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Nature versus nurture is a long-standing debate in biology and society about the relative influence on human beings of their genetic inheritance (nature) and the environmental conditions of their development .
Hereditarianism is the research program according to which heredity plays a central role in determining human nature and character traits, such as intelligence and personality. Hereditarians believe in the power of genetic influences to explain human behavior and solve human social-political problems.
First are the "nurture" and social learning paradigm supporters that believe learning has more to do with communication behavior than genetics. Then there are others who believe the whole argument is pointless. Condit calls for a multi-causal model that would incorporate both nature and nurture.
The phrase "nature and nurture" refers to this complementary relationship. The phenotype of an organism depends on the interaction of genes and the environment. An interesting example is the coat coloration of the Siamese cat. In this case, the body temperature of the cat plays the role of the environment.
The early eugenicist Francis Galton invented the term eugenics and popularized the phrase nature and nurture. [12]Early ideas of biological determinism centred on the inheritance of undesirable traits, whether physical such as club foot or cleft palate, or psychological such as alcoholism, bipolar disorder and criminality.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, social scientists debated whether human behaviour was the product of nature (genes) or nurture (environment in the developmental period, including culture). An example of interaction (as distinct from the sum of the components) involves familiarity from childhood.
For example, survivors of sexual abuse found PTSD was influenced considerably by familial nature of support, negative parental reactions were found to intensify PTSD whereas high levels of social support helped diminish psychological fallout and recovery time. Ecological pathways include factors such as a history of abuse, physical and sexual.
E. O. Wilson defined sociobiology as "the extension of population biology and evolutionary theory to social organization". [6]Sociobiology is based on the premise that some behaviors (social and individual) are at least partly inherited and can be affected by natural selection. [7]