Frances Galton's Theory: The Nature Vs. Nurture In Human Development

The nature vs nurture debate began with Frances Galton in 1865. Frances Galton wanted to look at the debate of nature vs nurture from a different perspective than ever before, and get evidence from actual twins and families themselves. He began his studies by taking interest in twins who were very alike in adulthood and youth, who were educated together for many years, and find out whether they ended up growing to be unlike one another, and if so, what the family thinks the main causes were that caused these dissimilarities. Galton states that “In a few of these not a single point of difference could be specified. In the remainder, the colour of the hair and eyes were almost always identical; the height, weight, and strength were generally …show more content…
Schizophrenia is a commonly used example of this. Old theories led people to believe that there was no possible way that schizophrenia runs in families, but it is caused by poor parenting. This theory was soon after disproven (Plomin & Asbury, 2005). The risk for schizophrenia is the same whether children are raised by their schizophrenic parent/s or adopted away when they are young. Studies have shown that MZ twins have many more similarities than DZ twins do, which is expected. DZ twins are almost identical clones, while MZ twins have a 50% chance of being genetically identical. So, if only 45-50% of MZ twins both inherit the same schizophrenic gene, the other 50% must be due to environmental factors (Plomin & Asbury, 2005). Although this does not correlate directly with this movie, this is strong evidence that the debate should not be nature vs nurture, but nature and nurture. The twins in the movie represent both of these in several ways. Samantha and Anais are identical twins, this contribution being made by their genes (50% nature). The difference in their personalities, careers, and overall lifestyles is due to environment (50% nurture). They both live in very different parts of the world and hold different careers. Samantha is an actress in several comedies and movies, while Anais is currently designing clothes …show more content…
While trying to determine a way to tell the difference, I realized that they speak a little differently, and began to wonder if this was contributed to nature, nurture, both factors, or if I was just crazy. It is assumed that MZ twins have nearly identical physiological characteristics that are relevant in speech production; this has been proven through several studies and analyses (Weirich 2011). The initial results point out the crucial role of shared social environment (nurture) in speech production. In this case nurture is more aimed towards linguistics, while nature is something more visible when they are speaking. After further analyzing the results and taking other factors into consideration, auditory similarity is something that can occur in twins or even person strangers, and is explained by acoustic parameters. So the difference in voice I was hearing may have been true, but is it not directly related to them being twins like I had thought.
Theories have always assumed that environmental aspects such as socioeconomic status or parental divorce are what make children similar to one another. This would not explain why children growing up in the same home have different personalities and cognitive abilities later in life. Similarities in children are inherited from their genes rather than environment they share. Recent genetic research has