Question

What is the nature vs. nuture problem? How can we test our ideas about this?

Answer 1

In this case, it is important to define what nature and nurture is. Nature refers to all of our genes that will code for a determined phenotype. While nurture is the environmental factors that will interact with us. Experiences and social relationships are a good example of nurture. Now, the problem that all of the scientist are discussing is how exactly nurture and nature interact. An typical example of this is the behavior and predisposition to suffer a mental disorder. It has been observed that identical twins that comes from parents that passed then a genetic disorder which promotes a severe mental illness can express the disorder depending on the environment where they grow. As you can expect, an stressful environment will trigger more easily the expression of a determined disease in one of the twins.

In this way, we can test our ideas about how nurture influence nature. We actually need brothers with the same genetic make up and study their phenotype in different environments. These experiments are not very common because the chances to obtain two identical twins that grow in different environments are too low. However, record from adoption centers have facilitated some cases that allow us to observe the relationship between nature and nurture.