NATURE VERSUS NURTURE

Nature versus Nurture



Nature versus Nurture

Introduction

Ever since the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, many attempts have been made to apply the insights of evolutionary biology to the study of humans.

From Darwin's time on, the application and extension of evolutionary biology to the study of human nature has gone through changing tides of “biologization” and antibiological demarcations, resulting in the nature-nurture distinction and in the debate of how much in human behavior is innate or inherited-and thereby a possible candidate for a biological explanation, and how much is influenced by nurture-which can therefore only be explained by reference to cultural and intellectual influences (Aunger, 2000).

Nature and Nurture: Darwinism and the Nature of Nature

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection (Darwin, 1859) describes the world of organisms as a world of competition for survival and replication. Due to the high fertility rate of most populations, within a few generations the world would be overcrowded by most species, but in fact we observe in most cases an almost steady state of population. From that observation, Darwin infers that there must be strong competition for the resources organisms need; that is, not all individual organisms that are born are in fact able to survive and to reproduce (the struggle for existence). The next step is the fact that individuals of the same kind slightly differ in their qualities and that often certain varieties are inherited. In the struggle for existence, those qualities that lead to better survival chances (natural selection in a narrower sense) and higher chances of reproduction (sexual selection) will thereby necessarily be more often present in the next generation than maladaptive features or disadvantageous traces (Axelrod, 1981).

Nature Versus Nurture: The Case for Nurture

Before and still after the rise of sociobiology in the 1970s, two ways of dealing with the biological side of human nature in the social sciences and philosophical anthropology can be distinguished.

Humans are either, first, regarded as a very special animal that has been equipped by evolution with a very peculiar nature. Since this peculiar nature has been brought forward by the forces of evolution, biological knowledge can to some degree be fruitfully applied in the enterprise of understanding humans. Since, however, human nature differs distinctly from animal nature, there are in this view limits for this application, and there is a clear distinction between the realm of animals and the human sphere: Evolution itself has led to a creature that has left the realm of pure biological determination.

Second, against this cautious incorporation of biological knowledge in the humanities, a strong antibiological tendency can be found in the doctrine of the antiuniversalistic character of human cultures and in the idea of the autonomy of cultural processes, an idea originally already put forward by Alfred Kroeber in his theory of the “superorganic” nature of cultural processes (Carruthers, 2005). Cultural processes that shape human behavior are considered to be not at all biologically determined, and they might even be independent from ...