Nature versus nurture

This time it was scientists, and he, he asked like 190 fellows from the Royal Society of Science, uh, and, to r- send back, like, self-reported data about their families and their education, and, like, 100 of them did, roughly.

And his goal was to try to figure out the relative impact of nature versus nurture, right? Look at what these scientists say about, like, what inspired them and made them become great scientists, and try to figure out how much is, you know, heredity play into scientific genius, and how much is, like, just how you raise people, right? And this is why Galton becomes, if you've all hear- everyone's heard the term, like, nature versus nurture.

We're all familiar with that concept.

Galton is the first guy to name it, right? Not that people hadn't wondered about this before, but nature versus nurture, using those specific words to discuss that, comes from Francis Galton.

Um, his biographer, Michael Bulwer, suspects that Galton took the phrase itself from a passage in Shakespeare's The Tempest, where Prospero calls his adopted son Caliban, quote, "A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick." Now, o- one thing Galton found as he goes through the self-reported backstories of these scientists is that first sons are twice as likely to be, uh, the, to become, have become scientists as youngest sons, right? They're like way likelier.

And Galton accurately credits this to the advantage of nurture.

Nice, not nice, whatever.

So we've talked about relationships and how they affect you and how much it's nature versus nurture.

Why are you writing a second book on Finding Margaret?

I'll tell you why.

And you could have these 16 clones that were test tube babies grown in a lab and then introduced to 16 different environments, raised by 16 different families, 16 different economic settings.

Would they all become serial killers? Because it was exploring the concept of the nature versus nurture issue or the born to kill hypothesis.

And that just happened to be the subject material of Dr. Eric Hickey's latest episode.

And he was interviewing a neurocriminologist.

I want to talk today about one of the greatest sources of both happiness and unhappiness for many, perhaps most people, and that's being a parent.

What are the kinds of things that you think that you need to do so you can have good and happy kids? Should you be lax? Should you be strict or easy? Should you yell at them a lot? Should you have a lot of rules or not so many? Should they be free range? What are the different styles of parenting? How should you behave? Does it matter at all what I do? And that's really the nature versus nurture debate.

How much of a child's development is due to their genes rather than their upbringing? It turns out that there are certain things about parenting that not everybody takes into consideration that are really important that most people don't know about.

And if you do these parenting things, it'll matter a lot.

But here's where my research really started.

How much does it matter? [laughs] You know, 'cause this is kind of the baseline of what you would do as a behavioral scientist.

You want to know is, like, does it matter at all what I do? And that's really the nature versus nurture debate.

How much of a child's development, um, and an adolescent's development is due to their genes rather than their upbringing? Okay, now, now, when I was a kid, the psychology literature, uh, suggested that nurture was a lot more important than nature, and this has kind of gone back and forth over the years.