Nature and nurture is sometimes looked at as a dichotomy. In this paper I will provide multiple reasons why I do not feel this is accurate. The nature and nurture controversy pertains to whether biology, genes, evolution, etc. (nature) explain ones behavior and development or does ones environment, experience, caregivers, etc. (nurture) explain ones behavior and development. However, both are valid when trying to discern the major influences ones development.
In professor Belsky’s Social and Personality class and multiple other psychology classes I have taken, the nature versus nurture idea seems to be a very important concept to cover. And this is because nature and nurture are commonly regarded as fundamental determinants …show more content…
Nature is the referring to the more scientific view of the two. Nature can be loosely defined as genetic inheritance or the genetic makeup (the information encoded in your genes), which a person inherits from both parents at the time of conception and carries throughout life. In contrast, nurture can be defined as the different environmental factors to which a person is subjected. This includes dimensions such as physical environments, social environments, experience or learning. However, I will argue that together nature and nurture interact and influence our behavior and …show more content…
And most experts would agree that it is probably a combination of many factors that makes some more than other at high risk for developing a dependency to alcohol (Arck, B.S. & Hamel, J.S). Family studies have provided very resourceful information about the way alcoholism may be passed down. Children of alcoholics who were adopted at birth and had no contact with the alcoholic parent developed alcohol dependence more frequently than adopted children, whose birth parents were not alcoholic. In fact, studies of identical twins who have been adopted, and who share virtually the same genetic makeup, show much stronger similarity to one another in alcohol use patterns (Arck, B.S. & Hamel, J.S). There clearly is link between genes and alcoholism. But in a study conducted by Jacob, T., Waterman, B., Heath, A., True, W., Bucholz, K. K., Haber, R., . . . Fu, Q. (2003) support the hypothesis that family environmental effects do make a difference in accounting for offspring outcomes, in particular that a low risk environment can moderate the impact of high genetic risk regarding offspring for the development of alcohol-use disorders. The study consisted of 732 pairs of twins, their children, and the children’s mothers, all which completed a computer- assisted telephone interview with highly trained interviewers. And what they found was that