nature vs. nurture

Post Reply New Topic

Which one is more agreeable to you?

Nature and nurture both play a role. Some people over-emphasize nature. Other people over-emphasize nurture.

People Who Over-Emphasize Nature:

- Fascists
- Eugenicists
- Racists

People Who Over-Emphasize Nurture:

- Radfems
- Fundamentalists
- Leninists

I think that people are naturally prone to "sexual deviancy", but elitist propaganda generates racism, nationalism and all that other nonsense.

They're both lacking.

We generally don't hold people too accountable until they hit at least 18 years and a lot of the most important future-setting stuff happens before that point. There seems to be ample evidence that much of what does lead crazy behavior is genetic/evolutionary drives but set and setting, as well as what kinds of value epiphanies a person has had in their lives, has a lot to do with how healthy their coping mechanisms are or in how pro-social a way that they're able to work their problems out.

As far as criminal justice is concerned I really like what Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky have to say on this. I'd agree with them that determinism (ie. no free will) is most likely what we have, it's complex but at the end of the day of a person's stresses overwhelm them it's a physical rather than nonphysical/metaphysical event, and the reference Sam often goes back to is Charles Whitman's brain tumor - effectively that for everyone in which this breaks down it may not be a brain tumor but things as hard bound, both in genetics and likely even more so in the way their life unfolded and how they were handled by those around them, that their odds of ending up where they were amounted to 100%. In that case criminal justice shouldn't be punitive but practical, ie. separate those who have a proclivity to harm others, figure out what's going wrong, and see if it can be remedied. There also has to be some way of vetting them or progressing them back into civic society that doesn't involve them being unhireable, miserable, and turning right back to crime or whatever else to make up for the stigma.

As of right now our culture seems to be built too much on domination or hierarchy to even want other people to be functional past giving it lip-service for casting blame. If someone fails in a criminal way, fails a drug test, can't hack work requirements as presented - awesome, more for me! We can't go on like that without significant blowback, and we have to understand how much pain that causes and the long-term consequences well enough not to be as excited about our own short term gains at the expense of others.

Nature vs nurture in its pure either or form is long outdated.

Most of our traits are influenced by both and it's not easy to measure which is accountable for how many percent. How easily someone can be influenced by which external factor can also depend on their genetics which just makes the whole thing more interwoven. Among the two options in the poll I tend more towards the nature one because I really don't think that entertainment, art, porn and music are the most important external factors to shape an individual.

Agree with Darth about how idealogues of both right and left emphasize nature, or ditto of both right and left will emphase nurture, for their own agendas.

The hot button religious and poltical issues make the old nature vs nurture question almost impossible to even approach.

I doubt that we here on WP can answer the age old question on this thread. Lol!

To some extent one can put the hot button issues aside an approach the question of whether certain human traits are nature or environment. But there are constant surprises on both sides. Traits there were long assumed to be genetically inherited turn out to be heavily environment influenced. And traits (like aptitudes) that were long assumed to be a matter of character turn out to be the hardwired differences that seem to be in part genetically coded. But even "inheritability" is itself influenced by environment. We now know about "epigenetics" ( genes that get turned on by environmental factors, but that remain dormant in the absence of those factors).

Someone once said that nature is environmental influence stored up over time (ie evolution through natural selection). And so the question is really "short term nurture vs long term nurture".

Both are equally disagreeable.

Nurture isn't irrelevant, but nature definitely trumps it

I went with nature, but only because I had to choose one. I believe it's more or less both.
I have to ask, though: what does sexual deviancy entail? Pedophilia? That's a no brainer. But there are still many people who hold repulsive hatred of gay people, calling them deviants.

Wait hold on, aren't you just as much to blame for your actions if not more if they stem from stuff that happened to you rather then something as uncontrollable as your genes?

Nurture IS Nature.