tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post7465062154374677591..comments2024-02-29T03:57:00.088-05:00Comments on The Mermaid's Tale: Nature vs nurture, and human behavior: where’s the science?Anne Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09212151396672651221noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-23778459719796583742014-10-01T09:42:12.469-04:002014-10-01T09:42:12.469-04:00Ooops, typo. In the above comment I meant that nat...Ooops, typo. In the above comment I meant that nature and nurture are NOT fundamentally identical.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17504200079510125008noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-40774403000646341342014-09-23T08:03:14.523-04:002014-09-23T08:03:14.523-04:00As a footnote to this post, we addressed the idea ...As a footnote to this post, we addressed the idea that nature and nurture are one and the same in a pair of posts a few months ago, <a href="http://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2014/06/insanity-genes-versus-environment-as.html" rel="nofollow">here </a>and <a href="http://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2014/06/genes-vs-environment-more-on.html" rel="nofollow">here.</a>Anne Buchananhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09212151396672651221noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-84090883212002610012014-09-23T03:14:02.474-04:002014-09-23T03:14:02.474-04:00Many authors have commented that the nature vs nur...Many authors have commented that the nature vs nurture debate is like asking "what is more relevant for the area of a rectangle: it's width or it's height?"<br /><br />This is all fine and true, but there's another metric that's extremely relevant: how malleable is each of them?<br /><br />It only takes material and educational resources to provide the nurture part to an individual. It is achievable today, within years.<br /><br />However, obtaining a genetic structure that is amenable to this kind of nurture is not an easy task. You can teach a "slow" child more math by forcing him to put in more time and effort. This is the difference between a smart and a slow student, the fact that the slow one needs more effort and may never reach the same peak values (for example, he might be able to grasp calculus, but anything beyond that just leads to diminished returns and plateaus anyway at partial differential equations, after hours of tutoring by the best professors money can buy - an example).<br /><br />So yeah. Nature and nurture both are relevant, but they're fundamentally identical.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17504200079510125008noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-68799927505212582282014-09-22T11:29:12.341-04:002014-09-22T11:29:12.341-04:00The problem is that nature-nurture attempts to sub...The problem is that nature-nurture attempts to substitute a source (genes or environment or gene-by-environment interaction) for the development of psychological characteristics and abilities without the benefit of tedious, time-consuming, pain-staking, careful characterizations of the developmental processes involved in both maintaining stability across development and redirecting developmental trajectories toward unpredicted outcomes. Each phase of development builds upon the consequences the interactions of the individual with his/her environment during previous phases of development. Only by characterizing the sources for commonalities of trajectories (unlikely to reside in either the DNA or the environment) and the sources for individual variability in the trajectories, will we be able to affect the course of development (which is what education, rehabilitation, prevention, and therapy is about). Modern Eco-Devo (and Evo-Devo) is providing some of the conceptual and empirical ways of doing real developmental research that avoids the N-N cycle.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11929881417404726456noreply@blogger.com