What We Know for Sure: Revisiting the Nature-Nurture Debate
Sarah Geronimo.
She’s one of the highest-paid Filipino artists of all time—a triple threat who can star in a blockbuster movie, belt out a sultry ballad, and set the stage on fire with her dance moves.
Esquire Magazine estimated her net worth to be somewhere between P500M to P3B.
But the singer of the once-viral “Tala” is probably the last person in your mind when talking about “Nature Versus Nurture.”
So what does the lady have to do with the debate?
Only this: Was Sarah destined to be the Sarah Geronimo we know today (nature), meaning she’s had it in her all along or was it the unflinching doggedness, the endless hours of practice and training (nurture) that catapulted her to being one of the brightest stars in show business?
Here, we talk about what we’ve learned about that question.
What We Know For Sure
It is both.
When the English polymath Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin) first coined the term “nature versus nurture” in the mid-1800s, thinkers and scientists immediately started gravitating towards two different camps. Not that Galton was the first to consider the question, (it was all the rage during the time of Aristotle), but he was able to capture the issues in one catchy, smart alliteration.
Ever since then, the suggested duality invited hardened positions.
Naturalists were of the persuasion that while some training can be beneficial, for the most part, the most important aspects of a person, his traits and abilities are genetically determined. Hereditary factors dictated one’s appearance and personality characteristics.
Social biologist Owen Wilson, in writing his book “On Human Nature,” argued that social behavior is biologically determined—that genes and the forces of evolution make the person.
This line of thinking was carried to the extreme by the eugenics movement, which aimed to selectively breed desirable physical characteristics in humans.
On the other hand, behaviorists credited the environment, experiences, culture, training, and personal relationships to the making of the person. These factors potently impact the person that comes out the other end of the tunnel.
John Watson, one of the foremost proponents of the behaviorist school, became famous for his “Twelve infants” quote when he said:
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take anyone at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors...”
The same J. Watson was also controversial with his “Little Albert Experiments” where he sought to show classical conditioning in humans, proving that behavior was a byproduct of one’s environment.
So was Wilson or Watson right?
Research through the decades suggests that they both are. Biological imperatives do have an impact on behavior. But so does the social environment. Training matters
It is now generally accepted that nature and nurture interact to both shape the person. Leaving out one for the other compromises our understanding of the complex mechanisms involved.
And with this acceptance, the debate has shifted into, “Which of the two has a bigger impact on the person?”
It is more nuanced.
Once again, thinkers ran to their respective fields and ideological camps.
The “nature” camp insisted that genes were responsible for practically everything we see. “Nature wins,” they’ll say.
As more and more of the human DNA was uncovered, and after 50 years of twin studies, the conclusion was that the differences and similarities between people can be sufficiently explained by the differences and similarities in their genes.
Not to be outdone, the “nurture” camp, also with their own overwhelming evidence, is saying, “As a practical matter, it’s nurture.”
So, which is which? Which of the two contributes greater to the kind of people we become?
The problem may be in the way the issue has been framed by Galton almost 200 years ago. First, it sets the whole thing up as an either/or issue and it took many decades to untangle that knot and realize that, “Hmmm, maybe it can be both.”
Second, the clever alliteration is a potent reduction of what is a plethora of issues. It hides the fact that it can cover a host of subjects. When we speak of “Nature vs. Nurture,” what are we really talking about?
Are we talking about physical characteristics, are we talking of personality, of which there are a-thousand-and-one different facets?
Yes, they both matter. But it may very well be that they hold different weights depending on the specific issue at hand. One set of specific interactions might prove true for issues like eye color, weight, and height, and a different consideration may be needed for subjects like intelligence, or athletic ability. Depending on the subject, one may take precedence over the other.
(The two camps might hold overwhelming evidence for their case because they are talking about different things—all under the guise of the general tag “nature vs. nurture.”)
A more nuanced approach is needed. Tempting might it be to put things in reductionist boxes, a piecemeal approach might lead to better insights. Instead of saying, “Nature is stronger” or “Nurture is more potent,” one might say, “When it comes to X, nature/nurture is proving to be a stronger indicator.”
That doesn’t solve the problem necessarily, (as evidenced by this study and that study on childhood obesity), but it puts more clarity on the specific topics we are considering.
Exciting New Research
Exciting insights are coming out of the field of epigenetics.
For the longest time, people, especially on one side of the debate, have been asking, “Are we at the mercy of our genes?”
Are our destiny and diseases coded into our DNA and there’s pretty much nothing we can do about it?
The emerging field of epigenetics may have something to say about this. Epigenetics is concerned with how the cells manage gene expression without any alteration to the DNA sequence itself.
So, how about them genes?
Well, epigenetic research says that you can actually turn genes “ON” and “OFF.” This means that you may have the gene for a certain character trait or disease, but if that gene is turned “off,” the trait or disease will not manifest.
This implies that human beings are not helpless vessels of genetic material, that they can do something about it. And so you might ask, “What is this compelling force that helps determine the expression or non-expression of genes?” What turns genes on and off?
Well, the behaviorist camp will be happy to know: It’s the environment! Whether this is the environment of individual cells or the social environment a person is in, exposure to some factors will very largely determine whether and which genes are manifested or not.
Experiments on agouti mice show that genetically similar rats will come out vastly different depending on the nutrient “environment” they are exposed to in utero. One rat will grow up to be brown, obese, prone to diabetes and the other will not. Their difference will be so stark you would doubt that they were genetically similar, to begin with.
The “nurture” camp will certainly celebrate the seeming tilting of wisdom in their favor.
But not so fast, because the same field of epigenetics is also discovering that human life experiences can leave a chemical “mark” in one’s genes and can be passed down to the next generations. So questions like, “Are you what your mother ate?” are really not out of the realm of possibility.
Studies even suggest the existence of epigenetic inheritance of trauma, where people whose parents experienced severe trauma, like those who lived through the American Civil War, the Holocaust, or the Dutch famine, have been epigenetically and biologically impacted by the experience, and that this negative effect can be passed further to the grandchildren generation.
The science is still young and more research is still needed to firmly establish truths, but what is being made fundamentally even clearer is what we have known decades ago, that it is both nature and nurture.
We may even have given ourselves a hard time when we try to separate the two because they may very well be the two sides of the same coin, and it may have been better to approach the issues with questions like “What is the nature of nurture?” or “How can we nurture nature?”
So, as to our girl Sarah Geronimo, she is what is she is because of the awesome talent she inherently has, and the countless hours of practice and training she has gone through the years.
So yeah, it’s both.
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