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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 .
The nature–culture divide is the notion of a dichotomy between humans and the environment. [1] It is a theoretical foundation of contemporary anthropology that considers whether nature and culture function separately from one another, or if they are in a continuous biotic relationship with each other.
Nurture is usually defined as the process of caring for an organism, as it grows, usually a human. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It is often used in debates as the opposite of "nature", [ a ] whereby nurture means the process of replicating learned cultural information from one mind to another, and nature means the replication of genetic non-learned behavior.
Social determinism is the theory that social interactions alone determine individual behavior (as opposed to biological or objective factors). [citation needed]A social determinist would only consider social dynamics like customs, cultural expectations, education, and interpersonal interactions as the contributing factors to shape human behavior.
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]
Historically, interactionism has presented a limited view of the manner in which behavioral traits develop, and has simply demonstrated that "nature" and "nurture" are both necessary. [3] Among the first biologists to propose an interactionist theory of development was Daniel Lehrman . [ 4 ]
Some anthropological and sociological theorists that take a cultural relativist perspective may deny the existence of cultural universals: the extent to which these universals are "cultural" in the narrow sense, or in fact biologically inherited behavior is an issue of "nature versus nurture".
Social conditioning represents the environment and personal experience in the nature and nurture debate. Society in general and peer groups within society set the norms which shape the behavior of actors within the social system. Though society shapes individuals; however, it was the individual who made society to begin with and society in turn ...