Editing Nature versus nurture (section)

==History of debate==

According to ''[[Records of the Grand Historian]]'' (94 BC) by [[Sima Qian]], during [[Chen Sheng Wu Guang uprising]] in 209 B.C., [[Chen Sheng]] asked the rhetorical question as a call to war: "Are kings, generals, and ministers merely born into their kind?"<ref>{{cite book |author1=中山大学中文系. 《古汉语基础知识》编写组 |title=古汉语基础知识 |date=1979 |publisher=广东人民出版社 |page=107 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FnQyAAAAMAAJ&q=%E7%8E%8B%E4%BE%AF%E5%B0%87%E7%9B%B8%E5%AF%A7%E6%9C%89%E7%A8%AE%E4%B9%8E+%E9%81%BA%E5%82%B3 |access-date=2020-09-12 |language=zh}}</ref> ({{lang-zh|王侯將相寧有種乎}}).<ref>{{cite wikisource
 |author=Sima Qian
 |author-link=Sima Qian
 |title=Records of the Grand Historian
 |wslink=zh:史記/卷048
 |volume=048}}</ref> Though Chen was obviously negative to the question, the phrase has often been cited as an early quest into the nature versus nurture problem.<ref>李盟编, DNA密码,中国言实出版社, 2012.04,第133页</ref>

[[John Locke]]'s ''[[An Essay Concerning Human Understanding]]'' (1690) is often cited as the foundational document of the ''[[Tabula rasa|blank slate]]'' view. In the ''Essay'', Locke specifically criticizes [[René Descartes]]'s claim of an [[innate idea]] of [[God]] that is universal to humanity. Locke's view was harshly criticized in his own time. [[Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury]], complained that by denying the possibility of any innate ideas, Locke "threw all order and virtue out of the world," leading to total [[moral relativism]]. By the 19th century, the predominant perspective was contrary to that of Locke's, tending to focus on "[[instinct]]."  [[Leda Cosmides]] and [[John Tooby]] noted that [[William James]] (1842–1910) argued that humans have ''more'' [[instinct]]s than animals, and that greater freedom of action is the result of having more [[Psychology|psychological]] instincts, not fewer.<ref>{{cite web|url = https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/primer.html|last1 = Cosmides|first1 = Leda|last2 = Tooby|first2 = John|website = Center for Evolutionary Psychology|title = Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer|publisher = ucsb.edu|date = January 13, 1997|access-date = October 19, 2021|archive-date = February 6, 2023|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20230206213533/https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/primer.html|url-status = dead}}</ref>

The question of "innate ideas" or "instincts" was of some importance in the discussion of [[free will]] in [[moral philosophy]]. In 18th-century philosophy, this was cast in terms of "innate ideas" establishing the presence of a universal virtue, a prerequisite for objective morals. In the 20th century, this argument was in a way inverted, since some philosophers ([[J. L. Mackie]]) now argued that the evolutionary origins of human behavioral traits forces us to concede that there is no foundation for ethics, while others ([[Thomas Nagel]]) treated ethics as a field of cognitively valid statements in complete isolation from evolutionary considerations.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/show_article2.asp?ID=6008 |first=John |last=Mizonni |title=Ruse's Darwinian ethics and Moral Realism |publisher=Metanexus Institute |work=metanexus.net |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061001133708/http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/show_article2.asp?id=6008 |archive-date=2006-10-01 }}</ref>

=== Early to mid-20th century ===
In the early 20th century, there was an increased interest in the role of one's environment, as a reaction to the strong focus on pure heredity in the wake of the triumphal success of Darwin's [[Evolution|theory of evolution]].<ref>Craven, Hamilton. 1978. ''The Triumph of Evolution: The Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900–1941'': "While it would be inaccurate to say that most American experimentalists concluded as the result of the general acceptance of Mendelism by 1910 or so that heredity was all powerful and environment of no consequence, it was nevertheless true that heredity occupied a much more prominent place than environment in their writings."</ref> During this time, the [[social sciences]] developed as the project of studying the influence of culture in clean isolation from questions related to "biology. [[Franz Boas]]'s ''[[The Mind of Primitive Man]]'' (1911) established a program that would dominate [[American anthropology]] for the next 15 years. In this study, he established that in any given [[population]], [[biology]], [[language]], [[Material culture|material]], and [[symbolic culture]], are [[Autonomy|autonomous]]; that each is an equally important dimension of human nature, but that none of these dimensions is reducible to another.

==== Purist behaviorism ====
[[John B. Watson]] in the 1920s and 1930s established the school of ''purist [[behaviorism]]'' that would become dominant over the following decades. Watson is often said to have been convinced of the complete dominance of cultural influence over anything that heredity might contribute. This is based on the following quote which is frequently repeated without context, as the last sentence is frequently omitted, leading to confusion about Watson's position:<ref>[[John B. Watson|Watson, John B.]] 1930. ''Behaviorism''. p. 82.</ref>{{blockquote|Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.}}During the 1940s to 1960s, [[Ashley Montagu]] was a notable proponent of this purist form of behaviorism which allowed no contribution from heredity whatsoever:<ref>[[Ashley Montagu|Montagu, Ashley]]. 1968. ''Man and Aggression'', cited by [[Steven Pinker|Pinker, Steven]]. 2002. ''[[The Blank Slate|The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature]]''. New York: [[Penguin Books|Penguin]]. {{ISBN|1501264338}}. p. 24.</ref> {{blockquote|Man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture ... with the exception of the instinctoid reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is entirely instinctless. }}In 1951, Calvin Hall suggested that the dichotomy opposing nature to nurture is ultimately fruitless.<ref>Hall, Calvin S. 1951. "The Genetics of Behavior." Pp. 304–29 in ''Handbook of Experimental Psychology'', edited by S. S. Stevens. New York: [[John Wiley and Sons]].</ref>

In ''[[African Genesis]]'' (1961) and ''[[The Territorial Imperative]]'' (1966), [[Robert Ardrey]] argues for innate attributes of human nature, especially concerning [[territoriality]]. [[Desmond Morris]] in ''[[The Naked Ape]]''  (1967) expresses similar views. Organised opposition to Montagu's kind of purist "blank-slatism" began to pick up in the 1970s, notably led by [[E. O. Wilson]] (''[[On Human Nature]]'', 1979).

The tool of [[twin study|twin studies]] was developed as a research design intended to exclude all confounders based on [[behavioural genetics|inherited behavioral traits]].<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Rende|first1=R. D.|last2=Plomin|first2=R.|last3=Vandenberg|first3=S. G.|date=March 1990|title=Who discovered the twin method?|journal=Behavior Genetics|volume=20|issue=2|pages=277–285|doi=10.1007/BF01067795|issn=0001-8244|pmid=2191648|s2cid=22666939}}</ref> Such studies are designed to decompose the variability of a given trait in a given population into a genetic and an environmental component. Twin studies established that there was, in many cases, a significant heritable component. These results did not, in any way, point to overwhelming contribution of heritable factors, with [[heritability]] typically ranging around 40% to 50%, so that the controversy may not be cast in terms of ''purist behaviorism'' vs. ''purist [[Psychological nativism|nativism]]''. Rather, it was ''purist behaviorism'' that was gradually replaced by the now-predominant view that both kinds of factors usually contribute to a given trait, anecdotally phrased by [[Donald O. Hebb|Donald Hebb]] as an answer to the question "which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?" by asking in response, "Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?"<ref>Meaney M. 2004. "The nature of nurture: maternal effects and chromatin remodelling." In ''Essays in Social Neuroscience'', edited by J. T. Cacioppo and G. G. Berntson. [[MIT Press]]. {{ISBN|0-262-03323-2}}.</ref>

In a comparable avenue of research, anthropologist [[Donald Brown (anthropologist)|Donald Brown]] in the 1980s surveyed hundreds of anthropological studies from around the world and collected a set of [[cultural universals]]. He identified approximately 150 such features, coming to the conclusion there is indeed a "universal human nature", and that these features point to what that universal human nature is.<ref>Pinker (2002), pp. 435–439.</ref>

==== Determinism ====
{{See also|Social determinism|Cultural determinism|Biological determinism|}}
At the height of the controversy, during the 1970s to 1980s, the debate was highly ideologised. In ''[[Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature]]'' (1984), [[Richard Lewontin]], [[Steven Rose]] and [[Leon Kamin]] criticise "[[genetic determinism]]" from a [[Marxist]] framework, arguing that "Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology ... If [[biological determinism]] is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and production workers." The debate thus shifted away from whether heritable traits exist to whether it was [[Politics|politically]] or [[Ethics|ethically]] permissible to admit their existence. The authors deny this, requesting that evolutionary inclinations be discarded in ethical and political discussions regardless of whether they exist or not.<ref>Kohn, A. (2008) ''The Brighter Side of Human Nature''. Basic Books. {{ISBN|078672465X}}</ref>

=== 1990s ===
Heritability studies became much easier to perform, and hence much more numerous, with the advances of genetic studies during the 1990s. By the late 1990s, an overwhelming amount of evidence had accumulated that amounts to a refutation of the extreme forms of "blank-slatism" advocated by Watson or Montagu.{{citation needed|date=January 2021}}

This revised state of affairs was summarized in books aimed at a popular audience from the late 1990s. In ''[[The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do]]'' (1998), [[Judith Rich Harris]] was heralded by [[Steven Pinker]] as a book that "will come to be seen as a turning point in the [[history of psychology]]."<ref>{{cite book|author=Harris, Judith Rich |title=The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Revised and Updated|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-uKBJRMJBjcC&pg=PR21|date=24 February 2009|publisher=Simon and Schuster|isbn=978-1-4391-0165-0|pages=21–}}</ref> However, Harris was criticized for exaggerating the point of "parental upbringing seems to matter less than previously thought" to the implication that "parents do not matter."<ref>A position not actually taken by the author, but apparently it was feared that "lay readers" would still interpret the book in this way, as in  "Will it free some to mistreat their kids, since 'it doesn't matter'?", with this fear being attributed to "psychologist Frank Farley of Temple University, president of the APA division that honored Harris" by {{cite news |last=Begley |first=Sharon |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/newsweek/parent090798a.htm |title=The Parent Trap |newspaper=Newsweek |date=1998-09-29}}</ref>

The situation as it presented itself by the end of the 20th century was summarized in ''[[The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature]]'' (2002) by [[Steven Pinker]]. The book became a best-seller, and was instrumental in bringing to the attention of a wider public the paradigm shift away from the behaviourist purism of the 1940s to 1970s that had taken place over the preceding decades.<ref>{{Cite web |title=The Blank Slate: the modern denial of human nature {{!}} Workers' Liberty |url=https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2017-07-26/blank-slate-modern-denial-human-nature |access-date=2024-08-21 |website=www.workersliberty.org |language=en}}</ref>

Pinker portrays the adherence to pure ''blank-slatism'' as an ideological [[dogma]] linked to two other dogmas found in the dominant view of human nature in the 20th century:

# "[[noble savage]]," in the sense that people are born good and corrupted by bad influence; and
# "[[ghost in the machine]]," in the sense that there is a human soul capable of moral choices completely detached from biology.

Pinker argues that all three dogmas were held onto for an extended period even in the face of evidence because they were seen as ''desirable'' in the sense that if any human trait is purely conditioned by culture, any undesired trait (such as crime or aggression) may be engineered away by purely cultural (political means). Pinker focuses on reasons he assumes were responsible for unduly repressing evidence to the contrary, notably the fear of (imagined or projected) political or ideological consequences.<ref>{{cite web |author=Pinker, Steven |url=http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/tbs/index.html |title=Steven Pinker – Books – The Blank Slate |publisher=Pinker.wjh.harvard.edu |access-date=2011-01-19 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110510091413/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/tbs/index.html |archive-date=2011-05-10}}</ref>