Adopted Children: The Influences Of Nature And Nurture

Improved Essays
Behavioral genetics is a field that attempts to tease apart influences of nature and nurture on one’s development. In order to study these influences, researchers often study families with adopted children. Think about people who commit serious crimes. How might influences from both nature and nurture explain this behavior? How can studying adopted children provide clues to the heritability of committing crimes?
This experiment of studying adopted children is the ultimate test of “Nature versus Nurture.” Is the way people are and behave truly due to their environment or biology? The truth is that is is both, but this is a test to observe the extent of its severity.
We all change over time physically, cognitively, socio-emotionally and multi-contextually

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Most people enter parenthood understanding that a lot of work goes into raising a baby. However, young parents put an enormous amount of extra pressure on themselves when they decided to start a family. When parents raise their children they often replicate or oppose the way their parents raised them. What if I told you, that when applied as solely one or the other, both nature and nurture play a very small role in building a responsible, ambitious child. In fact, a child’s behavior is a combination of more than just nature and nurture, but genetics and environmental stresses, the formula is Genetics x Environmental Influences.…

    • 1236 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The article discusses that in the early 20th century it was believed, and still on going for some researches, that genes, environment, and behavior where due to nature vs nurture. Nature was a form of someone’s DNA and genotypes, where as, nurture is a form of environmental factors. In the middle 20th century, researches started to take into the account the possibility that environmental factors could influence DNA, therefore, altering behavior. It was thought that genes are changeless, that genes only influence developing systems in the body and maintains that same system throughout the lifespan (Carey & Gottesman, 2006).…

    • 1875 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Murderers: Nature vs. Nurture The nature vs. nurture debate helps researchers explain ones actions based on either their genetic traits or based on how they were raised. The nature side offers an explanation for the persons inherited genetic traits to help explain their actions such as how they behavior especially at a younger age. The nurture part helps give one an explanation to how a person behaves or acts based on the environmental factors that person was raised in and how society could have “created them”. This argument can be presented in the Clutter family murder on whether the murderers, Dick and Perry, were influenced by nature or nurture factors.…

    • 1732 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The ban of pitbulls clearly has two defined sides; to be banned or not. People promoting the ban of pit bulls often rely on statistics or ideas created by others to conceive their opinion. In contrast, there is actually a lot of falsity to these ideas, and make pit bulls seem a lot worse and more dangerous. There are many myths about pit bulls or preconceived ideas, this is an essay that undermines those and details the truth about pit bulls and why they should not be banned. To begin, years ago during philosophical research including scientists such as, Thomas Hobbes and Aristotle, there was experiments conducted to see if criminal behaviour could be hereditary.…

    • 874 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Biological Positivism Case Study

    • 2092 Words
    • 9 Pages
    • 10 Works Cited

    For this, researchers studied siblings that had been separated from an early age and had later gone on to commit crimes. They then compared the convictions of their biological parents and their adoptive parents to see if there was any pattern. If the siblings showed more resemblance to their biological parents in terms of convictions and criminal history, then it could prove that there is a more of a genetic influence towards someone committing a crime. A study done by Hutchings and Meddick (1975) found that if the adoptee's biological father had a conviction and adoptive father had not, then the adoptee had a 20% chance of getting a criminal conviction whereas if the biological father didn't have a conviction but the adoptive father did, then the chance of the adoptee obtaining a conviction decreased to a 13.5% chance (Brill, 1986). This study seems to support the Twin studies on the nature debate side, with the child being brought up in a different environment from it's biological parents, it is easier to separate the genetic and environmental factors in this study.…

    • 2092 Words
    • 9 Pages
    • 10 Works Cited
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    It is believed that how one is raised makes a huge impact on their behavior. Another factor can be if their identity is known to the victims, or what personality one has. The Nature versus Nurture effect can be a key factor in why a person commits evil actions. Nature is how one’s genetics, and where they get their instincts from.…

    • 897 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A conversation has been sparked from current parents to those who are thinking of having a family on how they can ensure that their child will grow up in the best way possible. The argument of nature versus nurture has ignited a conversation with both individuals active in the science community, as well as, the average individual. During the Inheritance podcast of RadioLab, the elements in which directly influence a child’s genes and upbringing are discussed using examples from studies done on rats, records of individuals in Sweden, and the effect of drug addicted mothers on the child. The conversation begins with an example that uses lab rats to better understand if a mother were to nurture a pup with constant licking, how the pup would then mother their own pups.…

    • 837 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Providing you race for the census categorizes you into a group decided only by your skin color. People with similar skin color do not necessarily mean that they are from the same ethnic background, country, speak the same language or hold the same beliefs. People with the same skin color still have diverse geographical and cultural backgrounds and Berger adds “dark-skinned people whose ancestors were not African share neither culture nor ethnicity with Africans”. Because there is such diversity in the United States and different ethnicities living here, people are more likely to come from mixed ancestry. The US Census would like to know the makeup of the United States but by asking people to pick a race they may fall into, publishes inaccurate…

    • 514 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Nature Vs. Nurture The Nature Vs. Nurture situation is a prominent issue that has created debates for decades now. Throughout history, a phenomenal amount of tragedies have occurred that have made psychologist and the general people question if it is a person's genetics that make them do evil things or because of how they were raised (McLeod).…

    • 839 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Nature versus nurture has been a debatable issue since as early as the 17th century in psychology. The issue consists on whether humans are how they are because of their nature or because how they are nurtured during child development. In a 2007 article, McLeod contributes that nature is what humans inherit while nurture is environmental influences. Researches and psychologists who are strong in their position of nature are called nativists. Meanwhile, the researchers and psychologists who agree on nurture are called empiricists (“Nature vs. Nurture, 2007, para.…

    • 1480 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    In recent years, many people involved and aware of the controversy have noticeably decided that the answer to whether people are born a certain way or develop based on their environment is both. Nurture, however, is what determines…

    • 1320 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Introduction The argument of nature vs. nurture has been one of the oldest and one of the largest controversies on whether our influences come from our genes (nature) or environmental factors (nurture), and how it could affect our behavioral, appearances, development, and our personality. These two play a big role in the human development. This argument will always exist on what is said about the human development. Scientists have not been able to sort this argument out and decide which one rules out the other.…

    • 778 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Nature versus Nurture "Nature versus Nurture" is one of the oldest argument of all time in history and it still continues until now. Beckett (2002) defined the nature as qualities and characteristics which are transmitted to humans directly from parents through genetics. While, nurture could be explained as "all external factors surrounding human beings from birth to death" (Beckett 2002). Wherefore, scientists confirm that the factors which influence human behavior are subdivided into three aspects.…

    • 733 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Feral children are also extremely critical evidence toward the nature versus nurture debate because the evidence favors the nurture argument, which relates to the conception that humans do and think specific things because they are taught to do so. Feral children are proof to this as they show that without the fitting human socialization they usually do not expand their comprehension of language, emotions, a sense of right and wrong or the norms of human…

    • 1007 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Lombroso's Atavism Theory

    • 1421 Words
    • 6 Pages

    One question of which the biological explanation asks is could we identify genetic markers in those with a predisposition to crime? Lombroso’s atavism theory is one of the earliest theories of inherited criminality and links outward physiological features to inherited criminal behaviour arguing it is easy to spot criminals as they are not fully evolved and criminality is innate rather than made. He stated that criminals had distinct facial features for example a large protruding jaw, large ears, extra toes and that they had no guilt and were unable to distinguish right from wrong. Lombroso’s theory is very much an outdated one and has since been highly criticised, firstly the theory is too determinist. Even if there was a relationship between…

    • 1421 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays