Looking through my psychology book, I come across multiple definitions, and the most important and widely discussed one is this…
“The Nature-Nurture controversy: Nature refers to an organism’s biological inheritance, nurture to environmental experiences. The “nature” proponents claim biological inheritance is the most important influence on development, the “nurture” proponents that environmental experiences are the most important.”
-John W. Santrock in his book
In short, the nature vs nurture argument simply asks the question: are we made by what our parents gave us, or are we made by the way we’re raised and the place we’re raised in? For example, our hair colour is predetermined by genetics, and is all according to what our parents have in their genetic code, and what their parents had, and so on. But choices we make later on in life, such as career choices or spiritual choices, are largely influenced by our environment around us.
Psychologists have been arguing against it for as long as psychology itself has been considered a science — John Watson came forward with the Tabula Rasa Theory in his time, and to this day we’re still not sure if we agree with him or not. Or maybe, it’s a mixture of both that makes us who we are?
Psychology itself has done various studies involving siblings, just to see if it really all can be boiled down to one thing. Twin Studies involve watching twins grow up in two completely different places — surely, if they’re genetically identical, then they’ll still grow up to be pretty much the same?
Unsurprisingly, not really. Twins separated at birth can grow up to still be very similar to each other with little habits and quirks, but most of the time, they tend to grow up completely different from each other. Allow me to explain.
Let’s imagine you had a twin sibling, identical to yourself in every genetic way possible. You look the same, and have the same physical capacity for strength, and the same capacity for intelligence (it is, after all, genetic). But you grow up in an environment rich with literature, technology, and such, while your twin grows up with a family that can’t afford a computer, let alone an education, and said twin is never given the capacity to develop the intelligence that they have potential for. If you ever meet up face to face, years later, you will have developed your intelligence to its potential because of the facilities you had available. Your twin, however, will probably appear to be not as smart as you.
That being said, there are instances where twins grow up in the exact same environment and still differ from each other. That’s more of a matter of identity, however, rather than genetics. Imagine being compared to someone who looks exactly like you 24/7. I’d want to be as different as possible after a while too.
The thing about the nature-nature argument, is that there is actually no sure fire way of testing it. Separating twins at birth, unless they’re orphaned and adopted by families in different parts of the world, is illegal, I’m pretty sure (even if it’s for a scientific purpose). And even then, the twins might never actually meet up if they’re separated by oceans. We can speculate and we can think about it, and theoretically it is totally possible that the nature-nurture argument can be debunked, but we can never actually be sure.
Personally, I believe that there are multiple factors that are present in our lives that are affected by both nature and nurture. Looks are obviously nature, and the ability to give affection comes from nurture. But there are various other things that become a part of us that are a mix of both — intelligence, mental disorders, health disorders, personality, even sexuality.
A great example, I believe, is BBC America’s Orphan Black, which brings up the argument quite prominently.
Imagine you are cloned and your clones grow up in different parts of the world from you. One grows up in London, one in Cambridge, one in Germany, one in Toronto, one in California, and so on. Who’s to say that you’ll all grow up to be the same person? According to the show, you most definitely won’t. You might all grow up to take on different jobs, different interests, different styles for hair and looks even. There is no way that, just because we have the same genetic make up to somebody else, then suddenly we will be the same as them. We will grow up with different parents, in parts of the world that are totally different from each other. Even if you grow up in the same location, who’s to say that you’ll still experience things the same way?
We are formed through our experiences, ultimately.
To answer the question I posed myself at the very top of this page — "Are we really products of our genetics?’ — I have only one thing to say: No, we’re not. Our genetics give us our appearances and our potential to be. It is how we grow up, who we grow up with, and where we grow up, that makes us who we are. It is not what was predetermined by our parents when they conceived us. Our environment is everything, and the way we perceive the experiences we have.