Nature Vs Nurture Quotes

“You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions . . . by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.”
― Malcolm Gladwell

“Don't tell me from genetics. What've they got to do with it?" said Crowley. "Look at Satan. Created as an angel, grows up to be the Great Adversary. Hey, if you're going to go on about genetics, you might as well say the kid will grow up to be an angel. After all, his father was really big in Heaven in the old days. Saying he'll grow up to be a demon just because his dad _became_ one is like saying a mouse with its tail cut off will give birth to tailless mice. No. Upbringing is everything. Take it from me.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Needs are imposed by nature. Wants are sold by society.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa & America.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“History and man made each other.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“She's a she-wolf. Her nature demands she's dominated, even if she tries to fight it. She'll listen to an amount of force – positive force, not negative force. But leave the run wide open with no boundaries and she won't listen to you at all. All she'll listen to is the call of freedom, even if it leads her straight into a trap. Stop thinking like a human. She's a wolf.”
― Dianna Hardy, Blood Shadow

“How far beyond your mother do you hope to get? You are not going to be a different woman entirely, so just be a slightly altered version of her, and relax.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“The problem, of course, with the idea of nature versus nurture was that it posed a choice between determinisms.”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon’s Ashes

“Most of us experience gender conditioning so young—research shows it begins in infancy—that we misunderstand the relationship between nature and nurture, culture and biology, fitting in and being oneself.”
― Thomas Page McBee, Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man

“In effect, we know from Darwin that there are only four characteristics necessary in order to get adaptive evolution, right? If you have reproduction, variation, differential success, and an environment of limited resources, you're going to get adaptive evolution.
When we set up an economic system, or a political system...*it evolves*. Things evolve within it. And if we don't anticipate that what we write down in our documents about what we're trying to accomplish does not have the capacity to overwhelm whatever niche we have set up and that we will ultimately see the creatures that are supported by the environment that we created, then we will never get this right. Because we will always be fooled by our own intentions, and we will create structures that create predators of an arbitrary kind.
So we need to start thinking evolutionarily, because that's the mechanism for shaping society into something of a desirable type rather than a monstrous type.
[...]
So let's say we're talking about a political structure...and we know we don't like corruption...and we're going to set a penalty for attempting to corrupt the system. OK, now what you've done is you've built a structure in which evolution is going to explore the questions, 'What kind of corruptions are invisible?' and 'What kinds of penalties are tolerable from the point of view of discovering how to alter policy in the direction of some private interest?' Once you've set that up, if you let it run, evolutionarily it will create a genius corruptor, right? It will generate something that is capable of altering the functioning of the system without being spotted, and with being only slightly penalized -- and then you'll have no hope of confronting it, because it's going to be better at shifting policy than you will be at shifting it back.

So what you have to do is, you have to build a system in which there *is no selection* that allows for this process to explore mechanisms for corrupting the system, right? You may have to turn the penalties up much higher than you would think, so that any attempt to corrupt the system is ruinous to the thing that attempts it. So the thing never evolves to the next stage, because it keeps going extinct, right? That's a system that is resistant to the evolution of corruption, but you have to understand that it's an evolutionary puzzle in the first place in order to accomplish that goal.
[...]
We sort of have this idea that we inherited from the wisdom of the 50s that genes are these powerful things lurking inside of us that shift all of this stuff that we can't imagine they would have control over, and there's some truth in it. But the larger truth is that so much of what we are is built into the software layer, and the software layer is there because it is rapidly changeable. That's why evolution shifted things in that direction within humans. And we need to take advantage of that. We need to be responsible for altering things carefully in the software, intentionally, in order to solve problems and basically liberate people and make life better for as many people as possible, rather than basically throw up our hands because we are going to claim that these things live at the genetic layer and therefore what can we do?”
― Bret Weinstein

“A conscience is a self-reproaching program that is installed in us, not by nature, but by our culture.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors. These roles, Reinberg learned, are often determined not by genes but by signals from the physical and social environment. 'Sibling ants, in their larval stage, become segregated into the different types based on environmental signals,' he said. 'Their genomes are nearly identical, but the way the genes are used—turned on or off, and kept on or off—must determine what an ant "becomes." It seemed like a perfect system to study epigenetics. And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab.'

The collaboration between Reinberg, Berger, and Liebig has been explosively successful—the sort of scientific story ('two epigeneticists walk into a bar and meet an entomologist') that works its way into a legend. Carpenter ants, one of the species studied by the team, have elaborate social structures, with queens (bullet-size, fertile, winged), majors (bean-size soldiers who guard the colony but rarely leave it), and minors (nimble, grain-size, perpetually moving foragers). In a recent, revelatory study, researchers in Berger’s lab injected a single dose of a histone-altering chemical into the brains of major ants. Remarkably, their identities changed; caste was recast. The major ants wandered away from the colony and began to forage for food. The guards turned into scouts. Yet the caste switch could occur only if the chemical was injected during a vulnerable period in the ants’ development.

[...] The impact of the histone-altering experiment sank in as I left Reinberg’s lab and dodged into the subway. [...] All of an ant’s possible selves are inscribed in its genome. Epigenetic signals conceal some of these selves and reveal others, coiling some, uncoiling others. The ant chooses a life between its genes and its epigenes—inhabiting one self among its incipient selves.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee

“No expert was born an expert.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A genius is produced not by a woman’s womb but by a man’s efforts.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Sandra stood by, quietly amused: she wore a sugar pink track suit with matching plastic hairslides in the shape of elephants. Edward could see quite clearly behind her shoulder, like the aura visible to spiritualists, the woman she would be in thirty years time. There is probably nothing to be done about people, he thought, nothing at all, nor ever has been: processed, from the cradle to the grave. Most neither know nor care, which makes it worse.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“Free will is never without charge and is costliest when an individual chooses selfishness and avarice over the common good. Some think animals dumb but mark the instinctive co-operation of insects while men murder and steal and tell me we are superior.”
― Stewart Stafford

“A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Final Problem and Other Stories

“We live as if nature and nurture were equal parents when the evidence suggests that nature has both the whip hand and the whip.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“[D]o you know what began my real
education?... Your calling me Miss Doolittle that day when I first came to Wimpole Street. That was the beginning of self-respect for me. And there were a hundred little things you never noticed, because they came naturally to you. Things about standing up and taking off your hat and opening doors... [T]hings that showed you thought and felt about me as if I were something better than a scullerymaid; though of course I know you would have been
just the same to a scullery-maid if she had been let in the drawing-room. You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Violet might wear her sparkling recklessness well, but beneath it she was careful, careful, careful. Maud was not; but she would learn to be. She would choose to be, as she chose every day to be generous and kind and all the other things that defied the coiled snake of her inherited nature.”
― Freya Marske, A Restless Truth

“You could clone Elvis Presley and, while the clone would look identical, it would not have the utterly unique life experiences that made The King who he was. After all that time, effort and expense, the clone might choose to be a gardener instead of a singer! There's also the ethical dilemma of recreating all the genetic problems Elvis had due to his maternal grandparents being first cousins.”
― Stewart Stafford

“There are ribbons that ensnare, it
seems, though I cannot feel these
restraints: a tangle of shared
understandings, expectations, values,
and obligations that demarcate sentient
boundaries and frame the articulation
of essence. Yet, there is also something rather arbitrary and inadequate about
these ribbons and their juxtaposition.”
― Ashim Shanker, trenches parallax leapfrog

“Robert Plomin is among many who hold to the multigene view of behavioral traits and is quite sure this complexity explains the lack of success in implicating specific genes for specific behaviors. In an April 1994 article in Science, Plomin argued that all the evidence suggested that behavioral traits were not influenced by single major genes but by an array of genes, each with small effects. He views the single-gene approach as doomed to failure. While stressing the complexity, Plomin sees hope for progress in a different direction. “I’m interested in merging molecular genetics and quantitative genetics,” he says. “That’s what many of us are trying to do, not saying we think there’s a single gene and we hope to stumble on it. But rather let’s bring the light of molecular genetics into this dark alley and look for genes here. And that means we need approaches that will allow us to find genes that account for very small effects—not 20 percent of a trait’s cause, not 10 percent, but less than 1 percent. There are ways to do that. Association approaches. The Human Genome Project will speed up this sort of research.”
― William Wright, Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality

“It is clear that spiritual naturalism can be used to defend any ‘positive’, i.e. existing, norm. For it can always be argued that these norms would not be in force if they did not express some traits of human nature. [...] In fact, this form of naturalism is so wide and so vague that it may be used to defend anything. There is nothing that has ever occurred to man which could not be claimed to be ‘natural’; for if it were not in his nature, how could it have occurred to him?

Looking back at this brief survey, we may perhaps discern two main tendencies which stand in the way of adopting a critical dualism. The first is a general tendency towards monism, that is to say, towards the reduction of norms to facts. The second lies deeper, and it possibly forms the background of the first. It is based upon our fear of admitting to ourselves that the responsibility for our ethical decisions is entirely ours and cannot be shifted to anybody else; neither to God, nor to nature, nor to society, nor to history. All these ethical theories attempt to find somebody, or perhaps some argument, to take the burden from us. But we cannot shirk this responsibility. Whatever authority we may accept, it is we who accept it. We only deceive ourselves if we do not realize this simple point.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato

“If you had caught me in a quiet moment, when [...] stimuli weren’t bombarding me, [and asked me how I was feeling] I would have responded [...]: Something’s not right. I feel unsettled. Everything feels like the same old, same old. Something is missing. [...]

I saw that all of my perceived happiness was really just a reaction to stimuli in the external world that made me feel certain ways. I then understood that I was totally addicted to my environment, and I was dependent on external cues to reinforce my emotional addiction.

What a moment for me. I had heard a million times that happiness comes from within, but it never hit me like this before [...]

Staying busy keeps unwanted emotions at bay. [...] But when we never overcome our limitations and continue carrying the baggage from our past, it will always catch up with us. [...]

[People may try to make all sorts of external environmental changes in] futile efforts to do or try something new so that they can feel better or different. But emotionally, when the novelty wears off, they are still stuck with the same identity. [...]

When we keep that diversion up, guess what eventually happens? We grow more dependent on something outside of us to change us internally. [...]

Nothing outside of us can ever make us happy. [...]
Nothing in our environment is going to “fix” the way we feel. [...]

Let go of the façade, the games, and the illusions. [...]

Happiness comes from within. [...] Once you change your internal state, you don’t need the external world to provide you with a reason to feel joy, gratitude, appreciation, or any other elevated emotion.”
― Joe Dispenza, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

“One interesting fact about disgust is that it is a piece of human psychology that does not sit easily on either side of the traditional nature–nurture divide. On the one hand, the capacity to be disgusted, together with a small set of things that appear to be universally and innately disgusting, is a part of the species’ typical psychological endowment. These are a part of human nature; one does not have to learn how to be disgusted, and one does not have to be taught to be disgusted by certain things, either—like the pungent smell of rotting garbage on a hot summer day, for instance. On the other hand, the variation evident in what different people find disgusting reveals a considerable role for nurture as well. In other cases, people do learn what to be disgusted by through individual experience, through social interactions with others, and through the type of education that constitutes the refinement of their moral and aesthetic sensibilities.”
― Daniel Kelly, Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust

“Born in his circumstances, would my thoughts change?
Or echo his views, radical and strange?
Unbelievable, yet a question that's clear,
Does environment shape the beliefs, we hold so dear?”
― Amogh Swamy, On My Way To Infinity: A Seeker's Poetic Pilgrimage

“In 1843, in a discussion at Springfield, Illinois, [Joseph] Smith expressed his most open ideas regarding racial equality: Black people were not biologically inferior, but were impeded by a lack of educational opportunities and other environmental circumstances common to enslavement. 'They come into the world slaves mentally and phy[s]ically. change their situation with the white & they would be like them,' he argued. ' They have souls & are subjects of salvation' he continued and even suggested that 'Slaves in washington [were] more refined than the presidents.' Give them equal opportunity, in other words, and they could achieve equal or greater results.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“I can't help wondering: Am I a monster?
And--if so--was I born or was I made?”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse