BIO-NUTURANCE: NATURE & NUTURE COMBINED

INTRODUCTION:

Heritability of twins indicates that both nature and nurture play a part in the creation of human behavior. Both blank slate and biological reductionism now have appeared to have receded from academic debate (Pinker,1997; Pinker, 2002) However, the authors suggest that both nature and nurture make an interesting bifurcation, but the two have meld together. In MRI studies, the environment can express itself by making configurations on the brain. Further, nature combined with nurture express social actions that in part heritable from past dead ancestors. This may be demonstrated with mental illness. Thus, in the real world, academe should coin a term to express that nature-nurture is really like a wire with two smaller wires (nature and nurture) entwined together (Ridley, 2003.)

DISCUSSION:

Bio-nurturance is suggested as a term to describe the synthetic intermixture of nature and nurture. The term means that both play a synergistic interaction of human social, psychological and biological activity. The term means that the two become one from pre-delivery to death.

Denotatively and connotatively, it does not mean the following:

1. That nature and nurture when working together both automatically contribute 50% to human behavior. In certain instances, there is an imbalance where one is favored over the other.
2. That group rates apply to individuals. Thus, bi-polar depression may have group averages, but the individual can easily vary from group statistics.
3. Those measures of the components may indicate balance but not intensity. Some genetic variables can be so robust and virulent that the balance distorts how troubled an individual can be (Stout.2005) Bi-polar depression can genetically be so severe in one person and yet less so in another. This degree of severity is not necessarily illuminated by heritability studies. Further the environment can be so awesomely dysfunctional that the genetic components of natural resilience is overwhelmed by the ecological and wider world (Diamond, 1999)

In academia, it is still important to tease out the two forces. Additionally, it may be that some behavior clearly has more nurture than nature or vice versa. As an example, a neighborhood with numerous chemical containments and social pathologies can overwhelm a youngster. Or as Stout (2005) suggested above, a sociopath personality is so virulent that even when raised in a very promising environment, the youngster is cold, loveless, and without remorse (p.129.)

CONCLUSION:

 Other terms such as socio-biology, or the more moderate to liberal evolutionary psychology are terms that denote the interplay of the two forces (nature and nurture) but they do not appear to have a term to define that in reality that one plus the other in this instance equals one. Bio-nurturance suggests that the two forces become so intermingled, intermixed, that they are almost homogenized. Or if one wants to describe the dual phenomenon as synergistic. One plus one equals three.

REFERENCES:

Diamond, Jared (1999) Guns, germs & steel, New York: W.W. Norton

Pinker, Steven (1997) How the mind works, New York: W.W. Norton

Pinker, Steven (2002) The blank slate: the modern denial of human nature, New York: Viking.

Ridley, Matt (2003) The agile gene, New York: HarperCollins

Stout, Martha (2005) The sociopath next door, New York: Broadway Books