<p>Hi all! I was wondering what you guys thought about the following:</p>
<pre><code> are we entirely a product of environment or are we entirely built on inherent qualities? or are we somewhere in between? Finally, what do you think is the general opinion of University of Chicago from an institutional standpoint?
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<p>Umm I don’t mean to be condescending, but that’s kind of a bad question IMHO. I’ve NEVER heard anyone make the claim for one extreme or the other. It’s accepted by everyone that they both are large factors. Ask ANY social scientist in any field. Hence, it’s silly to say that U of C would have an ‘institutional standpoint’ on the topic. It’s like asking whether UChicago takes an ‘institutional standpoint’ on whether the earth is flat: I suppose it does in a sense, but the belief is so widely held among others that the matter is totally irrelevant to anything.</p>
<p>yea I guess I see what your saying, but, you would be surprised how many disagree on this. Sorry, we have just been getting into huge debates about it at my school right now and I wanted an outside opinion…</p>
<p>well, there is a lot of controversy about steven pinker in his field and i don’t know much about him (because i haven’t bought the 6 millionth copy of the language instinct) but i found this to be a good read on the topic</p>
<p>pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/nature_nurture.pdf</p>
<p>Yes, there is a history of disagreement over this question. </p>
<p>Ever hear of Locke’s Tabula Rasa theory? Sigmund Freud?</p>
<p>I think society has taken a shift to the opposite end, however. That is a broad generalization, I know. Consider the advent of stem-cell research, steroids, growth hormones…OK, so some of these are cosmetic, but more and more it seems as if people consider genetics the greatest factor in determining who we are.</p>
<p>Asking how much is nature and how much is nurture is like asking how much of the area of a floor is made up of the height and how much is made up by the width. For an interesting read see: The Dependent Gene: The Fallacy of “Nature vs. Nurture” by David S. Moore </p>
<p>See also a recent book by Brown University’s Philip Lieberman. “Towards an Evolutionary Biology of Language.”</p>