Free Nature vs. Nurture Essay :: essays research papers

What is inborn and what is learned? The handling as to whether nature or nurture were the driving force defining our cognitive abilities, was for a long time considered interminable. In the 18th century, Locke and the position empiricists claimed that individuals were born with a tabula rasa and only experience could establish mind, consciousness and the self. On the continent, Leibniz envisaged the self as a monad carrying with it some knowledge of a basic understanding of the world. Until the 1960s, this dispute was still in truth vivid in the behavioural sciences B. F. Skinners school of behaviorism in the USA postulated (as reflexology did earlier) agentral rules for every types of learning, neglecting innate differences or predispositions. K. Lorenz was sensation of the protagonists of ethology in Europe, focusing on the communicable aspects of behavior. It was Lorenz who annihilateed the antagonistic view of behavior in showing that in that location indeed are innate differences and predispositions in behavior where only fine learning occurs. Today, it is largely agreed upon that nature and nurture are virtually cooperating to bring about adaptive behaviors. Probably only in very few cases ontogenetic programs are not subjected to behavioral plasticity at all. Conversely, the possibility to acquire behavioral traits has to be genetically coded for. Today, realising that genes and environment sustain and interact synergistically, traditional dichotomy of nature vs. nurture is commonly seen as a false dichotomy. Especially operant conditioning, i.e. the learning of the consequences of ones own behavior can lead to positive feedback loops between genetic predispositions and behavioral consequences that envision the question as to cause and effect nonsensical. Positive feedback has the inherent disposition to exponentially amplify any initial small differences. For example, an at support negligible difference between two brothers in a gene af fecting IQ to a small percentage, may lead to one discovering a book the will spark his interest in reading, eyepatch the other never gets to see that book. One becomes an avid reader who loves noetic challenges while the other never finds a real interest in books, but hangs out with his friends more often. Eventually, the reading brother may end up with highly different IQ scores in convertible tests, simply because the book loving brother has had more opportunities to train his brain. Had twain brother received identical environmental input, their IQ scores would scantily differ.