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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 .
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.
There are many different facets of human behavior, and no one definition or field study encompasses it in its entirety. [2] The nature versus nurture debate is one of the fundamental divisions in the study of human behavior; this debate considers whether behavior is predominantly affected by genetic or environmental factors. [3]
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.
[2] [3] Behavioural genetic concepts also existed during the English Renaissance, where William Shakespeare perhaps first coined the phrase "nature versus nurture" in The Tempest, where he wrote in Act IV, Scene I, that Caliban was "A devil, a born devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick". [3] [4]
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 ]
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]
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.