Nature vs Nurture

[Dodgee]

I thought I'd start a topic for people to share there thoughts on this subject.

Are we all a product of our environment? Our thoughts words and actions shaped by our upbringing.

Or are we pre - programmed? Born to be what we are regardless of outside influence?

The topic has been studied extensively and many experiments done on the subject so there piles of data to reference and link etc..

But this isn't so much about the science behind these things (although it is without doubt relevant) but more to get a feel for people's differing opinions on the matter.

Hopefully people will find it a topic of interest to discuss.

Thanx in advance for all input.

Cheers

[johnnyneuro]

Nature vs Nurture is the wrong question.

It's Nature AND Nurture, the two always go together. In other words, genetics confer a predisposition that environment acts upon.

An interesting aside is that genes are not that important to us as individuals. Afterall, we share more 99% of our DNA with chimps and other primates. Differences between individuals in a species are coded in the epigene. The mechanisms of the epigene were first discovered in the 1970s, but have only really taken off in the last few years. In doing so we have come to realise just how little is known about inherited traits.

[Hir]

I believe in reincarnation, I think your shaped to some extent when you are born. But the environment definitely has a huge influence on who you are. There are studies of separated twins which demonstrate the huge influence of environment on our personal growth, or lack of.

[Cambium]

Both, just like cannabis, or any plant for that matter. Plays out across all of life.

[Boojum]

I'm kinda with johnnyneuro on this, I don't think that nature vs nurture is a valid debate because I think that both play a part. I think that some things are genetically set in stone (that's mostly the physical/physiological stuff), that some things one can have a genetic predisposition for but whether or not they actually manifest is down to environmental factors (stuff like a predisposition to cancers, heart disease and perhaps even some mental illnesses like bipolar disporder) and some things are entirely down to environment. To say that everything is either/or, black or white seems to me to be oversimplifying to the point of nonsense.

[JimmyPage]

Read somewhere, that it's more appropriate to think of DNA as a recipe than a blueprint. Not sure if that helps, but it does rather weaken the "everything is determined" side of the argument.

[Boojum]

I'd say that template is perhaps a decent analogy for DNA, DNA acts as a template for protein synthesis, but just because it contains the information about how to make proteins doesn't necessarily mean it determines which proteins should be made and when all of the time (though it does a lot of the time), environmental factors play a part in that too.

[Dodgee]

Good comments folks.

I've recently been reading a little bit about Innatism and Nativism and it's got me thinking is all.

It's basically a variation on the nature/nurture discussion.

The idea being that some knowledge is inherited genetically/heraditory as is broadly accepted to be the case in many animals..

It's an interesting idea.

[Hir]

We must have species specific behaviour. It can be deceiving to try to understand ourselves by looking at the intrinsic behaviour of other species, but they all do have their own species specific behaviour, so must we. If a young one is 'abandoned' in nature and survives they know what they are about, all of the nurturing stuff is the past down information, and humans better accept that animals do this, from one generation to the next. Animals communicate in ways we are not willing to accept, but they know their own nature. We are animals living in a complex social arrangement that constantly, I would say, opposes our natural state.

(Like, for example, I got arrested for just being naked in what was I suppose a public place, but it was a beautiful summers night, full moon, no people. But it is an offence to be naked!]

Edited December 18, 2014 by Hir

[Guest bazzad9]

nature +nurture +genetics +epigenetics

all one big mix of varying degree's of the above

[Boojum]

As growers we know that genotype, phenotype and response to environmental factors all matter when growing herb, as they do in everything

[Road_Runner]

Genotype and Phenotype.

Same applies to humans.

RR

[FunkyJazzJesus]

the environment in which life seems to grow has a pattern to it, this pattern dictates how predictable vibrations/energy are, energy can simply wobble more or less, release more energy than not, this pattern also has a limitation within each stage of itself, we have come from animals which developed over a few billion years, we know of many lifeforms that matter has formed into, elements have evolved into more complicated components, we have proof of this, by our existence. After all of these interactions, their is a pre determermained element which has built up over time, the actions of all of that energy and how it has reacted has given us certain restrictions you could say, for instance the way our ancestors ate, what the food was, what the environment was like, what chemicals were in the environment, these things matter if they have reoccured in a similar manner repeatedly, this seems to relay information to our genes and keep it, if it's an event that keeps happening, if we change the stability of our environment it will seem that perhaps their are some negative reaction from our genes, maybe they can look "broken" but maybe it's because we need certain information that was always their, we have always lived around nature, if we take it away their is a deficiet of energy/information our bodies normally would have and therefore exhibit the lack of this information by the negative reaction, the same way as our bodies reaction to having a lack of oxygen causes cells to function in a way we call death, it is just a reaction to the information.

However because we're a collection of older information and that gives us some inherited necessities, we also have a memory that acts upon the information it recieves by first hand experiences, we act upon the information we sense, we assemble this information as memories, as evidence to our behaviours, how the world works, what i've eaten, what objects have smell, shapes, colours, every single seperation you can imagine between things is actually a the feeling of having a memory, memory gives the ability to compare everything thus showing its similarities and differences at the same time. We follow what our memory wants, we try to please our memory, if we have an experience that makes your body/brain feel terrible then you will generally memorise the idea of avoiding that or atleast memorise that you do not like it, so things from our past like needing to be around nature, can be experienced in many ways, we can have bad experiences of things that are a requirement for a better life, this is where memory can become very complicated, also the fact that our memory is collecting information and using it to have the feeling of consciousness by having a network of trillions of peices of information, this is something we're beholdant too, we can see easily with cannabis that if you give people certain memories, they have certain conclusions, like if you tell people its bad, they are generally then judging something they don't know based of someone elses information to actually have the idea of knowing, they then they have to jump to conclusions because if they actually looked at any real information (reality) with the false information on their memories, they will obviously see the displacement of their memory and see that they have not thought about then because we use our memories as evidence for our thoughts, feelings, experiences it becomes very hard to disregard the only source of information we feel of as being as close to what we can know, then people can deny thing, like words are tools to try and show what thoughts are happening or what memories are coming into your mind at any given time, we can say words and have completely different memories coming up in our mind but the words are the same, so therefore it can appear that there is this fluidity to words, but again if i say the word drug, terrorist, money, life, they all have limitations based on what experiences you've attatched to those words, people can hear the word drug and if they've experienced predominantly negative experiences while encountering the word, it's likely that's how they will naturally and automatically assume the word is to be felt. Memories can also change, we can see differences in the same thing, we can act upon something we've started to realise is actually a bad thing, therefore we can escape to some degree the predetermained nature of things, as also this experience must collect new information to add to the old, we can direct this old ship down different future routes with our current actions, genes are like water in this way, which ever way we choose to go, it will start to shape towards that way and after shaping in a direction for so long all's it means is, it's difficult to change direction later, so if we keep going the route of technology, we're actually choosing not to keep evolving our biology so much in the same direction as it would be going if we wanted to go in a way that would later, make the direction of evolution more towards creating changes and advancements in our brain by putting it to use, which i would disagree is what a technological march is going in the direction of, we make things for instance that cause cancer because in our past we didn't have all of this is in the environment so our body reacts, we see this as a negative thing, we see this as our bodies being weak in some way, we try to develop a way to have all these things that cause cancer but also want to be able to take away and stop cancer, this is counter productive, we don't really want to advance our bodies out of having cancer, it's just a way of our bodies saying something needs to change because the changes are causing death which means you have no choice of the changes. We have lived for billions of years through the other lifeforms, they have made it easy to act upon certain information in nature, we have lungs that transports oxygen through our body because plants were here first and they break oxygen out of water and they do that because we live on a planet filled with water, so it is hard to understand why we'd want to make a machine that does those same mechanisms but with less control but as humans would feel as if we know more because we would be able to say more words about something we've stripped down, torn apart, rebuilt in a lesser way than we would if we just stared at a tree, i feel we don't have much relationship to technology as far as we do to other things in nature, we're trying to develop and nurture our relationship but i think it just makes us react in a negative way, because technology requires us to create it, which means we take it from somewhere, and somewhere has already been evolving for billions of years to actually not just be inanimate anymore, invisable functions we cannot sense, our sense of memory gives us alot of senses we don't normally talk about, the sense of time, the sense of self, the sense of similarity, the sense of difference, like how we have discovered atoms, we cannot see what an atom actually looks like, as an atom i mean, this is something only our memory can sense, we can imagine things in different forms than what our physical senses are able to see and by using these both, gives us the knowledge of things that are beyond, feeling, smelling, seeing and hearing.

Edited December 19, 2014 by FunkyJazzJesus

[LouisLitt]

If your born in a stable it doesnt make you a horse

but be raised by chickens like that kid that got stuck in a chicken coop from birth and as far as your concerned Youd be a chicken!!

Nurture plays a much bigger role that nature as far as i can see, i can see a strong argument for nature not playing any part at all