What Is the Nature Versus Nurture Conflict?
People have long wondered what makes humans act as they do and what produces the differences in human behavior that can be seen every day. Scientists have been especially interested in finding out what causes types of behavior that are considered antisocial or abnormal. For a long time there were two schools of thought. Some scientists believed that everyone is destined to act the way they do because of the genes they inherit from their parents. These scientists believed for the most part that the environment that a person grows up in has little or nothing to do with the way that a person behaves. This idea is called the “nature school of thought,” because it was believed that nature has given each person certain genes whose traits cannot be escaped. Scientists of the “nurture school of thought” believed that humans are not inclined from birth to any certain forms of behavior. They believed that the genes children get from their parents do not matter. The environment that a child grows