Why nature & nurture won’t go away

Authors

  • Steven Pinker Harvard University

Abstract

The nature-nurture debate has preoccupied psychology and the social sciences for centuries. Many writers have expressed a hope for a compromise that it will make the debate disappear.. In this view, all behavior comes from an inextricable interaction between heredity and environment, and it is a mistake to try to tease them apart. reasons, among them that it is simply false that all aspects of brain function involve a mixture of heredity and environment, and that holistic interactionism obscures our for several understanding of how the mind works. As an illustration, I discuss the case of the effects of parenting, where holistic interactionism has led to false and misleading conclusions.

Author Biography

Steven Pinker, Harvard University

ohnstone Family Professor in the department of psychology at Harvard University, conducts research on language and cognition. A Fellow of the American Academy since 1998, author of six books, including “How the Mind Works” (1997), “The Language Instinct” (2000), and “The Blank Slate” (2002).

Published

2006-04-25

Issue

Section

Articles