{"id":1208,"date":"2015-09-08T20:09:12","date_gmt":"2015-09-08T20:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.candelalearning.com\/intropsychmaster\/?post_type=chapter&p=1208"},"modified":"2016-11-17T02:17:16","modified_gmt":"2016-11-17T02:17:16","slug":"what-have-we-learned-about-nature-nurture","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-intropsychmaster\/chapter\/what-have-we-learned-about-nature-nurture\/","title":{"raw":"What Have We Learned About Nature\u2013Nurture?","rendered":"What Have We Learned About Nature\u2013Nurture?"},"content":{"raw":"
It would be satisfying to be able to say that nature\u2013nurture studies have given us conclusive and complete evidence about where traits come from, with some traits clearly resulting from genetics and others almost entirely from environmental factors, such as childrearing practices and personal will; but that is not the case. Instead, everything<\/em> has turned out to have some footing in genetics. The more genetically-related people are, the more similar they are\u2014for everything<\/em>: height, weight, intelligence, personality, mental illness, etc. Sure, it seems like common sense that some traits have a genetic bias. For example, adopted children resemble their biological parents even if they have never met them, and identical twins are more similar to each other than are fraternal twins. And while certain psychological traits, such as personality or mental illness (e.g., schizophrenia), seem reasonably influenced by genetics, it turns out that the same is true for political attitudes, how much television people watch (Plomin, Corley, DeFries, & Fulker, 1990), and whether or not they get divorced (McGue & Lykken, 1992).<\/section>
[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"447\"]\"Mother Research over the last half century has revealed how central genetics are to behavior. The more genetically related people are the more similar they are not just physically but also in terms of personality and behavior. [Photo: \u85cd\u5ddd\u82a5 aikawake][\/caption]
<\/figcaption><\/figure>It may seem surprising, but genetic influence on behavior is a relatively recent discovery. In the middle of the 20th century, psychology was dominated by the doctrine of behaviorism, which held that behavior could only be explained in terms of environmental factors. Psychiatry concentrated on psychoanalysis, which probed for roots of behavior in individuals\u2019 early life-histories. The truth is, neither behaviorism nor psychoanalysis is incompatible with genetic influences on behavior, and neither Freud nor Skinner was naive about the importance of organic processes in behavior. Nevertheless, in their day it was widely thought that children\u2019s personalities were shaped entirely by imitating their parents\u2019 behavior, and that schizophrenia was caused by certain kinds of \u201cpathological mothering.\u201d Whatever the outcome of our broader discussion of nature\u2013nurture, the basic fact that the best predictors of an adopted child\u2019s personality or mental health are found in the biological parents he or she has never met, rather than in the adoptive parents who raised him or her, presents a significant challenge to purely environmental explanations of personality or psychopathology. The message is clear: You can\u2019t leave genes out of the equation. But keep in mind, no behavioral traits are completely inherited, so you can\u2019t leave the environment out altogether, either.\r\n\r\nTrying to untangle the various ways nature-nurture influences human behavior can be messy, and often common-sense notions can get in the way of good science. One very significant contribution of behavioral genetics that has changed psychology for good can be very helpful to keep in mind: When your subjects are biologically-related, no matter how clearly a situation may seem to point to environmental influence, it is never safe to interpret a behavior as wholly the result of nurture without further evidence. For example, when presented with data showing that children whose mothers read to them often are likely to have better reading scores in third grade, it is tempting to conclude that reading to your kids out loud is important to success in school; this may well be true, but the study as described is inconclusive, because there are genetic as well as<\/em>environmental pathways between the parenting practices of mothers and the abilities of their children. This is a case where \u201ccorrelation does not imply causation,\u201d as they say. To establish that reading aloud causes success, a scientist can either study the problem in adoptive families (in which the genetic pathway is absent) or by finding a way to randomly assign children to oral reading conditions.\r\n\r\nThe outcomes of nature\u2013nurture studies have fallen short of our expectations (of establishing clear-cut bases for traits) in many ways. The most disappointing outcome has been the inability to organize traits from more<\/em>\u2013 toless<\/em>-genetic. As noted earlier, everything has turned out to be at least somewhat<\/em> heritable (passed down), yet nothing has turned out to be absolutely<\/em> heritable, and there hasn\u2019t been much consistency as to which traits aremore<\/em> heritable and which are less<\/em> heritable once other considerations (such as how accurately the trait can be measured) are taken into account (Turkheimer, 2000). The problem is conceptual: The heritability coefficient, and, in fact, the whole quantitative structure that underlies it, does not match up with our nature\u2013nurture intuitions. We want to know how \u201cimportant\u201d the roles of genes and environment are to the development of a trait, but in focusing on \u201cimportant\u201d maybe we\u2019re emphasizing the wrong thing. First of all, genes and environment are both crucial to every<\/em> trait; without genes the environment would have nothing to work on, and too, genes cannot develop in a vacuum. Even more important, because nature\u2013nurture questions look at the differences among people, the cause of a given trait depends not only on the trait itself, but also on the differences in that trait between members of the group being studied.\r\n\r\nThe classic example of the heritability coefficient defying intuition is the trait of having two arms. No one would argue against the development of arms being a biological, genetic process. But fraternal twins are just as similar for \u201ctwo-armedness\u201d as identical twins, resulting in a heritability coefficient of zero for the trait of having two arms. Normally, according to the heritability model, this result (coefficient of zero) would suggest all nurture, no nature, but we know that\u2019s not the case. The reason this result is not a tip-off that arm development is less genetic than we imagine is because people do not vary<\/em> in the genes related to arm development\u2014which essentially upends the heritability formula. In fact, in this instance, the opposite is likely true: the extent that people differ in arm number is likely the result of accidents and, therefore, environmental. For reasons like these, we always have to be very careful when asking nature\u2013nurture questions, especially when we try to express the answer in terms of a single number. The heritability of a trait is not simply a property of that trait, but a property of the trait in a particular context of relevant genes and environmental factors.\r\n\r\nAnother issue with the heritability coefficient is that it divides traits\u2019 determinants into two portions\u2014genes and environment\u2014which are then calculated together for the total variability. This is a little like asking how much of the experience of a symphony comes from the horns and how much from the strings; the ways instruments or genes integrate is more complex than that. It turns out to be the case that, for many traits, genetic differences affect behavior under some environmental circumstances but not others\u2014a phenomenon called gene-environment interaction, or G x E. In one well-known example, Caspi et al. (2002) showed that among maltreated children, those who carried a particular allele of the MAOA gene showed a predisposition to violence and antisocial behavior, while those with other alleles did not. Whereas, in children who had not been maltreated, the gene had no effect. Making matters even more complicated are very recent studies of what is known as epigenetics (see module, \u201cEpigenetics\u201d http:\/\/noba.to\/37p5cb8v), a process in which the DNA itself is modified by environmental events, and those genetic changes transmitted to children.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"479\"]\"Mother The answer to the nature \u2013nurture question has not turned out to be as straightforward as we would like. The many questions we can ask about the relationships among genes, environments, and human traits may have many different answers, and the answer to one tells us little about the answers to the others. [Photo:legends2k][\/caption]\r\n

Some common questions about nature\u2013nurture are, how susceptible is a trait to change, how malleable it is, and do we \u201chave a choice\u201d about it? These questions are much more complex than they may seem at first glance. For example, phenylketonuria is an inborn error of metabolism caused by a single gene; it prevents the body from metabolizing phenylalanine. Untreated, it causes mental retardation and death. But it can be treated effectively by a straightforward environmental intervention: avoiding foods containing phenylalanine. Height seems like a trait firmly rooted in our nature and unchangeable, but the average height of many populations in Asia and Europe has increased significantly in the past 100 years, due to changes in diet and the alleviation of poverty. Even the most modern genetics has not provided definitive answers to nature\u2013nurture questions. When it was first becoming possible to measure the DNA sequences of individual people, it was widely thought that we would quickly progress to finding the specific genes that account for behavioral characteristics, but that hasn\u2019t happened. There are a few rare genes that have been found to have significant (almost always negative) effects, such as the single gene that causes Huntington\u2019s disease, or the Apolipoprotein gene that causes early onset dementia in a small percentage of Alzheimer\u2019s cases. Aside from these rare genes of great effect, however, the genetic impact on behavior is broken up over many genes, each with very small effects. For most behavioral traits, the effects are so small and distributed across so many genes that we have not been able to catalog them in a meaningful way. In fact, the same is true of environmental effects. We know that extreme environmental hardship causes catastrophic effects for many behavioral outcomes, but fortunately extreme environmental hardship is very rare. Within the normal range of environmental events, those responsible for differences (e.g., why some children in a suburban third-grade classroom perform better than others) are much more difficult to grasp.<\/p>\r\nThe difficulties with finding clear-cut solutions to nature\u2013nurture problems bring us back to the other great questions about our relationship with the natural world: the mind-body problem and free will. Investigations into what we mean when we say we are aware of something reveal that consciousness is not simply the product of a particular area of the brain, nor does choice turn out to be an orderly activity that we can apply to some behaviors but not others. So it is with nature and nurture: What at first may seem to be a straightforward matter, able to be indexed with a single number, becomes more and more complicated the closer we look. The many questions we can ask about the intersection among genes, environments, and human traits\u2014how sensitive are traits to environmental change, and how common are those influential environments; are parents or culture more relevant; how sensitive are traits to differences in genes, and how much do the relevant genes vary in a particular population; does the trait involve a single gene or a great many genes; is the trait more easily described in genetic or more-complex behavioral terms?\u2014may have different answers, and the answer to one tells us little about the answers to the others.\r\n\r\nIt is tempting to predict that the more we understand the wide-ranging effects of genetic differences on all human characteristics\u2014especially behavioral ones\u2014our cultural, ethical, legal, and personal ways of thinking about ourselves will have to undergo profound changes in response. Perhaps criminal proceedings will consider genetic background. Parents, presented with the genetic sequence of their children, will be faced with difficult decisions about reproduction. These hopes or fears are often exaggerated. In some ways, our thinking may need to change\u2014for example, when we consider the meaning behind the fundamental American principle that all men are created equal. Human beings differ, and like all evolved organisms they differ genetically. The Declaration of Independence predates Darwin and Mendel, but it is hard to imagine that Jefferson\u2014whose genius encompassed botany as well as moral philosophy\u2014would have been alarmed to learn about the genetic diversity of organisms. One of the most important things modern genetics has taught us is that almost all human behavior is too complex to be nailed down, even from the most complete genetic information, unless we\u2019re looking at identical twins. The science of nature and nurture has demonstrated that genetic differences among people are vital to human moral equality, freedom, and self-determination, not opposed to them. As Mordecai Kaplan said about the role of the past in Jewish theology, genetics gets a vote, not a veto, in the determination of human behavior. We should indulge our fascination with nature\u2013nurture while resisting the temptation to oversimplify it.\r\n\r\n<\/section>

<\/section>
<\/section>","rendered":"
It would be satisfying to be able to say that nature\u2013nurture studies have given us conclusive and complete evidence about where traits come from, with some traits clearly resulting from genetics and others almost entirely from environmental factors, such as childrearing practices and personal will; but that is not the case. Instead, everything<\/em> has turned out to have some footing in genetics. The more genetically-related people are, the more similar they are\u2014for everything<\/em>: height, weight, intelligence, personality, mental illness, etc. Sure, it seems like common sense that some traits have a genetic bias. For example, adopted children resemble their biological parents even if they have never met them, and identical twins are more similar to each other than are fraternal twins. And while certain psychological traits, such as personality or mental illness (e.g., schizophrenia), seem reasonably influenced by genetics, it turns out that the same is true for political attitudes, how much television people watch (Plomin, Corley, DeFries, & Fulker, 1990), and whether or not they get divorced (McGue & Lykken, 1992).<\/section>\n
\n
\n
\"Mother<\/p>\n

Research over the last half century has revealed how central genetics are to behavior. The more genetically related people are the more similar they are not just physically but also in terms of personality and behavior. [Photo: \u85cd\u5ddd\u82a5 aikawake]<\/p>\n<\/div>

<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It may seem surprising, but genetic influence on behavior is a relatively recent discovery. In the middle of the 20th century, psychology was dominated by the doctrine of behaviorism, which held that behavior could only be explained in terms of environmental factors. Psychiatry concentrated on psychoanalysis, which probed for roots of behavior in individuals\u2019 early life-histories. The truth is, neither behaviorism nor psychoanalysis is incompatible with genetic influences on behavior, and neither Freud nor Skinner was naive about the importance of organic processes in behavior. Nevertheless, in their day it was widely thought that children\u2019s personalities were shaped entirely by imitating their parents\u2019 behavior, and that schizophrenia was caused by certain kinds of \u201cpathological mothering.\u201d Whatever the outcome of our broader discussion of nature\u2013nurture, the basic fact that the best predictors of an adopted child\u2019s personality or mental health are found in the biological parents he or she has never met, rather than in the adoptive parents who raised him or her, presents a significant challenge to purely environmental explanations of personality or psychopathology. The message is clear: You can\u2019t leave genes out of the equation. But keep in mind, no behavioral traits are completely inherited, so you can\u2019t leave the environment out altogether, either.<\/p>\n

Trying to untangle the various ways nature-nurture influences human behavior can be messy, and often common-sense notions can get in the way of good science. One very significant contribution of behavioral genetics that has changed psychology for good can be very helpful to keep in mind: When your subjects are biologically-related, no matter how clearly a situation may seem to point to environmental influence, it is never safe to interpret a behavior as wholly the result of nurture without further evidence. For example, when presented with data showing that children whose mothers read to them often are likely to have better reading scores in third grade, it is tempting to conclude that reading to your kids out loud is important to success in school; this may well be true, but the study as described is inconclusive, because there are genetic as well as<\/em>environmental pathways between the parenting practices of mothers and the abilities of their children. This is a case where \u201ccorrelation does not imply causation,\u201d as they say. To establish that reading aloud causes success, a scientist can either study the problem in adoptive families (in which the genetic pathway is absent) or by finding a way to randomly assign children to oral reading conditions.<\/p>\n

The outcomes of nature\u2013nurture studies have fallen short of our expectations (of establishing clear-cut bases for traits) in many ways. The most disappointing outcome has been the inability to organize traits from more<\/em>\u2013 toless<\/em>-genetic. As noted earlier, everything has turned out to be at least somewhat<\/em> heritable (passed down), yet nothing has turned out to be absolutely<\/em> heritable, and there hasn\u2019t been much consistency as to which traits aremore<\/em> heritable and which are less<\/em> heritable once other considerations (such as how accurately the trait can be measured) are taken into account (Turkheimer, 2000). The problem is conceptual: The heritability coefficient, and, in fact, the whole quantitative structure that underlies it, does not match up with our nature\u2013nurture intuitions. We want to know how \u201cimportant\u201d the roles of genes and environment are to the development of a trait, but in focusing on \u201cimportant\u201d maybe we\u2019re emphasizing the wrong thing. First of all, genes and environment are both crucial to every<\/em> trait; without genes the environment would have nothing to work on, and too, genes cannot develop in a vacuum. Even more important, because nature\u2013nurture questions look at the differences among people, the cause of a given trait depends not only on the trait itself, but also on the differences in that trait between members of the group being studied.<\/p>\n

The classic example of the heritability coefficient defying intuition is the trait of having two arms. No one would argue against the development of arms being a biological, genetic process. But fraternal twins are just as similar for \u201ctwo-armedness\u201d as identical twins, resulting in a heritability coefficient of zero for the trait of having two arms. Normally, according to the heritability model, this result (coefficient of zero) would suggest all nurture, no nature, but we know that\u2019s not the case. The reason this result is not a tip-off that arm development is less genetic than we imagine is because people do not vary<\/em> in the genes related to arm development\u2014which essentially upends the heritability formula. In fact, in this instance, the opposite is likely true: the extent that people differ in arm number is likely the result of accidents and, therefore, environmental. For reasons like these, we always have to be very careful when asking nature\u2013nurture questions, especially when we try to express the answer in terms of a single number. The heritability of a trait is not simply a property of that trait, but a property of the trait in a particular context of relevant genes and environmental factors.<\/p>\n

Another issue with the heritability coefficient is that it divides traits\u2019 determinants into two portions\u2014genes and environment\u2014which are then calculated together for the total variability. This is a little like asking how much of the experience of a symphony comes from the horns and how much from the strings; the ways instruments or genes integrate is more complex than that. It turns out to be the case that, for many traits, genetic differences affect behavior under some environmental circumstances but not others\u2014a phenomenon called gene-environment interaction, or G x E. In one well-known example, Caspi et al. (2002) showed that among maltreated children, those who carried a particular allele of the MAOA gene showed a predisposition to violence and antisocial behavior, while those with other alleles did not. Whereas, in children who had not been maltreated, the gene had no effect. Making matters even more complicated are very recent studies of what is known as epigenetics (see module, \u201cEpigenetics\u201d http:\/\/noba.to\/37p5cb8v), a process in which the DNA itself is modified by environmental events, and those genetic changes transmitted to children.<\/p>\n

\"Mother<\/p>\n

The answer to the nature \u2013nurture question has not turned out to be as straightforward as we would like. The many questions we can ask about the relationships among genes, environments, and human traits may have many different answers, and the answer to one tells us little about the answers to the others. [Photo:legends2k]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Some common questions about nature\u2013nurture are, how susceptible is a trait to change, how malleable it is, and do we \u201chave a choice\u201d about it? These questions are much more complex than they may seem at first glance. For example, phenylketonuria is an inborn error of metabolism caused by a single gene; it prevents the body from metabolizing phenylalanine. Untreated, it causes mental retardation and death. But it can be treated effectively by a straightforward environmental intervention: avoiding foods containing phenylalanine. Height seems like a trait firmly rooted in our nature and unchangeable, but the average height of many populations in Asia and Europe has increased significantly in the past 100 years, due to changes in diet and the alleviation of poverty. Even the most modern genetics has not provided definitive answers to nature\u2013nurture questions. When it was first becoming possible to measure the DNA sequences of individual people, it was widely thought that we would quickly progress to finding the specific genes that account for behavioral characteristics, but that hasn\u2019t happened. There are a few rare genes that have been found to have significant (almost always negative) effects, such as the single gene that causes Huntington\u2019s disease, or the Apolipoprotein gene that causes early onset dementia in a small percentage of Alzheimer\u2019s cases. Aside from these rare genes of great effect, however, the genetic impact on behavior is broken up over many genes, each with very small effects. For most behavioral traits, the effects are so small and distributed across so many genes that we have not been able to catalog them in a meaningful way. In fact, the same is true of environmental effects. We know that extreme environmental hardship causes catastrophic effects for many behavioral outcomes, but fortunately extreme environmental hardship is very rare. Within the normal range of environmental events, those responsible for differences (e.g., why some children in a suburban third-grade classroom perform better than others) are much more difficult to grasp.<\/p>\n

The difficulties with finding clear-cut solutions to nature\u2013nurture problems bring us back to the other great questions about our relationship with the natural world: the mind-body problem and free will. Investigations into what we mean when we say we are aware of something reveal that consciousness is not simply the product of a particular area of the brain, nor does choice turn out to be an orderly activity that we can apply to some behaviors but not others. So it is with nature and nurture: What at first may seem to be a straightforward matter, able to be indexed with a single number, becomes more and more complicated the closer we look. The many questions we can ask about the intersection among genes, environments, and human traits\u2014how sensitive are traits to environmental change, and how common are those influential environments; are parents or culture more relevant; how sensitive are traits to differences in genes, and how much do the relevant genes vary in a particular population; does the trait involve a single gene or a great many genes; is the trait more easily described in genetic or more-complex behavioral terms?\u2014may have different answers, and the answer to one tells us little about the answers to the others.<\/p>\n

It is tempting to predict that the more we understand the wide-ranging effects of genetic differences on all human characteristics\u2014especially behavioral ones\u2014our cultural, ethical, legal, and personal ways of thinking about ourselves will have to undergo profound changes in response. Perhaps criminal proceedings will consider genetic background. Parents, presented with the genetic sequence of their children, will be faced with difficult decisions about reproduction. These hopes or fears are often exaggerated. In some ways, our thinking may need to change\u2014for example, when we consider the meaning behind the fundamental American principle that all men are created equal. Human beings differ, and like all evolved organisms they differ genetically. The Declaration of Independence predates Darwin and Mendel, but it is hard to imagine that Jefferson\u2014whose genius encompassed botany as well as moral philosophy\u2014would have been alarmed to learn about the genetic diversity of organisms. One of the most important things modern genetics has taught us is that almost all human behavior is too complex to be nailed down, even from the most complete genetic information, unless we\u2019re looking at identical twins. The science of nature and nurture has demonstrated that genetic differences among people are vital to human moral equality, freedom, and self-determination, not opposed to them. As Mordecai Kaplan said about the role of the past in Jewish theology, genetics gets a vote, not a veto, in the determination of human behavior. We should indulge our fascination with nature\u2013nurture while resisting the temptation to oversimplify it.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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