nature or nurture or both?

Answer 1

Both. Nature presets you for a propensity to act a certain way, but nurture engraves your traits on the basis of what nature gave you.

Answer 2

for some things, like the instinct of a baby to suck on the mother's breast, its obviously nature, for other things, like religious preference, its obviously nurture, and for a lot of other things, like IQ, athletic ability, etc, its various combinations of nature and nurture.

Although in reality I think the nature/nurture divide is kind of outdated.

Answer 3

It's the interaction between nature and nurture. Not just both, but both together.

You heard of the Jensen/Kamin/Burt affair? Maybe that's why you're asking. If not, here it is...

Arthur Jensen, in '60s (still going even now, apparently) used some stats produced by Burt (already dead) to prove (as he saw it) that black people were genetically stupid, and then concluded that state support for education in black areas was pointless. Nature it was, so forget nurture.

Burt's stats were about correlation of intelligence (or rather, IQ scores) between identical twins separated at birth. He apparently wasn't pursuing any racist motivation per se, he was just trying to be a famous scientist. But twins like that are hard to come by. Invention is easier.

Leon Kamin analysed Burt's results and discovered that Burt had actually faked all of his data! Jensen's theory (already known as "Jensenism") was in rather obvious trouble. Nature now up sh1t creek, nurture takes over.

In my humble opinion, Jensen was a complete idiot to go straight for an antagonistic political conclusion. If he'd done the science more thoroughly before jumping for the political conclusion, he might have seemed less stupid - and he probably wouldn't have reached that conclusion. Being duped by Burt wasn't so much his fault as his desperate hurry to be an @rse.

Speaking non-scientifically, I'd also say that Jensen must be a total racist b'stard which the world will not miss when he finally joins the choir invisible. But you have to respect science. Luckily for those who want to sleep at night and have self respect, racism turns out to have a complete lack of scientific merit. But I digress.

Jensen was down but not out and the debate raged, rages, on. Last I heard (maybe 10 years ago) he was down to 20% of IQ being down to nature, with the rest being nurture.

Conclusions:
- IQ is IQ, but intelligence is bigger than it.
- Because of the huge influence of nurture, IQ tests are normalised (tuned) for each social, cultural, sexual and age group they are applied to.
- Nature matters a lot, but nurture is crucial.

And then I became a parent... and met this brand new person who seemed to bring her complete own personal package into the world, quite apart from what we teach her. Maybe it's parental angst, but I do feel unable to take credit for all that my daughter is of herself. All we did was make space for her to be herself.

New conclusion: You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but you're not given a sow's ear to start with.

Answer 4

to nurture. for to nurture is to love.

Answer 5

both