Nature Vs Nurture Ted Talk

[Giovanni Sealy]

RecentlyI was going through some old photos of my dad, Kurt Katch. He was an actor who escaped the Nazis and immigrated to the U.S. in 1937 with my mom (and two suitcases). Neither spoke English (but they did speak five other languages!) and once they left their families they never saw them again. All of their relatives perished in the Holocaust.

My dad died at age 65 when I was just 12 years old, so I never knew him when I (and he) got older. But a gander at these old photos are telling. Indeed, the physical resemblance is unmistakable. We are about the same age, 45, in this photo. I always have wondered if the dramatically different turns our respective lives took had an effect on our personalities, social intelligence, IQ, and other traits that made us who we are (and were).

While scientists have studied physical, behavioral, and intellectual inheritance throughout human history, the systematic investigation of the inheritance for most human traits formally began with Sir Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin, in the 1869 book Hereditary Genius and in other writings.

Devising research to study the nature/nurture issue is complicated. It requires innovative approaches and new technological methods that can isolate and distinguish the cause-and-effect of human traits due to genetic or environmental influences. The two major approaches involve studying twins that have been raised together or who were separated at birth (or during early childhood). The second approach involves identifying how different genes correlate to specific traits, or how environmental influences (effects of circumstances of life and experience) affect how genes express. As noted above, this field of study is termed epigenetics.

Researchers worldwide have established twin registries where scientists systematically identify twin births and follow their development and life circumstances until death. The Swedish Twin Registry, founded in 1959 at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, contains information on 194,000 twins born since 1886. This largest twin registry in the world has made important strides regarding cardiovascular disease, cancer, and aging. The Twins UK Registry, which launched a database for studying arthritis, includes more than 14,000 twins, aged 16-100 years, throughout the United Kingdom.

By studying twins separated in infancy and raised apart, scientists can answer the question: To what extent do cognitive and psychological differences between people result from nature and/or nurture?

Research from the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research (The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart) includes more than 137 pairs of separated identical and fraternal twins and triplets who participated in a battery of medical and psychological tests. Over the years, identical twins reared apart developed personalities and interests that showed about the same degree of resemblance as identical twins raised together.

Gene expression is the process by which the instructions in DNA are converted into a functional product, such as a protein. When the information stored in DNA converts into instructions for making proteins or other molecules, it is called gene expression and represents a tightly regulated process that allows a cell to respond to its changing environment. It acts as both an on/off switch to control when proteins are made, and also a volume control that increases/decreases the number of proteins made.

Fortunately, not all epigenetic changes are permanent. Some epigenetic changes can be added or removed in response to changes in behavior or environment. In fact, epigenetic changes often occur in smokers vs. non-smokers. After quitting smoking, former smokers can begin to have increased DNA activity in certain genes. Eventually, they can reach levels similar to those of non-smokers.

The nature-nurture debate has been cast as a contest between the idea that some characteristics are caused primarily by genetic factors and other characteristics are caused primarily by experiential factors. This premise is outdated and is not supported by current research. We now know that genes do not act independently of their contexts. Instead, genes do what they do because of their contexts.

(Lead image from Sports Illustrated. Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar are identical twins who happen to be Wolverines and rabid sports fans. This is a great video interview by then-student journalist Eric Cutter in which the twins share memories of seeing real-time game action by the legendary Fab Five, Desmond Howard, and more.)

Gloria Steinem is a journalist and social activist in the feminist, peace and civil rights movements. A fellowship to India in the late 1950s inspired her to fight for the rights of women and the poor. Steinem founded Ms. Magazine in 1972, and is the author of four books.

I didn't go to school until I was 12 or so. My parents thought that traveling in a house trailer was as enlightening as sitting in a classroom, so I escaped being taught some of the typical lessons of my generation: for instance, that this country was "discovered" when the first white man set foot on it, that boys and girls were practically different species, that Europe deserved more textbook space than Africa and Asia combined.

Instead, I grew up seeing with my own eyes, following my curiosity, falling in love with books, and growing up mostly around grown-ups -- which, except for the books, was the way kids were raised for most of human history.

Needless to say, school hit me like a ton of bricks. I wasn't prepared for gender obsessions, race and class complexities, or the new-to-me idea that war and male leadership were part of human nature. Soon, I gave in and became an adolescent hoping for approval and trying to conform. It was a stage that lasted through college.

I owe the beginnings of re-birth to living in India for a couple of years where I fell in with a group of Gandhians, and then I came to the Kennedys, the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam.

But most women, me included, stayed in our traditional places until we began to gather, listen to each other's stories and learn from shared experience. Soon, a national and international feminist movement was challenging the idea that what happened to men was political, but what happened to women was cultural -- that the first could be changed but the second could not.

I had the feeling of coming home, of awakening from an inauthentic life. It wasn't as if I thought my self-authority was more important than external authority, but it wasn't less important either. We are both communal and uniquely ourselves, not either-or.

Since then, I've spent decades listening to kids before and after social roles hit. Faced with some inequality, the younger ones say, "It's not fair!" It's as if there were some primordial expectation of empathy and cooperation that helps the species survive. But by the time kids are teenagers, social pressures have either nourished or starved this expectation. I suspect that their natural cry for fairness -- or any whisper of it that survives -- is the root from which social justice movements grow.

So I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe that a unique core self is born into every human being -- the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

The truth is, we've been seduced into asking the wrong question by those who hope that the social order they want is inborn, or those who hope they can write the one they want on our uniquely long human childhoods.

But the real answer is a balance between nature and nurture. What would happen if we listened to children as much as we talked to them? Or what would happen if even one generation were raised with respect and without violence?

Uta Frith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

This view is becoming increasingly rare, as research is demonstrating that genes and environment are actually interconnected and can amplify one another. During an event at Berlin Science Week on November 7, organised by the Royal Society, we discussed how the debate is changing as a result of recent findings.

Take literacy. Making language visible is one of the most extraordinary achievements of human beings. Reading and writing is fundamental to our ability to thrive in the modern world, yet some individuals find it difficult to learn. This difficulty can arise for many reasons, including dyslexia, a neuro-developmental disorder. But it turns out neither genes nor environment are fully responsible for differences in reading ability.

The design for building the underlying circuitry is somehow encoded in our genomes. That is, the human genome encodes a set of developmental rules that, when played out, will give rise to the network.

However, there is always variation in the genome and this leads to variation in the way these circuits develop and function. This means there are individual differences in ability. Indeed, variation in reading ability is substantially heritable across the general population, and developmental dyslexia is also largely genetic in origin.

And here nurture comes in again. Difficulties in learning to read and write are particularly visible in languages with complex grammar and spelling rules, such as English. But they are far less obvious in languages with more straightforward spelling systems, such as Italian. Tests of phonology and object naming, however, can detect dyslexia in Italian speakers too.

3a8082e126