Define nature vs nurture within psychology

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What can be said about nature Vs nurture? How can they be compared and defined within psychology?

-- Sarah-Louise Mckinnon (sweetjosie84@hotmail.com), January 28, 2002

Answers

This question has come up before. Please see the older questions on the Forum. To copy what I wrote at http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=007pL6,

"Which is more important: the top side of your bread or the bottom side? Same for nature and nurture -- you can't have one without the other. They do not add. They combine in a wide variety of complicated ways."

In fact, sometimes it is even hard to tell which is which. Consider an organism whose gametes (sex cells) have been altered by exposure to raditation: to that organism the effects are environmental (i.e., nurture) but to the offspiring that is produced from those gametes, they are genetic (nature).

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), January 28, 2002.


The nature vs Nurture debate has been going on for an extreme amount of time, the main problem with a question like this is that any one person at any one time can, of course, do both.

-- Richard Wait (rich_wait@hotmail.com), April 18, 2002.

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