The nature vs. nurture debate has been at the forefront of psychology for many decades. The purpose of this essay is to try and answer this question using the case study of Genie. The essay shall also look at some of the roles that a multidisciplinary team would play in a case like Genies and if there was any hope of rehabilitation Cheap essay writing sercice. If you need professional help with completing any kind of homework, Success Essays is the right place to get it. Whether you are looking for essay, coursework, research, or term paper help, or with any other assignments, it is no problem for us Nature vs. Nurture. This debate within psychology is concerned with the extent to which particular aspects of behavior are a product of either inherited (i.e. genetic) or acquired (i.e. learned) characteristics. Nature is that which is inherited / genetic. Nurture which refers to all environmental influences after conception, i.e. experience
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In psychology during the 19th century, nature-nurture debates were voiced in the language of instinct versus learning. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was widely assumed that that humans and animals entered the world with a fixed set of inborn instincts, nature vs nurture debate essay.
But in the s and again in the s, the validity of instinct as a scientific construct was challenged on conceptual and empirical grounds. As a result, most psychologists abandoned using the term instinct but they did not abandon the validity of distinguishing between nature versus nurture. Still, for some psychologists, the earlier critiques of the instinct concept remain just as relevant to these more modern usages.
The tension in nature-nurture debates is commonly eased by claiming that explanations of behavior must involve reference to both nature-based and nurture-based causes. However, for some psychologists there is a growing pressure to see the nature—nurture dichotomy nature vs nurture debate essay oversimplifying the development of behavior patterns.
The division is seen as both arbitrary and counterproductive. Rather than treat nature and nurture as separable causal factors operating on development, they treat nature-nurture as a distinction between product nature versus process nurture. Thus there has been a longstanding tension about how to define, separate, and balance the effects of nature and nurture. Inputs from these two sources are thought to add their own contribution to development see Figure 1.
Figure 1, nature vs nurture debate essay. The traditional view of nature and nurture as separate causes of development. In the traditional view, nature and nurture are treated as independent causal influences that combine during development to generate outcomes. Note that, during development, the effects of nature and nurture shown in horizontal crossing lines remain independent so that their effects on outcomes are theoretically separable.
Because some traits seem to derive more from one source than the other, much nature vs nurture debate essay the tension associated with the nature—nurture division deals with disagreements about how to balance the roles of nature and nurture in the development of a trait. Evidence to support the nature—nurture division usually derives from patterns of behavior that suggest a limited role of environmental causation, thus implying some effect of nature by default.
Table 1 depicts some common descriptors and conditions used to infer that some preference, knowledge, or skill is nature based. It is important to reiterate that nature-based causation e. Such inferences can generate tension because each of the observations listed here can be explained by nurture-based environmental factors.
Confusion can also arise when evidence of one descriptor e. For much of recorded history, the distinction between nature and nurture was a temporal divide between what a person is innately endowed with at birth, prior to experience natureand what happens thereafter nurture. It was not until the 19th century that the temporal division was transformed into a material division of causal influences Keller, New views about heredity and Darwinian evolution justified distinguishing between native traits and genetic causes from acquired traits and environmental causes.
Galton began writing about heredity in the mids. He believed we would discover laws governing the transmission of mental as well as physical qualities. Their social reform efforts were geared to enhancing educational opportunities and improving living conditions. Galton, nature vs nurture debate essay, a political conservative, opposed the notion of natural equality, arguing instead that people were inherently different at birth Cowan,and that these inherited mental and behavioral inequalities were transmitted through lineages like physical qualities.
To explain the biological mechanisms of inheritance, Galton joined a growing trend in the s to understand inheritance as involving the transmission of hypothetical determinative, germinal substances across generations.
Foreshadowing a view that would later become scientific orthodoxy, Galton believed these germinal substances to be uninfluenced by the experiences of the organism. His theory of inheritance, however, was speculative.
Realizing he was not equipped to fully explicate his theory nature vs nurture debate essay biological inheritance, Galton abandoned this line of inquiry by the end of that decade and refocused his efforts on identifying statistical laws of heredity of individual differences Renwick, Historians generally agree that Galton was the first to treat nature as heredity and nurture everything else as separate causal forces Keller,but the schism gained biological legitimacy through the work of the German cytologist Auguste Weismann in the s.
Namely, Weismann opposed Lamarckian inheritance and promoted a view of evolution driven almost entirely by natural selection. On this view, Lamarckian-style inheritance of acquired characteristics was not biologically possible.
Their work convinced many to draw unusually sharp distinctions between the inherited nature and the acquired nurture. Ever since, psychology has teetered between nature-biased and nurture-biased positions. With the rise of genetics, the wedge between nature—nurture was deepened in the early to mid- 20th centurycreating fields of study that focused exclusively on the effects of either nature or nurture. Twenty-first-century psychology textbooks often state that the nature—nurture debates have been resolved, and the tension relaxed, because we have moved on from emphasizing nature or nurture to appreciating that development necessarily involves both nature and nurture.
In this middle-ground position, one asks how nature and nurture interact. For example, how do biological or genetic predispositions for behaviors or innate knowledge bias early learning experiences? Or how might environmental factors influence the biologically determined maturational unfolding of bodily form and behaviors? On nature vs nurture debate essay view, the nature—nurture divide is neither a legitimate nor a constructive way of thinking about development.
Instead, developmental analysis reveals that the terms commonly associated with nature e. The nature—nurture nature vs nurture debate essay oversimplifies developmental processes, nature vs nurture debate essay, takes too much for granted, and ultimately hinders scientific progress. Thus not only is there a lingering tension about how to balance the effects of nature and nurture in the middle-ground view, but there is also a growing tension to move beyond the dichotomous nature—nurture framework.
Definitions of instinct can vary tremendously, but many contrast a instinct with reason or intellect, thought, willwhich is related to but separable from contrasting b instinct with learning or experience or habit. Early usages of the instinct concept, following Aristotle, treated instinct as a mental, estimative faculty vis aestimativa or aestimativa naturalis in humans and animals that allowed for the judgments of objects in the world e.
The modern usage of instincts as unlearned behaviors took shape in the 17th century. Disagreements arose as to whether instincts derived from innate mental images or were mindlessly and mechanically physiologically generated from innately specified bodily organization Richards, Challenges to the instinct concept can be found in the 16th century see Diamond, nature vs nurture debate essay,but they were most fully developed by empiricist philosophers of the French Sensationalist tradition in the 18th century Richards, Sensationalists asserted that animals behaved rationally and all of the so-called instincts displayed by animals could be seen as intelligently acquired habits.
Nature vs nurture debate essay Sensationalists, instincts, as traditionally understood, did not exist. Species-specificity in behavior patterns could be explained by commonalities in physiological organization, needs, and environmental conditions.
Even those instinctual behaviors seen at birth e. Erasmus Darwin —for example, speculated that the movements and swallowing experiences in ovo could account for the pecking and eating of grain by young chicks. The traditional instinct concept survived.
For most people, the complex, adaptive, species-specific behaviors displayed by naïve animals e. Arguably as important, however, was the resistance to the theological implications of Sensationalist philosophy. One of the strongest nature vs nurture debate essay to Sensationalism was put forward in Germany by Herman Samuel Reimarus — More so than any other, Reimarus extensively catalogued instincts in humans and animals.
Rather than treat instincts as behaviors, he defined instincts as natural impulses inner drives to act that were expressed perfectly, without reflection or practice, and served adaptive goals Richards, But many issues surrounding the instinct concept were left unsettled. How do instincts differ from reflexive behaviors? What role does learning play in the expression of instincts, if any? Do humans have more or fewer instincts than animals?
These questions would persist well into the first decades of the 20th century and ultimately fuel another anti-instinct movement.
In the 19th centurythe tension about the nature and nurture of instincts in the lifetime of animals led to debates about the nature and nurture of instincts across generations. Debating the relative roles of neo-Lamarckian use-inheritance versus neo-Darwinian natural selection in the transmutation of species became a significant source of tension in the latter half of the 19th century. Although the neo-Lamarckian notion of instincts as being inherited habits was rejected in the 20th centurynature vs nurture debate essay, it has resurged in recent years e.
Darwinian evolutionary theory required drawing distinctions between native and acquired behaviors, and, perhaps more so than before, behaviors were categorized along a continuum from the purely instinctive unlearnedto the partially instinctive requiring some nature vs nurture debate essayto the purely learned.
Still, it was widely assumed that a purely instinctive response would be modified by experience after its first occurrence. As a result, instinct and habit were very much entangled in the lifetime of the organism.
Given their importance in evolutionary theory, nature vs nurture debate essay, there was greater interest in more objectively identifying pure instincts beyond anecdotal reports. Some of the most compelling evidence was reported by Douglas Spalding — in the early s see Gray, Spalding documented numerous instances of how naïve animals showed coordinated, seemingly adaptive responses e. This technique involved selectively depriving young animals of seemingly critical learning experiences or sensory stimulation.
Should animals display some species-typical action following deprivation, then, presumably, the behavior could be labeled as unlearned or innate. In all, these studies seemed to show that animals displayed numerous adaptive responses at the very start, prior to any relevant experience. Not only would the deprivation experiment be used as the primary means of detecting native tendencies by European zoologists and ethologists, but Spalding also showed evidence of what would later be called imprinting, critical period effects and evidence of behavioral maturation.
Reports of pure instinct did not go unchallenged. Lloyd Morgan questioned the accuracy of these reports in his own experimental work with young animals. In some cases, he failed to replicate the results and in other cases he found that instinctive behaviors were not as finely tuned to objects in the environment as had been claimed.
More so than before, a sharp distinction was drawn between native and acquired characteristics, including behavior Johnston, They envisioned a new natural science of psychology that would nature vs nurture debate essay identify the germinally determined, invariable set of native psychological traits in species and their underlying physiological neural basis. Despite their differences, in the first two decades of the 20th century both psychologists and sociologists generally assumed that humans and animals had some native tendencies or instincts, nature vs nurture debate essay.
Concerns were even voiced that instinct had not received enough attention in psychology. Disagreements about instincts continued to focus on the now centuries old debates of how to conceptualize them. Were they complex reflexes, impulses, or motives to act, or should instinct be a mental faculty like intuitionnature vs nurture debate essay, separate from reasoning and reflex Herrnstein, ? Defined in this way, human instincts were simply labels for human activities, but how these activities were defined was arbitrarily imposed by the researchers.
Is feeding, for instance, an instinct, or is it composed of more basic instincts like chewing and swallowing? The arbitrariness of classifying human behavior had led to tremendous inconsistencies and confusion among psychologists. Not all of the challenges to instinct dealt with its teleological usage. Some of the strongest criticisms were voiced by Zing-Yang Kuo throughout the s, nature vs nurture debate essay. Kuo was a Chinese animal psychologist who studied under Charles Tolman at the University of California, nature vs nurture debate essay, Berkeley.
Like Dunlap, he warned that instincts were labels with no nature vs nurture debate essay value. To illustrate, after returning to China, he showed how the so-called rodent-killing instinct in cats often cited by instinct theorists is not found in kittens that are reared with rodents Kuo, nature vs nurture debate essay, These kittens, instead, became attached to the rodents, and they resisted attempts to train rodent-killing.
Echoing the point made by Guer, Kuo claimed that appeals to instinct served to stunt scientific inquiry into the developmental origins of behavior.
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Cheap essay writing sercice. If you need professional help with completing any kind of homework, Success Essays is the right place to get it. Whether you are looking for essay, coursework, research, or term paper help, or with any other assignments, it is no problem for us Nature versus nature essay is structured just like other essays. It has an introduction, body and a conclusion. This part highlights various definitions of nurture and nature besides giving scenarios plus thesis statement expounding nature vs nurture debate alongside how to start nature vs nurture essay The nature vs. nurture debate has been at the forefront of psychology for many decades. The purpose of this essay is to try and answer this question using the case study of Genie. The essay shall also look at some of the roles that a multidisciplinary team would play in a case like Genies and if there was any hope of rehabilitation
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