• Question: Nature or nurture?

    Asked by on 3 Jan 2019. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ed Morrison

      Ed Morrison answered on 3 Jan 2019:

      The question is a little vague.

      I work in psychology and a good rule of thumb is that about half the variation between people in almost anything of interest is due to genes, half to environment.

      What I often find to be true, however, is that people are very likely to prefer environmental explanations over genetic ones.

    • Photo: Gemma Chandratillake

      Gemma Chandratillake answered on 3 Jan 2019:

      Both!

    • Photo: Reka Nagy

      Reka Nagy answered on 4 Jan 2019:

      Depends on what you’re asking about – different human traits (and diseases) have different ratios of nature and nurture contributing!

      For example, there are some diseases (for example Huntington’s Disease) that have very well-establish genetic causes – so if you have the ‘Huntington’s mutation’, you are very likely to develop the disease, regardless of what you eat, drink or how much you exercise.

      However, other traits (for example, a lot of psychological traits and illnesses such as depression) have much stronger environmental influences – while they have some contribution from genetics, environmental facts play a much larger role in these.

    • Photo: Gill Harrison

      Gill Harrison answered on 14 Jan 2019:

      Both. There has been research on twins showing that both can have an effect.

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