Are human characteristics fixed, or are they shaped by factors in a person’s social environment? In other words, is it something that is set at conception as the product of breeding (nature), or is it something more complex linked to the overall function of the environment (nurture), or is it a mixture of the two? The controversies surrounding the nature versus nurture debate are long standing and have produced many varied studies.
According to Charles Darwin (1859), evolution is the process by which the human species has developed from other species by means of adaptation through natural selection. Darwin proposed this theory in his book “On the Origin of the Species”. His theory of evolution consists of variation, inheritance, competition, natural selection and finally adaptation. Darwin believed that individuals within a species differ from one another; some of this variation is inherited from their parents.
Competition between individuals is inevitable as they must compete for the limited recourses of food or mates. This is followed by natural selection, competition leads to individuals within the species with the best characteristics producing the most offspring, the individuals who are best adapted to their ecological role will be the fittest as they are more likely to survive and therefore reproduce.
Environmental change means that the new characteristics that have developed are continually being selected, promoting evolution and survival of the fittest. According to the psychologists who lean towards the nature idea of intelligence, we are born with certain capacities to observe our environment in certain ways. These capacities are incomplete or immature when first born and develop gradually throughout childhood. These particular psychologists believe learning plays only a minor role in the development of an individual’s intellect.
The empiricists (nurture), on the other hand, maintain that we are born as blank slates and that our knowledge and abilities are acquired through a process of differing experiences and are therefore learned. The issue of the role of heredity or environment in shaping our eventual intelligence began to appear as long ago as the seventeenth century when a philosopher named John Locke (1632-1704) produced data on the subject of empiricism (nurture).
He argued the newborn mind to be like a blank slate, tabula rasa on which development is directed by experience and education in the form of human learning that can be written from scratch, thus forming the nurture argument. This view differed from that of many philosophers of the time and also from the developing group of new psychologists. One such person who had very different ideas towards intelligence was Francis Galton, the first cousin of famed scientist Charles Darwin who was a devoted eugenicist having invented the term in 1883. Galton also constructed the world’s first intelligence test.