The nature versus nurture debate is about the causes of differences between people.
Like all living things, people have inherited innate qualities. There are also events or experiences which happen during life. 'Nature' describes the effect of a person's genes and biology, whereas 'nurture' describes whatever happens during life.
In the language of population genetics, the heritability of a feature is the extent to which it is inherited genetically. That includes traits of behaviour and character. Though the public debate is all about humans, the principles apply to any living thing, plants as well as animals.
The phrase 'nature versus nurture' was suggested by the Victorian polymath Francis Galton. He was influenced by Darwin's On the Origin of Species. He investigated the influence of heredity and environment on social advancement.
It was always known that people inherited some features, but were modified during life. The terms had been contrasted, for example, by Shakespeare (in The Tempest: 4.1). Even before Shakespeare, the English schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster wrote in 1582:
- "Whereto nature makes him toward, but that nurture sets him forward".
Galton did not oppose nature to nurture as two alternatives. The phrase 'nature vs nurture' has been criticized for its over-simplification. Almost all writers have realised that both play a part in our make-up. One who, at first sight, seemed to think humans got their 'mind' from nurture (the tabula rasa or blank slate theory) was philosopher John Locke. He, however, was only concerned with how we acquire knowledge from sense data.
Both nature and nurture play interacting roles in development, and many modern psychologists and anthropologists consider the contrast naive. They see it as an outdated state of knowledge.