The big idea: Why are you the way you are? Two answers pull in opposite directions: you were born like this (nature), or your surroundings made you this way (nurture). Almost every argument about people hides one of these.
Nature
- You come pre-loaded — talents, temperament, instincts
- Genes and biology do the heavy lifting
- You'd turn out roughly the same anywhere
Nurture
- You start blank and get filled in by life
- Family, culture and experience do the shaping
- Raise you elsewhere and you'd be a different person
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The strongest 'nurture' idea says we begin with nothing written in us at all.
Locke's blank slate: John Locke said the newborn mind is a tabula rasa — a blank slate. There are no built-in ideas; everything you know arrives through experience, writing on that slate over time. So who you become is written by the life you happen to live.
Checkpoint — Locke: In one line: the mind starts blank, and experience writes on it. Hold that — the next thinker turns it into a whole science of shaping people.
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In the 20th century one thinker pushed nurture to its limit.
Skinner and behaviourism: B. F. Skinner founded behaviourism: what you do is shaped by conditioning. Reward a behaviour and it grows; punish it and it fades. On this view, even your character is a pile of habits built by consequences — change the rewards, and you change the person.
Nurture is powerful (Locke / Skinner)
- Strength: explains why upbringing matters so much
- Strength: rewards and punishments really do change behaviour
- Weakness: twins raised apart still end up strikingly alike
- Weakness: ignores clear inborn traits (temperament, talent)
Nature pushes back
- Strength: genes clearly shape height, temperament, risk of illness
- Strength: some fears and skills appear with no training
- Weakness: genes don't fix everything — environment matters hugely
- Weakness: 'it's all in the genes' can excuse doing nothing
Go further — higher-level insight: The modern answer refuses the either/or. Genes and environment interact: a gene may only 'switch on' in certain surroundings, and a child's inborn temperament shapes how others treat them, which then shapes the child. So the sharp exam move is to argue about how much and how they combine, not to pick one side outright.