] and of 15 neuroimaging hits, none did.[16] The editorial board of Behavior Genetics noted, in setting more stringent requirements for candidate-gene publications, that "the literature on candidate gene associations is full of reports that have not stood up to rigorous replication...it now seems likely that many of the published findings of the last decade are wrong or misleading and have not contributed to real advances in knowledge".[17] Other researchers have characterized the literature as having "yielded an infinitude of publications with very few consistent replications" and called for a phase out of candidate-gene studies in favor of polygenic scores.[18]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_heritability_problem

Quoting Andrew4Handel

What I am seeking to show is that you can make a valid distinction between nature and nurture without it been an oversimplification.

It's the opposite. Your distinction is an unnecessary complication.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I think you would have to be a determinism to believe nature could not be overcome.

I am a determinist. I also believe that nature and nurture are one. So that makes me also believe that nurture can't be overcome either. You can't overcome BOTH your genetics or your upbringing. It makes you who you are. If not, you'd be something else.

Thanks for sharing.

Reply to Harry Hindu Nature relies on environment to express phenotypes. In the human species, like in no other species including crows, Nature saved a good deal of pre-set guidelines that is info and occupies space in our DNA, by trusting the environment to complete our designs. The another great advantage, is that in that way the final product will be more adjusted to the actual, ever-changing ecological and social demands of a nomad and socially complex species. The pitfall is that what the snake gets from its blueprints, we need to take from the social womb; if the social womb is sick or poor, we do not mature well. We do not even learn to talk if the environment fails; that doesn´t happen to snakes, which hiss all the same whatever happens around them.

Quoting DiegoT

Nature relies on environment to express phenotypes. In the human species, like in no other species including crows, Nature saved a good deal of pre-set guidelines that is info and occupies space in our DNA, by trusting the environment to complete our designs.

Nature doesn't have goals, like trusting the environment to complete our designs. You imply that nature has a mind.

As I already told Andrew, genes are part of the environment. The other members of your species are made up bags of genes. These bags of genes are part of your social environment.

Quoting DiegoT

The another great advantage, is that in that way the final product will be more adjusted to the actual, ever-changing ecological and social demands of a nomad and socially complex species. The pitfall is that what the snake gets from its blueprints, we need to take from the social womb; if the social womb is sick or poor, we do not mature well. We do not even learn to talk if the environment fails; that doesn´t happen to snakes, which hiss all the same whatever happens around them.

This is a great example of how both nature and nurture (the environment) have equal influence on what we are now.

Reply to Harry Hindu when feminists say that sex is a determined by society, they are right; but they aren´t right in assuming that is a bad thing. It is legitimate and necessary that the social milieu plays a part in the design development, or the biological basis is thwarted. So it´s not society VS "true natural self", or society VS whatever-I-want-to-be; the truth is that your inheritance is both genetic and cultural, and you need both to mature healthily. Feminists end up rejecting both natures, because they are crazy.

Quoting DiegoT

when feminists say that sex is a determined by society, they are right;

No, they aren't. Sex is determined by biology. The expected behavior of each sex is determined by society. No matter how hard they try, society can't make a man have a menstrual cycle, get pregnant, and have babies.

Reply to Harry Hindu well yes, sexual identity is determined by biology, but behaviour needs society

Reply to DiegoT no, behavior needs biology. Can you have behavior without biology? Being a social animal is part of your biology.

Sounds like many of you playing the semantic game of knocking down scare crows.

Quoting DiegoT

when feminists say that sex is a determined by society, they are right; but they aren´t right in assuming that is a bad thing

Yes but only because it is often defined as such in an awkward way. This principle is not uniform and some species can switch sexes (not just genders). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_hermaphroditism

Male behaviours and female behaviours are strongly linked to hormonal levels. So if you take a disease like polycystic ovarian syndrome, this becomes quite clear.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pcos/symptoms-causes/syc-20353439

Think about this...
1 - these women are often hairy in places they should not be.
2 - they are usually fat.
3 - they often do not have the ability to have children
4 - they can lose hair in places that women do not usually lose hair (balding))

How much do these women feel like the women that they see on the cover of magazines? Do they feel like what society tells them a woman is? So for every sex-specific hormone, run a plot of the hormone levels for men and women and look at the two distributions. I would imagine that you will get two offset normal looking distributions with different parameters. For many of these very potent hormones, you will have overlap. Those areas of overlap are areas where you would expect disparities between how someone perceives themselves with respect to how society perceives their sex/gender.

So you know how in the DSM 5, everything became a "spectrum disorder". The exact same principles can apply to sexes and genders. They have finally realized (by "they", I mean the medical profession; psychiatry mostly) that they cannot box people in such silly ways.

Feminism: they can say all they want but they do not dictate biology. I do not think it is possible to defend the position that society does not dictate gender stereotypes.

Quoting Harry Hindu

As I already told Andrew, genes are part of the environment. The other members of your species are made up bags of genes. These bags of genes are part of your social environment.

I agree with this position. I believe that the best way to view what "life" is, is to view it as entities that can reproduce and protect genetic upgrades. "anti-life" would be viruses. Everything else is just one thing... "life". bacteria is life, humans are life.. the divisions do not make sense to me. It would be bizarre to not think of all life on the planet just being self protecting genetic code.

Quoting Harry Hindu

This is a great example of how both nature and nurture (the environment) have equal influence on what we are now.

This claim would require quite a fair bit of justification (with data) to support. You would first need to come up with a metric to measure the relative contributions to even begin to utter the words which you have here spoken. If you were to be able to defend this statement in a peer-reviewed manner, you would probably win a Nobel Prize.

Quoting MarcRousseau

This claim would require quite a fair bit of justification (with data) to support. You would first need to come up with a metric to measure the relative contributions to even begin to utter the words which you have here spoken. If you were to be able to defend this statement in a peer-reviewed manner, you would probably win a Nobel Prize.

My point in the quote above that, was that nature and nurture are the same. If they are the same thing, then it makes no sense to say that there must be some distinction between them that we can measure.

Nature doesn't have goals, like trusting the environment to complete our designs. You imply that nature has a mind.: I don´t imply anything Harry Hindu, I used a personal language as biologists do to. Because we all know beforhand that nature has no mind (so far as we know); it´s like saying: "these clouds are promising" when you expect them to produce rain.

"anti-life" would be viruses" Well not at all MarcRousseau; viruses are very very important for life in all scales. They are as important as bacteria and I´m not sure that life could even happen without them. Consider for example, how the DNA molecule in each of your cells is a former macro-virus that infected ancient unicellular forms.

Hello Mr. Hindu,

Quoting Harry Hindu

My point in the quote above that, was that nature and nurture are the same. If they are the same thing, then it makes no sense to say that there must be some distinction between them that we can measure.

I do not think nature and nurture are the same at all. Humans, being a subset of "life", are both. If you think about Nature vs Nurture in terms of gene expression, this distinction between the two becomes rather hard to ignore. Nature is essentially what you were born with.. so it is precisely the genetic code included in your DNA from the point that you were born.

Nurture is the sum total of all physiological interactions with the environment. This includes every single thought you have had and all the food you have eaten, everything you have witnessed, how well you sleep, etc... everything. The nurture will increase or decrease gene expression according to need, provided that system which deals with the thing you are doing, has the capacity to make adjustments.

Nature and Nurture are distinct in the same sense that Yin and Yang in the taijitu symbol are separate: opposite forces within the same active system. Both nature and nurture are made of information, interacting with information. Nature is Yang, and Nurture is Yin. if you push dough through a tool to make spaghetti, the push of the dough is yang and the container with holes it has to go through to make the filaments is yin. Our genetic self is dough, our vital energy is the push, and our environment is the device with the shaping holes.

We can should think of DNA, bodies, personalities as static objects, but as phenomena that happen in time. This approach makes easier to understand how nature and nurture are the same process.

I add this picture for ilustration of the Yin Yang dynamics:

https://i.blogs.es/fff198/marcato/original.jpg

Reply to MarcRousseau If this were the case, then we could raise elephants in a human society and they would become human. This obviously isn't what will happen, because an elephant's nature is such that it can't behave like a human. It is designed differently. Its nature is such that it prevents it from being affected the same way humans are by our social environment. In other words we would have equal outcomes for everyone, despite their genetic differences if they were simply raised in the same environment. This isn't the case. Nature is just as important as nurturing in the how an individual develops.

Reply to DiegoT I like this idea. Thanks.

I think that just creating a child makes you ultimately responsible for that child. I think there is a lot parents can do before and after a child is born that influences outcomes.

It seems very easy to influence outcomes and I cannot see how genes can prevent an outcome being influenced.
The below video outlines some of the problems with behavioral genetics and twin studies.
For example identical twins separated at birth still shared the womb for 9 months and could be equally influenced by the mother biochemistry and her moods and so on.

I think part of this issue comes down to free will and volition so that we are not just driven by natural forces but can intervene.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0WZx7lUOrY

Reply to Harry Hindu

Hello Mr. Hindu,

This is not the case at all about genetics. You should think about what I have said a bit. The DNA we have and the DNA the elephants have is different. To be able to behave like us, they would need the capacity to make large brains as well as to make to have the right vocal chords etc... I do not think you can think of these things as simply as you are making it out to be. These processes are quite complicated actually and need to be understood from a biological point of view before attempting to reason about them in philosophical manner.

The twin studies you have mentioned are a really interesting example of nurture and nature playing together. These twins should have identical DNA and yet they do not look exactly alike. What is the difference? usually nurture.

I wish you all good luck in your quest for knowledge.