Nature and Nurture: Heredity

Abstract

The question of the relative importance of nature and nurture in predisposing people to behave differently is a vexed one, having important implications beyond the immediate concerns of psychology. For mental illness, sociopathy or intellectual ability, for example, the broad question of the place of the individual in society is raised. We are forced to consider the nature and extent of the opportunities that face the individual and, in the light of his limitations, what might constitute realistic and humane social policies. These and similar questions naturally generate a great deal of emotion as well as interest, and emotional attitudes have often hindered an objective evaluation of the empirical evidence, resulting in exaggerated claims for the importance of nature or nurture to the complete exclusion of the other.

It often happens also that the children may appear like a grandfather and reproduce the looks of a great-grandfather because the parents often conceal in their bodies many primordia mingled in many ways, which fathers hand on to fathers received from their stock; from these Venus brings forth forms with varying lot, and reproduces the countenance, the voice, the hair of their ancestors Lucretius On the Nature of Things