The Age-old Question: Nature vs. Nurture

by Craig Bennett

I’ve often wondered how people raised in the same house by the same parents at essentially the same time can grow up to be so different. My sister and I, for example, are very different from one another in almost any respect you can think of. But our mother and her sister, our aunt, were unlike one another to the same extent: totally different personalities, tastes, preferences, and anything else you could think of. And then there are families with a “black sheep” who follows an entirely different developmental path from his or her siblings—often a distinctly negative one. How? Why?

Perhaps one rather extreme example of this puzzle is something that I encountered in a newspaper advice column. The columnist received a worried letter from a seventeen-year-old whose twin brother wanted to throw a party while their parents were out of town for the weekend. The letter-writing twin was against it; but, unable to talk his brother out of it, he decided to monitor the situation to see that things didn’t get out of hand. Unfortunately, they did. Late in the evening, a quantity of alcohol appeared, and the drinking began in earnest. He left the party long enough to drive home one of the guests who had drunk enough to throw up; and when he got back, there was complete chaos. Everyone was drunk. Several people had vomited. There was broken glass strewn around, and someone had cut his foot and was bleeding badly. He was about to call 911, but a sober friend showed up and persuaded him otherwise. Instead, he stayed up all night checking on everyone and drove them home in the morning.

He felt guilty for not trying harder to keep his brother from inviting all those people to a party, and he was angry with him for doing so. His brother told him that he was being too dramatic and that he should be more understanding and forgiving. His question to the columnist was, should he listen to his brother—again? (1)

The interesting thing here is that the two boys were twins. If we are products of our environment to the extent that many psychological experts would have us believe, how was it possible for twins of the same age and sex, raised in the same household by the same parents at the same time, to turn out so differently? To have such conflicting values and such disparate levels of personal responsibility? It would certainly seem that the only credible explanation would lie in the presence of some major personality differences that were present at birth.

Something else that had always intrigued me were the stories I’d run into of children who grew up in generally abysmal circumstances but managed to overcome them, apparently by sheer determination

Somewhat earlier, I had read of a teen-ager from North Carolina who, for both her junior year and part of her senior year of high school, was homeless and had to live in the family car with her mother and sister. Nevertheless, she managed to graduate first in her class and become the recipient of a scholarship to Stanford University. One of the things on which she relied as a constant source of hope, she claimed, was Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” a hit song from 1978. Whenever she had access to the internet, she would listen to that song. She even copied the lyrics onto her backpack. (2)

Apparently, that song gave her hope. It taught her a lesson that she recalled every day when she left the automobile in which she was living to go to school and every day when she returned to it: this was not permanent. This was not her future. This would come to an end eventually, and every day that passed brought her closer to that time. She would survive.

In Evolving God, William and Mary anthropology professor emeritus Barbara J. King asserts that “the old dichotomy between nature and nurture is deservedly dead and buried.” According to her, major differences in ethics, morality, and attitude toward life in general are possible even with twins simply through the random, unpredictable events and influences that accounted for the experience of one twin but not the other. “Genes and the environment are deeply entwined,” she states, “with enormous influence going both ways.” Some would claim that the jury is still out, but most of the reading on the subject that I’ve done tends to agree with Professor King. (3)

Professor David Linden of the Johns Hopkins University considers the nature vs. nurture question as an approach to understanding the origin and development of one’s individuality to be “needlessly reductive.” He acknowledges that both heredity and environment contribute to the particular combination of physical, mental, and behavioral tendencies that define each one of us. But most of those traits or tendencies, he declares, are influenced not by one or the other, but by both. Even such purely physical characteristics as height and weight cannot necessarily be attributed exclusively to one factor or the other. In Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality, he explains that individuality as being the result of “heredity interacting with experience, filtered through the inherent randomness of development”—and experience applies very broadly to the whole process. (4)

Yet, I still have to wonder. What about those twin boys, one of whom held an entirely different attitude from that of the other toward mature, responsible behavior? Their differences didn’t just spring forth overnight. Something had to be working for years for them to wind up so far apart when they were in their mid-to-late teens.

And exactly what was it that separated that young girl from countless other young people who would be and had been simply crushed by such circumstances. Exactly what enabled her to recognize the lyrics of a song as a source of inexhaustible hope—inexhaustible hope that lay somewhere within her own heart and soul? If it was something she had acquired during her childhood, how did that happen? If not, then what could explain it?

And what of the many others whose stories we don’t hear, who spent their youth in the most dismal circumstances and yet went on to lead relatively pleasant, stable, “successful” lives? What was it that enabled them to distance themselves sufficiently from their childhood environment so that they could avoid being permanently scarred by it, never to wholly recover from the psychological and emotional damage inflicted on them when they were young? Perhaps it could be explained by nothing more than a particularly fortuitous combination of genes and experiences outside of the family. But might it, in fact, have been something else—something that extends farther back and beyond the mere genetic heritage and environmental conditions of the life into which they had been born? Something, perhaps, that extends back beyond their birth itself… ?

-Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and the Firefly Bookstore, Kutztown, PA

• Ask Amy: Twin brothers’ party is “Risky Business.” Allentown, PA Morning Call Mar 30, 2018 G03
• Goldsmith, Barton. “Music has the power to move us in many ways.” Tribune News Service, Reading, PA EagleSept. 3, 2017 D1
• King, Barbara J. Evolving God. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, 2017 pp. 196-197
• “Nature, Meet Nurture.” Forefront: Neuroscience. Johns Hopkins Magazine, vol 72, no. 3, fall 2020 p.22

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