Nature/nurture

Dr Helen M Macbeth, a biological anthr-opologist, is a pr-incipal lecturer at Oxord Polytechnic, and Secretary of the Biosocial Society. 'But, out there, people do have a concept of a dichotomy called nature/nurture'. Therefore, the social anthropologist in the discussion argued, it was a valid theme for a first term course in Anthropology (Biological and Social), whereas the biological anthropologist had dismissed the topic as an out of date debate, based on false dichotomies, which had wasted much academic energy over three or four decades. Although I start this article with an apparent disagreement, I shall go on to support both statements. I shall consider some of the interpretations of what the nature/nurture debate is, and from this I shall briefly suggest that here is a topic on which biological and social anthropologists might pool their respective expertise to produce new insights, both theoretical and pragmatic, rather than argue without truly appreciating the perspectives of interest to others. The nature/nurture debate did become a topic in the course, 'Invitation to Anthropology', which covered topics such as inbreeding/incest avoidance, sex/gender roles and behaviour towards kin. In tutorials half-way through the term, I asked students what they considered the nature/nurture debate was about. Thirty tutorial students had signed up for my tutorials and by chance (or by their choice) the large majority of these were 'mature students'. I conducted no accurate survey, but very few had come straight from school. There were several women in their forties (or over), of whom at least three had entered the College on the basis of 'access courses', rather than 'A' levels. Clearly this is not a representative sample of the 'general public', even when I augmented it by asking a few neighbours and friends what the nature/nurture argument meant to them. Nevertheless, in agreement with the social anthropologist, I can confirm from this small and non-random sample that there is a popular belief in the existence of a nature/nurture debate. However, individuals held differing ideas of what the two sides of the dichotomy were, yet tended to imagine they were talking about the same thing. Below I shall examine at least four different concepts of what the sides of this debate are, summarized as follows: 'innate v,er-sus learned', 'biological v,er-sus sociallcultur-al', 'the animal in us ver-sus the human in us' and 'genes ve-sus environment'. As a biological anthropologist I shall expose the false dichotomies in all of these. Because of this, as a biologist, I do find the debate itself out of date and irrelevant, but the general public's belief in its existence affects other beliefs in our society and this does make the debate socially significant. On topics such as human behaviour, the published material which is considered to be the nature/nurture debate is still frequently polemical. I found some writers (e.g. Rose & Rose 1986 1), presumably to enhance their rhetoric, would slip, without making the distinction, from 'biological' to 'innate' and then infer that innate meant 'inherited'. I am personally not quite sure whether innate is more generally taken to mean genetic or congenital, but I found that some students did not even know that genetic and congenital had quite different meanings. Either way, I certainly dislike the rhetoric which uses 'biological' and 'genetic' as though they were interchangeable. This vagueness by those who presumably know better may have been used just to enhance an emotive style but it may well have a great deal to do with the misunderstandings about the nature/nurture debate. When teaching about multifactorial inheritance I have always preferred to start with less emotive examples, such as diseases or height and weight, but when I suggested to a social anthropologist the use of this approach, he disagreed. He considered that such references were red herrings relevant neither to the nature/nurture debate nor to anthropology and that we should keep to behavioural characteristics. It was patiently (and with good humour) explained to me that studies of the genetic and non-genetic aetiologies of such pathologies and physiologies were biology and not part of anthropology (we clearly must increase the frequency of our biosocial dialogues!) and that anyway the nature/nurture debate was only of popular concern in regard to behavioural qualities. Later it became clear to me that for some of the interpretations of the nature/nurture debate, as for the early Galtonian concern with it (Galton, 1869 ), it was indeed essential that the characteristic considered be behavioural; initially I had not recognized what others understood by the nature/nurture debate. In the following discussions of these interpretations, therefore, I shall only refer to behavioural characteristics. My first example of an interpretation of the nature/nurture debate has several nearly equivalent variants, e.g. 'innate versus learned', or sounding more scholarly, 'genes versus socialization', which is a modernized version of Galton's (1874) quest to find out whether English scientific genius was a product of 3 biological heredity or social upbringing . All these variants of the same theme are false dichotomies. One problem is that there are events and social causes of diversity which do not fit comfortably within the words 'learning' or 'socialization'. 'Learning' from 'socialization' of course exists, but is only achieved within a living, functioning brain. Current biological knowledge of the brain illustrates another problem. If innate and genetic mean the same thing, then all nongenetic but nevertheless biochemical and mechanical causes of diversity are omitted. If, however, innate is taken to mean congenital rather than genetic, then in the former only post-natal biological influences are omitted. The point is that there are myriad non-genetic, biological and mechanical effects on development before and after birth

Dichotomy · Epistemology · Nature versus nurture · Sociology · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Race, Genetics, and Society

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