Nature vs. Nurture

Originally Posted by amnorvend

I don't see nature and nurture as being mutually exclusive. For instance, there's a gene that makes you predisposed to parkinson's and yet there are plenty of people who have the gene that never get it. So I don't think it's nature vs nurture. I think it's more accurate to say nature + nurture = free choice.

That may sound odd, but here's how I see it: No effect is without cause (save maybe the creation of the universe). So if you make a choice, my first question would be "What caused you to make that choice?". The answer is going to be your biological temperament and your experiences. So, I would make the argument that nature and nurture give you free choice. They aren't alternatives to it.

This for sure.

Its very rarely either nature OR nurture. Its both. If you make a decision, then its nature and nurture that lead you to it.

Originally Posted by Schwarz

Without denying the importance of these factors, I think that in addition to nature and nurture, there is also a third element, the element of free choice. To me behavior seems to explainable in terms of these three factors, possibly with individual variation in the breakdown of how much.
Any thoughts?

I don't think that 'free choice' is needed as a separate category. Think about what determines who you are and how you see things. That's what would determine what it is that drives you to make this free choice.

Nature and nurture are concomitant. Neither is more prominent than the other - both are optimal.

Both harvest the sapient human, both give rise to free thinking. A child cannot learn a language without a functional (pre)frontal cortex, but she also cannot learn it if she has no one to learn it from. Ex: 'Feral' child Genie.

(Of course it's not necessarily so cut-and-dry, but that's a basic premise in this case.)