nature versus nurture
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.26 in modern English
22
Scrabble Score
19
Letters
4
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
phrase
The longstanding academic inquiry into the relative contributions of innate biological factors (nature) and environmental influences or upbringing (nurture) to the development of human traits, behaviors, personality and psychology.
Example Sentences
- "Since Francis Galton coined the phrase “nature versus nurture” 150 years ago, the debate about what makes us who we are has dominated the human sciences. Do genes determine our destiny, as the hereditarians would say? Or do we enter the world as blank slates, formed only by what we encounter in our homes and beyond? What started as an intellectual debate quickly expanded to whatever anyone wanted it to mean, invoked in arguments about everything from free will to race to inequality to whether public policy can, or should, level the playing field. Today, however, a new realm of science is poised to upend the debate — not by declaring victory for one side or the other, nor even by calling a tie, but rather by revealing they were never in opposition in the first place. Through this new vantage, nature and nurture are not even entirely distinguishable, because genes and environment don’t operate in isolation; they influence each other and to a very real degree even create each other. The new field is called sociogenomics, a fusion of behavioral science and genetics that I have been closely involved with for over a decade. Though the field is still in its infancy, its philosophical implications are staggering. It has the potential to rewrite a great deal of what we think we know about who we are and how we got that way."
Etymology
The phrase was coined in the mid-1800s by the English Victorian polymath Francis Galton in discussion about the influence of heredity and environment on social advancement.