Question: What is your side on the Nature vs. Nurture debate?

Luna Munoz answered on 19 Mar 2011:

I believe that they both work together. The most fascinating work on this is shown very clearly (and interactively) here. Research on rats showed that mom rats who licked their rat babies more, turned on certain genes that would help the rat be more calm when it encounters stress. Mom rats who licked less, failed to turn on these genes and their rats were more anxious. This shows that epigenetics is at play not just genetics (epigenetics is the idea that genes depend on something to activate them).

We are born with certain genes but they are just there to prepare us for a certain environment. If we are a rat and we will live in a place where we need to be on our toes at all times, then our mom can ‘write’ to our genes to programme a more anxious temperament. It’s not just rats. There are cases of identical twins being adopted and some of these twins both had the gene for schizophrenia. Researchers found cases where only one of the pair of twins actually got the disease; for the other, the gene was silenced and the twin never got schizophrenia! This was probably because of nurture.

If you think about it, this is very cool! Nature or nurture shouldn’t win out; a complex dance between the two allows for just the right person to come into the environment in which they live!